美語狂人雜記

III. Ishmael as a Diegetic Narrator

Ishmael (portrayed by Richard Basehart), the observing wanderer like his namesake in Genesis 4, is the innocent subjected to the fires of experience. Predestined, he casts away the status quo—his conventional community (New York) and his conventional status (like Melville, he was an ex-schoolmaster)—for the journey into the unknown experience (Day 75). Ishmael gives us little information about his appearance, but I am proposing, as many critics have, that “Ishmael is the personification of Melville; then he would be a young man in his teens, tall, broad-shouldered, and fair of complexion” (Roberts 1987). In this sense, as Edinger (1978) has pointed out, Melville has what might be called an “Ishmael Complex”: “the personal life experience and identification with an archetypal image which is strikingly similar to the Biblical Ishmael” (Edinger 16).

Important for this point, I am going to argue in terms of the Lacanian concept, is the fact that it is such a dual image (e.g., the image of Ishmael as lifelike Melville and a participant narrator at the same time) that constitutes the matrix of the imaginary, of recognition/misrecognition and identification, and hence of the first articulation of the I, of subjectivity. To pursue this argument a step further, I’d like to claim that the Lacanian subject here we’re referring to does not mean “I,” “self,” or “ego” in the specifically Freudian (or sometimes Cartesian) sense of that term. Rather, it critically reframes notions such as “experience” and “selfhood” within a context of an instituted system (Davis and Schleifer 106). The dynamic duality of Ishmael might be strengthened by the dramatis personae. This particular mise-en-scène reflects Ishmael as an innocent narrator or a naive narrator. Because Ishmael accepts without question Ahab’s morality and motives, which are dramatized as vengeance against nature and revolt from God. He is spellbound by the Satanism of Ahab, the willfully destructive pursuit of knowledge that dissolves into nothingness. This narrator Ishmael, along with the forecastle Ishmael, feels involved in what happens to Ahab (Feidelson 675-676).

On Lacan’s concept, I am arguing, this dual identity of Ishmael is the signifier of the child (narrator Ishmael) in front of the mirror (i.e., Pequod) which determines its identification with the alienating image (i.e., the concept of “Other” which is the symbolic voyage itself). Rob Lapsley and Michael Westlake (1992) refer to this as:

"In assuming an identity assigned by the Other, the child both sees the world from its own subjective viewpoint while being denied the viewpoint of the gaze of the constituting Other. Thus, to be a subject is to be looked at from somewhere other than the position from which one sees. What is desired in love is to be seen by the Other as one wishes to be seen, to overcome the split between the eye of the subject and the gaze of the Other." (Easthope 182-183)

In watching Moby-Dick, we hypothesize that it is a Bildungsroman narrative film: the diegesis of the development of the narrator’s mind and character as he passes from childhood through varied experience—and usually through a spiritual crisis—into maturity and the recognition of his identity and role in the world (Abrams 121). Consequently, as Day (1975) specifies, Ishmael must tread the way to Heaven through the bottomless pits of Hell. The spiritual odyssey of Ishmael from innocence through all evil and pain to eventual harmonious serenity is symbolized in “The Try Works” in chapter 96 (Day 75).

The hypothesis can be further justified, in ways of the audio-visual effect, by the introduction of an intricate relation between fictional narration and cinematic pro-filmic which has been represented expressively and artistically to make the film. As the screen lights up and the background music is yet to come, we look at the wandering image of diegetic narrator Ishmael setting out to sea while the soundtrack begins amid harmonious bird-twittering. All of a sudden, a nihilistic and haunting voice strikes like a marvelous caesura: "Call me Ishmael." After that caesura comes the magic symphony as background music, along with the following cadenced yet enigmatic monologue:

"Some years ago, having little or no money, I thought I would sail about and see the oceans of the world. Whenever I get grim and spleenful, whenever I feel like knocking people’s hats off on the street, whenever it’s a damp, drizzly November in my soul, then I know it’s high time to get to sea again. Choose any path you please, and ten to one that path shoots down to water. There’s magic in water that draws all men away from the land, leads them over the hills, down creeks and streams and rivers to the sea. The sea, where each man, as in a mirror, finds himself." (Moby Dick 1-2)

It should be well noted that the use of first-person narrative discourse co-extensive with the image track undoubtedly draws the film closer to literary speech, but within the filmic discourse, its function within the text is much more dynamic and dimensional. As Claire Johnston (1978) has claimed in Double Indemnity, "While the film poses a first-person narrating discourse that takes the form of a memory, the filmic/diegetic image is always in the present. Far from displacing the enigma in revealing the plot resolution at the beginning of the film, the first-person narrative discourse, in its play of convergence/divergence with the visible, produces an enigma at another level for the viewer: a split relationship to knowledge" (Easthope 136).

The title sequence sets the film under the complex mark of identification: the innocent narrator Ishmael (the subject’s self-image/infant lack of motor control) in front of the mirror determining his identification with the forecastle Ishmael (the alienated image/objet a). The image which the narrator Ishmael sees in the mirror is, in this sense, an “alienated” one. That is, I argue, the narrator Ishmael "misrecognizes" itself in the mirror (i.e., the sea, as recalling the last sentence in Ishmael’s monologue), finds in the image a pleasing unity which he does not actually experience in his own body. Therefore, in Bezanson’s (1953) terms, "we are reminded by shifts of tense from time to time that while forecastle Ishmael is busy hunting whales, narrator Ishmael is sifting memory and imagination in search of the many meanings of the dark adventure he has experienced" (Hayford and Parker 656).

For Lacan, the imaginary identification with objects under discussion is precisely the ego formation process which is essentially narcissistic: we arrive at a sense of an "I" by finding that "I" reflected back to ourselves by some object or person in the world (Eagleton 164-165). The recasting of the concept of narcissism has profound implications for Melville’s view on Narcissus. For us, the same tormenting and mild image in the fountain Narcissus fails to grasp is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to all. In this sense, like Ishmael, one may see one’s own image but in a context of life and reality which is not one’s self. "To be Ishmael," says Chase (1957), "is to be able at the last minute to resist the plunge from the masthead into the sea one has with rapt fascination been gazing at, to assert at the critical moment the difference between the self and the not-self" (Chase 108).

In the ending sequence, the camera holds in frame the forecastle Ishmael floating out of the Pequod’s vortex, following the coffin as a lifebuoy made for Queequeg when he thought himself dying. The narrator Ishmael, now out of frame, speaks in an incantation fashion: "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee... The drama’s done..." Inspired by Aumont et al. (1992), I’d like to add, having defined himself (i.e., narrator “I”) according to the function of misunderstanding or misrecognizing, Ishmael (i.e., ego) is, from his origin, dedicated to the imaginary and to allure. Via successive identifications, Ishmael constructs himself as an imaginary instance (forecastle “I”) in which the subject tends to alienate himself, and this instance is nevertheless the condition sine qua non of the subject’s self-synchronization, of his entry into the symbolic. To avoid confusion, I’d like to cite Feidelson’s (1953) words that despite the fact that Ishmael (forecastle “I”) and Melville (narrator “I”) "often merge into one. Ishmael is the delegated vision of Melville; he can enact the genesis of symbolic meaning, whereas Melville, speaking solely as an omniscient author, could only impute arbitrary significance" (Hayford and Parker 674).

The distinction can be rendered visual by imagining that young Ishmael is no common sailor thoughtlessly enacting whatever the fates throw his way. He is a pondering young man of strong imagination and complex temperament; he will, as it were, become the narrator in due time. But right now he is aboard the Pequod doing his whaleman’s work and trying to survive the spell of Captain Ahab’s power. The narrator, having survived, is at his desk trying to explain himself to himself and to whoever will listen (Bezanson 657).