『모비딕』의 미학적 가치론: 개인 서사 창출

Abstract

This discussion explores the value of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick as literary narrative. In terms of narrative, the grand narrative of the novel embeds several small but important narratives. Pastor Mapple’s sermon on Jonah emphasizes a certain part of the Book of Jonah for the congregation. Ishmael’s view of Jonah later shifts beyond the sublime of Mapple’s religious authority towards his own personal sublime variation. Ishmael’s telling of the story of the Town-Ho, a sperm whaler, expands its constitutive uncertainty, thereby only amplifying its inherent sublime dimension. The stories of Jonah and Town-Ho expand into the novel, Moby-Dick and yield a further narrative surplus. Ishmael’s narrative accompanies not only the narrative of Jonah and Town-Ho, but also that of Captain Ahab and the crew of the Pequod. Ishmael’s self, fashioned with these narratives, is in the constant process of construction and deconstruction via connections and deviations among them. The initial invocation of Moby-Dick to the reader, “Call me Ishmael,” represents the dual processes of Ishmael’s ‘self-fashioning’: objectifying his own experience as well as inviting the readers to his narrative construction. As in sublime aesthetics, readers’ engagements with Ishmael’s narrative self-composition create continuous reinterpretation and surplus. Moby-Dick as Ishmael’s self-narrative provides us a model of Foucauldian “aesthetics of existence.” Ishmael became the heroic reader of the self-narrative, and accordingly the reader of the narrative has an opportunity of self-establishment as another heroic reader. The narrative aesthetics of Moby-Dick helps us, just not to discover or explore its meanings, but to initiate the meanings and values of our own reading.