In my case reading Moby Dick in Israel
is related to the plight of the immigrant writer. The book first and foremost
means a great work of art to me, but on a more personal level I do feel a
certain kinship with Melville’s alienation (though it wasn’t an immigrant’s
alienation), with Ishmael’s wanderlust and “spleen,” and with Ahab’s monomania
(as the result of losing a part of yourself).
Writing in a foreign language presents two options: that of
either abandoning your previous self or of trying to integrate it with a new
and largely strange medium. Though Moby Dick is not about immigration, it is
about the combination of what may be impossible to combine.
Elsewhere, I describe my experience of writing in English
after immigrating to Israel
from Kazakhstan
as an attempt to grow a third head to explain what the other two are saying. I
could also, perhaps, compare it to a whale’s trying to reverse millions of
years of evolution and devolve into a half marine, half land mammal, a
chimerical merwolf, hunting prairie dogs by day and diving for squid by night,
leaving strange prints on the shore, as if White Fang has been fighting with
the white whale.
Hi Slava,
ReplyDeleteYour post got me thinking of language and dialects. If considering evolution, imagine if Ahab could have understood the language of the whales. What would he have done different, if at all? Would he use other whale's assistance to find Moby Dick faster, or would he perhapse receive insights about Moby Dick's behaviour leading him to withdraw from hunting him?
Thank you,
Adi