The Indefinite Sublime: Tom McCarthy on Moby-Dick

Why It Matters

McCarthy’s reading reframes Moby‑Dick as a model for probing the limits of knowledge, offering scholars a bridge between literary analysis and the systemic thinking central to interdisciplinary research.

Key Takeaways

• McCarthy links Moby‑Dick’s “whiteness” to the philosophical sublime.
• He argues the novel’s blanks represent unknowable, infinite spaces.
• Longinus’s concept of hypsos underpins Melville’s ecstatic prose bursts.
• Burke’s “dark sublime” explains the terror without divine reassurance.
• McCarthy sees Moby‑Dick as a parable of thought’s limits.

Summary

Tom McCarthy’s Santa Fe Institute talk, titled “The Indefinite Sublime,” uses Herman Melville’s Moby‑Dick as a laboratory for exploring how literature maps the unknowable. He opens by recalling a dream‑email anecdote and a playful mapping exercise—placing the novel on an A4 sheet versus an empty A5 envelope—to illustrate the book’s pervasive blanks and voids.

McCarthy argues that the novel’s recurring whiteness functions as a visual and conceptual blank, a “sublime of absence” that mirrors Longinus’s hypsos: moments where language erupts into ecstatic, thunder‑like bursts and then collapses into silence. He ties this to Edmund Burke’s “dark sublime,” where terror is felt without divine reassurance, and shows how Captain Ahab’s visions and the whale’s deformed mouth embody this rupture. References to Kant and the Kantian notion of formlessness further underscore the novel’s engagement with limitlessness.

Memorable moments include the quote from Cormac McCarthy—“Moby‑Dick is not a story you read once, it is a storm you survive”—and McCarthy’s own advice to writers: “buy more paper, use better paper, indent the first sentence.” He also highlights Melville’s bibliographic cetology, treating whale species as book chapters, to illustrate how knowledge itself is riddled with holes, echoing the indefinite.

The talk positions Moby‑Dick as a parable of thought’s boundaries, suggesting that literature, like scientific models, maps spaces that remain fundamentally unchartable. By weaving literary theory, philosophy, and institutional critique, McCarthy demonstrates how classic texts can inform contemporary interdisciplinary research, especially at places like the Santa Fe Institute where emergent systems are studied.

Original Description

Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, published 175 years ago, is a parable of both man’s power and his impotence; of space’s cartographic conquest and the blind spot at the heart of every map; or, to couch it in scientific terms, of knowledge and its limits, or foundations, in the irredeemably unknowable. In an exclusive event,Tom McCarthy will trace Moby-Dick’s own tides and meridians to unpack the ways in which Melville overhauls the language of the Enlightenment and breaks open the horizons of modernity. Drawing on twentieth-century visual art as well as classical and eighteenth-century philosophy, he will reveal a “grammar of the indefinite” at work in Melville’s prose, and suggest that Moby-Dick’s ultimate battleground might be that of culture, language, and writing — that is, of literature itself. Tom McCarthy’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre, and radio. He is a recipient of the Believer Book Award and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, an Internationaler Literaturpreis finalist, and a two-time Booker Prize finalist. He is also the author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. His latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021. Since 2022, he has held the position of Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute. Born in Scotland, he is now a Swedish citizen and lives in Berlin. Learn more, follow us on social media and check out our podcasts: https://linktr.ee/sfiscience