building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

the “revelation” can also be seen, however, in Moby Dick, in which as before the
reader was not spared long, technical, encyclopaedic and sometimes even
pedantic digressions, but most of all the protagonists were given names which
could suggest the significance of the entire voyage narrated. If the message in
Typee was represented by the desertion from the ship to a savage world, a new,
uncontaminated land, Moby Dick, recalled the real expeditions to the West by
using the epic allegory of the sea voyage.
It could be said, therefore, that whereas Achab looked for the meaning of his life
in the obscure depths of the Ocean, the pioneer searched for them at the frontier
and in the wilderness. Furthermore, Achab, Elijah, Gabriel and Ishmael were,
without any doubt, names taken from the Scriptures, but such names were
common in New England and Melville has legitimately taken some elements from
daily life, thus creating a tension between the narrative and news of the time.
To this sometimes candid and partially unconscious search for truth, he was able
to add both the “biblical” message and at the same time the calling, which
animated the Americans of that time, by reworking his personal experiences.
Naturally we are aware of the limits of the proposed reading. It is clear that the
voyages told by Melville are neither simple chronicles, nor a literary expedient, nor
even a naïve desire to evoke the religious world. They are understandably voyages
and adventures with a universal significance, just as a universal significance can be
ascribed to the explorers of the unknown lands of the West. All the possible
interpretations of those events show the conflict between a desire of affirmation
over nature and a fear of the unknown.
Jean Baudrillard, in his well‐known essay Amérique (1986), highlights the
relationships between social, historical and economical changes which have
formed part of the formation of the American vocation of appointing itself as a
utopia come true. A land of age‐old religious experiences and confirmations, a
symbol of the zero degree of European culture:
“In the opinion of the European, America continues to remain a latent
form of exile, a ghost of emigration and exile, and therefore a form of
internalisation of its culture. At the same time, it corresponds to a
violent extroversion and therefore to zero degree of the very same
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