[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
and far fewer Americans. The numbers of those killed in Iraq are
not yet complete there are killings, day by day but dead Iraqis
outnumber dead Americans, British, and other Coalition sol-
diers and contractors. The mess in Iraq has not yet caused
much consternation in the United States. At least for the time
84
Moby-Dick
being, the spirit of revenge appears to be dominant: most Amer-
icans evidently approve the war, even though the justification
given by Bush for going to war has turned out to be specious. Not
that Ahab is to be identified with the president, his cabinet, and
his advisers. In an allegorical reading of the book, they would cor-
respond to Ahab, Starbuck, Ishmael, the Pequod and its crew,
everyone determined to kill the white whale. In Moby-Dick, ac-
cording to Donald Pease s reading, Ahab took the white whale as
excuse for setting aside the contractual agreement he made with
owners and crew to gather oil for the Nantucket market. The
whale embodied cosmic malice sufficient to justify Ahab s reject-
ing the prosaic duty of collecting oil. Since September 11, then,
the formally undeclared war against terror has proceeded,
though such a war can t ever be won. America remains vulnerable
to sporadic attacks, but the existence of a common enemy is sup-
posed to keep the people united. The problems entailed in recon-
stituting Afghanistan and Iraq persist, but these are in another
country.
I am not immune to this rhetoric. I was in New York on Sep-
tember 11, 2001, and was as appalled as anyone else by the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I wondered, as
days passed, what response the Bush administration could honor-
ably make. Economic sanctions, diplomatic acts, Periclean wis-
dom, Christian forgiveness love your enemy, do good to those
who hate you seemed implausible, given the mood of the Amer-
ican people. Besides, the admonition in Matthew and Luke to
85
Moby-Dick
love your enemies seems to refer only to private relations. I re-
cently came upon the passage in The Concept of the Political in which
Carl Schmitt insists on a distinction between private enemy and
public enemy, in Latin between inimicus and hostis:
The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything
that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, par-
ticularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of
such a relationship. Never in the thousand-year struggle
between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Chris-
tian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love
toward the Saracens or Turks. The enemy in the politi-
cal sense need not be hated personally, and in the pri-
vate sphere only does it make sense to love one s enemy,
that is, one s adversary.26
Still, I hoped for some response from the Bush administration
other than the bombing of mostly innocent people. Only the un-
forgivable can be forgiven, Jacques Derrida said two years before
September 11, 2001.27 Perhaps it might be possible for Bush to act
from deeper values than the popular immediacies of revenge; or
from more profound motives than those of statecraft. No sign of
that. The Treaty of Versailles is now regarded as a disaster, its
punitive force having issued mainly in the rise of militant nation-
alism in Germany and the emergence of Hitler. A few days after
September 11, at a ceremony in the National Cathedral in Wash-
ington, D.C., the Protestant Archbishop said in the presence of
86
Moby-Dick
Bush and other dignitaries that we must not become the evil
we claim to destroy. That was worth thinking about, but it seemed
to bring about no second thought in those who listened to the
homily. The primitive motives were already in place.
Reading Moby-Dick again now, it seems inevitable that we take
it as a revenge tragedy, with all the simplicities that that entails. It
is also a book of the Old Testament rather than the New. It has
no place for a Sermon on the Mount or for turning the other
cheek. Ahab has his humanities, as Melville says. In chapter 125
he lodges the boy Pip in his own cabin: Come! I feel prouder
leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Em-
peror s! 28 It is an allusion and a response to Lear s creaturely ac-
knowledgment of the Fool in the storm of act III, scene iv: In,
boy; go first. You houseless poverty, /Nay, get thee in. But it is
an aberration. Within a few pages Ahab refuses to help the Rachel
to search for its lost boat, and then we have the three days of the
chase for the white whale. The revenge play ends as most such
plays do, in death nearly universal. And I only am escaped alone
to tell thee. There is no place for perhaps or if or but.
What to make of all this? We need an interpretation inde-
pendent of the Americanization of politics and anthropology. We
should release ourselves from the assumption that there is one
story and one story only, and that it is an American story in ful-
fillment of America s manifest destiny. The reading of Moby-Dick
should take a literary and, yes, aesthetic form, bearing in mind
that aesthetics means perception and an aesthetic reading deems
87
Moby-Dick
the book to be offered only to be perceived. There is no merit in
replacing one allegory with another. We are reading a disparate
book; parts of it are descriptions of the natural world, sermons,
soliloquies, elucidations of the trade and appurtenances of whal-
ing; parts allude to revenge tragedy, epic poetry, romances, yarns
of the sea, adventure stories, Cervantes s Don Quixote, Milton s
Satan, Shakespeare s Macbeth, Lear, and the Fool. Readers have
not known how to read the white whale. In Call Me Ishmael
Charles Olson interpreted it as all the hidden forces that ter-
rorise man, Death, for short.29 Yvor Winters took the whale as
the chief symbol and spirit of evil. 30 James Wood, perhaps ac-
knowledging the death of Satan, interprets the whale as God and
Devil, a composite of forces perhaps equally lethal to man.31 In
Thieves of Fire I took the whale to be a symbol of limits, the wall,
the hard circumference of things, as well as everything contained
in Robert Lowell s IS, the whited monster, in The Quaker
Graveyard in Nantucket : life itself, beyond which there is noth-
ing, the void. 32 But what we need, in thinking of the whale, is not
an allegory in which it may take its place but a more subtle figur-
ing, on the lines of Frye s commentary in Anatomy of Criticism,
where the theme is the heraldic symbol. I am aware of Pease s ob-
jection to the criticism that deals in myth and symbol, but this pas-
sage from Frye knows its limits and observes them:
Still another is the kind of image described by Mr. Eliot
as an objective correlative, the image that sets up an in-
88
Moby-Dick
ward focus of emotion in poetry and at the same time
substitutes itself for an idea. Still another, closely related
to if not identical with the objective correlative, is the
heraldic symbol, the central emblematic image which
comes most readily to mind when we think of the word
symbol in modern literature. We think, for example,
of Hawthorne s scarlet letter, Melville s white whale,
James s golden bowl, or Virginia Woolf s lighthouse.
Such an image differs from the image of the formal
allegory in that there is no continuous relationship
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]