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f telling the primordial truth was the result of Hawthorne 's dream in The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville in Moby-Dick probably realized that such "truth" was too deep to tell completely. He found it, as he says in the chapter on "Cetology," "full of leviathanism, but signifying nothing." 1 He had already learned from Shakespeare and Hawthorne that it was "a tale told by an idiot" whose lunacy was the proper text and test for his imagination. No more "crazy" after his fall from "something" into "nothing" than Rip or Dimmesdale, the narrator of Moby-Dick wakes up to "that damp, drizzly November" of his soul with absolutely nothing to do. "Having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore," Ishmael confesses, "I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world" (p. 12). Once again we find the American writer on the "blank page in existence ," 2 headed for the myth of his identity in the fluid element Melville calls "an everlasting terra incognita" (p. 235). Columbus may have discovered the dry land of America, but en route he "sailed over numberless unknown worlds." From these we were, like Ishmael, perennial outcasts despite the alleged progress of our civilization. However much "baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make" (p. 235). Such is the fate [35] Melville's High on the Seas of Ahab and the Pequod, of course, in this dialectic of the Leviathan. Whereas The Scarlet Letter lacks a beginning and an ending in its myth of man in the Dark Wood and womb of his imagination, MobyDick lacks a discernible middle in its effort to recreate the myth of Jonah in the belly of the whale. It consists of episodes and stories that recommence the voyage of the self into the unknown, which hides its beginning and assures its ending. From "Loomings" to "Epilogue" this whale's tale keeps starting over with sketches about a crew that is in fact as fictional as Irving's crew of revelers in the Catskills. Like the abandoned Bulkington, their tales signify nothing more than the fate of every fiction about an identity outside the present. One tale that stands out for its fiction in this assemblage of "facts" about whaling is "The Town-Ho's Story." Like the raft passage in Huckleberryr Finn, it exists outside the larger story to remind us that the first-person narrator is a storyteller and not an "eyewitness" to the events he recounts. In Mark Twain's "aside," the tall tales or boastings of the raftsmen are cut down to reality by another tall tale-that of the shortest combatant whipping the two bigger men. In "The Town Ho's Story," the hissed threat of Steelkilt defeats the fiction of the captain's supremacy at sea. Yet another fiction, the lakeman's warning serves as fact for the captain and, indirectly, as fate for his first mate, Radrley. Interestingly , both the raft passage and "The Town-Ho's Story" appeared prior to the publication of the fiction to which they origillally belonged .3 Because he had dedicated his passage to another story (to which it did not belong), Twain never returned the part to the whole of Huckleberryr Finn, but Melville had already exhausted his stories of shipboard "youth" and so was compelled to put his tale back into the larger lie of his literary maturity. This was the myth he created in Moby-Dick, for the other is merely a "story" in the sense that it ends happily instead of not at all. Moby-Dick begins every time it ends with the awakening of the orphan in a coffin. As in the epilogue, the writer in Melville's fiction is always waking up as an orphan, yearning in the present for the living past. In his biography of Melville, Edwin Haviland Miller has already argued perceptively for this identity-theme, that of the orphan whose genius is shaped largely by his sense of alienation from his parents and parentallove.4 "Call me Ishmael," Melville announces at the beginning of his book, and we do because the story begins with an aura [ 3 6 ] [3.133.159.224...

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