Martin Mühlheim - Fictions of Home

Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans . It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all. (19–20; ch. 1; emphasis added)

Gone are such guarded phrases as “very nearly” or “almost.” Instead, Ishmael now claims that all of us (“we ourselves”) share Narcissus’s fatal attraction to watery reflections.

Ishmael’s theory thus has strong affinities with Jacques Lacan’s account of the development of subjectivitysubjectivity. Lacan describes the mirror stagemirror stage as an irreversible process of subject-formation through alienationalienation:

[T]he mirror stagemirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation – and, for the subject caught up in its lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmentedfragmentation image of the bodybody to what I will call an ‘orthopedic’ form of its totality – and to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure. (“The Mirror Stage” 78)

Lacan is a notoriously difficult thinker, but Pam MorrisMorris, Pam has provided an excellent paraphrase of his argument regarding the mirror stagemirror stage and its role in the formation of the subject:

According to Lacan, at the mirror-phase of the infant’s development, it achieves a joyful perception of itself as a unified being, physically separate and independent from its surrounding world – an image of itself such as it might indeed see in a mirror. This recognition of a specular image offers a wholly desirable selfself in contrast to the infant’s actual state of total dependencedependence, uncoordinated motor skills, and boundaryboundaries and borders uncertainty between itself and the world. It is, however, misrecognitionmisrecognition, since self can never be identical to image. Thus the narcissisticnarcissism desiredesire for a unified self initiated in the mirror stagemirror stage and pursued throughout life is always for a phantasy, for the imaginary ego-ideal. This first splitting of the subject into a perceiving self and a self as imaged is repeated in the next phase of development – entry into the Symbolic Order. A sense of individual subjectivitysubjectivity is constituted with the acquisition of the first person pronoun singular, but as with the specular image there exists an unclosable gap between the ‘I’ who speaks and the ‘I’ which is the subject of that discoursediscourse. These two phases of development, the mirror stage and entry into language, constitute the subject’s sense of self as an autonomous individual, but, since this image is an imaginary ideal, the subject is decentred and driven always by narcissisticnarcissism desire after the unified ego-ideal it can never attain. ( DickensDickens, Charles’s Class Consciousness 4–5)

As MorrisMorris, Pam observes, the Lacanian subject is decentered and driven by narcissisticnarcissism desiredesire, and Sean HomerHomer, Sean rightly argues that Lacan defines the ego as “the effect of images” – a function of “misrecognitionmisrecognition; of refusing to accept the truth of fragmentationfragmentation and alienationalienation” (HomerHomer, Sean 25). All humans, in this view, are alienated, and in a sense the ego’s work is to disguise this fact from the subject. The mystifying work of the ego in turn renders it necessary for exceptionally insightful individuals – such as Lacan or Ishmael – to draw our attention to the hidden fact of alienationalienation as a universaluniversal human condition. In short, while Ishmael initially portrays his decision to go to sea as merely his own individual problem, he later tries to convince us that the condition is in fact rooted in the alienated subjecthood he shares with Narcissus and, indeed, with us all.60

We ought to note, however, that Ishmael misrepresents the mythmyth of Narcissus – a fact that should alert us to the possibility that his rhetoric, though powerful, may at the same time be misleading. In Ishmael’s account, Narcissus dies by drowning, yet this is not the case in any of the extant versions of the myth. In traditional accounts, Narcissus either kills himself with a sword, or he dies of thirst because he no longer dares to disturb the waterwater that reflects his beloved mirror-image (Bremmer 712; Grimal 302). Harrison HayfordHayford, Harrison is of course right in arguing that Ishmael’s presentation of the myth is better suited to MelvilleMelville, Herman’s novel (660), since the story of Narcissus’s death by drowning in the first chapter beautifully foreshadows the drowning of Ahab and his crew at the end of the Moby-Dick . However, in contrast to HayfordHayford, Harrison, we need to emphasize that Ishmael’s version of the myth of Narcissus is “the key to it all” – as Ishmael himself puts it (20; ch. 1) – not because this story discloses a universaluniversal truth, but precisely because it constitutes a case of misrepresentationmisrepresentation on Ishmael’s part. After all, while Ishmael’s Lacanian view of an inherently alienating selfhoodselfhood may be convincing as such, it clearly fails to answer the question he originally posed to himself: What is it that compelled him (and not anyone else, or even all of us) to go to sea? A theory of universal alienationalienation cannot explain Ishmael’s particular choice, and accordingly we must remain skeptical of his rhetorical shift from contingentcontingent circumstances (lack of money and emotional “interest”) via alienationalienation as a recurring problem in his life (“whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul”) to alienationalienation as a basic human condition. Indeed, rather than accepting Ishmael’s interpretation of alienationalienation as a universal truth, we should see it as yet another attempt to make a home of homelessnesshomelessness: a measure of Ishmael’s desiredesire to belong and simply be just like everyone else.

In order better to understand the problematic elision underlying Ishmael’s rhetorical sleight of hand, we may adopt Richard SchmittSchmitt, Richard’s distinction between, on the one hand, the precondition for alienationalienation, and, on the other, alienationalienation itself. According to SchmittSchmitt, Richard, alienationalienation “is a threat in human lives because we live as persons we did not choose to be in a world not of our own making” (48). For SchmittSchmitt, Richard, the bodybody illustrates well that though we may have a good deal of influence on our life, we can never fully controlcontrol or understand it; we cannot exist without a body, nor can we choose our body freely. Moreover, as our body constitutes both the basis of our existence and the root cause of our mortalitymortality, our relationship towards it is, in SchmittSchmitt, Richard’s view, fundamentally ambivalentambivalence (46–47). SchmittSchmitt, Richard further contends that this ambivalenceambivalence is related to Martin HeideggerHeidegger, Martin’s notion of Geworfenheit (‘thrownnessthrownness or Geworfenheit’):

Because we are geworfen (thrown) into this world, we do not know it […]. We find ourselves in the world, as we grow up, and need to discover its traits. We are not born understanding the world, nor do we know who we are ourselves but must discover that as life goes on. (48–49)