earticle

영어

This paper explores the tension between Emerson’s Nature and Melville’s Moby-Dick in terms of their conflicting stances toward vital issues in nineteenth-century optics: transparency versus opacity and transcendental rationality versus corporeal contingency. For this, I examine how Crary rediscovers the significance of Goethe as the one who founded not only physiological optics against Newton’s physical optics but also the physiological model of subjective vision against Kant’s idealistic model of subjective vision. Using it as theoretical lens, I demonstrate how the two writers’ disparate attitudes towards Goethe in Melville’s 1851 letter and Emerson’s 1840 Dial essay are related with Emerson’s transparent eyeball in Nature and Melville’s color and light/darkness symbolism and imagery in Moby-Dick. Goethe’s earlier attempt to support, but eventual repudiation of, Kant’s esteem for transparency and transcendence in the subject-as-observer’s vision and epistemology— alongside Goethe’s later anti-Romantic position by turning away from his earlier seemingly Romantic characteristics in his literature—are crucial for understanding Emerson’s and Melville’s complex positions on Goethe. In theorizing his notion of the transparent eyeball, Emerson draws on, among several possible sources of inspiration, Kant’s transcendental and idealistic subjective vision and Newton’s theory of transparent bodies and light transmission and reflection. In contrast, although Melville in the 1851 letter criticizes Goethe’s romantic concept of “all feeling,” Melville’s emphasis on ambiguity, opacity and corporeality in color and light imagery in Moby-Dick is reminiscent of Goethe’s color theory, especially the effects of the turbid media for the observer’s visual perception as a necessary condition for the appearance of colors as physiological phenomena. I read Melville’s Goethean color and light imagery as his critique of Emerson’s pro-Newtonian and pro-Kantian transcendental optics.