Allegories of War: Paul de Man’s Moby-Dick Translation

Abstract

Allegories of War:Paul de Man’s Moby-Dick Translation Michael Boyden This article deals with a Flemish translation of Moby-Dick, published in Antwerp in 1945, which has been attributed to the deconstructive critic Paul de Man in the Belgian phase of his career. The article’s objective is twofold. First, it qualifies the well-intentioned but one-sided claim on the part of de Man scholars that the Moby-Dick translation constitutes a resolute turning point in de Man’s ideological trajectory. Second, in doing so, it draws out some of the aporias of allegorical readings of the postwar period, which adopt a redemptive framework geared towards the American nation. My main claim is that, contrary to American liberal critics, de Man did not approach Moby-Dick in terms of a larger struggle against totalitarian closure, but rather responded to the theme of antimodernism and Melville’s complex relation to imperialism. This interpretation is inferred from the modifications to the novel’s situation of address, the amplification of martial imagery, and paratextual insertions by the translator. Rather than arguing for or against a specific reading of Moby-Dick, the article’s larger aim is to highlight the displacements inherent in any allegorical interpretation of the novel. In a still dominant but by no means uncontested reading of Moby-Dick, the book’s larger theme is framed in terms of a struggle between the ideological closure embodied by the “monomaniac mind” of Ahab and Ishmael’s democratic alternative. The orphaned Ishmael has the last word, which for Charles Feidelson, F. O. Matthiessen, Richard Chase, R. W. B. Lewis, Leslie Fiedler, and others, indicated that the book displayed a characteristically American, “melodramatic” quality (Chase 157). At least since the end of the Cold War, this allegorical understanding of the novel has increasingly come under fire from the so-called “New Americanists,” notably Donald Pease, who in an influential essay links the “essentialized opposition” between Ishmael and Ahab to a discourse of exceptionalism inherent in American Studies (137).1 Similarly, WaiChee Dimock has stressed how Melville’s dream of freedom and democracy in Moby-Dick “is haunted always by its obverse” (138). Dimock sets her interpretation off from a long line of Melville scholarship that in her view posits [End Page 21] Ishmael as a central “redemptive figure” in the book (236n52). Although such revisionist interpretations have done their work in exposing some ideological presuppositions of liberal criticism in the Cold War era, their field of vision remains national. Despite the desire to go beyond the narrowly “national telos” of earlier critics, Pease constructs C. L. R. James’s Marines, Renegades and Castaways, which the Trinidadian critic completed while in custody at Ellis Island, as “an additional episode within Melville’s masterwork” that somehow serves to complete Melville’s “interrupted intention” (156). However radical in purpose, such exegetical gestures remain tied to utopian visions—representing Melville’s “actual” intention—of an alternative, more democratic America.2 My aim in this article is to approach Melville’s “cultural declaration,” as John Bryant has called it (70), from a slightly wider orbit by way of a relatively unknown Flemish translation of Moby-Dick, published in 1945, which has been attributed to the deconstructive critic Paul de Man in his early, Belgian career. The translation raises important questions about de Man’s ideological leanings during the war. But the case may equally illuminate the ideological constraints governing interpretations of Melville’s classic by forcing us to come to terms with Moby-Dick’s appeal in ideological contexts ostensibly diametrically opposed to American conceptions of democracy. When the de Man “affair” broke out in the late 1980s, well-intentioned friends and colleagues referred to the Moby-Dick translation, which de Man completed at the end of the war after he had ceased writing for the collaborationist press, as evidence of his moral right-mindedness.3 Thus, in an oft-quoted essay reprinted in her book Testimony, Shoshana Felman argued that the Melville translation signals an “absolute break” in the young de Man’s ideological orientation (134). Offering a forthrightly allegorical reading, Felman suggests that the Moby-Dick translation was for de Man a way of...