생명의 영성: 멜빌의 『모비딕』을 중심으로

Abstract

Critics of modern society claim that modern dualism, an exclusive and domineering mode of thought, has engendered all kinds of separation and oppression, thus driving human society and the earth toward the unprecedented crises. This paper agrees with those who think that spirituality can be a solution to modern apocalyptic situation. But traditional concept of spirituality has limitations as a unifying vision since it, influenced by dualism, tends to separate soul from body, individual from society, human from nature, afterworld from this world. Thus this paper introduces a notion of spirit as an organic whole life with every part of it in harmonious relationship with others. Any form of life, whether it is an individual entity or a collective one like the earth and the universe, forms a unified system in which all parts are interrelated, intercommunicative and interdependent. This understanding of life principle helps us to appreciate that hitherto separated and opposed things like soul/body, subject/object, human/nature, and afterworld/this world, are in fact in inextricable and mutually supporting relationship. In this light, spirituality means an attitude to respect life and pay attention to its principle that all parts are dynamically interconnected in a organic whole. And it is lack of this spiritual attitude, i.e., disregard of harmonious and meaningful relationship with others that has driven modern civilization toward the contemporary critical conditions. Melville's novel, Moby-Dick, published in mid-nineteenth century(1851), exemplifies an early attempt to portray the precarious situation modern human beings find themselves in. They stand at a crossrads: they can stubbornly go on the journey leading to disintegration and destruction or they can change direction and turn toward the path of unification and life. Two different kinds of pursuit of Moby Dick, the symbol of life without and within, comprise this novel. Ahab, the captain of the Pequod (the ship of modern civilization) embodies modern sovereign self, insulated from others, dominating over others and trying to expand himself into the world. To him, Moby Dick is just an object of control and manipulation, and his monomaniac pursuit to kill it pushes the ship and its crew toward a disaster. Contrastingly, Ishmael is drawn toward the white whale and the mystery of life it represents. In the process of pursuit of it, he gets a wholistic and holy insight that I and others, birth and death, fact and fancy, sky and earth, joy and sorrow, presence and absence, are not unrelational oppositions but inextricably interwoven pairs like "Siamese twins," encompassing Other within self. Thus when Moby Dick reveals himself eventually at the end of the novel, he seems to see a manifestation of abundant life in its fullness in that whale. Ishmael's conversion to reverence for interrelatedness of life makes him the sole survivor of the tragedy that has befallen the Pequod, and a prophetic writer who proposes spiritualty, a unifying vision, as an alternative to modern dualist view which has produced current perilous situation.