““Indeed, as a system of exchange based on a highly codified feeling that is continually reproduced and circulated even as it cannot be subjectively felt, Melville’s novel harnesses the logic of this market for an inquiry into the role of virtual emotion in literature in particular.55 It seems fitting, then, that Melville’s most anti-psychological novel, one explicitly preoccupied with the politically ambiguous uses of semblances of feeling, takes care to ensure that readers remain uncertain about what its own organizing semblance of feeling might be.””
