Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

237This subjection or rather elimination of time legitimated antebellum America’s discourses ofexpansionism. To degrade time is to postpone the disintegration of Empire, “for temporal declineremained an imperial fate, the subordination would put off that fate indefinitely. Expanding notonly continentally but eventually to include the entire hemisphere, America would dispense spaceas a sort of temporal currency, buying its tenure in time with its expansion in space” (Dimock15). This extension in space, however, reflects America’s anxiety about declinethe eventualfate of all Empires. The narrative of progress had to deal with the natives who were considered asa threat to the prosperity of the nation. However, “at the frontier [the American Empire] falls off.Going from one hemisphere to another, what does it become? Nothing” (Diderot 177). To assurethe survival of Empire abroad and harmony at home, antebellum America offered the narrative ofprogress as “a narrative that admitted no warring polarity, only orderly succession” (Dimock 18).Considered as “barbarous” people, the Indians had to be civilized and made to submit to the rulesof the narrative of progress. Moby-Dick, a narrative of progress, evokes a rather different way oftaming the shrewd. Death or extinction of the first nations is what Moby-Dick illustrates. In fact,the Pequod, Ishmael tells us, is but “the name of a tribe of Massachusetts Indians, now extinct asthe ancient Medes” (82).Melville’s complexity and ambiguity lie in his affinity with many competing discourses:Orientalism, imperialism, and post-colonialism. As Edward Said has shown in Orientalism, “thegeneralization about ‘the Orient’ drew its power from the presumed representativeness ofeverything Oriental; each particle of the Orient told of its Orientalness, so much so that theattribute of being Oriental overrode any countervailing instance. An Oriental man was first anOriental and only second a man” (231). According to Melville, America’s corruption is not part