存有的力量:梅爾維爾《白鯨記》裡的多重生命

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(1)國立臺灣師範大學英語學系碩士論文 Master’s Thesis Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. 存有的力量: 梅爾維爾《白鯨記》裡的多重生命. The Power of Being: The Multiplicity of Life in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. 指導教授: 黃涵榆博士 Advisor: Dr. Han-yu Huang 研究生: 蔡琦. 中華民國 106 年 1 月 January 24, 2017.

(2) 摘要本論文以梅爾維爾的《白鯨記》文本為研究中心，探索德希達理論中的存有力量；依海德格所定義的存在觀點，闡明《白鯨記》中生命的多元性。此處界定海德格式的存在論述，是為了建立出:自我的存在如何在生命進程中，辨識出己之存在的在場與存有之間，所共同享有與不同擁有的特性。論文總共分四章，在導論與第一章中，闡明文學行為(閱讀與寫作)，如何產生虛擬現實及真實現實。進一步以虛擬現實中角色以實瑪利的在場，於讀者閱讀時產生我即是彼的想像，在閱讀置換中，讀者領悟到在場的必然，是源於存有的在場與不在場。此時，作者梅爾維爾的敘事形式，使得作者的地位與存有的地位產生平行，作者書寫的自我指涉，與德希達文學理論中的大書產生關連性。第二章中，採用傅柯的理論，討論《白鯨記》中亞哈船長的瘋狂是如何建構出其權力，亞哈的權力主要源自其對於主體性的追尋。第三章中，採用薩伊德的美國帝國主義理論，來探討《白鯨記》中白鯨以及皮考克船的文學隱喻。此一文學隱喻可以視為政治方面的法西斯主義以及美國帝國主義的縮影；同時探討了捕鯨船建立的權力空間是全球化的標誌，也探討了政治權力與文化權力的關聯性。第四章中，採用阿岡本的理論探討在《白鯨記》中因例外狀態的建構而產生的裸命，使用在誓約形成法之力量下的裸命，來探討人的主權性其實是關於對解放自我存在的渴望。為了解放書中自我存在的困局，必須要回到文學行為中的讀者解讀。另外採用阿岡本的彌賽亞議題來創建閱讀中的彌賽亞時間，當彌賽亞時間在文學行為完成時出現，則產生了當下的時空。當下的時空完成了存有為主體性的生命，此一生命便是合一的生命，在文學行為中的虛擬現實與真實現實的相遇，產出了時間的意義性—成為存有。關鍵詞:存有、在場、生命、權力、瘋狂、彌賽亞時間. I.

(3) Abstract My thesis aims to take Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick to explore Jacques Derrida’s theory to elucidate the power of Being. I take Martin Heidegger’s definition of the notion of Dasein to demonstrate the relevance of “presence,” which I use in my thesis to illustrate the multiplicity of life in Moby-Dick. I take Heidegger’s assertion on presence to construct the idea of self-presence and further reveal how the features of self-presence are distinguished from and related to those of Being. The thesis consists of four chapters. In the Introduction and Chapter 1, I illustrate how the literary act (reading and writing) generates a virtual reality in the reader that exists concurrently with the reader’s actual reality in life. I further take Ishmael’s presence in the virtual reality to expound that the reader generates the imaginary life form of “I am,” the character Ishmael. In the process of replacing the presence-identity, the reader comes to understand that the necessity of the presence is derived from the absence and existence of Being. The narrative form that Melville creates aligns the position of the author to be similar to that of Being. The self-referential quality that Melville creates in Moby-Dick generates a relationship with the only one book that is mentioned in Derrida’s Writing and Difference. In Chapter 2, I take Michel Foucault’s theory to discuss how the madness of Captain Ahab constructs his power in Moby-Dick. Ahab’s power originates from his searching for subjectivity. In Chapter 3, I use Edward W. Said’s discussion on American imperialism to illustrate the literary metaphor of Moby Dick and the Pequod. In the political aspect, the literary metaphor can be viewed as the epitome of fascism and American imperialism. Concurrently, I explore how the power-space that the whaling ships construct marks the phenomenon of globalization. I also discuss the relations with cultural power and political power. II.

(4) In the fourth chapter, I take Giorgio Agamben’s theory to discuss the bare life, which is generated from the state of exception. I use the power of the law formed by the vow on the Pequod to discuss how the bare life pertains to the sovereignty of mankind. The sovereignty of life generates from the desire to liberate the self-presence. To liberate this predicament in Moby-Dick, I elaborate on my interpretation of the literary act. I take Agamben’s messianic issues to create messianic time in reading. This messianic time appears when the literary act has been completed, which generates the time-space of the now. This fulfills the life form that employs the Being of the subject within-life-itself. This is the oneness of life. The virtual reality and actual reality that interact during the literary act give birth to the significance of time as being the Being.. Keywords: Being, presence, life, power, madness, messianic time. III.

(5) Acknowledgement All my love dedicate to my parents, May Guo and Robert Tsai. My little brother, Andy Tsai, is like my angel during my difficult times on using computer. I owe my respect and gratitude to my advisor, Professor Han-yu Huang, and my oral defense committee members: Professor Hui-hua Wang and Professor Chen-Hsing Tsai. I especially thank for Professor Huang and Professor Wang’s professional guidance. My NTNU journey goes to an end, but I will always keep in mind all the friends that I met in the school. Lillian Chen, Penny Ho, Jocelyn Chen, Kelly Kuo, May Lin, Anitata Liu, Bellini Lin, and Fiona Tsai are my supporters. I must confess that my school brothers and sisters make me feel young again. Xiu-wen Chang, Max Ting, Matthew Lin, Elsa Lin, Jessica Su, Charmin and other cute young faces that ignite my passion on keeping walking on the seemingly long and dark thesis road. I owe my gratitude to two professors, Mary Goodwin and Aaron Deveson, without you, I cannot strengthen my patience and love to literature. My love and respect also dedicate to Professor Lin, Professor Lee, Professor Liang, Professor Chang, Professor Shao and Professor Su. In the end, I dedicate my love and respect to NTNU, and I strongly believe this thesis pertains to this school.. IV.

(6) Table of Contents Introduction. 1. Chapter 1. Ishmael and His Call. 28. Chapter 2. Madness and Power. 52. Chapter 3. Cultural Impressions in Moby-Dick. 69. Chapter 4. The Oneness of Life. 83. Conclusion. 98. Works Cited. 103. V.

(7) Introduction Motivations and Backgrounds Herman Melville (1818-1891) is an American author, whose legendary reputation was established following the publication of his novel, Moby-Dick (1851). The basic setting of the novel inherits its literary significance from the Holy Bible and shows its literary influence from the works of Shakespeare. Melville’s intention is clearly to follow the tradition of the literary canon to create an American epic. Moby-Dick proves that the life journey of becoming an independent American is ideologically driven by the need to seek out a personal, unique way of life, which is presented as the eagerness to reach the peak of greatness in order to be a successful man. It also presents one of the traditional fantasies of the American hero—that being a hero originates from a man’s life struggles and his accomplishment of being successful as the outcome of his work. In the novel, Melville transforms a commercial whaling journey aboard the Pequod into a group of commutative expectations pertaining to the attainable hero legend. Geographically, the story narrative begins from the land (Nantucket) and ends in the sea (Pacific Ocean), which partially illustrates that the author’s literary intention is to take a grand geographical journey. The setting is designed to fortify the characteristic power of American individuality. In addition, the corresponding soliloquy of Ishmael reveals a singularity state in which a person can experience himself or herself on the margin of life and death. In other words, Melville creates the protagonists such as Ishmael and Ahab to challenge the traditional thoughts of being an independent man and the manner in which one reaches the state of mental freedom. The real state of being does not mean to be enlightened by knowledge obtained through some rational, cognitive process. Subtly, the author uses Moby-Dick as an epic metaphor to express his perceived ideal 1.

(8) of liberation. This type of liberation is based on the political ideology of classical liberalism, yet the genuine sign of being truly liberated is not limited to freedom from economic burden and political manipulation. In this respect, the ambitious work of Moby-Dick is Melville’s interpretation of the universal state of man’s life derived from the interaction of socialized power and the inherent power of life. To clarify the overall structure of Moby-Dick in my thesis, Melville’s background must first be introduced. He was born in New York City on August 1 in 1819. He was from a successful merchant family, but their fortune was lost after the sudden death of Melville’s father, Allen, in 1832. Before writing Moby-Dick, he worked as a school teacher in Massachusetts from 1837 until 1839. In 1839, Melville became a sailor and finally completed his sea journey in Hawaii in 1842. In 1841, he enlisted aboard the Acushnet, sailing from New York on a whaling voyage, which ended in 1842. As “a child of the American Revolution” and “of the War of 1812” (Parker and Hayford ix), Melville employs his revolutionary American concerns to expound his literary vision of the epic tradition. He adopts the ideas of political power, commercial activity, religious concern, transcultural ponderings, dilemmas of globalization, racism, and philosophical thought to interpret the multiplicity of life and the eagerness of finding the ultimate solution for the fate of humankind. In Sound the Whale: Moby Dick as Epic Novel, Christopher Sten indicates that “many critics have gone on record as calling Moby-Dick an epic or acknowledging it has significant ties with the epic tradition” (2), asserting that Melville’s attempt is to show “the powers behind the great spiritual epics of the world are the same powers that propelled its major religious methodologies” (3). Nevertheless, my understanding of Moby-Dick departs from Sten’s argument. I argue that Melville wants to use Moby-Dick as an epic simile to discuss the states of political power and spiritual 2.

(9) struggle. The book implies that political power actually originates from a cognitive awareness of the spiritual struggle. It especially enacts the danger of misusing political power and the perplexity of acknowledging the unavoidable pain of the programmed physiological recession of one man’s life, in both body and time. I also consider that Melville intends to take the shipwreck of the Pequod as a metaphor to reveal the passage of spiritual growth in the context of individualism. Concurrently, freedom and the importance of individuality are addressed in the book. Based on the background of his own life experiences, Melville knows that the context of a story could be a literary experiment and a metaphor for errors made in the past. In my thesis, it is not my intention to use Moby-Dick to construct any definite conceptual definition of power or life. Modern criticisms and scholars provide a means for literary criticisms to justify and demonstrate some of Melville’s intention in Moby-Dick, but these works cannot with all certainty encompass all the literary clues in the context of the original text. Only the author can reveal evidence of his literary ambition for his creation, and only in part. Melville demonstrates a great deal of care about the literary position of his Moby-Dick in a letter to Nathanial Hawthorne: I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb, Ineffable socialites are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome’s Pantheon. It is a strange feeling—no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content—that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. (Moby-Dick 545) Apparently, Melville is serious in his view of Moby-Dick as an honest confession of life and literature. The book is partially an account of his personal history, which is evident in both the plot creation and characterization. It seems that he hopes that Moby-Dick can break traditional monotheism and transcend the gap between religious 3.

(10) faith and social discipline. This is evident in his desire to celebrate with Hawthorne and “all the gods in old Rome’s Pantheon.” He intends for Moby-Dick to explore the possibilities of personal freedom and human relationships, and he is careful to avoid implanting erotic fantasies and events in the book, implying that the literary ideal embedded in this story focuses on the functionalization of delivering power to humankind. Evidently, what Melville mentions to Hawthorne justifies his intention in Moby-Dick: it is the will of humankind that creates the conditions necessary for success and dominates the necessity of action. Power generates from the need to take action and infuses its impact in the consequences of those conditions. Nonetheless, Melville worries that the book cannot successfully convey his literary intentions to the reader. Accordingly, he writes to Hawthorne, wishing that at least his friend will understand the vision of the book. This is why he proclaims that Moby-Dick is “a wicked book,” yet he is in a state of being content during its creation. In my opinion, Moby-Dick is an ambitious book that expresses the modern Prometheus dilemma. The author creates the legendary character, Captain Ahab, who displays a type of deliberate madness and commits vengeful acts to manipulate the Pequod crew to state his desire to kill Moby Dick. Captain Ahab views Moby Dick as the doomed symbol of terror. According to Ahab’s Christian knowledge, Moby Dick represents the sea monster, the Leviathan, and Ahab himself has the right to fight this beast to regain his reputation as captain and commander of his ship. By contrast, Ishmael is a figure of spiritual ambition, for he desires to view his survival as God’s providential arrangement. Thus, Ishmael asserts his “going on the whaling voyage” (22) as “part of [a] grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago” (22). Therefore, Ishmael narrates the shipwreck story to prove that it is the fate of doom “cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting 4.

(11) from my own unbiased free will and discriminating judgment” (22). Ishmael obviously desires to prove that his survival is a meaningful decision from the Almighty God. He attempts to prove that his life deserves to be preserved after the tragic event that eventually unfolds. In this case, Ishmael intends to apply traditional Christian theology to describe his whaling journey and the meaning of life. The structure of his narrative shows his subtle intention to be the literary symbol of pre-Christ. Ishmael wants his narrative to portray the metaphysical allusion of preparing for the second coming of Christ. Nevertheless, I do not want to draw on a Christian theological perspective in my thesis. Moby-Dick is a creation of Melville, and so biblical material could only be viewed as a form of literary evidence that supports my arguments. Basically, I suggest that Ishmael, Ahab, and other figures in Moby-Dick are multiple reflections of the “One” life; this does not pertain to the separated consciousness of one man’s life, but a form of life that is beyond human morality and represents the consensus of being an individual amidst a rapidly changing world. Specifically, the meaning of the “One” life in my thesis argument may approximate the idea of “all the gods in old Rome’s Pantheon.” However, the idea of the “One” life is not limited to religious meaning. My thesis assumes to be a literary supplement of the perceived idea of presence rather than a judgmental interpretation of any ideology. What Melville truly discusses in the book is the life struggles one ensues in living through suffering and the myths associated with self-identification. This is why my thesis is entitled “The Power of Being: The Multiplicity of Life in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.” I believe that Melville constructs the journey of Moby-Dick to inform the reader that life is based on the intertwined implications of the self and other people, and it is essential to 5.

(12) distinguish between individual satisfaction and public well-being. The substrate of life consists of the continual human will to create presence. Here, I take Martin Heidegger’s notion of “Dasein” in Being and Time to address the issue of “presence.” Heidegger asserts that this word means that an entity’s experience of his or her being is beyond logical and formal aspects, because the entity is understanding a developed realization that his being accords to the “presence at hand” (Being and Time 26). Heidegger illustrates Dasein as a “moment of vision” that is generated from the instant space-time being of “now”—a temporal within-time-ness phenomenon (Being and Time 388). As Heidegger asserts, “Dasein has forgetten itself in its ownmost thrown potentially-of-being” (Being and Time 388). I believe that Dasein is a phenomenon of the person who recognizes that the being of himself or herself is distinguishable from that of others because of the passage of time. I consider that Heidegger’s explanation on Dasein is close to my thesis concern on the phenomenon of presence, because I also use “presence” to identify the life state of humankind. Specifically, I take Michael Inwood’s A Heidegger Dictionary to expound the details of “presence” as follows: The Greek parousia, “a being present, presence, arrival”, is compounded from ousia and para, ‘beside, by, etc.’. Pareinai similarly means “to be [einai] present [para]”. (The form ousia stems from the feminine present participle of einai, ousa.) Heidegger held that ousia meant “presence” . . . making-present characterizes Dasein in its being-in-the-world . . . .That is why this Dasein . . .always means that is expresses itself, its very own being towards the world-can say “now this, now that”. (A Heidegger Dictionary 174-75) 6.

(13) Briefly, Heidegger reckons the significance of “presence” as an independent performance before an entity, which is a scene that determines the state of being. It is a scene shot by the indispensable power from the outer world, and within the time of “now,” the entity receives a vision that focuses itself and appears in space. Therefore, the entity compels itself to feel only itself in the here and now. For my thesis argument, I want to tackle the concept of “presence” as the figure that is initially formed by the power of free will. In this thesis, free will is the will that a person exercises in taking or cancelling an action. It does not pertain to the overall concept of living consciousness, but the type of will by which a person owns his or her right to make reality remain or change according to his or her determined choice. A person’s choice of the free will is about their concern of wanting their presence of being to be shown in reality or for it not to be revealed in a given situation. My point is that any action must first be shaped in a person’s mind, and it is the decision of that person to involve his or her will that determines whether or not their free will be shown. Even in a literary work, a successful author can make characters show their free will and persona, which are presented as a type of literary performance. For me, reading Moby-Dick requires an understanding that the multiple characters in the structured narrative all belong to the commutative elements. These elements more or less influence the development of the narrative and eventually establish the whole book. Therefore, I propose that it is the power to exercise will to create presence that determines the narrative meaning of the characters’ lives and Ishmael’s only chance for survival. The will power to create presence puzzles those who do not understand the value of the self and others, but it occasionally reveals genuine hints to them that death is inescapable. Once people realize that their value of life is not defined by the value that 7.

(14) others place upon them, they return to their rationality to face their coming death and deal with the rest of their lifetime by their own free will. Nonetheless, once people are controlled by obsession or deprivation of their freedom by the will of others, they become confined in a state of suffering or madness. Melville emphasizes a type of American-based multiplicity of life in Moby-Dick, but almost all the characters—regardless of their statuses—finally end up in the shipwreck, and only Ishmael’s soliloquy exists. Clearly, Melville sets Ishmael as the witness of the whole journey. The shipwreck and story of the Pequod have fundamentally changed the rest of Ishmael’s life; the survivor Ishmael carries the collective memory and endures as a witness to the representative “One” life of the whole narrative.. Literature Review In general, dissertations and essays about Moby-Dick focus on the following issues: the ungraspable narrative of the book; Ahab’s satanic blasphemy; Ishmael’s desolate inner world and his relationship with the pagan Queequeg; and specific discussions on Starbuck, Stubb, Pip, Fedallah, Flask, and other members of the Pequod crew. Some topics take Mapple’s sermon on Jonah and the whale, Ishmael’s ponderings on category, and the whiteness of the whale (Moby Dick) to illustrate the intertwined phenomena between the developing field of science and nineteenth-century fundamentalist speech on Christology, animality, and the reflective judgment of imperialism. In Melville and the Theme of Boredom, Danial Paliwoda reckons that Melville attempts to deal with the “numbing and deadening consequences of confronting or evading boredom” (Introduction 12). He further asserts that boredom is evidently a cause of evil in Moby-Dick. He takes Ishmael and Ahab to prove his assertion: 8.

(15) “Ishmael is not alone in his shocked recognition of boredom’s blackness. Even Ahab experiences bouts of boredom; it appears as if his monomania shields him from it (“Moby-Dick God or the Devil” 108). Apparently, Paliwoda points out that it is a sense of nothingness that causes wrongdoings in Moby-Dick. Nonetheless, I do not purpose that this sense of nothingness is the root of mad urges or evil. In fact, I believe that experiencing the boredom of life is the occasion when a person starts to realize that he or she should change his or her life state. When a person experiences the blankness of boredom that appears in his or her presence, it does not imply that person has become evil. Instead, the blankness of boredom is a clear manifestation signifying that the inner self is at work, in that the person is reconsidering the meaning of his or her life. Boredom means that this individual entity should not be confined by the routine of life. Feeling bored hints that this life entity should take action to break the status quo to find a new way of living or a solution to the problems in his or her own life. It is an inborn sense of responsibility that a man or woman aspires to take action to establish his or her own life, rather than relying on the endlessly unsatisfying unknown while journeying toward the manifestation of his or her devastating being in the blankness of boredom. To clarify the sense of nothing, I take Sharom Cameron’s The Corporeal Self Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne as a definitive explanation: “But while ‘nothing’ would seem to be the absence of identity, for Ahab it comes (falsely) to constitute identity, for ‘nothing’ is the one state in which differences are not perceived” (Moby-Dick; 41). Cameron later raises the questions that a man or woman who suffers from the void of meaning in life would intend to change the feeling of nothingness by projecting his or her identity as a way of power control, which inevitably influences the perceptions of other people. The main reason is that the 9.

(16) projector finds a similar feature of in the void feeling from the other man. Therefore, she raises the identity issue to illustrate Melville’s Ahab: Why am I not identical to the world—that is, why must I be a position to (have to) understand the world from which I differ? Why am I not identical to myself—that is, made of a single substance, purged of ambivalence and contrary desires, as Ahab tries to purge himself of Pip, or of that aspect of himself which is drawn toward Starbuck rather than Fedallah ( the man Pequod’s crew) or as the Pequod’s men purge themselves of femal sexuality? (“Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale” 41). To be brief, Ahab himself tries to rebuild his identity by influencing others; he wants to establish a new crew for the Pequod according to his own controlling charisma and position of authority. He needs the whole crew to assist him to reap payment for the loss of his leg by killing Moby Dick, and he seeks to exert his power over the crew to achieve this objective, and in doing so cure his mental trauma of nothingness. Tracing back to Ahab’s mental illness, Moby Dick is the subject that carries Ahab’s anger and the Pequod’s crew’s objectifying passion toward the sea journey. In A Hero’s Journey, William Ellery Sedwick considers that “The White Whale is all evil to Ahab . . . . The White Whale has a tremendous power to do harm. But unless the world is so denatured as to be synonymous with harmful or dangerous, he cannot be called evil. If a man sees evil in him, then it is his own evil which is reflected back at him” (“Moby-Dick in Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind” 143). Here, I must point out that the evil in the story does not generate only from Ahab or Fedallah’s inner world. Instead, it is the whole Pequod crew who form the collective consciousness that is driven to kill the white whale; specifically, it is their evil intent that creates a field of destructive evilness. The reason is that Ahab is only 10.

(17) the captain of the Pequod; the fact is that this position could be easily filled by other crew on the ship. If Starbuck or other exclusives would dare to revolt against Ahab’s order, the narrative tone of the story would be different. Hence, I believe that it is the collective consciousness of evil that results in the tragedy. The evil is rooted in every crew member’s subconscious, for they all want to kill Moby Dick to acquire reputation or material benefit. It seems that Ishmael is the only man who keeps an objective view of the white whale, because he does not view it as a token of evil. Ishmael ponders the white whale as a symbol of natural mystery. With this context in mind, I return to the relationship among Ishmael, Ahab, and “whiteness”. It should be noticed that it is the pervasive horror and worship toward the “whiteness” that exalt Ahab’s position and power to Ishmael, as Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of Power: A Reading of ‘Moby-Dick’ argues in its context: Ishmael’s encounter with whiteness has the essential relation to his encounter with Ahab. Understanding what the riddle of whiteness meanings in Ishmael’s case cannot be separated from understanding the enigma that Ahab is for Ishmael; So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, … the barbaric white leg on which he partly stood. (124) Before encountering Ahab, Ishmael tries to exile himself at sea to escape his own melancholia. Once he sees what he believed to be a scared captain stand erect with his physical wound and psychological pain, he is moved by the captain’s courage of confronting his great suffering in life. For Ishmael, Captain Ahab presents the kind of masculinity that overwhelms the trauma of existing as—or more simply, being—a fragile body. This is why Ishmael subconsciously chooses to become one of Pequod’s members—he requires a dangerous quest to fasten his inner weakness of forsaking the potential meaning found in the act of being an individual. This type of danger is not 11.

(18) about prolonging the coming of death, but about the way of facing it within the constraints of one person’s limited power. The whaling journey symbolizes Ishmael’s humane hope of obtaining the will power to deal with the harshness of reality. In other words, the sea becomes a power-space for the Pequod crew to interact with their inner evil. Still, Ishmael’s survival ultimately depends on the lifebuoy that was actually intended to be a coffin for his bosom friend, Queequeg. As Christopher Sten writes, Queequeg reworks the countenance of little surrogate god, Yojo, to suit his inner vision. Neither man’s action sacrilegious because both work out of the inner necessity of the returning hero . . . . Queequeg is more than the guide who will show Ishmael the way to the hidden god . . . . He is the god, and image of that “inexorable self” at the center of every successful hero. A pagan, savage, and illustrate . . . . (14) Simply, Melville creates Queequeg to purify the civilized arrogance that Ishmael had acquired before meeting him, and their relationship forms from Ishmael—despite being a Christian—doubting the conservative doctrine of Queequeg’s faith. After befriending Queequeg, he quickly accepts Queequeg’s suggestion that Ishmael should find the whaling ship (even the suggestion originally comes from Yojo, a pagan idol, and Ishmael accepts Queequeg’s faith in Yojo). Queequeg is the ideal image of a natural man; he is gifted with specific skills precisely for hunting whales, and his constitution is strong, as evidenced by him recovering from a fatal illness. Queequeg’s character represents the traditional epic hero, because he is healthy, strong, loyal, and determined to kill his target. From this perspective, Melville intends to illustrate a healthy uncivilized figure to set off Ishmael’s disillusionment from civilized society. Nonetheless, after boarding the 12.

(19) Pequod, Queequeg becomes a tool for implementing Ahab’s power. The sacrifice of his blood ultimately symbolizes the crew’s oblation to Ahab’s satanic vow. The pagan involves himself in the fight with the spiritual war of satanic desire and the Christian God. His Yojo seems powerless and shows no sign of redeeming him from this whaling voyage. In fact, the wearing away of Queequeg’s physical body completely erodes his natural identity, for his presence on the Pequod is dominated by Ahab’s manipulation and Fedallah’s political power. He maintains his status as a hero in his laboring works, but his life seems to be destroyed after the shipwreck. In this case, the coffin lifebuoy becomes the last remnant of his heroic act toward the living. It appears that Melville wants to employ the destruction of this heroic pagan to reveal that it is the power of the employer to obtain the real vested interest, rather than the power of the employees. The relation between Queequeg and his contract to the Pequod is a satirical narrative of the modern labor force. Given this context, the question arises as to why Melville employs Ahab as a prefiguration of a Satanist. In T. Walter Herbert, JR’s “Calvinist Earthquake: Moby-Dick and Religious Tradition,” Herbert assumes that “Ahab is paradoxically mad because of his mind struggle to the orthodox descriptions of the ravages of sin” (New Essays on Moby-Dick 129). Herbert considers that “Moby-Dick is a work like the Book of Job, or Augustine’s Confessions . . . in which art and sacred are fused . . . . Melville does not attack traditional ideas about God with the object of replacing them with better ideas; his mission is prophetic, that of calling us to a deeper life” (New Essays on Moby-Dick 113). In this respect, the reader must reconsider Melville’s religious description on Father Mapple’s sermon: “God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah” (Moby-Dick 49).. 13.

(20) According to Herbert, the literary comparison between Mapple’s Jonah and Captain Ahab signifies God attitude toward the plan for humankind’s redemption: “Jonah accepts the whale’s attack as a divine correction; Ahab takes it as an outrageous affront. Jonah yields to the divine assault in terror; Ahab resists it in fury. Jonah moves on to do his Lord’s bidding; Ahab sets out upon an ‘audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge’” (New Essays on Moby-Dick 125). Herbert gives sufficient evidence to define Ahab as a satanic antihero; nevertheless, I hold a different viewpoint on Ahab’s death. The evil of Ahab is not about his anger being focused on killing Moby Dick, but his attitude toward his crew and his ultimate hunting method. I do not consider that, in Moby-Dick, Jonah is the model of God’s only chosen survivor. It should be noted that after the shipwreck, Ishmael is saved and narrates his story, which epitomizes and keeps alive the literary lives of the other Pequod numbers; therefore, Moby-Dick signifies the complicated modern conflict between the inner struggle of men and women and the outer quest for finding a meaningful end for each individual life. The discussed scholarly works express a literary interpretation of the presence of Ishmael and Ahab. In my thesis, I consider that these works can explore the ideological relations between power and life and can be used in my thesis to formulate a clear discussion on Moby-Dick. I propose that power manipulation and life cognition construct the form of human presence in both body and mind.. Methodology I shall explain why I mainly apply Jacques Derrida’s theory and Michel Foucault’s theoretical findings to explore my research topics: presence, power, and madness. In addition, to expound the life issues in Moby-Dick, I use Edward W. Said’s 14.

(21) work of Giorgio Agamben’s concept on bare life to intensify my standpoint on linking Moby-Dick with the idea of the oneness of life. I elaborate on the life issues with political aspects and power theories to present the possibility of the existence of consciousness in Melville’s Moby-Dick from my reading interpretation. In my opinion, Moby-Dick presents the multiplicity of humanity and philosophical thoughts on human life toward the universal dilemma and the paradox of humanism. Here, I take Derrida’s arguments to explain the function of literary criticism in the text. Derrida asserts that literary criticism is “structure in every age, in its essence and destiny” (Writing and Difference 5). He argues that literary criticism derives its totality and configuration from the text. It is significant that Derrida views literary criticism as a type of ideological structure. When the structure of literary criticism appears, it implies that there exists a possibility of the life state being deconstructed by other causes. According to Derrida, the nature of the structure is to discover its “catastrophic consciousness,” because the structure “is perceived through the incidence of menace, at the moment when imminent danger concentrates our vision on the keystone of an institution, the stone which encapsulates both the possibility and the fragility of its existence” (Writing and Difference 6). Once a literary criticism becomes an ideological structure, the act of reading generates a type of power that drives the reader to search for the permutations of multiple interpretations, which projects intertextual reconsiderations onto the original text. Reading is, according to Derrida, and active process of assembling the meaning of writing. This is what I discuss regarding my reading of Moby-Dick. I argue that Ishmael stands for the “keystone” position in the structure of Moby-Dick. Without Ishmael, Moby-Dick cannot reveal the essence of human isolation or hold the reader to keep an objective literary distance from the whole story structure. 15.

(22) On the other hand, Derrida argues that writing and reading are literary acts. He further explains how a literary act influences life experiences. In Writing and Difference, he argues One must be separated from oneself in order to be reunited with the blind origin of the work in its darkness. This experience of conversion, which found the literary act (writing or reading), is such that the very words “separation” and “exile,” which always designate the integrity of breaking-off with the world and a making of one’s way within it, cannot directly manifest the experience, they can only indicate it through a metaphor whose genealogy itself would deserve all of our efforts. (Derrida 8) Derrida explains that the literary act itself is a metaphor for the subconscious world. Because of its feature of “separation” and “exile,” the literary act actually creates an imaginary world in which messages from the literary text are transferred and transformed. His observation reveals that the presence of the characters and the reader are actually being unconsciously positioned in a space of exile. In other words, a literary act should be viewed from two aspects: one is the characters in the text, who consciously present their separated presence with the development of the whole story, and the other belongs to the reader—because of his or her reading, he or she is unconsciously assimilated into the development of the story. The reader’s cognition and imagination are activated by reading. During reading, the reader, in his or her determined position, reads the text in his or her reality, yet the mind of the reader creates a type of virtual reality, which creates a sense of exile. Specifically, the characters in the story make the reader feel as if their presence is floating in exile on the waters, and this is because both the reader and the characters belong to the same 16.

(23) vehicle (the text). The literary act creates a feeling of separation. The main reason is that the story carries both the determined (written) destiny of the characters and the notification from the reader. In this case, reading and writing undergo a similar experience of being separately grouped with certain characters and words. Reading may thus become a type of nihil to the reader, if he or she feels exile and separated from others within his or her own virtual reality. Nevertheless, reading can also become an experience in which the reader can also present the proof of the integrity of the literary act that Derrida mentions, as long as he or she is aware that this virtual reality is projected into actual reality. Here, I must point out that the text itself exists in reality, simply because of the fact that it has been printed. Both the reader and the text exist as a part of existential reality. Once the reader knows it is within actual reality that he or she experiences the virtual reality, he or she can overcome the sense of isolation that is experienced while reading. Because the reader recognizes that his or her feelings of separation and exile are their own temporal creation through the literary act, the reader understands that the integrated reality never leaves him or her during reading. It is the reader’s imagination and notification that subconsciously determine which feelings are experienced during the literary act. According to Derrida, the reader and the author to experience the literary act as a type of metaphor that guides people through experiencing different feelings through the text. I agree with his viewpoint but go further to state that Derrida deliberately avoids comparing the literary act (as a type of virtual reality) to make relations with the author and the reader. Therefore, it may cause the misconception that the literary act is just an isolated, individual act. In general, I divide the literary act into two parts: one part is Derrida’s type of individual experiences within the integrity of the literary act, the other part is the integrity itself (the whole reality), for it generates the 17.

(24) individual experience of separation and exile. In other words, it is a game of the mind for the reader to allow the literary act to affect his or her feelings of being an entity in virtual reality. This can be quite dangerous; if people experience a breakdown through their own interpretation of a literary act, they may generate an illusion of nihil and even be controlled by their self-created virtual reality. What I aim to achieve in my thesis is to use Derrida’s theory and Moby-Dick to illuminate a solution for the negative illusion that can be generated in the literary act. I argue that understanding the literary act presents a virtual reality to the author and the reader, and they should know that what they feel when reading the text is a personal creation of their projected inner interpretation toward reality. Certainly, in my thesis, the whole reality contains both the text and the literary act that the reader and the author experience. Regarding the issues of madness and power, I use Michael Foucault’s Madness and Civilization to explain the literary meaning of madness and its function in Moby-Dick. The reason I take Foucault’s viewpoint to discuss madness in my thesis is due to his special argument on the topic: What is constitutive is the action that divides madness, and not the science elaborated once this division is made and calm restored. What is originative is the caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason; reason’s subjugation of non-reason, wresting from it its truth as madness, crime or disease, derives explicitly from this point. (Foucault xii) Foucault illustrates that people generally reckon madness as the opposite side of reason. Accordingly, being mad must imply that a mad person’s human rights have been deprived by others’ seemingly rational judgments. Foucault gives the reader a clear picture to understand the ridicule of only view of madness—as the normative opposite of nonreason. In Madness and Civilization, Foucault points out that madness 18.

(25) does not mean being in a state of nonreason. To illustrate his opinion on the aspect comprising reason and madness, Foucault comments: The man of madness communicates with society only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the requirements of conformity. As for a common language, there is no such thing; or rather, there is no such thing any longer; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue. (Foucault xii) From Foucault’s observation, I see a similar situation of madness related to Captain Ahab and Pip in Moby-Dick. Both of these literary figures embody Foucault’s argument of the broken dialogue and the abstract communications toward the outer world. Captain Ahab subconsciously utilizes his madness to ignite the passion of the whole crew to embark on a heroic quest and face destruction without feeling. On the other hand, Pip’s mad dialogue reflects his suffering of having being abandoned by the Pequod. Both Captain Ahab and Pip demonstrate the phenomenon of how people in their madness deal with the reason that exists in the outer world. Moreover, this demonstration of madness is deliberately shown in Madness and Civilization, Foucault states that “The experience of madness was clouded by images of the Fall and the Will of God, of the Beast and the Metamorphosis, and of all the marvelous secrets of Knowledge” (Foucault XIV). Foucault’s description of madness expresses a type of mysterious life experience. It dichotomously covers sacred-profane ideas and challenges the ideology of being humane. In Moby-Dick, madness mysteriously takes over Ahab and Pip’s capacity for taking rational action for their own well-being—both. 19.

(26) of them are overwhelmed by fantasy. While Pip’s madness is the result of suffering, Ahab’s madness manifests as a type of dangerous desire that devours his rationality. Ahab’s madness mostly presents in his power control over the Pequod crew. To expound the power issue, I choose Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as the major theoretical discussion. I also take Steven Luke’s Power, A Radical View to define the concept of power. Notably, Foucault deliberately expresses his argument on the issue of power and its relation with the body, discipline, and punishment. Foucault asserts that “power produces knowledge” (Discipline and Punish 27) and further argues that “power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” (Discipline and Punish 27). This means that power inevitably constructs a field that produces knowledge that serves the power-created space, and knowledge that generates more power is then constructed and grown by the power-created space, enabling the existence of knowledge to retain its power. The reason I take the power-knowledge concept is because of its referential meaning to the manner in which Captain Ahab employs his power in Moby-Dick. Ahab’s knowledge of being a captain infuses his power with the Pequod, and he uses his knowledge to deepen the power of his personal influence over the crew so that they work and serve his purpose—to kill Moby Dick. In my thesis, I provide further evidence of this power-knowledge concept in Moby-Dick. In addition, power is the tool with which the punishment is delivered. Foucault argues that, historically, punishment has gradually evolved from punishment of the body to that of soul.. 20.

(27) [T]he punishment-body relation is not the same as it was in the torture during public executions. The body now serves as an instrument or intermediary: if one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as property. (Discipline and Punish 11) According to Foucault, the body is an intermediary that presents individual liberty. If the body is punished by power, the punishment becomes a strategy that deprives the liberty of a man or woman’s body. Subtlety, the punishment tortures the body and mind from being controlled by the power of others. In Moby-Dick, I use Foucault’s punishment theory to explain how mental punishment drives Ahab mad. I also use this punishment-body relation to expound the negatives of power abuse in Moby-Dick. I explain further the body relation between discipline and punishment from the power aspect presented in the novel. My thesis explores how Ahab governs disciplinary power on the Pequod. Moreover, to explicate the concept of power, I draw on Steven Luke’s Power, A Radical View as a literary assistant for my thesis, in which Luke’s viewpoint on power is adopted to illustrate Ahab’s power employment. After my discussion on Ishmael’s literary presence, Ahab’s madness, and the power issue, I explore Melville’s intended setting for the two characters. Why does Melville create Captain Ahab and Ishmael to establish such a desolate story? The bleak view constructed by humankind and nature somehow presents a particular American literary impression. Therefore, I discuss the cultural impressions placed upon Americans in the novel. These impressions include political expansion, the ambition for globalized commerce, and the basic nationality of the founding of the ideal America (specifically, the United States of America). I draw on Edward W. Said to elaborate the American impressions in Moby-Dick to focus on the political and 21.

(28) cultural implications of the literary setting. Said’s assertion is used to prove that, from the perspective of that seemingly ideological conflicting Palestinian-American author, the image of Americans implies a dominant sense of political supremacy among people in the country. . . . an image of Americans . . . as “a new race of people, independent of the sin-darkened heritage of man, seeking a totally new and original relationship to pure nature as hunters, explorers, pioneers and seekers.” Such imagery keeps recurring in nineteenth-century literature, most memorably in Melville’s Moby-Dick, where, as C.L.R. James and V.G. Kiernan have argued from a non-American perspective, Captain Ahab is an allegorical representation of the American world quest; he is obsessed, compelling, unstoppable, completely wrapped up in his own rhetorical justification and his sense of cosmic symbolism. No one would want to reduce Melville’s great work to a mere literary decoration of events in the real world; besides, Melville himself was very critical of what Ahab was up to as an American. (Culture and Imperialism 288) Said points out that the primitive animacy of accepting a person’s wild nature is a particular American feature. Ahab compares himself with the Supreme Being, whereas his rival is a mere sperm whale. By contrast, Ishmael seeks universal faith. In addition, the other Pequod crew members are the embodiment of different aspects of American cultural identity. The crew indulge themselves in Ahab’s visionary speech and lose their capacity to accept objection from the subaltern. The Pequod crew, in fact, work for money and worldly fame, not for conscience. In brief, it is the captain’s obsessive heroism and the crew’s herd behavior that ultimately lead to the shipwreck.. 22.

(29) In addition to Said’s theoretical discussion on imperialism, I also take Richard Sennet’s Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization to explore the spatial relations and its function on the human body. Sennet asserts that “[t]he spatial relations of human bodies obviously make a great deal of difference in how people react to each other, how they see and hear one another, whether they tough or are distant” (Sennet 17). The spatial restraints collect human bodies, thereby producing collective memory, which invents a space for political manipulation. This supporting evidence explains why Ahab and his men epitomize a dominant feature of being the primitive animacy of nineteenth-century American society. In the final part of my thesis, I employ Geogio Agamben’s theory to represent my own literary critical interpretation of “presence” in Moby-Dick. The books I choose from Agamben are The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans and State of Exception. The reason I take Agamben to summarize my thesis is because of his deliberate discussion on the messianic context and the political state of being an abandoned individual in society. I employ the messianic issue to summarize the calling of Ishmael the dead Pequod crew. Here, I must emphasize that the messianic related discussion is a type of literary supplement in my thesis. I do not seek to take certain religious aspects to construct or replace my assertion on the multiplicity of life. Instead, I justify that it is the power of presence that constructs an ideal life state for mankind, which is the oneness of life. This is why I require biblical material and Agamben’s messianic issues to illustrate the nature of the meaning of the oneness of life in Moby-Dick. I also propose that the literary implication of the Pequod is similar to Agamben’s idea on life in State of Exception. I argue that it is justifiable to use Agamben’s political discussion and metaphysical religious searching to derive a meaningful 23.

(30) picture of political life. The employment of Agamben’s political life in my thesis is to assist the reader in experiencing freedom and independence after reading the literary text, Moby-Dick. Having read Moby-Dick and as the author of the thesis, I aim to illuminate a type of universal research path for understanding the way that a person can be one unique individual, accompanied with his or her personal created virtual reality, yet still live consciously within the genuine knowledge of the unchangeable total reality—the One, the eternality. To illustrate my thesis intention clearly, I use The Agamben’s Dictionary to explain Agamben’s theoretical attitude toward “life”: “Agamben’s work is littered with reference to conceptions of life, though he argues that ‘life’ is not a biological concept but a political one. In keeping with this, his own approach to the philosophy of life is to attempt to grasp the ways that life has been central to the history of Western politics” (The Agamben’s Dictionary 123-24). Apparently Agamben’s consideration of life approximates my thesis exploration on the issue of human life in Moby-Dick. I use Agamben’s recognition of life as evidence to support the idea that Melville intends to use Moby-Dick to demonstrate the realistic form of a truly liberal man’s life. The novel basically reflects a type of American ideological liberty from the nineteenth century. However, I also reckon that Moby-Dick can be read as a political metaphor that conflicts its arguments on the power of presence, which can be inferred from the existence of hegemony, capitalism, and Marxism in the novel. The main reason is that Moby-Dick is a work that displays great concern on the issues of power, life, and action driven by free will. To simplify my thesis concern on the issue of life, I focus on the meaning of presence in life in Moby-Dick and the evolution of related developments: madness and the vacation from the inner self of free will. Therefore, I use Agamben’s invented conception on “bare life” to explain why power originally operates and functions on 24.

(31) man’s body and will. According to The Agamben Dictionary, “bare life” is the third type of life meaning created by Agamben. The first two life types are “bios” and “zoe.” Bios mainly relates to living organisms, and zoe is the type of life that the Supreme Being (God) has, as derived from its controlling power. Agamben finds that “bare life” should be added to interoperate the relations between power and life. According to The Agamben Dictionary, Agamben adapts this term from Welter Benjamin’s essay, “Critique of Violence”, in which it figures as “the bearer of the link between violence and law” (HS 65). In Agamben’s analysis, bare life forms a couple with sovereignty, whose “fundamental activity” is “the production of base life” (HS, 181) . . . . Agamben argues that modern times progressively reduce human beings to bare life: A life that is neither human nor animal, but rather an inhuman kind of life that exists at the limits of ethical and political categories. The “werewolf” (HS, 107), who exists in a zone of in distinction between the animal and the human, is one of the examples of bare life that Agamben cites. (30) In this respect, I take “bare life” to discuss the politicized abandoned life in Moby-Dick, and finally, I use Agamben’s messianic interpretation to explore my genuine wanting to discover the essence of creating a free and blank space in which the “bare life” condition is restored in Moby-Dick.. Outline of Chapters In my study of Moby-Dick, Ishmael initiates and ends the shipwreck story. My thesis views Ishmael as a man who realizes the nature of his life through the experience of his whaling journey. Ishmael is a man who responds to his calling 25.

(32) through his narrative voice, and his presentation of the story represents the structure of a tragic event. My thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter 1 applies Derrida’s Writing and Difference to discuss the figure, Ishmael, and the biblical implications in Moby-Dick. I reckon Ishmael as a figure who pushes the narrative flow. Ishmael’s narrative provides the reader an opportunity to involve himself or herself differently in reading and interpreting the story. In this respect, Ishmael’s narration enables the reader to decode the hidden ideological metaphor through their reading experience. Accordingly, I draw on Derrida’s viewpoint on interpretation, sign, and structure to discuss the significance of Ishmael’s presence. In Chapter 2, I mainly use Michael Foucault’s power theory to interpret Ahab’s revenge and his power influence on the Pequod crew. The relationship between power abuse and madness are also mentioned. I argue that Ahab’s power operation and madness reveal the presence of his life. In Chapter 3, I take Edward W. Said’s theory and Richard Sennett’s Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization to expound the political meaning of the Pequod. The cultural impression of the book presents the political vision of nineteenth-century America. The Pequod crew are a literary nationality metaphor to nineteenth-century Americans. The story epitomizes the danger of fascism and its conflicts with other political ideologies. The followers of power commit their lives to a specific ideology. Chapter 4, the final chapter, explores the significance of the whaling journey. I also briefly summarize the philosophical vision of the book and identify Ishmael as the chosen representative of the “One” life in the book. Finally, I point out that the “One” life is the metaphysical projection of the oneness of life, which generates from the history of searching for the universal truth—this can also be interpreted as the eternality of finding the original meaning of being.. 26.

(33) Expected Findings and Contribution I expect that my thesis will intervene in literary disputes on Ahab’s madness. I suggest that Ahab is the one who, in addition to exerting his power and will in a frank manner, lives beyond moral principles. Yet he is not evil in the sight of the Pequod crew. His madness mainly manifests as his power manipulation of the Pequod crew. He is controlled by a vengeful drive and fantasy of being a leading authority. Moreover, I indicate that Ishmael is the power supplement of Ahab, because he is mentally distant from Ahab’s controlling speech. His life embodies the oneness of life. I use Derrida’s concept of deconstruction and biblical knowledge to explain the allegorical meaning of Moby-Dick. I expect to find a literary interpretation that departs from a traditional theological point of view. I hope that my thesis can justify the relationship between power and life. Ahab is the embodiment of the power concept; Ishmael is representative of the “One” life. I assert that power originates from the prejudice of valuing the essentiality of individuality. Ultimately, power is just a type of embodiment of the life narrative.. 27.

(34) Chapter One Ishmael and His Call Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael; because the Lord hath heard thy affliction. And he will be a wild man… (Holy Bible, Genesis 16: 21) Melville’s Moby-Dick comes under the influence of the Holy Bible. The biblical meaning of the name “Ishmael” originally refers to an abandoned child with an affliction from his mother, Hagar. Hagar’s lamentation is heard by God. God promises Hagar that her child will be “a wild man” (Holy Bible, Genesis 16:13). This prophecy for Ishmael in the Bible becomes a literary clue for Melville to establish the biblical metaphor in the name-identity to form the shape of the narrator, Ishmael in Moby-Dick. In the beginning of Moby-Dick, the narrator issues a demand to the reader to “Call me Ishmael” (18). This proposition suggests that Melville decides for Ishmael to experience the affliction of abandonment and grow up in a natural state. In the story, Ishmael signifies the name-identity given to him, which presents as the state of being a man without any ideological bond with dogmatic religious beliefs or ethnic groups. At least in this book, the narrator, Ishmael, is free from fundamentalist ideological judgments. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael plans his sea journey to “substitute for pistol and ball” (18). His suffering is evidently rooted in biblical heritage, but he does not hold the traditional Christian faith. According to Herbert, “Ishmael dreams of a truth that is universal that absorbs what is genuine in the diverse pieties of humankind while refusing to grant a monopoly on religious truth to any of the ‘queer crochets’ men use to set one system on belief against another” (“Calvinist Earthquake” 120). That is, 28.

(35) Ishmael celebrates the universal truth in life and he needs to develop his mentality in order to seek for truth, rather than faith. Regarding the truth that Ishmael attempts to find, the reader must first determine the constitutive function and angles of the narrator, Ishmael. In Ishmael’s White World: A Phenomenological Reading of Moby-Dick, Paul Brodtkorb clearly analyzes Ishmael’s mentality: “Since Ishmael uses the very way that he presents (that is, sees, hears, feels, reports, judges) what he narrates in order to justify to us his total existence, the relation that is his reconstitution of his world and self is formally present in his rhetorical purpose” (Brodtkorb 4). From Brodtkorb’s perspective, Ishmael mainly presents a world that includes his presence within the narrative structure in Moby-Dick. In other words, Ishmael witnesses the historical truth of his presence. Brodtkorb also addresses the relation between Ishmael’s presence and truth: “Mind activity participate in the constitution of fact” (Brodtkorb 4). In addition, “What Ishmael experiences, then reconstitutes in the form of language, is not separable from his varying states of mind” (Brodtkorb 11). According to Brodtkorb, Ishmael’s language indicates the “facts” from his experiences, and the textual “facts” are based on his perceived presence. Briefly, Ishmael’s narrative is influenced by his mental reaction and value in interpreting the historical truth of the cause and effect to this shipwreck. Ishmael seeks universal truth in his narrative, and he endows his story with a fatalistic shadow. Thereby, his arrival becomes an enclosed literary constitution that is limited to his personal viewpoint and the meaning of the suffering that he experienced in life. Rowland A. Shrill gives an extended analysis on Ishmael’s ambitious narrative of the universal truth:. 29.

(36) Ishmael had been committed, from early in his questing, to seek out an exhilarated world and to explore its resonances in relation to the tangled web at the center of his own heart. The final implications of his humanity, he senses, can only be settled in the context of, and in an authentic response to that encompassing symbolic world which rises up around him. In the process implied by taking the span of portents—that is, in the process of expecting a full-freighted world, of discovering in it portents of a transcendent dimension, of scrutinizing the contours of these portents, and of possessing their significance for his life—Ishmael learns of the last complications of human life, learns of the revelatory, but ultimately opaque, character of life in history, and learns that his mortal condition derives its own significance only in an integral response to the immense mystery which is intermittently present to him. (95) Sherrill asserts that Ishmael intends to seize the metaphysical significance from the outer world. Although Ishmael finally recognizes that human life cannot transcend the mysterious power of nature, he believes that the mortal condition eventually becomes a meaningful form of presence derived from the vision of nature. To explain Sherrill’s argument, I point out that death is not the main issue of the book. Ishmael’s survival implies that the mystery of life pertains to the awareness of the presence. Life is not a rehearsal for death, but a single performance by every self-aware presence. Ishmael’s identity in the book reveals Melville’s subjective view of life. As William V. Spanos asserts, “Melville puts Ishmael as proper name, as identity, under erasure. The narrator, as the sequel more explicitly and audaciously reveals, becomes ‘Ishmael/Melville,’ . . . an inquiring subject who is himself the object of inquiry, a. 30.

(37) ‘constitutor’ who is himself the ‘constituted,’ as it were, the seer, who is himself the seen” (The Errant Art of Moby-Dick 76). Obviously, Ishmael is against the authority and presents his individuality in seeking the universal truth. His rebellious free spirit leaves him a space to calmly judge Ahab’s madness and power. As Spanos argues, Melville makes Ishmael an erased self-projecting image. Melville’s purpose for Ishmael is to create a literary afterimage that retains the memory and sensations from the story; meanwhile, the processing of the sequence of plot developments evidently initiates and ceases with the will power of the narrative voice. In other words, Ishmael’s narrative produces a mirroring world: the narrator is both the executor within Moby-Dick and the manipulator of the orientation of the story structure. His power certainly comes from Melville’s planned setting of the book. In this case, I agree with Spanos’s “Ishmael/Melville” argument on this literary identity. Although Ishmael is a literary representation of the author, he is not responsible for the shipwreck—it is Ahab who is predominantly responsible for this fatal incident. Ahab is the one who has the power to control the Pequod. Ahab and Ishmael are participants in the same journey, yet their life principles differ considerably. Brodtkorb provides a metaphysical viewpoint on discussing the difference between Ishmael and Ahab. Like Ahab, Ishmael tries by going to sea to reinvent his future by willing a change in its patterned character. His ascents to the masthead are as much attempts to get out of time as to get out of circular movement; the inviting vortex leads to eternity as well as to restful stasis. Ishmael would like to escape endless circularity. A final vertical movement, he hopes at certain points, would free him; but throughout the book he remains 31.

(38) caught in the horizontality of time. He plays the temporary man, to Ahab’s man of eternity. His attempt to fill the emptiness of his experience of Ahab and the whale is finally an attempt to give meaning to all of time. (Brodtkorb 100) Ishmael attempts to escape from the emptiness of his life. Through his journey, he never ceases seeking spiritual redemption. His journey leads him out of the condition of inertial melancholia. Thereby, he calls for theological recognition to prove that his survival has ended his rooted melancholia. In fact, his survival is a witness for Ahab’s endless quest. Ahab is the man who attempts to challenge himself to determine the mystery of eternity. Ishmael is only a man who applies Ahab’s experience to prove the power of life. In other words, Ishmael absorbs Ahab’s life power and internalizes the journey as spiritual redemption for his life experience. Therefore, the presence of Ahab must carry metaphysical significance through the journey. I conceive that Ahab symbolizes the subconscious mind of a Western man. Ahab rejects Hebraic-Christian values because he strongly relies on his reason and emotions. In other words, Ahab reckons himself as the controller of his own life. He refutes the Christian God father figure in order to seize the power of his free will. Ahab wants to be an independent man rather than a child of the Almighty God. The will to dominate takes over a part of Ahab’s humanity. His focus on his loss eventually drives him mad. Brodtkorb argues that Ahab is driven mad by his disabled body. From this aspect, Ahab leads Ishmael to face the natural state of the mind and reality. During the journey, Ahab effectively becomes the Father of Ishmael’s abandoned mentality. For Ishmael, Ahab certainly is not the substitutive symbol of the Father, but as a male figure that forms a substantial part of Ishmael’s life history. The other reason I assert that Ishmael views Ahab as a father figure is based on their biblical names. In fact, Melville wants to use Moby-Dick to reconcile the tragic stories 32.

(39) from the Bible. That is why he chooses the name Ahab to act as a catalyst for Ishmael’s motivation in relation to their life quest. Through the narrative in Moby-Dick, Ishmael obviously holds a type of sympathetic love and impressive admiration toward Ahab. If God calls Ishmael to honestly face his life condition, then Ahab is the father who calls the Pequod crew (including Ishmael) to stand against the struggles of life. From this perspective, Ishmael inherits Ahab’s mental projection of masculinity toward spiritual suffering and physical weakness. According to Melville’s setting, Ishmael actually has two fathers in Moby-Dick: one is the Christian Father, God, who gives and saves Ishmael’s body; the surrogate father is Captain Ahab, because he teaches Ishmael how to exercise power to implement man’s free will to derive a vision that alters the unsatisfying reality. Nevertheless, Ahab is not the duplicate ideological founder of Ishmael’s mind. Eventually, Ishmael evolves himself to face the tragic end of the Pequod and its crew: he decides to narrate the whaling voyage, and this is a sign that his survival is driven by the need to obtain an opportunity to deal with the seemingly paradoxical conflicts between the two father figures. This seemingly impious story is actually Melville’s ambitious work for combing traditional interpretative Christian faith and the ideological chaos of the nineteenth-century America. I propose that Moby-Dick is intended to be read as a literary classic on modernity, because it involves philosophical pondering on theology, science, political power, and the free state of individuality, and it constitutes the historical necessity of the inevitable deconstruction in an isolated community (the Pequod). Based on my topic, Ishmael and his call, I suggest that Ishmael’s call is not a single call to the Christian God, but to consciousness of the reality that he experiences. He skillfully employs multiple narrative voices in his own narrative voice. Ishmael’s 33.

(40) narrative voice shows that he wants to know the genuine meaning of the whole story. In other words, Ishmael calls for a sufficiently meaningful response to his chaotic historical condition after the shipwreck occurs. In the next two sections of this chapter, I describe my understanding of Ishmael and his narrative presence. In the first section, I explain the biblical relations of Melville’s literary intention of the plot setting and illustration of the characters. In the second section, I apply Derrida’s Writing and Difference to depict the metaphysical presence and signifying structure of the whole book.. Biblical Allusions in Melville’s Moby-Dick In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not. (Holy Bible, Matthew 16:18) In the Epilogue of Moby-Dick, Ishmael narrates that his life is saved by “the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracting search after her missing children, only found another orphan” (427). According to Melville’s setting, the Rachael represents the godmother of the orphan, Ishmael. The Rachael provides a new and temporary habitat for Ishmael to leave the “soft and dirge-like main” (427). To Ishmael, the encounter with the Rachael symbolizes and occasion that helps him to return to the earth to narrate his sea journey. I refer to the Rachel as Ishmael’s godmother on the basis of the Hebrew meaning of the name “ewe”. From a literary perspective, Ishmael 34.

(41) becomes the lamb symbol under Christian beliefs, for his life is a type of rebirth from the Rachael, the ewe. Here, I must justify the lamb symbol of Ishmael in Moby-Dick does not signify that this protagonist embodies the real state of innocence. In principle, my literary concern differs from the biblical announcement from the representative Lamb of God, Jesus. As shown in the Bible, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Certainly, Ishmael’s presence in Moby-Dick is not equal to Jesus’ theological significance as the agent of God in the Holy Bible. My use of the lamb image in my thesis is due to my reading and reasoning of Melville’s historical background. The Lamb of God symbol must have inspired Melville’s writing of Ishmael’s suffering in and survival of the sea journey. Therefore, I argue that Melville/Ishmael feels that the whole story of the whaling journey embellishes the process of how to be liberated from an imprisoned mentality. That is, after Ishmael is saved by the Rachael, he takes his tragic experiences into his narrative, which is not intended to present fear toward sinful acts. On the contrary, Ishmael’s narrative is a type of propitiation to the sacrifice of the Pequod crew. It also represents that Melville’s Moby-Dick tries to employ the biblical lesson to multiply the prophetic warning by his literary work. Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the rightness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life. For as by one man’s disobedience of one shall many be made rightness. Moreover the law entered, that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound: That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through rightness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord. (Holy Bible, Romans 5:18-21) 35.