Genre and Bodily Principle-A Bakhtinian Reading of Moby-Dick

黃淑娥(Shu-O Huang)

Moby-Dick ； Melville ； Bakhtin ； genres ； grotesque realism

小說與戲劇

18卷1期（2007 / 12 / 01）

115 - 129

英文

In this essay, I try to relate Melville's Moby-Dick to Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of the novel and grotesque realism, in terms of the mixed genre of the work and the image of the material body, illustrated by Melville's treatment of the barbarian Queequeg's tattooed body and the corpuses of the whales. One of Moby-Dick's notable features is the heterogeneous literary form, which has been discussed by critics ever since its publication. Reviewers of the nineteenth century condemned the formal incongruity of Moby-Dick, while critics of the twentieth century acknowledged the unconventional form as a literary value. In this essay, I will also deal with the mixed genre of the work, but through a different viewpoint. I will read the work in the light of Bakhtin's theory of the novel, elucidated in The Dialogic Imagination. In Moby-Dick, different genres, high and low, literary and nonliterary discourses, ranging from epic, drama (comedy and tragedy), lyric meditation to journalism of cetology and whaling, juxtaposing each other without hierarchical order. Those non-literary discourses are not ornamental or subject to the high genres of epic or tragedy, but occupy considerable, substantial space with their autonomy. With different voices suspended, confronted, parodied and dialogized, Moby-Dick exemplifies the novel genre, which, according to Bakhtin, is more hybrid, proletarian and democratic. On the other hand, I also seek to redefine, based upon the theory of grotesque realism, those chapters concerning cetology, the butchery of the whales, and Queequeg's tattooed body, as metaphors of the carnival-grotesque. Some critics regard Melville's description of the butchery of the whales as his attack on industrialism or as capitalists' relentless exploitation of nature. Yet, I will associate Queequeg's body and the dismembering of the whales' bodies with the carnival-grotesque symbols of open-ended bodies. Melville's humor and his treatment of the bodies reflect not so much a serious critique of capitalism as a carnivalesque celebration and fearless exploration of the open corpus as part of the cosmos. An investigating attitude toward the body, as well as a celebration or exaggeration of it, is common to both liberated America and paganism. In the pioneering stage of America, writers such as Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau and Melville all conveyed their yearning for practical experience, liberation and rejuvenation. The spirit echoes that of a carnival, which also represents an escape from the pretenses of the Orthodoxy, the official. In Moby-Dick, the mixed, liberated discourses and the positive images of the open-ended bodies communicate a new country's aspiration for freedom, from all the constraints of literary forms, ideologies and institutions of the Old World.

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