In the center of a circle: poetics of space in Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and H. Melville’s novel “Moby-Dick, or The Whale”

Abstract

This article is dedicated to the analysis of peculiarities of space arrangement in the “Divine Comedy” by Alighieri and the novel Moby-Dick, or The Whale” by Herman Melville. On the examples of structural mythologemes “journey inside yourself” and “path towards the center of a circle”, present in both works, the author notes the impact of Dante upon Melville and determines the differences in their poetics of space. Structural, semantic and comparative-historical analysis of the texts in question allows speaking of the transformation of symbolism of the images of circle and its center, circular, vertical and horizontal movement, as well as reconsideration of meaning of the category of chaos and order, opposition “internal-external” from Dante’s works to worldview of the authors of the era of Romanticism. The novelty of this work consists in simultaneous analysis of the impact of Dante’s poetry upon Melville and comparison of peculiarities of the poetics of space of both authors for determining fundamental changes in representations of the structure of world space and space of the inner world of a person. In artistic realm of H. Melville, symbolic point of the center of a circle – “center of the world” –is no longer static, it becomes unreliable, depicting heads of madman characters and the images of the objects, which semantics does not resemble the concept of emptiness. The motif of the loss of structuredness along with the motif of mutual reciprocity of spatial dimensions and characteristics distinguish Melville’s poetics of space, delineated in the dialogue with distinct features of space arrangement in Dante’s works.