Pip's Acts of Dissolution

Don Pease particularizes this scientific position in Melville’s character of Pip, whose experience of radical disaggregation—near death by drowning—entwines his body with the operations of coral insects, celestial orbs,... [ view full abstract ]

Don Pease particularizes this scientific position in Melville’s character of Pip, whose experience of radical disaggregation—near death by drowning—entwines his body with the operations of coral insects, celestial orbs, mollusks, the ocean floor, and other aqueous, meteorological, and marine forces. In "Pip's Acts of Dissolution," the separation of Pip's body from the integrative power interconnecting its parts gives rise to an alternative materialism of the body: Pease reads Pip's drowned body as instantiating expansions and cavitations of his flesh that suggest his eyes, hands and bones to be more than merely parts of human structures. In moving with the sea-breathing of coral reefs and mollusks, they instead collude with aqueous powers that devolve into a fusion of animal, vegetable, and mineral life, and as such remove Pip from the contractual bonds with Pequod'scaptain Ahab.