Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
In One Foot in the Finite, K. L. Evans makes the case that Melville's masterpiece Moby-Dick offers a chance to rethink literary realism. Distinguishing between realism as an attempt to hold up a mirror to the natural world and the more nuanced realism associated with the work of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Melville, Proust, Woolf, and Joyce, Evans suggests that even narratives like Moby-Dick that are highly stylized or include fantastical elements can depict life as it is actually lived and experienced by real people.
This spirited contribution to materialist critiques also includes a timely reexamination of concepts. Concepts (like "whale") are puzzling because they are not part of the natural world, the world of physical objects and forces in which human beings are immersed, and yet they are not denizens of the subjective, essentially private inner world philosophers since Descartes have associated with the world of ideas. Though the whale that figures centrally in Moby-Dick is otherworldly or nonsensible, a "phantom" as Melville writes, it is not merely an idea or creation of the mind. For Evans, Melville is a realist because he shows how the concept "whale" is intersubjective--how it can be comprehensible to and rightly used by any number of persons.
The argument that our concepts (and their linguistic expressions) are not separated from the actual lives of humans has widespread literary and philosophical ramifications, for it overturns a view of language in which words pass at such remoteness from tangible things that all talk is idle and the meanings of our signs turn out to be capricious and arbitrary.
Synopsis
One Foot in the Finite inspires a radical shift in our view of Melville's project in Moby-Dick, for its guiding notion is that Melville uses his book to call into question the naturalism that distinguishes the early modern period in Europe. Naturalism is not only the idea that reality is exhausted by nature, or that there exists a domain of physical entities subject to autonomous laws and unaffected by human ingenuity; it also implies a counterpart, a world of pretense and deception, a domain of mental entities ontologically distinct from physical entities and therefore constituting a different realm. To naturalists, whales are part of the background of existing objects against which man assembles his various, subjective, rather arbitrary interpretations. But in Moby-Dick Melville casts upon the world a more ingenious eye, one free of the dualist veil. He confronts a basic misconception: that the contents of consciousness comprise a different order from physical life. He rubs out the dividing line modernity has drawn between the human world of names or concepts and the nonhuman world of plants, creatures, geological features, and natural forces. Melville's philosophizing, carried by fiction, has dramatic consequence. It overturns our view of language as a system of mental representations that might turn out to represent falsely.