The Semiotics of the Ship: From Myth to the Model of National Self-Knowledge

Abstract

The article develops an integrated research perspective on the image of the ship as a multifunctional semiotic mechanism linking mythology, religious symbolism, cultural semiotics, and the poetics of modern and contemporary literature. The theoretical framework unites topoi-studies, archetypal analysis, cultural philosophy, chronotopics, heterotopology, and perinatal psychology. On the material ranging from ancient and medieval sources to Melville, Stevenson, Poe, Eco, and Cortázar, the ship is shown to operate as a chronotopic operator (translating spatial conflicts into temporal ones), a space of power and law (state model / anti-panopticon), a mediator of subjective experience (death-and-rebirth scenarios in Poe), and a figure of national destiny (Costan Zarian’s novel The Ship on the Mountain).
The study’s originality lies in (1) a typology of the ship’s functions (threshold / home / power / personality) and their dynamic transitions; (2) a model of the “ship as chronotope operator,” revealing anti-heterotopic effects in Eco; and (3) the interpretation of Zarian’s text as a soteriological and introspective paradigm in which salvation is integrated with a program of national self-knowledge. The conclusion argues that the ship is not a decorative motif but the core of semantic design, transporting meanings between myth and history, the collective and the personal, the bodily and the spiritual–thus providing a universal language for describing the liminal experience of human existence.