Dice of Drowned Men’s Bones 291reader with “a livid hieroglyph.” They are the decipherable but complexly
encoded, complexly burdened parts of an inaccessible self, the fragments of
a mutilated—because unrepresentable—whole. The question is: How did
Crane find hope in this sea change? How does the fragmentation of word
and self in “At Melville’s Tomb” differ from the “song of minor, broken
strain” in “C 33”? How could the mutilation of the body possibly anticipate
its restoration?
In American Hieroglyphics, John Irwin suggests one answer to these
questions when he calls attention to the way in which the drowning of
Bulkington, in “The Lee Shore” chapter of Moby-Dick, functions
synecdochically to describe the work of synecdoche in Melville’s novel as a
whole. Bulkington, a handsome sailor in a line running beyond Billy Budd to
Phlebas and Crane’s Melville, gives one “glimpses ... of that mortally
intolerable truth” that the natural elements of the air and sea always drive
any “deep, earnest thinking” back upon “the treacherous, slavish shore.”
Melville’s Ishmael continues: “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! ...
O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-
perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!” (Melville, Writings of Melville,
Vol. 6, Moby-Dick,107). The “six-inch chapter” of “The Lee Shore,” Ishmael
tells us, is itself “the stoneless grave of Bulkington.” Irwin, who interprets
this epitaph as a prefiguration of the wreck of the Pequod,writes: “What leaps
up from the spray of his ocean perishing is the phallic coffin/life
preserver/book—the part-whole relation of the phallic six-inch chapter to
the body of the text prefiguring the symbolic relationship of the book to the
self.”^13 The relation of the chapter to the whole of the book, like that of
Crane’s own “scattered chapter” to “any complete record of the recent ship
and her crew” (Crane, Complete Poems and Selected Letters,239), is a relation
of survival throughdismemberment, of the whole persisting in its parts. By
the end of the novel, Bulkington is returned whole, even as the Pequoditself
is lost, when Ishmael rises from—is cast up by—the vortex of its grave,
buoyed by “the phallic coffin/life preserver/book.” Ishmael, at the same time,
survives the unsurvivable voyage not by renouncing but by reaffirming the
moral imperative of the quest, allowing us to identify character and narrator
in a way we could not in the case of modernist narratives like The Waste Land
or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
The structure of Melville’s novel presents a narrative unfolding of
Crane’s desired union of author and hero, self and text. As Irwin indicates in
his comments on “The Lee Shore,” the English word “chapter” derives, like