トランスナショナルな身体 : メルヴィルの小説に見るその可能性と不可能性
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概要
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With the transnational or transatlantic turn in the recent studies of the American Renaissance, scholars have looked more closely than ever at the encounters between different peoples in Herman Melville's fiction. Following this trend, this paper reexamines his idea of transnational fusion of diverse ethnic/national identities, or "ethnic cosmopolitanism" as Timothy Marr called it, focusing on the representaitons of the body in his later works. In Moby-Dick (1851), the bond between Ishmael and Queequeg is expressed in bodily terms. When Ishmael wakes to find Queequeg's hand thrown over him in the bed, he remembers a strange sensation he experienced in his childhood. Ishmael was shut up in his room by his step-mother as a punishment. When he woke up after a few hours' sleep, he found that a phantom form sat beside his bed and that its "supernatural hand" was in his hand. At the bottom of Ishmael's discordance with the world lies this strange feeling of a double body. This sense of physical dislocation goes away, however, when Ishmael finds "a melting" in himself, being one with Queequeg. The three "diptych" stories written in the 1850's offer interesting examples of transatlanticism in Melville. Each of the stories is consisted of two sections in which the narrator tells about his experiences in America and in England, respectively. In the English sections, the narrator shares food and drinks with other people, or mingles with the crowd; his body is opened up, as it were, to the outside world. In the American sections, however, there prevails a sense of emptiness, sterility and closedness, as seen especially in "The Tartarus of Maids." It is by this contrast in physical sensations that Melville emphasizes the sickness of his own country. Israel Potter (1855) is a novel set in the period of the American Revolution. The protagonist, captivated by the British Army, makes his escapes in disguise, but is soon found out to be a Yankee. He never succeeds in looking like a British, or, in other words, acquiring a transatlantic body. His failure is a narrative necessity in an adventure story, and also an ideological one in a story of the war between America and England. This does not mean, however, that the novel presents a definite American national identity. Ethan Allen is a war hero whose Americanism lies in his sprit of the West, but his physical description is made of allusions to European elements. Paul Jones, another brave hero in the war, has tattoos on his arm like an indigenous New Zealand warrior's. Israel gazes at them in the dark room with surprise. This is a kind of reenactment of Ishmael's first night with Queequeg, but Jones' transnational body does not represent a fusion of ethnic identities but the savage nature of America. This contradiction, though itself being a richness of Melville's fiction, points to a radical question: "Is it possible to be truly transnational?"