Moby-Dick : la fable du ventre

Abstract

The narrative voice rising up from the wreck of the Pequod in the Epilogue of Moby-Dick ; or, The Whale seems to have overcome « the universal cannibalism of the sea » which came to a climax with Ahab's doom. But the narrative which feeds on the dismemberment of a body merely revives cannibalism under another guise. And yet, it is through this cannibal-like narration that Ishmael endeavours to elicit a voice, thus locating the advent of the Word in the bowels. Ishmael, in Jonah's wake, attempts to convert the devouring maw into a prophetic mouth. But the bowels fail to be transfigured. Far from delivering the wonders of the Word, they solely give forth the raving sounds of the belly, a hellish ventriloquy.

‘I must calculate over again’: measures of pain in Melville

“…In Moby-Dick, where the tenor has been elided, only the vehicle remains to signal the movement of figuration itself as the work of a paradoxical mimesis that does not aim at capturing its object in order to convert it into a set of measurable quantities, but follows instead the rhythm and the form of its singular allure. 47 As a figuring that never reaches the fullness of a figure, 'very like a whale' thus provides an apposite-because appositely incomplete-figuration of pain: a figuration without measure. *** When Melville asks in Pierre (1852): 'can Truth betray to pain?…”