THE SILENT LETTER IN H. MELVILLE’S MOBY DICK, OR THE WHALE

Abstract

The article analyzes the role of the unpronounceable (silent) consonant ‘h’ and the image of the mute letter in Herman Melville’s poetics, especially in Moby-Dick, or The Whale. The paper discusses the indistinction of textual objects (the word ‘whale’, the title of the novel The Whale) and images (white sperm whale Moby Dick, pale characters in Melville’s short stories), which is key for characterizing Melville’s works as autometatexts. The common characteristics that unite both layers - the graphic, auditory existence of the text and the fictional world of the novel - are ‘silence’ and ‘visibility’. The article examines the structure-forming role of these concepts for the system of the images and motifs and their conceptualization within the framework of Melville’s philosophy of creativity and the paradox of the genius who is able to tell the Truth in fiction. The act of creating and reading a text is identified with the process of drawing and seeing a silent letter; the novel then is a transformation field for both the writer and the reader into an architect and a stonemason on the way to comprehending the secret knowledge through the matter of language. The article takes into account the interpretations of the role of the letter ‘h’ in the novel that are classical in Anglophone Melville studies; the methodology of the French philosophers, who wrote about Melville’s work; and modern interpretations from Russian literary criticism.