Читать книгу Fictions of Home - Martin Mühlheim - Страница 25

Let us examine how one such recurring trope – the image of the loom – can help us to bring into sharper focus some of Moby-Dick’s central concerns. We first encounter this recurring image in the title of the novel’s very first chapter (“Loomings”), and already we are faced with significant ambiguities. The nautical meaning of the term looming is “land or ships beyond the horizon, dimly seen by reflection in peculiar weather conditions” (ParkerParker, Hershel and HayfordHayford, Harrison 18n1) – and indeed at this point in the narrative we do not yet ‘see’ the Pequod, but perceive it only dimly in Ishmael’s reference to a “whaling voyage” on which he is about to embark (22; ch. 1). This specialized meaning of looming is thus relatively close to its more general – and often figurative – meaning as a “coming indistinctly into view” (OED): a vaguely foreshadowed, possibly ominous presence.93 However, looming can also denote the “action or process of ‘mounting’ the warp on the loom” (OED), which is precisely what the narrator does in the novel’s first chapter: he sets out to weave the web of his story.94 The title “Loomings,” in other words, simultaneously constitutes an authentic use of nautical jargon, an ominous expression of foreboding, and a playfully metafictionalmetafiction comment. From the outset, Moby-Dick’s concern with a realistic depiction of life at sea is thus counterpoised with a transcendental aura of prophecyprophecy as well as with an interest in the workings of textuality as such.

Moreover, when an actual loom appears later on in the novel, we are confronted once again with Ishmael’s characteristic desiredesire to imbue mundane facts with a deeper, transcendental significance. As he and Queequeg are “mildly employed weaving,” Ishmael begins to lose himself in thoughts about the symbolicalsymbolical value of looms:

[I]t seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage’s sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance – aye, chance, free will, and necessity – no wise incompatible – all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course – its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events. (179; ch. 47)

What is so extraordinary about Ishmael’s reading of the loom as a model of how necessity, free will, and chance interact as the three shaping forces of our lives is that his initial interpretation is thoroughly agnosticagnosticism, for “necessity” could designate natural and historical laws just as it might refer to any mysterious, providential design.

Characteristically, however, Ishmael later revises his original interpretation in order to salvage a transcendental meaning. In the passage quoted above, God is conspicuously absent from Ishmael’s image of the “Loom of Time,” but Ishmael later sets out on project of rhetorical readjustment by claiming that Pip, while abandoned during the chase of a whale, “saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom” (322; ch. 94). Whereas God was at first merely an unnamed possibility, he now suddenly emerges as the omnipotent weaver. This image of the “weaver-god” returns a few chapters later, when Ishmael describes the lush landscape of a Pacific island:

[T]he industrious earth beneath was as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures. […] Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver! – pause! – one word! – whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver! – stay thy hand! – but one single word with thee! Nay – the shuttle flies – the figures float from forth the loom; the freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! […] be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar. (345; ch. 102)

The whole world has now become, for Ishmael, a text woven by God, the great master-weaver, who is supposedly deafened by the noise of his creative act. And yet, the idea that our “subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar” seems to imply that there is some transcendent connection – possibly with the ones who have escaped the loom (which may be Ishmael’s poetic way of referring to the souls of the departed, as opposed to us mortals who “may be overheard afar”).

Just like his earlier rhetorical maneuvers, Ishmael’s remolded image of the “Loom of Time” thus expresses his deep yearning for a transcendental sense of belonging. At the same time, the idea that communicationcommunication with God is entirely impossible, and that the transcendent weaver will neither cease his work nor ever react to human supplications must make us wonder how we could possibly know anything about this absent being. Moreover, it is telling that Ishmael introduces the problem of social alienationalienation (i.e. the textile workers who are isolated from each other by the noise of the “material factories”) only to shy away from it, as if afraid of the “villainies” that we might detect if we remained undistracted by transcendental re-imaginings.95