The Indefinite Sublime: Tom McCarthy on Moby Dick

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; of spirit’s aspirational pursuit of its transcendent visions even as flesh mires itself in the basest of matter; or, to couch it in scientific terms, of knowledge and its limits, or foundations, in the irredeemably unknowable.

In an exclusive event, award-winning novelist Tom McCarthy will trace Moby-Dick’s own tides and meridians — vectors along which themes of technology flow into those of amputation and prosthetics, currents that convey the ships of statehood, law, and sovereignty slowly but surely on towards the whirlpools of abjection, criminality, and chaos — 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’ll reveal a “grammar of the indefinite” at work in Melville’s prose, and suggest that Moby-Dick’s ultimate battleground, fluid and treacherous, 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.

Reserve your free tickets to this event via the Lensic Performing Arts Center's box office. 

The 2026 Santa Fe Institute Community Lecture Series is free to attend thanks to generous sponsorship by the McKinnon Family Foundation, with additional support from the Santa Fe Reporter, and the Lensic Performing Arts Center.