《白鲸》—象征手法影射的生态悲剧＊

2010-04-11□余丰

湖南税务高等专科学校学报 2010年4期

关键词：影射象征主义白鲸

□ 余丰

(湖南农业大学东方科技学院,湖南长沙 410128)

《白鲸》—象征手法影射的生态悲剧＊

□ 余丰

(湖南农业大学东方科技学院,湖南长沙 410128)

白鲸作为一部高度象征主义的作品,融合了大量自然历史科学元素于其中。船长亚哈与莫比迪克之间血腥残忍的斗争恰恰象征了大自然与人类的长期冲突与对抗。结合文中用象征主义手法影射的人物命运,着重研究作者暗含其中的生态学意义。其中包括,人类作为万物之灵,无论如何不能与自然为敌,危害自然。

白鲸;象征主义;生态学;和谐

Introduction

As DH.Lawrence once put it,Moby Dick boasts the reputation of"the Odyssey of the sea with nobody to be its rival".Also,the gifted British critics W illiam SomersetMaugham,regards it as the greatmasterpiece of all the American Literature in his own critical work—GreatNovelists and TheirWorks1.Moby Dick,as itwere,overshadowed all other works of sea topics in more aspects than one.

The key to unlock the fancy treasure chest of the outstanding story,so to speak,is to dig out its blood tie with the history during 1848-1875 when capitalis m overwhelmed the globe.In the phase of 1851,the ruthlessmassacre against the sea was nothing less than the heartlessmassacre against the Indian,in the respect of the whole capitalism community.It is the era in which Melville lives,the traditional living style joins hands with the newly born profitable whale trade.So much is certain:as the way black man been sold as tangible goods,so were the valuable brain,teeth and baleen of the whales.In the stage of 1837-1941,Melville led a wondering life as mariner in the sea.As we all know, MobyDick stems from the practical experience of author himself.Moreover,Moby Dick serves as the coarse biography ofMelville in his early days.

L iterature Review

An unfading timeless encyclopedia,theMobyDick never fails to appeal enormous researchers.Former researches and critics aboutMobyDick falls into two categories:In the first place,on thoroughly analysis of individual character in Moby Dick.W ithin its sphere, some try to dig out the original figure of Ahab,some compare the figure Ahabwith Santiago which is the protagonist of Hemingway’s the Old Man and the Sea. In the second place,on certain conscious streams implied in it.For instance,some turn to the racial awareness of it,some attempt to reveal the anti colonialism spirits hiding in it.

In today’s atmosphere,the stream of harmony and sustainable development become key words of the present era. In 2010 Shanghai Expo,"better city,better life"brings the environmental problem once again to the magnesium light.There is nothing more incumbent on us than the environmental dilemma,which,if handled improperly,the heavy toll would be none other than ourselves to burden.

1 The alarm s of human’s evil behaviorsl aga inst the Nature

1.1 Author’s ecological view

Through the threshold of the Industrial Age,hu-man beings no longer merely satisfy with the l imited natural resources easily to be at hand,but do their utmost to plunder,to take advantage of the natural environment totally ignoring the price theymust pay for.As a matter of fact,as early as in 1951,Her manMelville’s MobyDick acted as a tragic prediction which indicated thatman in this universe lives a meaningless and futile life,meaningless because of greed.In this fiction,the author tried to instill readers the idea that the hatred towards the Nature would inevitably be ended by the ruin of both sides.

1.2 Defin ition of Ecology

In general,it is the professional research about the way in which plants,animals,and people are related to each other and to the environment.

1.3 Tight Relations between Man and Nature in literature works

From ancient t imes,western civilization boast the name of"blue civilization,"for it rises from the bluish The Mediterranean Sea. Those examples are abounding.The Chinese people are all proud of the name of "the son of the earth"for their yellow skin. In the meantime,the ancestors of the Greeks held the calling of"daughters of the sea"aswell2.The endless and enormous sea has never failed to st imulate our imagination and fantasy for ages.In Greek mythology,Poseidon became the mighty and majestic god of the sea,ruling all the waters around the earth.He was considered to have the greatest power next to Zeus.Aphrodite,the symbol of beauty and love,was also born in the great and restlesswaves of the sea.The epics of Homer,Iliad and Odyssey stemmed from the cradle of the sea. Literature works have close bearing on the background of the sea are totally countless.

1.4 Ecological view of ancient China

Moby Dick is the pioneer among those sea topic works to present the ecological balance be tween human endeavor and Nature elements.Moby dick represents the sum total of Melville’s bleak view of the world in which he lived.It is at once Godless and purposeless. The equilibrium between human beings and the Nature has long been a dilemma to deal with. In China,we can readily tracing to Spring andAutumn Period.As famous thinker Chuang Tzu has pointed out that"The nature liveswith me in symbiosis,and everything is with me as a whole."His view shows us the inner truth of the har mony achieved by both human beings and the elements.From the standpoint of The Theory of Evolution,Human were special,not because God had created them in His image,but because they had successfully adapted to changing environmental conditions and had passed on their survival making characteristics genetically. In essence,human beings enjoy no more rights,so to speak,or privileges over other creatures, animals and plants,for instance.According to Chuang Tzu,man and theMotherNature were supposed to live in harmony in all senses.However,with the development of the civilization and globalization,out of the insatiable desire for material goods and money,people turned to approaching the edge of the abyss of evil and destruction.As a result,the world became full to the brim of sewage,air containments,noises etc.Further, there is a seriesof chain reactionsof species declination and distinction.

1.5 Ecological Tragedy in M oby D ick

In the early stages of 18th century,Americans ruled the whaling industry by advanced tools and boats. In the process of conquering the Nature,man tasted the pleasure of conquering and ruling and therefore,which deeply intense their self-worshiping and self-esteeming.From the EnlightenmentAge till now,people has put heavy stress on the capability of human themselves, hardly aware of the rightly respect towards the Mother Nature.In the conflict between modern industrial civilization and the Nature,men tend to sing highly their great mighty of change things to the appropriate way. However,Moby Dick is the exception at all.Ahab justifiably represents the undue hatred against the Nature just due to the humiliation that theMoby Dick had given him.Ridiculous enough,he could bear the dreary pain and inconvenience of disability,butwhatprovoked him to the large extent is the humiliation of his soul.In Ahab’smind,there is nothing but revenge in this ruthlessworld.As a result,little infor mation is provided aboutAhab’s life prior to meetingMobyDick,although it is known that he was orphaned at a young age.When discussing the purpose of his quest with Starbuck,it is revealed that he first began whaling at eighteen and has continued in the trade for forty years,having spent less than three on land.He also mentions his"girl-wife," whom he married late in life,and their young son,but does not give their names.Several years of chasing and drifting had turned Ahab from an ordinary husband to a indifferent killer.Moreover,Ahab became ill-mannered.He refused to help his old friend to look for his lost son,he refused to stop in his way to hunt the gigantic whale for the sake of his guys,he also refused to take the Starbuck’s idea of let their crews go.The revenge plan burning his heart all the time,showed the evil and wicked side of human nature.At first,Ahab’s hunting ofwhales just out of profits.Finally,all his intention lies in killing theMoby Dick who swallowed his leg.Ahab’sworld view is:If the sun insultedme,Iwill beat it back all the same.He even mocks it,suggesting that the fury of the storm is nothingmajestic,but a kind of gassy stomach ache.

Following Ahab’s view,people would fight against Nature ever and forever for there are always earthquakes,hurricanes,flooding and beasts.Suppose man take avenge of every natural disasters,the only fate of thisworld is the arriving of the dooms’day.However, the destruction and catastrophes caused by the nature is nothing but the negative effects of unduly human efforts,having nothing association of the nature itself.On the contrary,as human beings fightmore,suffermore. To myway of thinking,there is nothing butAhab himself is the controller of hismiserable fate and the killer it turned out to be.For instance,in chapter 119,this ismarvelously theatrical.Tremendous fire,blackness, stor m,and battering sea-all are present,as are high emotion,conflicting beliefs,and clash of personalities. Ahab’s speech brings his hatred for the forces that" task"him and"heap"him. In other word,he is not defeated and destroyed by the seemingly"evil and cruel"Moby Dick;instead,his enemy was none other than his unbearable greediness and resentfulness from the beginning to the end.

Ahab ultimately dooms the crew of the Pequod to death by his obsession with Moby Dick.During the final chase,Ahab hurls his final harpoon while yelling his now-famous revenge line.The harpoon becomes lodged in Moby Dick’s flesh and Ahab,caught in his own harpoon’s rope and unable to free himself,is dragged into the cold oblivion of the seawith the injured whale. The whale eventually destroys the whaleboats and crew,and sinks the Pequod.

2 Symbolis m in M oby D ick

2.1 Ahab—the Capta in

When the ecological crisis is prevailing on our earth as quick as possible,it is quite natural and rational to reflect those ecological views in some literature works,such asMoby Dick.Herman Melville,worked as a whaler in his 18th in the whale catchers,gained a host of valuable experiences of whale catching in boats on the sea than lands.3 Despite the title,the realmain character is the Captain of Pequod—Ahab.He believes that the world is controlled by a vicious intelligence which operates through visible objects,and for him all the viciousness of that evil intelligence is presented byMoby Dick.Ahab is the tyrannical captain of the Pequod who is driven by a monomaniacal desire to killMobyDick,the whale thatma imed him on the previous whaling voyage.Despite the fact that he is a Quaker,he seeks revenge in defiance of his religion’s well-known pacifis m.Ahab’s name comes directly from the Bible.The Captain’s original character is the 7th king of Israel named Ahab in the Bible.On the one hand,Ahab governs his kingdom successfully by preventing his subjects from outside invasion.On the other hand,he severely blasphems God and is then punishes by Yahve.Ahab was killed in battle,and when he was buried,dogs drank his blood.Yahve not only tortured the king himself but also made his subjects died without full remains.The nature of Ahab in the Bible reveals the same fate of the Captain Ahab.

2.2 W hat does theW hale stands for

Aswe all know,the author endowed every characterwith assortment symbolic senses.Moreover,his intention means to bring people to home the important of Nature respect and protection.In general,Ahab represents the people who want to conquer the Nature even change the Nature to its own wishes.The Moby Dick, however,represents the changeable and invincible Nature elements.4 They both represent the undying and cut-throat battle be tween human beings and the Nature.In common views,the Moby Dick passes for the evil,irrational and mysterious energy which stems from the Nature.But in Ahab’s eyes,theMobyDick is far away from the born enemy of his mortal or flesh body, instead,his doom fate and subconscious’s enemy.Under Ishmael’s view,the enor mous sea boasts of noble truth,it is infinite.And,the Moby Dick is a natural part of the sea;his existence would not be changed by any other things or anybody. The color white is ex-plored in the chapter"TheWhiteness of theWhale."It calls into question the meaning of the chapters on cytology.In popular culture,MobyDick is often depicted as being an albino whale.For example,in the huge whale mural at the New Bedford Whaling Museum,a white sper m whale with a red eye and several harpoons(detached from their boats)stuck in its back is prominently displayed.This seems accurate,since the aforementioned chapter"TheWhitenessof theWhale"refers explicitly to"the albino whale."Others however claim that this is inaccurate,and that Moby Dick is colored like an average sper m whale,butwith so many scars as to appear white or is gray with several patches and streaks ofwhite.He is also described as having a wrinkled brow,a crooked jaw and three gashes in his right tail fluke.

2.3 The un ique image of theW hale

Moby Dick’s dimensions are never specified,but he is said to be one of the largest,if not the largest sper m whale known. Subsequently,Melville states (Chapter 103)that bull sperm whales can grow to the length of ninety feet;(this would be disputed by modern marine biologists who maintain they rarely exceed sixty feet).MobyDick also appears to be unusually intelligent,resorting to many clever strategies to defeat Ahab and his crew.He also seems to be capable of using his injuries to great advantage.On the second day of the chase,he allowsAhab and hismen to strike him with their harpoons during a head-on charge;he then s wims around wildly to entangle the harpoons before yanking Ahab towards him in order to cut him up with the harpoons embedded in his flesh.Moby Dick then s mashes Stubb and Flask’s boatswith his flukes,before sending Ahab’s boat flying with a powerful head butt. Even though Ahab has been defeated ignominiously,his rage against the whale is impressive as he tries to pry MobyDick’s jaws off the boatwith only his hands.MobyDick as he swims,Fedallah’s absolute stillness as he faces death in the whale’s jaws he"still-life"of the boat as Moby Dick munches it before snapping it in half.The sense of quiet,in spite of violence,contrasts with the sense of noisy,helter-skelter activity in the next.

2.4 The Author’s ego—Ishmal

The undue emphasis of modern civilization bring the trend of civilization out of the orbit,in otherwords, the wanting to control the Nature even everything become a fashion in the so-called civilized world.Quite naturally,everybody of the crazymodern world is never immune from the ambition to killing and murder. Ishmael,for example,serves as the vict im of this downward world.The inner hatred against the entire Nature not only veiled the Captain solely,but through the noble mighty of h im,all the crews on the board are veiled under it.They even turned to be clumsy and numb towards the whale involuntarily.Thus,those who tend to hate the Nature and change the Nature inevitably take the lead in the society and upside down the whole tide. Being the noble leader of Pequod,Ahab exerts surmountable influence on Ishmael.He burned the sparks on Ishmal and turned it to full fire.Ishamal,aswe all know,casting by strong symbolic meaning.The name Ishmael also appears in the Bible as that of the first son ofAbraham in the Old Testament.The name has come to symbolize orphans,exiles,and social outcasts-in the opening paragraph of Moby-Dick,Ishmael tells the reader that he has turned to the sea out of a feeling of alienation from human society.In the last line of the book,Ishmael also refers to himself symbolically as an orphan.Ishmael has a rich literary background(he has previously been a school teacher),which he brings to bear on his shipmates and events that occur while at sea.

At the very beginning,Ishmal was totally an outsider,after a period of time,Ahab had alter h im from an industrious and integrityman to a crazy and a meanly bigwig.Thus,Ishmal passes for a humble servant and accomplice of a seemingly ambitious but a crazy man innate.To some extent,Ishmal feel pity for the Nature,to be more exactly,to theMobyDick.However,he is never able to deprived of the controlling of evil powers.He is never able to change thewicked intention of Ahab.As the spokesman of the author, Ishmal turned out to be a wise man.In this fiction,Ishmal is never a merely caiquejee as we simply put,but a dimensionalwise man.Ishmael sees his shipmates as archetypes of human nature and society,and tells his story couched in a vast array of detail,largely occurring during sections in which Ishmael takes an a lmost-omniscient viewpoint.In the early stage of this story,Ishmal acted as a humble outsider to describe the bloody and fierce hunting of a gigantic whale.Even though he spares no effort to get away from the bloody hunting,he became a killer h imself all the same.At the meantime, Ishmal go out of his way to illustrate the azure of the endless sea and everything ofwhale’s characters at great length.He’s solitary and single goal lies to wake up the respect and worship toward the Nature people should rightly have.Though those troublesome and detailed research of the whale,Ishmal came to realize that it is incumbent on human beings to respect the whale for their exhaustible vitality.Further more,man should rebuild the harmonious relationship with the whale,as itwere, with the entire Nature.But in reality,all the harmony was replaced by bloody and fierce killing.Ishmal began hid voyage out of the s imple fancy or born attraction of the mysterious sea.But when he saw streams of mariners in the harbor,an inner lure of conquer arose in him.When he came to know that his a im is to take revenge onMobyDick instead ofmake profits,he rose to say"no"at once.Later,he didn’t manage to betray Ahab,all he could do is to obey his irrational orders.

Conclusion

The transformation of"symbolic images into a creative myth,embodying a significant reflection of the profound human pre-occupations,wereMelville’s own philosophic despair:"5 the finest novelAmerica has yet given to the world;it procla ims unmistakablyMelville’s spiritual desolation.Human beings and the whale both were essential part of the Nature;they are entitled to live on their own land.But humans,however,evade the sea and take it as a battlefield.As a result,the balance between man and the Nature is slit and then cause serious downward consequences.Despite those advantages and technologies the modern world brings us,it is hard to neglect the damages and catastrophes the Nature ever suffered.After the publication ofMobyDick,Herman Melville wrote to Hawthorne: I have written a wicked book,but I feelmyself as pure as a little lamb. How to understand the meaning of the word—"wicked"?To my understanding,Melville justwrote a history of whale hunting and killing,also an encyclopedia of everything,history,philosophy,religion,etc.When a writermusters up all his courage to unfold the dark side of this seemingly stainless world,surly and justifiably, he would sense the feeling of pure and noble.Moby Dick is an adventure saga;an adventure with a vague spiritual tone,an allegory ofman’s attack upon nature. On the cut-throat battle be tween people and the Nature,no one take the lead in the end.From the standpoint of ecologic view,Moby Dick is a Shakespearean tragic prediction of the future of human beings.From it,Pequod presents a miniature of the modern society. Ahab,crazy about taking avenge on the Nature not out of the human nature but out of the advanced civilization and technologies which heavily impressed h im.As an old saying goes,no garden without its weeds.As the advanced civilization and new technologies for med our life with never-ending improvement,it also strengthens the incredulity of our ability to change the Nature. If human beings continue centering their eyes on selfinflation and doingwhat theywant indiscr iminately,the world would certainly ruin in our own hands.

注释

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[3]Robert S,Levine.The Cambridge companion to Her manMelville[M]. Shanghai:Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press 2001:132.

[4]Murray Kriehger.The Tragic Vision:variations on a Theme in literary Interpretation[M].Chicago:TheUniversityofChicago press,1996:16.

[5]罗伯特,哈钦斯编.西方名著入门[M].北京:商务艺术馆,1995::87.

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