On Martin's essay

1. Martin describes an Ahab-led technological, sexually aggressive (not to mention, phallic) capitalism taking over nature, using it for it s own means and profits, divesting it of its natural energies. Taking hold of the whale, its life force, its natural "whale-ness" is methodically, violently, undone for the sake of its oil.

That oil is then sold, used in lamps, soaps, and so on, with no apparent respect to the whale, or what the whale was prior to its undoing.

Martin says this is also true of language, that is has surface and material before it is consumed in search – a utilitarian one – for meaning. But this is a weak parallel, if anything becomes it assumes a language as natural as the whale, and gives primacy to the way things appear (visually) to the other aspects of language, such, for example, sound or meaning.

The product of this strange parallel is an idealization of Melville as author, who, ostensibly stands in stark contrast to the capitalists or Ahabs of the world, in the very fact that he produces language, according to the Updike quote, in a way that is respectful to nature.

But this is not a lack of production, nor is it a lack of manipulation of natural means (sounds, sights) toward a certain, albeit indefinite, meaning, being the narrative itself. As much as we could disintegrate Melville's text into sexual energies, it is still – I think – a story about a whaling ship and a captain called Ahab and a certain whale, and whale blubber and oil, and so on and so on.

So, finally, the process of resisting the artificial manipulation of the natural world is, at least in a certain, very different way, also a mode of taking the natural world and processing it. And while the silences and resistances Martin point out are indeed key in understanding what makes this mode of production different than the cynical, technological one, it does not describe the piece as a whole, or, at least, does not describe its dark, manipulative, and very technological side – writing.

2. Martin opposes the possession, appropriation, and, finally, violation language does the natural world, yet the natural world Martin describes isn't made up of discriminate, individual objects, but is one holistic, mystical whole.

While the technologists and whalers of the world are accused of divesting nature without giving 'respect' to it, not acknowledging the life of the whale prior to taking advantage of it, they, in doing so, allow a communication of its discriminate parts.  

The best example of this being, naturally, Moby-Dick, the namesake of the novel, the object of its telos, who, unlike Martin, is not only respected as a whale (otherwise, what would be the point of going out of one's way to destroy it), but as an individual whale, one unlike others. This notion of one animal not being like others is strengthened, by the way, by Ishamel's description of each individual whale's breathing habits (291).