1. “The profane and the sacred: An initiation to the American romance”, Revue Française d'Etudes Américaines 5, 1978; “The gnosis of Hawthorne and Melville: An interpretation of The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick”, American Quarterly 2, Summer 1980; also The myth of America: Essays in the structures of literary imagination, The Hague, Mouton, 1973.

2. The present text is a modified version of the conclusion to The game of creation: The unlettered primeval language of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Paris, Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1982.

3. J.E. Miller, The American quest for a supreme fiction, Chicago, Ill., The University of Chicago Press, 1979; his perceptions do not only apply to epic poetry.

4. New York, Doubleday, 1957, p. 11.

5. N. Frye, Fables of identity, New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968, p. 527.

6. Le sacré et le profane, Paris, Gallimard, 1965, p. 16.

7. S. Bercovitch, The Puritan origins of the American self, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1975, p. 36.

8. S. Bercovitch, Horologicals to chronometricals: The rhetoric of the Jeremiad, Literary Monographs, Vol. 3, Madison, Wisc., The University of Wisconsin Press, 1970, p. 5.

9. For many insights into the interaction between black and white cultures, see L. W. Levine, Black culture and black consciousness, New York, Oxford University Press, 1978.

10. “American literature and the imagination of otherness”, Journal of Religious Ethics 3, Fall 1975.

11. See V. Sachs, ed., Le blanc et le noir chez Melville et Faulkner, Paris, Mouton, 1974.

12. Cp. R. Slotkin, Regeneration through violence, Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 1973, pp. 57-64.

13. Bercovitch, The Puritan origins of the American self, op. cit., p. 152, our italics.

14. Cp. B.A. Babcock, The reversible world, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1978, p. 14.

15. See V. Sachs, ed., Le blanc et le noir chez Melville et Faulkner, op. cit., pp. 230-276.

16. See Le blanc et le noir, op. cit., p. 148; a similar relation exists between the names of the white plantation owner and his nigger son, Charles Bon, see V. Sachs, The myth of America, op. cit., p. 105.

17. Cp. R. Bridgman, “Whitman's calendar leaves”, College English, March 1964.

18. “The maneuverings of a trancendental mind: Emerson's Essays of 1841”, Prospects 3, 1978.

19. “L'initiation ismaélienne ou l'ésotérisme et le verbe”, L'Homme et le Verbe, Eranos, 1970, Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1973.

20. Samuel Danforth's election sermon Brief recognition of New England's errand into the wilderness (1670) is, in a certain sense, paradigmatic; see Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, Madison, Wisc., University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.

21. G. Bachelard, La terre et les rêveries de repos, Paris, José Corti, 1948.

22. W. Sollers, “A defense of the `melting-pot' ”, European Association of American Studies conference, 1980, calls attention to the importance of alchemical knowledge among the early Puritan immigrants. This interest lasted well into the nineteenth century. It is not surprising therefore that alchemical imagery is so important in Melville's or Hawthorne's writings. Taking the example of Hawthorne's Septimius Felton, Sollers goes as far as to speak of “an Indianization” of alchemy in America.

23. The problem of language gained real importance for the first time in 1922 during the “Semana da Arte Moderna”, and with the publication of Mario de Andrade's Macunaima (1928).

24. Late in life, Whitman spoke of Leaves of Grass as being essentially a language experiment, an attempt at creating a sort of generalized algebra. P.F. Gura, “Language and meaning: An American tradition”, American Literature 1, March 1981, describes how the ante-bellum American linguistics reconsidered the whole relation between language and meaning.

25. The historian J. Sparks (1820) considered that a universal language would facilitate growth in the abstract realm of ideas, while a diversity of tongues reflects the peculiar tones and images of each country. Like W. Channing, he regretted that the Revolution had not expelled the English language and thrown America into “a confusion of tongues from which the young nation might have evolved a language adapted to its culture”; quoted by B.T. Spencer, The quest for nationality, Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 1957, p. 130.

26. S. Cavell, The Senses of Walden, New York, Viking Press, 1974, p. 14.

27. Cp. J.T. Irwin, American hieroglyphics, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1980.

28. Cp. A.F.C. Wallace, Rockdale: The growth of an American village in the early industrial revolution, New York, A.A. Knopf, 1978, pp. 237-239.

29. “La pratique de l'imaginaire”, Les imaginaires, Paris, Union Générale d'Editions, 1976, p. 435.

Literature and national identity: Labyrinthic form and primordial language in Moby-Dick;or,The Whale

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