The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,76

ornamental, prescribed absence in early American literature and, I submit, it is instructive. It only seems that the canon of American literature is “naturally” or “inevitably” “white.” In fact it is studiously so. In fact these absences of vital presences in young American literature may be the insistent fruit of the scholarship rather than the text. Perhaps some of these writers, although under current house arrest, have much more to say than has been realized. Perhaps some were not so much transcending politics, or escaping blackness, as they were transforming it into intelligible, accessible, yet artistic modes of discourse. To ignore this possibility by never questioning the strategies of transformation is to disenfranchise the writer, diminish the text, and render the bulk of the literature aesthetically and historically incoherent—an exorbitant price for cultural (white male) purity, and, I believe, a spendthrift one. The reexamination of founding literature of the United States for the unspeakable unspoken may reveal those texts to have deeper and other meanings, deeper and other power, deeper and other significances.

One such writer, in particular, it has been almost impossible to keep under lock and key is Herman Melville.

Among several astute scholars, Michael Rogin has done one of the most exhaustive studies of how deeply Melville’s social thought is woven into his writing. He calls our attention to the connection Melville made between American slavery and American freedom, how heightened the one rendered the other. And he has provided evidence of the impact on the work of Melville’s family, milieu, and, most importantly, the raging, all-encompassing conflict of the time: slavery. He has reminded us that it was Melville’s father-in-law, Judge Shaw, who had, as judge, decided the case that made the Fugitive Slave Law law, and that “other evidence in Moby-Dick also suggests the impact of Shaw’s ruling on the climax of Melville’s tale. Melville conceived the final confrontation between Ahab and the white whale sometime in the first half of 1851. He may well have written his last chapters only after returning from a trip to New York in June. (Judge Shaw’s decision was handed down in April 1851.) When New York antislavery leaders William Seward and John van Buren wrote public letters protesting the Sims ruling, the New York Herald responded. Its attack on ‘The Anti-Slavery Agitators’ began, ‘Did you ever see a whale? Did you ever see a mighty whale struggling?’ ”9

Rogin also traces the chronology of the whale from its “birth in a state of nature” to its final end as commodity.10 Central to his argument is that Melville in Moby-Dick was being allegorically and insistently political in his choice of the whale. But within his chronology, one singular whale transcends all others, goes beyond nature, adventure, politics, and commodity to an abstraction. What is this abstraction? This “wicked idea”? Interpretation has been varied. It has been viewed as an allegory of the state in which Ahab is Calhoun, or Daniel Webster; an allegory of capitalism and corruption, God and man, the individual and fate, and most commonly, the single allegorical meaning of the white whale is understood to be brute, indifferent Nature, and Ahab the madman who challenges that Nature.

But let us consider, again, the principal actor, Ahab, created by an author who calls himself Typee, signed himself Tawney, identified himself as Ishmael, and who had written several books before Moby-Dick criticizing missionary forays into various paradises.

Ahab loses sight of the commercial value of his ship’s voyage, its point, and pursues an idea in order to destroy it. His intention, revenge, “an audacious, immitigable and supernatural revenge,” develops stature—maturity—when we realize that he is not a man mourning his lost leg or a scar on his face. However intense and dislocating his fever and recovery had been after his encounter with the white whale, however satisfactorily “male” this vengeance is read, the vanity of it is almost adolescent. But if the whale is more than blind, indifferent Nature unsubduable by masculine aggression, if it is as much its adjective as it is its noun, we can consider the possibility that Melville’s “truth” was his recognition of the moment in America when whiteness became ideology. And if the white whale is the ideology of race, what Ahab has lost to it is personal dismemberment and family and society and his own place as a human in the world. The trauma of racism is, for the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self, and has always seemed to me a