"Clap eye on" Captain Pe(g)leg/Ahab : メルヴィルによる『白鯨』の原稿修正と反ナショナリズムの衝動

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Herman Melville's Moby-Dick was published in 1851, but, the manuscript had been almost completed by the summer of 1850. Evert Duyckinck, the editor of The Literary World, who looked over the text, wrote to his brother that it was "a romantic, fanciful and literal and most enjoyable presentment of the Whale Fishery." However, as Melville got more and more literary inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne through the months from late 1850 to 1851, he could not resist the impulse to revise the work. After all, when the published text appeared, it was much different from the 1850 manuscript. Unfortunately, there is no decisive evidence for verifying this rewriting process because all the manuscripts were lost. Thus, what the 1850 original story was like has been a riddle to Melville scholars. Howard Vincent, George R. Stewart, and James Barbour, relying on external evidences such as letters, quotations, and books Melville used, tried to identify two or three different stages where he worked on different parts of the text. Unlike those critics, Harrison Hayford analyzed the text itself in detail, and hypothesized that Melville changed some of the characters' names in the original manuscript without editing their descriptions. For example, in the 1850 manuscript, Ishmael's partner must have been Bulkington instead of Queequeg, and, in his process of revision, Melville must have changed "Bulkington" both into "Queequeg" in some parts and into "Ahab" in other parts. He swapped the roles of the characters only by editing their names. Above all, this essay focuses on the hypothesis that Peleg was originally spelled as Pegleg in the 1850 manuscript ("peg leg" means an artificial leg made of wood), and that he must have been the one-legged captain of the Pequod. Namely, Pegleg's role as the captain was taken over by Ahab as Melville proceeded with the revision of the manuscript. Hayford calls it a hypothesis, but if we analyze one scene in the present text where Ishmael talks with Peleg, we can assert that his hypothesis is right. This analysis is done by examining Melville's use of the idiom, "clap eye on." Moreover, if Pegleg were the one-legged captain of the ship, his characteristics would represent the national hero of the age, Andrew Jackson. Pegleg initiates Ishmael into the world of whaling by threatening him with his peg leg, the limb devoured by a whale, which symbolizes the dangerous jobs he will have to undertake. In a similar way, Jackson received scars on his head in the Revolutionary War, and he menaced his political enemy with a hickory cane, at the same time, he succeeded in initiating the Republic into a new democratic era. Then, we can assume that Melville composed some parts of the 1850 manuscript, responding to the imperatives of the Jacksonian ideology. This can also be explained by the political backgrounds behind his compositional works, and we can regard his process of revision including Pegleg's transformation into Peleg with his lost leg recovered as his effort to alienate himself from this ideology. Thus, this essay makes clear the textual dynamics deployed in the 1850 and 1851 Moby-Dicks which are transparently visible through each other, and demonstrates the ideological conflicts in which Melville struggled for artistic integration.
2010-03-31

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竹内勝徳
鹿児島大学

"Clap eye on" Captain Pe(g)leg/Ahab : メルヴィルによる『白鯨』の原稿修正と反ナショナリズムの衝動

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