Читать книгу Fictions of Home - Martin Mühlheim - Страница 16

To understand home we need to understand homelessnesshomelessness, and in few other novels is home as fundamentally absent as in Herman MelvilleMelville, Herman’s Moby-Dick: or, The Whale (1851).51 We find, for instance, that the crew of the Pequod and its monomaniac leader, Captain Ahab, spend most of the narrative far from home, with only one of the mariners returning from the voyage to tell the tale. We learn, too, that the loved ones who have remained at home can only communicate with the Pequod via lettersletters entrusted to outward-bound whalers – letters that may take years to reach their addressees, and perhaps will never arrive at all (196; ch. 53). The sailors’ physical absenceabsence from home is thus exacerbated by an almost complete lack of communicative ties to their home communities.

In what follows, we will focus in particular on Ishmael’s and Ahab’s sense of unbelonging, and on how it can be read in relation to such diverse ideas as Emersonian selfself-reliance, post-traumatictrauma and shell shock stress disorder, and HegelHegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich’s master-slave dialecticdialectic. We will begin the discussion by examining Ishmael’s profound sense of alienationalienation, which he attempts to combat through discursive constructions of universaluniversal belonging that seem persuasive but which, on closer inspection, turn out to be highly problematic. One way of interpreting Ishmael’s alienationalienation is to see it as arising from his lack of self-relianceself-reliance – in contrast to Ahab, who in many ways embodies EmersonEmerson, Ralph Waldo’s ideal. At the same time, Moby-Dick undermines any simple binarybinary oppositions opposition between Ishmael and Ahab, and the novel in effect constitutes a sustained critique of the concept of self-reliance as such. Moreover, we will find that both Ishmael and Ahab come from broken homes, and that both suffer from very particular kinds of unbelonging: social alienationalienation in the case of Ishmael, and mental alienationalienation (or ‘madnessmadness’) in the case of Ahab. Ultimately, though both experience moments of spiritual comfort that could in fact help them to combat alienationalienation, neither Ishmael nor Ahab manages to overcome their profound sense of homelessnesshomelessness.

If belonging proves elusive for MelvilleMelville, Herman’s characters, for us as readers it is likewise difficult ever to feel at home in a novel that, from the very outset, confronts us with highly unusual kinds of textuality. The following, for instance, are the opening paragraphs of Moby-Dick:

Etymology

(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School)

[The pale Usher – threadbare in coat, heart, bodybody, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queerqueer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nationsnations and nationalism of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortalitymortality.]

Etymology

“While you take in hand to schoolschool others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.”

Hackluyt.

“WHALE. * * * Sw. and Dan. hval. This animalanimals is named from roundness or rolling; for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted.”

Webster’s Dictionary.

Even in purely formalform and content terms, these paragraphs are likely to strike one as odd: square as well as round brackets, indented quotations, asterisks and a title – “Etymology” – that appears twice, once in a larger font and once in italics. Likewise, these paragraphs prove unsettling in terms of content, as they confront us with an eccentric figure who is no longer alive (“Late Consumptive Usher”; emphasis added), as well as with the twin possibility of mockery and untruth (“mockingly embellished,” “you deliver that which is not true”).1 It does not help, moreover, that this first section on the etymology of the word whale is followed by a longer and equally puzzling section containing eighty quotations on whales from a seemingly random array of texts (e.g. the Book of Genesis, Montaigne’s Apology for Raimond Sebond, and Captain Cowley’s Voyage round the Globe). These “Extracts,” as they are referred to in the text, were apparently “Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian,” whom the narrator calls a “painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil” (8; original emphasis). In short, the opening of Moby-Dick is one of the oddest in the literary canoncanon, and perhaps the best indicator of just how unhomelyunhomely it feels to most readers – including some leading literary criticsliterary critics – is the fact that they tend simply to ignore these sections, pretending instead that the novel opens with the first phrase of chapter one: “Call me Ishmael” (e.g. EagletonEagleton, Terry, How to Read Literature 23; Edinger 22; Peretz 36).52 More generally, we will find that Moby-Dick is “a work that breaks all boundariesboundaries and borders of genregenre” (Robert K. Martin 11) – a novel that juxtaposes various styles and registers and that continually raises expectations which it then proceeds to thwart. In Moby-Dick, characters as well as readers thus find it exceedingly difficult to establish a sense of home; significantly, the novel’s final word is “orphanorphans” (427; “Epilogue”).

Moby-Dick has often been read as a Great American Novel (BuellBuell, Lawrence 138), and the desiredesire to do so – i.e. to use it, as Nick SelbySelby, Nick puts it, to “define what American literature might be” (8) – perhaps constitutes an indirect response to the fundamental sense of homelessnesshomelessness conveyed by the text: a desire to fill the void of unbelonging by turning MelvilleMelville, Herman’s novel itself into a symbolic key to the imagined communityimagined communitycommunity of the American nation.53 And indeed, we will see that there is good reason to read MelvilleMelville, Herman’s tale as an allegoryallegory of the ship of the American state – a ship that has strayed dangerously far from its intended course. However, we will also find that the novel simultaneously discourages allegorical readings.54 Like the Pequod’s crew, readers are thus tossed to and fro on the stormy seas of Moby-Dick, unable to find that “final harbor, whence we unmoor no more” (373; ch. 114); like Ahab, we eventually begin to wonder “whether the world is anchored anywhere” (385; ch. 121). Both formally and thematically, Moby-Dick is thus a deeply agnosticagnosticism novel: admitting to, even longing for, the possibility of transcendencetranscendence, but failing truly to believe in the existence of a transcendental home. Indeed, MelvilleMelville, Herman’s novel even suggests that an unconditional beliefbelief in transcendence is likely to lead to personal as well as political disaster, and it is only in the most fleeting of moments that it seems possible to discern, on the horizon of Moby-Dick’s narrative universe, a utopian alternative to orphaned existence: moments of common endeavor and bodily comfort in which the question of transcendence is suspended in favor of a home in the here and now.