La parabole d’Achab

La parabole d’Achab

Moby Dick est une œuvre fondatrice dans la littérature américaine, mais dont le sens est toujours ouvert au débat. On peut l’interpréter selon un symbole qui échappe à la spécificité américaine, ou américaniste, comme cela est souvent fait, ou bien au contraire donner à ce symbole toute sa spécificité “nationale”, – et on parlerait alors d’un symbole de l’américanisme bien plus que d’un symbole de l’Amérique. Dans un premier cas, c’est la baleine blanche qui est le corps principal du symbole, dans le second c’est plutôt le capitaine Achab ; dans le premier cas, il s’agit plutôt d’une interrogation transcendantale, dans le second plutôt d’une prémonition également transcendantale qui serait une réponse donnée par avance au destin américaniste ressemblant étrangement dans son verdict à ce discours du jeune Abraham Lincoln en 1838 : «…Si la destruction devait un jour nous atteindre, nous devrions en être nous-mêmes les premiers et les ultimes artisans. En tant que nation d’hommes libres, nous devons éternellement survivre, ou mourir en nous suicidant.»

Jusqu’alors, l’utilisation symbolique des personnages de l’œuvre de Melville dans le champ de la parabole politique concernait surtout la grande baleine blanche. En 1998, le secrétaire à la défense William Cohen, poète à ses heures, avait confié à James Carroll que le Pentagone était comme une sorte de Moby Dick que le secrétaire à la défense-Achab tentait désespérément de dompter. La parabole avait une allure bureaucratique plutôt qu’épique et tragique, et Achab un rôle vertueux sinon le beau rôle. Dans son très récent texte pour le site progressiste et dissident Truthdig.org qu’il dirige, Chris Hedges choisit Achab pour justifier sa parabole et Achab devient une sorte de personnage maudit, dévoré par sa psychologie toute entière concentrée dans son hybris et promis à un sort catastrophique, – et Achab est l’Amérique d’aujourd’hui, promise effectivement à un sort catastrophique. Il n’est plus question d’une trahison des Pères Fondateurs, comme chez nombre de dissidents, il n’est plus question de la soi-disant pureté originelle de l’Amérique à sa fondation de 1776-1788 qui aurait été viciée peut-être irrémédiablement par l’évolution du pays. Au contraire, Hedges voit symboliquement la malédiction qui frappe l’Amérique comme présente à l’origine même, avec le symbole du nom du navire d’Achab, Pequod, du nom d’une tribu d’Indiens massacrés par les puritains en 1638 (Pequod est aussi l'Amérique avec ses massacres, et le navire comporte 30 hommes d'équipage, qui est le nombre d'Etats de l'Union lorsque Melville écrit son livre)... Le destin catastrophique de l’Amérique d’aujourd’hui tracé dès l’origine de l’origine, dans une psychologie qui porte en elle une tare indélébile, elle-même porteuse d’un sentiment d’autodestruction qui concerne la modernité elle-même (le Système n’est pas loin). Aujourd'hui, écrit Hedges, «comme Achab, nous rationalisons la folie» (notre folie...).

Rarement on a lu un texte aussi noir et désespéré sur l’Amérique, de la part d’un Américain qui fut toute sa vie un activiste, et dont l’activisme était au départ fondé sur les valeurs originelles de la fondation-1776 de l’Amérique. Tout espoir sur le destin de l’Amérique, et de la modernité par conséquent, semble avoir déserté l’esprit du progressiste Chis Hedges, et nous n’hésiterions pas à croire que ce sentiment qui apparaît, devient de plus en plus présent, consciemment chez quelques-uns, de plus en plus prégnant dans une psychologie collective qui ne va plus cesser de s’étendre chez les autres. C’est là la perception inconsciente qu’effectivement l’Amérique se découvre comme l’instrument d’une métahistoire catastrophique, et comme l’instrument principal du Système par conséquent, avec cet emportement de l’autodestruction... (Dans Truthdig.org, le 7 juillet 2013, «We Are All Aboard the Pequod».)

«The most prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a species is found in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia.

»Our country is given shape in the form of the ship, the Pequod, named after the Indian tribe exterminated in 1638 by the Puritans and their Native American allies. The ship’s 30-man crew—there were 30 states in the Union when Melville wrote the novel—is a mixture of races and creeds. The object of the hunt is a massive white whale, Moby Dick, which, in a previous encounter, maimed the ship’s captain, Ahab, by biting off one of his legs. The self-destructive fury of the quest, much like that of the one we are on, assures the Pequod’s destruction. And those on the ship, on some level, know they are doomed—just as many of us know that a consumer culture based on corporate profit, limitless exploitation and the continued extraction of fossil fuels is doomed.

»“If I had been downright honest with myself,” Ishmael admits, “I would have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing.”

»We, like Ahab and his crew, rationalize madness. All calls for prudence, for halting the march toward environmental catastrophe, for sane limits on carbon emissions, are ignored or ridiculed. Even with the flashing red lights before us, the increased droughts, rapid melting of glaciers and Arctic ice, monster tornadoes, vast hurricanes, crop failures, floods, raging wildfires and soaring temperatures, we bow slavishly before hedonism and greed and the enticing illusion of limitless power, intelligence and prowess. We believe in the eternal wellspring of material progress. We are our own idols. Nothing will halt our voyage; it seems to us to have been decreed by natural law. “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run,” Ahab declares. We have surrendered our lives to corporate forces that ultimately serve systems of death. Microbes will inherit the earth.

»In our decline, hatred becomes our primary lust, our highest form of patriotism and a form of eroticism. We are made supine by hatred and fear. We deploy vast resources to hunt down jihadists and terrorists, real and phantom. We destroy our civil society in the name of a war on terror. We persecute those, from Julian Assange to Bradley Manning to Edward Snowden, who expose the dark machinations of power. We believe, because we have externalized evil, that we can purify the earth. We are blind to the evil within us. Melville’s description of Ahab is a description of the bankers, corporate boards, politicians, television personalities and generals who through the power of propaganda fill our heads with seductive images of glory and lust for wealth and power. We are consumed with self-induced obsessions that spur us toward self-annihilation. [...]

» The ship, described by Melville as a hearse, was painted black. It was adorned with gruesome trophies of the hunt, festooned with the huge teeth and bones of sperm whales. It was, Melville writes, a “cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies.” The fires used to melt the whale blubber at night turned the Pequod into a “red hell.” Our own raging fires, leaping up from our oil refineries and the explosions of our ordinance across the Middle East, bespeak our Stygian heart. And in our mad pursuit we ignore the suffering of others, just as Ahab does when he refuses to help the captain of a passing ship who is frantically searching for his son who has fallen overboard.

»Ahab is described by Melville’s biographer Andrew Delbanco as “a suicidal charismatic who denounced as a blasphemer anyone who would deflect him from his purpose—an invention that shows no sign of becoming obsolete anytime soon.” Ahab has not only the heated rhetoric of persuasion; he is master of a terrifying internal security force on the ship, the five “dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.” Ahab’s secret, private whale boat crew, which has a feral lust for blood, keeps the rest of the ship in abject submission. The art of propaganda and the use of brutal coercion, the mark of tyranny, define our lives just as they mark those on Melville’s ship. C.L.R. James, for this reason, describes “Moby Dick” as “the biography of the last days of Adolf Hitler.”

»And yet Ahab is no simple tyrant. Melville toward the end of the novel gives us two glimpses into the internal battle between Ahab’s maniacal hubris and his humanity. Ahab, too, has a yearning for love. He harbors regrets over his deformed life. The black cabin boy Pip is the only crew member who evokes any tenderness in the captain. Ahab is aware of this tenderness. He fears its power. Pip functions as the Fool did in Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” Ahab warns Pip of Ahab. “Lad, lad,” says Ahab, “I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health. … If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him. I tell thee no; it cannot be.” A few pages later, “untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s forehead of heaven. … From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.” Starbuck approaches him. Ahab, for the only time in the book, is vulnerable. He speaks to Starbuck of his “forty years on the pitiless sea! … the desolation of solitude it has been. … Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? How the richer or better is Ahab now?” He thinks of his young wife—“I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck”—and of his little boy: “About this time—yes, it is his noon nap now—the boy vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to dance him again.”

»Ahab’s thirst for dominance, vengeance and destruction, however, overpowers these faint regrets of lost love and thwarted compassion. Hatred wins. “What is it,” Ahab finally asks, “what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time. …”

»Melville knew that physical courage and moral courage are distinct. One can be brave on a whaling ship or a battlefield, yet a coward when called on to stand up to human evil. Starbuck elucidates this peculiar division. The first mate is tormented by his complicity in what he foresees as Ahab’s “impious end.” Starbuck, “while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.”

»And so we plunge forward in our doomed quest to master the forces that will finally smite us. Those who see where we are going lack the fortitude to rebel. Mutiny was the only salvation for the Pequod’s crew. It is our only salvation. But moral cowardice turns us into hostages.

»Moby Dick rams and sinks the Pequod. The waves swallow up Ahab and all who followed him, except one. A vortex formed by the ship’s descent collapses, “and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”»

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