Читать книгу Fictions of Home - Martin Mühlheim - Страница 26

In Moby-Dick, the transcendental home remains out of reach, even as Ishmael refuses to relinquish his desiredesire for it; time and again, this sole survivor of the Pequod’s disaster uses all the rhetorical means at his disposal in an attempt to retrieve some grander meaning from the wreckage of his life at sea. Just like Ahab, in other words, Ishmael is unable to let go of Moby Dick; the specter of the whale continues to haunt him, and significantly he ends his tale, not on a note of hopehope and belonging, or with a scene of joyful homecoming, but instead as merely “another orphanorphans.”

It is remarkable how fundamentally absent home is in Moby-Dick. Both Ahab and Ishmael come from a ‘broken’ home (i.e. Ahab’s mother was madmadness, while Ishmael’s stepmother treated him badly – and we know virtually nothing about their fathers). Indeed, this lack of parental care may have something to do with the two characters’ desperate attempts in later life to cling to the idea of a transcendent father (benevolent or malicious, as the case may be). In Ahab’s case, things are made worse through the experience of traumatrauma and shell shock, and neither the power nor the solitude and isolationisolation that come with the captain’s office are likely to improve his condition, for while the former tends to foster a narcissisticnarcissism sense of grandeur, the latter shuts Ahab off from human interaction (including therapeutictherapeutic storytellingstorytelling). In effect, Ahab as a character constitutes a study of the pathologies inherent in Emersonian selfself-reliance, and it is only when Ahab, the ship’s master, encounters Pip the ‘slave,’ who suffers from a similar condition, that the captain tentatively begins to re-establish a sense of belonging – a development that is tragically cut short when the Pequod finally meets Moby Dick. Ishmael, meanwhile, is in some ways merely a good-humored conformist, but if we pay close attention to his rhetorical shifts, we find that in fact his textual contortions constitute discursive attempts at home-makinghome-making in the face of a deep sense of alienationalienation. Crucially, though Ishmael’s alienationalienation may be rooted in some fundamental human condition (e.g. existentialexistential & existential angst/trauma traumatrauma and shell shock or a human subjectivitysubjectivity that is necessarily based on lack), it is the lack both of financial resourcesresources and of any other kinds of interest that drive him away from a place that, given these circumstances, simply does not feel like home. Perhaps it is Ishmael’s ardent desiredesire finally to belong – to have a well-defined place in the world – that stops him from even contemplating civil disobedience as a means to prevent Ahab from abusing his power. Tragically, the Pequod’s calamitous journey will leave Ishmael with such a mutilated sense of self that even his own narrative spins out of controlcontrol, despite all his attempts to weave a discursive home out of the manifold strands of his story.

And yet, there are two brief moments in MelvilleMelville, Herman’s novel when Ishmael feels at home in the world, and both of these are strongly homoerotichomoeroticism. One of these two moments occurs, as we have seen, when Ishmael squeezes his co-workers’ hands, filled with such an “abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling” that he wishes to tell them: “let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness” (323). For one thing, we may note that Ishmael here alludes to a passage from ShakespeareShakespeare, William’s tragedytragedy Macbeth, in which Lady Macbeth is afraid that her husband may be “too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness,” and thus unable to seize the throne (1.5.16). From the reader’s point of view, this reference to a canonical text conveys an intertextualintertextuality sense of home at the very moment when Ishmael, too, feels that he belongs. At the same time, while the original metaphormetaphor thrives on associations of milk with motherhood and nourishment, Ishmael’s use of the word “sperm” (ostensibly as a short form of spermaceti) adds to the image a decidedly masculine and sexual twist, leaving the familiarfamiliarity phrase strangely altered.96 Byron R.S. FoneFone, Byron R.S. has suggested that “MelvilleMelville, Herman constructs a fictional world in which the primary characters are outcasts from the land-locked world of (hetero-)sexual moralitymorality” (52), and perhaps Ishmael’s alteration of the canonical text constitutes a stylistic correlative to the novel’s revision of supposedly given moral codes.

At any rate, the only similarly homelyhomely moment for Ishmael occurs much earlier in the novel, when he shares a bed with Queequeg at the Spouter-Inn in Nantucket. At the end of their first night together, Ishmael wakes up to find “Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner,” so that an observer could have “almost thought I had been his wife.” At this point, Ishmael’s sensations are still “strange” rather than pleasant (36; ch. 4), but his vague sense of discomfort has clearly faded by the second night:

How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg – a cosy, loving pair. (57; ch. 10)

Ishmael and Queequeg are like a “cosy, loving pair,” and every once in a while Queequeg affectionately throws his legs over Ishmael’s because the two are now “entirely sociable and free and easy”; indeed, Ishmael loves to have Queequeg smoking by his side because the latter seems to be “full of such serene householdhousehold joy” (57 and 58; ch. 11). In the comfort of a bed he shares with another man, Ishmael thus feels just as much at home as in the common laborlabor of squeezing sperm with his equals on board the Pequod.97

These, then, are the glimpses of a utopian vision in a novel otherwise suffused with homelessnesshomelessness: equalityequality and intimacy, shared work and bodily comfort – a home in this world rather than the next. In Ishmael’s case, bodily comfort happens to mean physical contact with other men, and it may well be that he fails to feel at home in his native land because there is no real place there for same-sex relationships:

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, […] by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country […]. (323; ch. 94)

Ishmael cannot imagine a real-life counterpart to his homoerotichomoeroticism “conceit” or “fancy,” and instead believes that “man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity” by settling for a conventionalconventions home shared with “the wife.” In a world where women are considered to be the natural home-makers, Ishmael is evidently unable to imagine an everydayeveryday home with another man at his side.98

It is therefore important to be clear about the limited nature of these visions of belonging. On the one hand, Moby-Dick’s utopian vision of equalityequality and intimacy – of shared work and bodily comfort – transcends the divisions of gender because in theory both men and women can engage in common laborlabor, and both men and women are able to heed the needs of other desiring human bodies. On the other hand, the utopian moments that are actually depicted in MelvilleMelville, Herman’s novel are shared only between men, and Ishmael as a narrator is unable to understand them as anything but fancies: pleasant, perhaps, but necessarily fleeting and insubstantial. In other words, unlike EmersonEmerson, Ralph Waldo’s selfself-reliant man, Ishmael and his ideas ultimately remain within the boundariesboundaries and borders dictated by custom.

This latter point also explains why Moby-Dick ought properly to be understood not as a downright rejection of EmersonEmerson, Ralph Waldo’s ideas, but as a complex and searching critique. What MelvilleMelville, Herman’s novel does reject, through its portrayal of Ahab, is EmersonEmerson, Ralph Waldo’s beliefbelief that selfself-reliance as such is synonymous with spiritual isolationisolation, and must always involve the will to dominate and sacrificesacrifice others. At the same time, Moby-Dick suggests that Ishmael is far too willing to accommodate to the status quostatus quo because he is afraid of standing apart, or appearing in any way as different from others. The point of the novel’s critique, in short, is that isolation from others is neither splendid nor an end in itself, but only, at times, a tragic necessity when faced with widespread communal injusticeinjustice – and it is this that Ishmael fails to grasp. Moby-Dick thus confronts us with two very different male figures, both of whom remain transcendentally homeless. MelvilleMelville, Herman’s women, meanwhile, stay behind on shore, as absent characters who merely serve to symbolize the conventionalconventions home. To overcome this ideological deadlock, we must now turn to George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, where a female character takes center stage.