Moby Dick and Don Quixote as Self-Conscious Novels

Moby Dick and Don Quixote as Self-Conscious Novels:

The Issue of Language and Artifacts

Writing against the grain of F. R. Leavis’s conception of English novel, expounded in his The Great Tradition, Robert Alter writes “the other great tradition,” as he suggests tongue-in-cheek in the preface to his Partial Magic. Leavis introduces the criterion of “seriousness” to the studies of English novel, keeping out of his story a whole line of novelists that do not meet the proposed expectations. Alter establishes a parallel genealogy of the novel, a “self-conscious novel,” one that “systematically flaunts its own condition of artifice and that by so doing probes into the problematic relationship between real-seeming artifice and reality” (Alter x). This paper looks at two very different novels, Moby Dick and Don Quixote, through two passages as self-conscious windows. As representatives of such genre, thing regardless of their differences in time of production or form or content, they both do essentially the same: they mix different levels of fiction and reality to question their own status as fiction and reality. One way of doing that is through real-objects and the idea of language they entail.

Moby Dick’s self-conscious first-person narrator Ishmael, a sailor alienated from society, wanders about New Bedford, Massachusets before signing up for a voyage aboard a whaling ship Pequod. In Chapter 7, “The Chapel,” he finds the Whaleman’s Chapel and inside it marble tablets. Upon closer inspection, he notices they are commemoration plaques erected by the families and shipmates of sailors lost at sea. They are cenotaphs, literally “empty tombs” in Greek, and they mark not only loss but absence. They are gravestones without a grave, providing...

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...hin and outside the artifacts it embeds can travel across the language barrier. The cenotaphs Ishmael stumbles upon are in a way like Flemish tapestries. Real-objects are aesthetical objects but also truth-claims, bound up with the language that constitutes them. A commemoration plaque in any language would still honor the memory of “Captain Ezekiel Hardy” and remain an aesthetical object in a novel – but would it remain a truth-claim in a self-conscious novel? On the other hand, Ishmael’s cenotaphs are not real-objects; they are unreliable representations. The purpose and function of such objects, it seems, lies less in their “realness” and more in their inherent ability to poke and probe the dialectic they embody. Perhaps they are in fact more like double-sided tapestries, scrutinizing with their interlaced threads both sides, both as real as they are fictional.