Pip - the Intolerable Third

“Pip—The Intolerable Third” w: The Same, the Other, the Third, red. Wojciech Kalaga i Tadeusz Rachwał, Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2003, ss. 194–214.

Pip - the Intolerable Third Pawel J~drzejko Universify of Silesia Katowice

Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale

An exercise: Take someone near you by the hand. Close your eyes - and think of what it is that you are holding. Then imagine that, as you are holding your neighbor's hand, he or she suddenly dies. Think again: if your neighbor is dead, then what is it that you are holding? What would it be if you decided to hold it for another hour? Another day? Another week?

**

!'!!

The exercise, macabre as it is, takes one straight into the space of liminal experience : experience beyond discourse, the memory of which is central to the reading of the present observations. This is so, because this paper focuses upon a common process, in the course of which the "commonplace" otherness of Others undergoes a transformation into a quality resisting definitions. Precisely for that reason, this unsettling quality necessarily needs to be reclaimed by discourse - or else rhetorically obliterated altogether. Throughout the present text, the Ersatz term of Thirdness is used to denote it. The disquieting, albeit unspeakable Third unceas-

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ingly "tasks" humankind and "heaps" it, and therefore has become one of the primary sources of philosophical reflection. Its non-discursiveness, however, imposes upon this article the uneasy task of modeling a situation, in which the readers' emotions together with their rational minds will jointhy work towards personal conclusions. This is why the present text, academic by assumption, must have a protagonist with whom one can identify : a protagonist wellknown, a character rather than a type, but certainly one born" out of discourse. Hence Melvillean Pip . Pip represents those of the protagonists of Herman Melville's sea-locked novels who manifest themselves as meticulously molded characters, equipped both with a recognizable appearance and with a definite inventory of experiences and convictions that determine their worldviews . The writer, however, does not allow any of them to remain in the state in which each of them begins his respective journey. Even though some (like Ishmael and Ahab), go to sea as a result of a particular epistemological assumption, others (like Redburn and White Jacket) find themselves on shipboard driven by mundane necessities, and still others (like Pip) start upon their journey without deeper reflection upon the motives that made them do it, each protagonist is to undergo an experience in consequence of which his individual consciousness will either radically change or will "dissolve" altogether. Melville's protagonists are made to face silent, indifferent being, which does not lend itself to being SUbjected to any "appropriating" rhetorical gestures . Moreover, like the participants of the exercise proposed in first paragraph of this paper, none of the central characters of Melville's "nautical" prose succeeds in convincingly dismissing their experience as "unreal." Due to his experience, each protagonist, initially equipped with a whole burden of pro-visions, undergoes an irreversible transformation, in effect of which these are replaced by post-visions. As in the case of the "macabre" exercise, through the idiosyncratically read "global" text of culture, of which the novel is a part, the existential experience becomes the reader's lot as well. Evidently, even a short journey into liminality never fails to leave a trace - even 13'

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if the journey is "but literary." Furthermore, it is especially the experience of an Other, who becomes terrifyingly Third, that triggers psychosomatic reactions of near-panic, which, in turn, activate mental processes oriented towards muffling one's unsettling intuitions. A successful self-delusion, an effect of these processes, will result in renaming the Third again as the Other. For that purpose, however, Utherapeutic," discursive strategies to reinstate oneself as a part of an orderly universe have to be employed. These , initially, prove effective in the case of Ishmael - largely because Bulkington, his Third, is out of sight. Pip as the Third, conversely, remains in sight, which renders futile all attempts to tame the otherwise impersonal thirdness. In order to approach thirdness at work, it will suffice to begin with a brief analysis of Ishmael's epitaph for Bulkington, and then to contrast the latter with Pip, whose thirdness is not to be "domesticated."

If Wellingborough Redburn finds unbearable the truth that death might be final and irrevocable, that there might be "naught beyond," and therefore seeks to find renewed peace of mind in resorting to the truth of the Bible, inquisitive Ishmael of Moby-Dick goes one step further and "appends" the death of his shipmate Bulkington with an epitaph. The narrator of the novel "domesticates" the death of the friend he admired by inscribing it into a particular narrative of martyrdom. As a result of such a subterfuge, Bulkington's death becomes thus a consequence of an uncompromised search for ultimate answers; a search ascribed to BUlkington himself, whose restlessness Ishmael sees propelled by unsettling intuitions. Hence the search itself is presented as an act of courage: Bulkington, while incessantly exposing himself to the dangers of the ocean, sees "glimpses [... J of [aJ mortally intolerable truth" through the liminal experience; the truth he has to fully uncover and recognize - or else he will die: Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mor· tally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the

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intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, 0 Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing - straight up, leaps thy apotheosis! I •

Ishmael, who has not as yet experienced the silence of being himself, acts as an advocate of the rebellion against any ossified rules determining the everyday perception of the world . Constructing BUlkington as a demi-god, he defends the independence of human thought. Paradoxically, however, it is upon the soul that he bestows the duty of making "intrepid efforts" to resist the rules imposed by God and by land . Thus, consciously or not, Ishmael intellectually sanctions the existence of some transcendental truth, faithfulness to which he chooses to see in the gesture of "cutting oneself loose" from land, in embracing the overwhelming, constant liquidity that, he claims, is as "indefinite as God ." The lee shore, though offering a misleading promise of safety, is that of which one must beware. The power of the gale may shatter ships that have not managed to tack their way out far enough; the ocean threatens to dash them against rocky shores, or hammer them into splinters on treacherous coastal shoals . Even though struggling against the gale in the open sea is dangerous, it is clear to any salt that an attempt to escape the storm by sailing afore the wind and heading for land is suicidal. "The safety of land" is a mirage; in an encounter with the storm the only "sincere" element, though cruelly so, is the sea. . Building upon the "lee shore" analogy, with his radical declaration that he "who would craven crawl to land" is "worm-like," I HermanMelville,Moby-Dick, orThe Whale, in The Writings of Herman Melville, eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, G. Thomas Tanselle, Vol. 6 (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1988), p. 107. From this point on, all references to this edition of Moby-Dick will be abbreviated MD: 107, the figures referring to page numbers.

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Ishmael elevates Bulkington - who, choosing not to escape death, has remained faithful to the imperative of seeking the "highest truth," attainable only as a result of casting away all that is safe - to the rank of hero, Ishmael is not willing to assume, however, that his friend's death could as well be interpreted "un markedly," as an accident at sea, devoid of an axiological "master narrative." Nonetheless, such a doubt, hidden under a pile of words, smolders secretly at the back of his mind: "Terrors of the terrible!" expostulates the protagonist, "is all this agony so vain?" "Domesticating" Bulkington's death, Ishmael metaphorically extends the literal act of "leaving the land behind" to encompass the rejection of all land-originating values , i.e, of all the paradigms of culture. Ishmael yearns to see the sense of a struggle to throw off the fixed "conceptual yoke," and therefore he needs to give Bulkington an epitaph. He immortalizes the admired idol as a dead hero in order to be able to keep admiring him and, as a consequence, to legitimate his own actions, which are born of an unsettling sense of inexplicable insecurity. Notably, Ishmael asks questions which are only seemingly rhetorical; in fact, he feels that it is they that indeed are the source of his incessant torment. The essence of the protagonist's disquietude is his liminal experience and its intellectual derivative: an intuition of the possibility that beyond the pure experience of being no other absolute truths might exist, In the course of the reading of Moby-Dick, the "juvenile" metaphor of the lee shore proves to be an introduction to a profound meditation upon the nature of human existence, Eventually, Mel ville will reject this metaphor as well, making Ishmael grow mature enough to mistrust metaphors - both those land-locked and those nautical - and to fight at all cost to retain his non-liquid J, physically present owing to the physical presence of the book, To Ishmael, who gradually discovers the discursive nature of the "legible world," the character whose reading most palpably demonstrates the incapacity of the rational discourse in the context of thirdness - is little black Pip, the Third himself.

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Pip, the child hero, like other characters of Moby-Dick, is not to be spared a traumatic experience of the sea. However, unlike the mature Ahab, the boy proves incapable of fending off the immediate consequences of the "flaw" that the trauma leaves, and preserving the integrity of his ego. The protagonist, a "[ ... J Poor Alabama boy,"'2 is the Pequod's be1l-boy, Captain Ahab's servant and, in all probability, his (present or ex-) slave. Pip's origin, . despite the reference to Alabama, is unclear: his own utterances allude to the Caribbean islands in the archipelago of the Antilles, but elsewhere in the novel Ishmael remarks that Pip comes from the Tolland County in Connecticut. Although in the course of the present argumentation those baffling indications, apparently inconsistent, will soon becom.e clear, they are not as important now, when it comes to determining Pippin's pro-uisions, a factor of pri· mary importance in the context of the character's transformation into the Third. Pip, like many boys in the 19 th century - both black and white - must face adult problems far before their time. Though still a child, Pip has to become a seaman: Now, in the whale ship, it is not everyone that goes in the boats. Some few hands are reserved called ship-keepers, whose province it is to work the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general thing, these ship-keepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising the boats' crews. But if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy. or timorous wight in the ship, that wight is certain to be made a ship-keeper. It was so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by nick'name, Pip by abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before; ye must remember his tambourine on that dra· matic midnight, so gloomy-jolly. In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar 2 MD: 121. In mid 19,h century (antebellum) Alabama slavery was still legal; the reference to the state ca n be thus read as a hint as to the status of Pip. Si mi lar indications can be traced in the chapter "The Castaway," in which the sailors compare the profits a successful whale hunt could bring (.hem Lo the profit they could gai n if they sold the boy at an auction block.

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I Pawel J'idrzeJko color, driven in one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race. For blacks, the year's calendar should show naught but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New Year's Days. Nor smile so, while I write that this little black was brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king's cabinets. But Pip loved life, and all life's peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he had somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his brightness; though, as ere long will be seen, what was thus temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to be luridly illumined by strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to ten times the natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County in Connecticut, he had once enlivened many a fiddler's frolic on the green; and at melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon into one star-belled tambourine. 3

Pip is the crew's mascot: joyful, liked by everyone on board, playing the tambourine - he brightens the ship's everyday routine. However, despite his shipmates' positive attitudes towards him, it is beyond doubt that the context in which Pip finds himself is utterly unnatural for a child. The place he belongs is by loving parents, and not on board of a whaler, among "renegades and castaways," where the rules of the unsparing ocean hold, where instances of homosexual rape are not rare or isolated, and where daily life is not simply "adult," but - even for a grown~up - by all means extreme. Determined by his race and position, Pip is thus "constructed" as an exceptional "romantic child." In her book discussing the child in romantic literature, Anna Kubale observes that Schiller elevated the child to the rank of a moral value, an ideal of self-perfection. As a personification of nature, the child possessed all those traits which romanticism, unlike the culture of Enlightenment, particularly cherished: spontaneity, concreteness, 3

MD: 411-412.

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totality of life, love of being. Hence childhood looms as enwrapped in the nostalgic mist of a memory of man who, although torn inside and suffering, is stili proud of his human condition, of which suffering is the most valid testimony. [... J After Schiller, the child attracted the attention of the romantics also for reasons other than its sole value as personified "naivete." What they found no less alluring was the child's quality as an open condition; as a pure possibility of concretization, the child stimulated their inventiveness. U[ ... ~ To romantics," it must be noted, "[ ... J all • that was univocal, ultimate, was in itself valued less than an open, unrealized possibility, which they informed with the traits of infinite becoming, eternal movement and efficiency of life." If Schiller understood the "pure innocence" of the child's condition philosophically, i.e. in general terms, as a "task" . as opposed to "experience," "realization" - the romantics in a peculiar fashion made it concrete, though without reducing it to univocality. In this way they were able to indicate what the child may be, how many "realities" and how much of "reality" it holds within.4

Kubale's remarks appear to precisely identify the traits characterizing Pip. The black boy is possibly the only protagonist in the novel to show entirely spontaneous reactions, such as fear in the face of a danger, or the anxiety and repulsion that the aggressiveness of the adults awakens in him (e.g. the brawl in the forecastle). At the same time, Pip, a painfully "concrete" character, is ultimately undefined - or, perhaps, "unfinished." Paradoxically, this is the reason why Pip is one of the most convincing and most ('complete" Chal"acters in the whole pantheon of Melvillean figu res) which coi'ncides with the fact that Melville, like Emerson') and other romantics, saw in the child a true human, and made it C.,] . - if the ,term is adequate -

a "liminal" ("syncretic") being

L.J. The child still remained in the closest relation to nature, yet was already an individual burdened with all -

also historical

4 Anna Kubale, Dziecho romantyczne. Szkice 0 literaturZ€ [The Romantic Child. Sketches on Literature] (Wrodaw-Warszawa -Krak6w-Gdansk-L6dz: Zaklad Narodowy im. Ossotinslrich, Wydawnictwo Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1984), p. 22. Translation and italics - P.J . .'; See, e.g.: Emerson's essays Nature and Self Reliance.

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Clearly, then, although in the novel he is one of the most distinctly draw n characters, Pip as protagonist "grows out" of the type of a "romantic child." Untypically, however, and perhaps more cruelly than other romantics, Melville places "his child" particularly "far from heaven" and particularly "cl ose to the earth." The terrifying experience t o which the writer su bjects Pip turns out to be the experience of pure being, in the face of which the infinitely open child proves completely vulnerable. Helpless, unable to resort to "adult," discursive strategies of self-defens e, P ip, although apparen tly a "supporting" character, emerges as the most perfect pers onification of the philosophical foundation of the whole novel : the s ub stance of human existence. For this to h ap pen , Pip's provision, the childish vision of the world, yet a vision branded by his bitter condition as a s lave, must undergo a transformation, the results of which do no t lend themselves to predication .

ti

A. Kub ale, Dziecho roman lyczne ... , pp. 22-23.

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As opposed to Ishmael's intuition of the silence of being, the Pequod's black boy traumatically experiences the essence itself when he falls overboard: Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awfullonesorneness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell if? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea - mark

how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.' Abandoned in the "heartless immensity" by whalemen, in whose world catching the whale is ascribed a higher value than the life of a "useless" boy, Pip experiences "the intense concentration of self:" in horrifying loneliness he becomes the center of a vast circle determined by the horizon. Enveloped in the indifference of the ocean, "unbearably" lonely, the boy faces death. He no longer is able to discursively separate his physicality from his spirituality: his body is his soul; if his self is supposed to last, his body must survive. Pip's sensation is t he intense, though unnamable, consciousness of his own body helplessly sinking in equally "corporeal" waves: it is a struggle of body against body. There is no room for persuading oneself that although the human body dies, the soul will live forever. The horror which takes the possession of the boy when, in the liminal situation, he unwittingly attains a state of the highest mindfulness, stems from the non-discursive experience of the illusory character of all discursive structures: the Universe is disappointingly s ilent. [ ... J from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his sou l. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his

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MD: 413-414.

204 I Pawee J~drzejko hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So roan's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God. a

Even in dead calm, grown-up men, experienced sailors, bathe in the ocean minding carefully not to lose physical contact with the ship. To Pip, a child, whose vision of the world is not yet "rigid," and whose psyche is not yet strong enough to repress the effects of the trauma, the liminal experience breaks the delicate web of structures he has only begun to build. The Lacanian quotation providing the motto to a recent Melvillist study by Marek Wilczynski provides an adequate psychological adumbration of what Melville intuited: What is the psychotic phenomenon? It is the emergence in reality of an enormous meaning that has the appearance of being nothing at all - so far as it cannot be tied to anything, since it has never entered into the system of symbolization - but under certain conditions it can threaten the entire edifice .9

What is Pip's madness then? While an experienced sailor might be supposed to be able to fight off the effects of the trauma and resume his duties when back on board, little Pip is no longer able to return to the world of "everyday" discourse. Has then Pip truly gone insane? It appears that Melville created Pip in such a way as to make his madness question the popular concept of madness. However, the romantic /Iphrenetism," a theme easy to observe in European and American writing of the 19,h century, manifests itself in Melville 8 MD : 414. 9 Jacques Lacan's definition in Marek Wilczynski, "The Agency of the Dead Letter in Bartleby," American Studies, Vol. 16 (Polish Association for American Studies; Warsaw University American Studies Center) (Warsaw: Warsaw University Press. 1998), p. 7.

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in a peculiar fashion: the issue is not, as one might conventionally suspect, that a mad man is in any way privileged as possessing a heart "that watches and receives." Rather, it appears that insanity is a state of horrifying illumination initiated by a passive and helpless experience of "the unwarped primal world," which cannot be repressed or muffled. Pip's speech is chaotic, as the verbal structures which so far have constituted his world have collapsed: the experience of the inhuman silence of being cuts language off from what it denotes. Although to other sailors Pip's words are devoid of sense, Ahab - the character whose narrative biography is "informed" with comparable experience - intuitively understands him and treats his words as the voice of truth. "Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whale-boat. Pip's missing. Let's see now if ye haven't fished him up here, fisherman. It drags hard; I guess he's holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti' Jerk him off; we haul in no cowards here. Ho' there's his arm just breaking water. A hatchet! a hatchet! cutl it off - we haul in no cowards here. Captain Ahab' Sir, Sir! here's Pip, trying to get on board again." "Peace, thou crazy loon," cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm. "Away from the quarter-deck'" "The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser," muttered Ahab, advancing. "Hands off from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?" "Astern there, Sir, astern! Lo, lo!" "And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of thy eyes. Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through! Who art thou, boy?" "Bell-boy, Sir; ship's-crier; ding, dong, ding' Pip! Pip! Pip! One hundred pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high -looks cowardly - quickest known by that! Ding, dong, ding' Who's seen Pip the coward?" "There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab's cabin shall be Pip's home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let's down." "What's this? here's velvet shark-skin, intently gazing at Ahab's hand, and feeling it. Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne'er been lost! This seems to me, Sir, as a

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I Pawel Jfd,zejllO man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, Sir, let old Perth now come and rivet tbese two hands together; the black one with the white, for I will not let this gO."IO

Pip, like the dying family Redburn" encounters in the Launcel lot's Hey, stares at Ahab with an absent gaze; his pupils are " vacant."" The boy's self has lost its in tegrity: the "conceptual" Pip is dead ; the boy whom Ahab talks to no longer is Pip, but rather an undifferentiated being of di spersed ego, which sometimes, chaotically and uncertainly, becomes uconcentrated" for a moment, only to fall apa rt agai n . When A hab asks Pip to tell him who he is, the boy defines himself as it were trilaterally: 1) Pip identifies himself through his functions: T he boy tells Ahab that he is " the bell-boy" and t h e "ship's crier." In this context, however, the Engli s h words are polisemou s: a "bell-bayH is a serving boy, or - if we unders tand the words as referring to individual objects and the das h as a link - a "bell-boy" is a boy who is a bell. S imilarly. "s hip's -crier" is either a person who passes orders and announcements, or else Clone, who is known on board of the ship to frequently cry or weep." The consequences of Melville's word-p lay are easy to notice. In the same sentence Pip's identity fir st " mingles" with that of t he bell (the boy introduces him self as "ding, dong, ding!") and imme diately afterwards, hi s identity becomes that of t he bosun's whistle, by which orders and commands are com municated, and which is used to get the crew's attention: the onomatopoeic "P ip! Pip! Pip' " - is precisely what Pip is. Furthermore, Pip's self-identi fication as "ship's crier," i.e. the person who t4a nn ounces important matters to the crew," coin cides with that as " bell-boy." Tangibly, the truths of which Pip is the herald are already contained in how he speaks: MD: 522. The main character of Melville's novel Redburn. 12 See Pip 's portraits on the faci ng pa ge . "Vacant" eyes, as a symptom of disi nteg rat ion of se lf. have been described , amon g others, by Alexa nd er Lowen (t he Po li sh edition of the bo ok, used by the author of the pre sent paper, is the following: Alexander Lowen, Duchowosc ciata, tra ns. Stefan Siko ra ( Warsz.awa: Agencja Wydawnicz. a Jacek SantoTs ki & CO, 1991 ), p. 74). 10

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his language is incomprehensible and unsettling matter; there is no way to ascribe "rational" meaning to the words the boy utters. At the same time, "ship's crier," i.e. "the one who cries on board" - is a coward, which is precisely how Pip's fellow crewmen treat him. 2) Pip offers a reward of "one hundred pounds of clay" to anyone who finds Pip-the coward. Clearly, "one hundred pounds of clay" in the context of "offering a reward for finding a missing person" is equivalent to the typical "one hundred pounds in sil,ver." On the other hand, however, it is clay, of which the first man is made in the Biblical narrative, and a hundred pounds, i.e. 50 kilograms, is about as much as the boy might actually weigh. Clay is Pip's equivalent; Pip and clay are values on opposite sides of the equal-sign. 3) Pip is "quickest known by" his height and his "cowardly" aspect. However, is it exactly this Pip - the one characterized as "five feet high" and "look[ing] cowardly" - whom the disintegrated Pip (although "the quickest known," i.e. "most alive" of all Pips) can no longer find. Pip .of such personaL characteristics does not exist. When Ahab takes "mad" Pip by the hand, the boy neurotically clutches at that hand: the loneliness he experiences is horrifying, and human love gives the boy a chance to re-build the structures of the world. The child's need for love, however, is a neurotic need, it is "infected" by the existential experience of being13 For the terrified Pip, the only way to regain the integrity of the ego is Ahab's love and closeness: the Captain is his only "life-preserver" although a "life-preserver," which is not good enough. The boy, unconsciously, struggles to re-erect the structures organizing his world - and to restore his own differentiating self. It seems, however, that the wishful message of love between people is the writer's own; Melville makes Pip - whose self, inexplicably, concentrates for a moment - utter the universal formula 13 Among many studies dedicated to this subject, the neurotic need for love is the subject of chapter 6 of Karen Horney's classic study The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1968).

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of human friendship as a sine qua non to retain the integrity of one's ego. Pip, however, such as he once was, is already "missing." Pip without an ego is not able to critically assess his past. His postvision is not the chaotic vision of the world of a person of unstable self: the trau rna he has undergone causes a complete disintegration of his ego. Having no self, Pip is not capable of any post-vision either. Such Pip - physically resembling the familiar Other he used to be, but in all other respects incomprehensible and disturbing to everyone on board butAhab - becomes the Third to the crew of the Pequod. Unlike any "ordinary" Other, such a Third questions the "universal" validity of (( obvious" constraints of time (Pip's pres ent, past and future collapse) and of space (Pip on board vs. Pip in the Antilles ). Neither himself to himself, nor Other to others, Pip no longer is Pip: who, then, survived the traumatic experience of the inhumanity of the Ocean? Pip-who-is-no-Ionger-Pip breaches the symbolic order shared by the crew of the ship: breaking out of the frames of his "familiar" identity, having no permanent properties other than appearance, Pip, disturbingly, becomes an entity beyond life and death. 4

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