Moby Dick and Don Quixote as Self-Conscious Novels Essay

Moby Dick and Don Quixote as Self-Conscious Novels: The Issue of Language and Artifacts Writing against the grain of F. R. Leavis’s conception of English novel, expounded in his The Great Tradition, Robert Alter writes â€Å"the other great tradition,† as he suggests tongue-in-cheek in the preface to his Partial Magic. Leavis introduces the criterion of â€Å"seriousness† to the studies of English novel, keeping out of his story a whole line of novelists that do not meet the proposed expectations. Alter establishes a parallel genealogy of the novel, a â€Å"self-conscious novel,† one that â€Å"systematically flaunts its own condition of artifice and that by so doing probes into the problematic relationship between real-seeming artifice and reality† (Alter†¦show more content†¦Ishmael reproduces the cenotaphs graphically, framed and with their distinct typographies, encouraging the reader to consider them artifacts, real objects from real life. They appear to be what Alter calls in the Preface to his Partial Magic â€Å"an ar twork mirroring itself as it mirrors reality† (Alter xi). The meticulously recreated â€Å"artistic† objects serve as instances of metafiction, calling attention to their status as artistic objects, problematizing the relationship between the fiction they are embedded in and the reality they invoke. The same goes for Father Mapple’s telling of the Biblical story of Job, who is swallowed by a giant whale, in Chapter 9, â€Å"The Sermon.† The cenotaphs incite Ishmael’s musings on death since he, a sailor himself, can relate to the situation he is observing. The lines that he reads â€Å"refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave (Melville 45), foreshadowing a possible grim future he will face. Such metafictional inserts appear throughout Moby Dick and mirror Ishmael’s state of mind or premonitions, which trouble a character obsessed with finding symbolism everywhere. Chapter 3 offers another moment of ekph rasis, when Ishmael first enters the Spouter-Inn and describes a blackened â€Å"boggy, soggy, squitchy picture† (ibid.