Читать книгу Fictions of Home - Martin Mühlheim - Страница 20

While in many ways Ahab offers a stark contrast to Ishmael and his humble “slave moralitymorality,” we must also acknowledge the many similarities between the two characters. For instance, like Ishmael, Ahab comes from a broken home; he is the son of a “crazy, widowed mother, who died when he was only a twelvemonth old” (78; ch. 16). In addition, both Ishmael and Ahab believe that the bodybody (and material existence in general) is ultimately insubstantial when measured against the transcendent soul, for just as Ishmael sees in his body “but the lees” of his “better being” (45; ch. 7), Ahab insists that “immaterial are all materials” (396; ch. 128). Of course, John WenkeWenke, John is right when he points out that Ahab – in contrast to Ishmael (and EmersonEmerson, Ralph Waldo) – is an “inverted PlatonistPlatonism” who believes that the transcendent source of life is malignant (706). However, the key point in this context is that neither Ahab nor Ishmael question the idea of transcendencetranscendence as such. Similarly, Ishmael’s statement that humankind seems, for the most part, “a mob of unnecessary duplicates” (356; ch. 107) strongly resembles Ahab’s view on the matter, which the latter makes explicit in a conversation with his first and second mates: “You two are the opposite poles of one thing: Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors!” (413; ch. 133). The many differences between Ishmael and Ahab should thus not blind us to the fact that they also share certain views and characteristics.72

As WenkeWenke, John observes, this spiritual convergence between Ahab and Ishmael has “its culminating, and most teasing, manifestation” in one of world literature’s great textual cruxes (710): a speech that has been attributed to both Ahab the character and Ishmael the narrator, and which is therefore worth quoting in its entirety:

Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye, […] men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progressprogress in this life; […] once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphansorphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it. (373; ch. 114)

In the first edition of Moby-Dick, this speech on orphaned souls and man’s fundamental homelessnesshomelessness was printed without quotation marks, and though they were added in later editions to make clear that the speech is Ahab’s and not Ishmael’s, their earlier absenceabsence points to a potential ambiguityambiguity that surely must, as Hershel ParkerParker, Hershel and Harrison HayfordHayford, Harrison put it with admirable understatement, have “implications for any critical argument that takes Ishmael and Ahab as embodying opposing values” (373n1). Both Ishmael and Ahab believe in transcendencetranscendence, and both feel deeply alienated; both come from broken homes; and both become obsessed with Moby Dick: Ahab with capturing the whale itself, and Ishmael with mastering the telling of its tale.

If we ask why, precisely, Ahab is bent on killing Moby Dick, one possible answer is to relate his obsessionobsession to a post-traumatictrauma and shell shock crisiscrisis. Ahab was mutilated in an encounter with Moby Dick, losing his leg (108; ch. 28) and consequently sufferingsuffering a profound violation of his bodily integrity: a defining characteristic of traumatic events (Fricke 14). Moreover, as is typical for the development of post-traumatictrauma and shell shock stress disorder (PTSD), some time elapses between the traumatic event and the appearance of the patient’s post-traumatictrauma and shell shock symptoms:

[When Ahab] received the stroke that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn bodybody and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him madmadness. (156; ch. 41)

This brief account opens with Ahab feeling an “agonizing bodily laceration” – in other words, the kind of sensory overload that, once again, is characteristic for traumatic events (Fricke 15–17). Later, like other victims of traumatrauma and shell shock (Schönfelder 64, 146), Ahab suffers from bouts of depression alternating with fits of feverish hyper-arousal, as well as from a pronounced desiredesire to take revengerevenge. Indeed, hyper-arousal and the desire for revenge coincide in the scene where Ahab discloses his desire to kill Moby Dick to the Pequod’s crew. Only a few moments earlier, Ahab had seemed to be sunk in impenetrable gloom (131; ch. 34); however, Ahab now mesmerizes his rapt audience with a countenance that is “fiercely glad and approving” (137; ch. 35). Since post-traumatictrauma and shell shock crises negatively affect patients’ interpersonal relationships (e.g. Herman 56), even the fact that Ahab generally remains “inaccessible” to the other members of the crew (Moby-Dick 131; ch. 34) may be the symptom of PTSD rather than simply a character trait. Moreover, in Dominick LaCapraLaCapra, Dominick’s terms, Ahab’s traumatrauma and shell shock is not structural or existentialexistential & existential angst/trauma, but historical (i.e. it “is related to specific events”; History and Memorymemory after Auschwitz 47).

Interestingly, in Moby-Dick Ahab feels drawn to others who have suffered from similarly traumatic experiences. For instance, when the Pequod meets a whaling ship from LondonLondon, Ahab learns that its commander, Captain Boomer, has lost an arm because of Moby Dick. Ahab immediately wants to meet his fellow sufferer, and he greets Captain Boomer in an uncharacteristically sociable manner: “Aye, aye, hearty!” (336–337; ch. 100). Similarly, Ahab responds keenly to the fate of Pip, the black ship’s boy who, on two occasions in the novel, becomes so frightened during the chase of a whale that he jumps overboard. While the first time the others immediately abandon the chase to pick Pip out of the waterwater, the second time they simply leave him behind. Although the sailors rescue Pip once the chase is completed, from that traumatic moment “the little negro went about the deck an idiot” (321; ch. 93). Significantly, when Ahab becomes aware of Pip’s altered condition, his reaction betrays intense emotionsemotions:

Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscientomniscience gods oblivious of sufferingsuffering man; and, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of lovelove and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor’s! (392; ch. 125)

Ahab, usually so “inaccessible,” suddenly feels that communitycommunity of sufferingsuffering which, according to Iwona Irwin-ZareckaIrwin-Zarecka, Iwona, often arises between people with shared experiences – especially if these experiences are of an “extraordinary if not traumatic quality” (47).