Author Archives: Ashley Sims

Pip in the Deep

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The cloudless sky that is affixed above the South China Sea holds no remembrance. Memory, like CO2 and heat, is absorbed into the ocean. Pip, being at sea long enough, is now a memory. Just another greenhouse gas occluding into omniscient seawater. He notices his body straining to stay afloat as he is carried down alive to wondrous depths. Corals sway to the faint current. Reef sharks gently swirl around him, unbothered by his tender presence. The Deep breeds energy, jolting Pip with pulses of knowledge. He is aware of every world; past, present and future. Every transpiring reality surrounded him, like glowing colossal orbs. He witnesses his ancestors, cradled in the same depths, relinquishing themselves to the same transcendent orbs. Mothers weeping; ocean salinity rising. Like them, he surrenders himself into the arms of the miser-merman. These arms, that hold the finite of history, collect Pip among their hoarded heaps and cast him to the depths.

The deep swallows light and disrupts spacial awareness. It is a space for knowing everything and knowing nothing in one swift, spark of a moment. The sound of clicking is heard in the distance, or in the foreground, or somewhere in between. There is no way to tell. Pip is lost in his surroundings yet procured in his being. No longer subjected to earthly toil, to societal intolerance, Pip feels weightless under this unfamiliar immense pressure. The pressure acts as a binary opposition to oppression. It cradles his soul. That is all he can really feel, his soul. He can’t feel his legs kicking or his arms waving, or his head bobbing. He can’t feel his body being dragged onto the deck of an ancient ship. He can’t feel the resuscitation. The clicking multiplies into thunderous echoes. The water around him is displaced. A shock of white, a flash of horror, Pip’s mind slips out of consciousness.

He is awoken by the surge of a massive fluke swimming away, stirring the water around like a school of sardines. Awake in a wake and sieged by what seems to be a starless night sky, an inky cloud where light cannot invade, no matter how much oil is collected. This is the realm where whales govern, where glares do not exist. The blackness permeates Pip. It is the most blackness he has ever contemplated. It feels like home. In a world where shapes barely exist, and the sound that would usually hang upon a breeze dissipates into the cool, dense molasses, communication is seismic. Communication is haptic. Communication is electric and is now a piece of Pip’s freshly attained knowledge. His heightened senses attempt to situate him in this new world. Beings glide around him, he can feel the pressure undulating like a current as they stream past him. He is being examined, beheld, welcomed. Pip felt things he has never felt before. Physical anguish, frothy vengeance, an Ocean full of ache gyrating around him. But also, collective existence, an unshakeable kindredness, a seep of community. One of them stops in front of him, so close their noses are inches apart. Pip can make out the scaled tail that sweeps back and forth holding this… this, thing, this being upright.

“The white whale has sent you here. He is the guardian of innocence, a knight of the Ocean and the great judge of morality.” Aj’s tidal voice drifted back and forth. “He has brought you to the deep, to the wajinru. It means you are one of us, a descendant of the enslaved. Welcome two-legs. I am called Aj.” Aj bowed his voltaic head and touched it to Pip’s cnidarian soul. “O thy fish God in yon darkness, I am Pip. Have mercy. The white whale you say? The white squall. Have mercy on Pip. I was but thrown from a whale ship, shirr, shirr, forced on the hunt.” Pip rambled, his electric mind rampant. “A whale ship” said Aj puzzled. “Were you not held captive?”

“Held captive? No, we Blacks in the North are free, well shirr, if I didn’t go on that whale ship I coulda got chained up myself.” explained Pip. “The North… Blacks? What is Blacks?” Aj wonders. “Ya know Blacks, negroes, I guess you can’t see so clearly down here but, me, I’m Black. The White men they shackle us, whip us, make us work.” Pip describes in sorrow. He never did have to say it out loud. “You mean all those bodies, cast from ships, all those innocent people dead, because, because they’re black?” Aj said, the rage boiling inside of him. “Pip, what else can you tell us of these people? Where do they live, these two-legs?” “I… they, live in America. Some in the North like me, a lot in the South. That’s where you don’t wanna be. That’s where they lash you, where they hang you.” Pip’s grief welling. “America? Pip I have something to ask of you.” “Shirr, shirr.” “I Aj, hold all the grief for my people, for the wajinru, the memories, the hauntings of our past are within me and only within me. I promised my Amaba not to share these stories. Right now, we live only in the present, in togetherness. But I fear for my people. They become restless, they yearn for who they are, for where they come from. I must break my promise, if only for a few days, to fill the cavities of their souls.” Aj says spouting with emotion. “Pip, I believe this is why you are here, why the white whale brought you to us. You hold knowledge from the other world. Will you help me? Will you help me bring relief to my people?”

“O what’s this? One asks for young Pip? Thy white God has brought me here. O that glorious whale. I have never felt more alive than here in this cold, dark abyss. Shirr, shirr I will help you.” Pip replied.

The next few days, or nights, or whenever it was in this place where light does not bother to penetrate, the wajinru congregated. They collected kelp, and mud, and the skin of the dead: sharks, rays, seals. Anything to envelop them, to protect them in what they knew would be a vulnerable state. The water hummed along with their electric palpitations. The vibrating pressure comforted Pip. He was anxious, but he felt free for the first time, alive with the idea of being needed, his mind being desired. The wajinru begin shoaling by the thousands, surrounded by their miry cocoon “Are you ready?” asked Aj. Pip nodded. They floated into the center of this gyrating ball of mud and dead matter. It resembled an oceanic womb, regenerating its inhabitants to foster new life. And inside, the water pulsed like the ocean’s heartbeat. Aj and Pip hovered in the center. Aj snapped his tail to the left and all the wajinru followed suit. He communicated to them through the water. Pounding his tail, electrically transmitting every story he learned from his Amaba. Happy and sad and everything in between, all of them. While he did this Pip went around from wajinru to wajinru. They were still, debilitated with the surge of information. Pip pressed his cheek to theirs, one by one. They wept. In anger, in confusion, in fleeting joy, with vengeance they wept. It lasted days. And this was the first Remembrance.

“The Past—or, more accurately pastness—is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past.” (Troulliot)

 The past shapes the present, therefore, the past surrounds us, like an ocean. Through fiction, the past is retrieved and reconstructed. In his 1851 novel Moby Dick, Herman Melville illustrates the lack of freedom of free Black men leading up to the Civil War. Throwing Pip overboard, and his subsequent enlightenment, is an acknowledgement of the atrocities of the Middle Passage and slavery because it is a recognition of the voices and History concealed in the Ocean’s depths. One hundred and sixty-eight years later, narrative discourse, like Rivers Solomon’s 2019 novella The Deep, continues to reiterate and remember the trauma inflicted on millions of captive people that were thrown overboard. Solomon retrieves the history of people who were deliberately silenced beneath the surface of the ocean. Both of these novels employ the setting of the Ocean to frame significant historical events. In this way, the Ocean operates as an archive of the American nation. An archive that has been concealed, like a witness who has collected hush money. Just as the silence of the ocean is depended upon to exploit it, so is the silence of the trauma of slavery. Emancipation might have been enacted, but the structures of slavery still exist, and silence enables them. Reading Melville’s character of Pip into Solomon’s novella The Deep demonstrates the prevailing marginalization of Black communities from 1851 to 2019. Pip and the wajinru act as voices for the Ocean and for Black communities both on land and those lost at sea.

Pip is a symbol of American blackness in Moby Dick. Christopher Freeburg, in his essay Pip and the Sounds of Blackness in Moby Dick, argues that Pip “allows us to realize that black culture is lodged in the very heart of the novel” (52) Melville is very purposeful and ahead of his time in his usage of Pip. It is Pip’s mere presence that welcomes readers into the diversity of America. This “presence constitutes the greatest value of the novel; he is a symbol of social equality and a catalyst for altruistic insight.” (Freeburg 52) Pip is a symbol of social equality because he demonstrates its inequities. The discrimination that independent Black individuals faced leading up to the Civil War constitutes a lack of freedom. In the “Forecastle—Midnight” Melville displays the marginalization of free Black communities: While ALL yell “The squall! The squall! Jump, my jollies! (They scatter.) PIP (shrinking under the windlass.)…” (193) soliloquizes. Pip giving a separate speech after “all” speak suggests that he is not a part of the crew. The Pequod, representative of the American nation, marginalizes Pip as America marginalizes Black communities. Through Pip, Melville demonstrates how freedom for Black individuals does not necessarily mean autonomy.

The “great shroud of the sea” (624) is a chronicle of all those who have been lost to its watery bowels. Through its obscurity, the Ocean is a silenced archive. It has been used as a naturally occurring cloak concealing capitalist exploitations. In “Pip’s Oceanic Voice: Speech and Sea in Moby Dick” Jimmy Packham “recognizes the power of language as a colonial tool, something which can impose itself onto a silence (…likely assumed) that cannot speak back” (Packham 7) Imposing language onto the voiceless enables History to be altered by colonial narrative. Melville also recognizes this muteness of the Ocean: “the waves rolled by… seemed a silvery silence” (Melville 253), “white, silent stillness of death in this shark” (Melville 206), “jetting his silent spout into the air.” (Melville 595). The archival Ocean and its creatures are speechless. The silence of an archive enables History to invalidate traumas. Silenced trauma and exploitation of the past enables the continuation of trauma and exploitation. Melville recognizes that “it’s the sea’s depths that obscure any voice the sea or its creatures might have.” (Packham 7) Because the Ocean and its inhabitants are unable to advocate for themselves, Melville assigns this task to Pip. “We can understand Pip’s discourse as Melville’s… effort to find a space in language for oceanic depth” (Packham 4) Pip, who was already a medium for the marginalized, forces the reader to acknowledge that the Ocean, similar to Black communities, is underappreciated, over fished(worked) and a vessel for unspoken trauma. Pip “saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it.” (454) Pip “spoke it”, that is he spoke for the Ocean and against Oceanic and Black exploitation.

 Melville’s concept of whaling drives his narrative. He frames his novel on the surface of the ocean. Therefore, the whalers only comprehend the surface. Pip, who has been “carried down alive to wondrous depths” (453) learns to speak for the deep. Packham raises the idea that Pip “comes to embody the ‘strange shapes’ of the depths, his voice exhibiting an instability that recalls the fluidity of the element into which he has plunged.” (Packham 1) When Pip, who represents American blackness,  speaks for the ocean’s abyss, he transpires the annals of a young nation. Pip’s designated voices collide when Pip’s soul is thought to be “in those far Antilles” (Melville 522) The Antilles, the Caribbean, where his ancestors were thrown from slave ships not so long ago. Pip is a voice for blackness, a medium for the Ocean, and ultimately an agent for his ancestors concealed in the sea. By giving Pip this multitudinous voice, Melville advocates for those lost within a buried archive. Melville uses Pip and the Ocean to frame the nation’s historical events.

The acknowledgement of the concealed archive is the cross section for Moby Dick and The Deep. One hundred- and seventy-five-years pass, and the United States continues to exploit its citizens while it feigns perfection. It is a time where Literature rather than History must command the discourse of the trauma of slavery in order to hinder the continuation of it. The Civil War may have legally ended slavery, but as Christina Sharpe points out in The Wake, “Racism [is] the engine that drives the ship of state’s national projects… cuts through all of our lives… in the wake of its purposeful flow.” (Sharpe 3) Slavery, through marginalization, through racism, through incarceration continues to press its haunting mark onto Black society. Silence enables exploitation. Silence of neighbors, silence of mainstream media, archival silence, exploits hidden in coral reefs, are all factors perpetuating exploitation. “The means and mode of Black subjection may have changed, but the fact and structure of that subjection have remained.” (Sharpe 12) Drexciya, clipping., and Rivers Solomon, the curators of the wajinru, exemplify the need to break the silence of this continuation of slavery. Literature like The Deep, which reinterprets the traumas of the Middle Passage into the creation of a new race of merpeople,attempts to begin a process of healing. This healing arises not only by re-gifting life to these erased humans, but by telling their story; uncovering the History that was meant to be obscured by the voiceless Ocean.

In The Deep it is the Ocean depths that act as the setting for the novel rather than the surface in Moby Dick. Expanding to the abyss of the Ocean as a main setting attempts to give definition to the deep, unknown, ocean environment.  Similar to Melville, who implements a uniquely American narrative with whaling, Solomon turns to the wajinru to constitute a distinct facet of American history: chattel slavery. Connecting these two stories materializes the Ocean as an American archive. Mooring Pip into the narrative of the wajinru points to the extensive duration the issues of racial marginalization and exploitation have subsisted. Pip, who was written nearly two-hundred years ago, was an attempt to enlighten readers of 1851. However, he continues to be relevant, Pip can easily become a character in a 2019 novel. He does not demonstrate what has passed, instead he now depicts the continuity of Black American subjection. Pip and the wajinru are modern vehicles for the advocacy and amplification of the Ocean and Black communities.

Fastening Moby Dick to The Deep aimed to establish two main assertions of the books: Ocean as archive and the oppression of Black communities. Utilizing Solomon’s narrative enabled a clearer highlighting of these allegories in Moby Dick, a book with endless analyses. Both of these novels employ the setting of the Ocean to frame American historical events. They recognize the important documents held within Oceanic depths and sought to retrieve them. For it is through literature that the past is reconstructed. Literature breaks the silence that exploitation so dearly depends upon. It then became natural to transport Melville’s sea speaking character of American blackness, Pip, to the profundal realm of the wajinru. The nearly 200-year-old Pip, who was fabricated before emancipation, emphasizes the continuity of a nation that upholds slavery as his character retains relevance. Through Pip, the wajinru, and the Ocean we learn that the concealment of sunken traumas promote exploitation. The Lorax might speak for the trees, but Pip and the wajinru speak for the Sea.

Works Cited

Freeburg, Christopher. “Pip and the Sounds of Blackness in Moby Dick.” The New Melville    

           Studies, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 42-52.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Penguin Books, 2003.

Packham, Jimmy. “Pip’s Oceanic Voice: Speech and Sea in Moby Dick.” The Modern Language

          Review, vol. 112, no. 3, 2017, pp. 567-584.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016,

https://doi-org.libproxy.sdsu.edu/10.2307/j.ctv1134g6v.3

Solomon, Rivers. The Deep. Saga Press, 2019.

Final Project Proposal

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I am nervous about it, but I am going to write Pip into The Deep by Rivers Solomon. I believe that Melville purposefully delivered Pip to his ancestors. I can’t stop thinking about the intersection of Pip’s soul lost to the Antilles and the mermaids from the Middle Passage.

Thesis:

In Chapter 110 of Moby Dick, while Queequeg is laying in his coffin preparing for death, Pip asks a favor of him. “Seek out one Pip, who’s now been missing long: I think he’s in those far Antilles.” (522) By conveying Pip to the Antilles, Melville delivers him to his ancestors. This delivery directs focus to the savage, immoral foundations of America. This subtle critique not only assesses Christianity and capitalism, but delivering Pip to the Middle Passage critiques the values of ‘civility’ compared to so called savagery. Melville indicates that there is no such thing as civility, only justified savagery.

American Patriotism

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In “The Anatomy of Melville’s Fame” it is surprising to read Riegel’s comments on how influential the British critics were in slowing Melville’s and Moby Dick’s rise to literary prestige. Although, thinking about it, it makes sense when considering “The American Scholar”. Emerson writes: “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.” It is now clear how necessary Emerson’s call for American scholarship and pride was. Scholarly, Americans were still under the tutelage of the British thinkers. Living an in overly patriotic America, it is hard to wrap a modern mind around the need for American pride. In fact, in Moby Dick it seemed that Melville was critiquing American patriotism. Using Ahab as an allegory for a patriotism that is blind to its own flaws. This is why it was unexpected to read: “Had Americans felt more cultural pride and less inclination to grovel before British oracles, Melville might have become then, as he is now, a great hero of American national consciousness.”  Melville was not only ahead of his time in his critique on religion and racial issues. He also saw the danger of America’s emerging patriotism. Melville saw how Manifest Destiny and expansionism was leading to a blind patriotism. The kind that ignores flaws and breeds dictators.

Riegel points out that the most recent revival of Melville started in 1919 and continues on today, today being 1931. Riegel says “that the recent revival of interest in Melville has been attributed by some to ‘the spirit of the age.” But in its truth the “term is difficult to define”. He goes on to ponder the spirit as the “appeal of Melville’s boldness and expansiveness” or as the decade’s “devotion to psychological history… to spiritual struggle… to the spectacle of man against the world.” Riegel even mentions “post-war psychosis of futility”. But I was shocked to find he didn’t mention post-war patriotism. 1919 marked the end of World War One and America’s entrance as a major world power both militarily and economically. Post-war American patriotism might be another reason Melville’s great American novel made yet another comeback into the literary world.

There is a Wisdom that is Woe; But there is a Woe that is Madness

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On the diverse nation-state of the whale ship Pequod, Pip is one of the few representatives of African-Americans. When jettisoned from a whaleboat, Pip’s perceived loss of sanity is actually the procuring of higher consciousness.  “God’s foot on the treadle of the loom” reveals to him his predisposed, hopeless role in society. Pip beholds his lack of freedom, even as a supposedly free African American. He comprehends the interminable suffering of man, of African-American man. In this omniscient state, Pip is altered into a rejection of his joyous self. He let’s go of his life-endearing character and gives in to African American’s expected function in the nation, as hollow performer. By forcing Pip into enlightenment, Melville impels his readers to examine the true sentiments behind the Fugitive Slave Act: society’s disregard of the suffering of their fellow man.

Pip is introduced directly after Ahab announces his true intentions for the Pequod, in the Midnight, Forecastle. While the other sailors sing and cast their convictions of this doomed mission, they demand Pip to play his tambourine: “Pip! Little Pip! Hurrah with your tambourine!… Here you are Pip… up you mount! Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it, stig it, quig it, bell-boy!” (188-189) While the other sailors assert their viewpoints and become representatives of their homelands, Pip is forced to be entertainer. Even in the absence of his tambourine, they tell him to become the instrument: “beat they belly then and wag thy ears… Rattle thy teeth then and make a pagoda of thyself.” (188-189)”. Not just his talent, but his body merely exists to serve others. The sailors, ignoring his resistance to play, “Pip! Hurrah with your tambourine! don’t know where it is…” (188) instill his role in society as only existing for the amusement of others. Contrary to his emplacement, Pip holds a sense of dignity. Melville establishes Pip’s sense of self-respect by giving him the last words in this chapter. Pip’s soliloquy ends in prayer: “Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here” (193) Although Pip has been placed at the bottom dregs of this make-shift nation, he still holds onto faith, a hope that God may have mercy on him. Pip’s prayer expresses a sense of optimism. Due to this optimism, Pip continues to believe he has control over his own fate. Beneath Pip’s plea, Melville arranges five asterisks ***** to close the chapter. These five asterisks not only conclude the chapter, but they also conclude Pip’s sanity. The asterisks symbolize that this petition for salvation is Pip’s final.

 Pip returns to the novel in his transformative chapter. Leaping from a boat, stranded at sea Pip is “carried down alive to wondrous depths, where… the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps… Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of water heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom; and spoke it” (453-454) In his abandonment, Pip undergoes a wisdom-induced metamorphosis. This alteration saw Pip, who “loved life, and all its peaceable securities” reject his former self. “Pip? Whom ye call Pip?” (567) His vision of the “joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, the… God-omnipresent” (453) divulges to him his harsh reality: regardless of freedom, Pip, and African Americans, are seen as entertainer, a body that exists for the use of others. “the unwarped, primal world” (453) reveals to him the interminable suffering of the Black American. His body remains intact, but the sea “drowned the infinite of his soul.” Pip’s soul has been lost, he is now just a shell of the African American experience.

The shell that is called Pip, bearing life’s unalterable course for African Americans, falls into the role that is initially bestowed upon him. His former self is gone: “Pip? Whom ye call Pip? Pip jumped from the whaleboat. Pip’s missing… Who art thou, boy? Bell-boy, sir; ship’s-crier; ding, dong, ding!” (567) Pip rejects his joyous, brilliant, questioning self and assumes the role of performer just as his shipmates expect. He becomes the bell-boy they demanded during their midnight in the forecastle. In his mad monologues, he constantly sings: “Rig a dig, dig, dig!” “ding, dong, ding!” These chants are reminiscent of what was bellowed at him in the forecastle: “Rig it, dig it, stig it, quig it bell-boy!” (189) Pip saw his role in society and stopped fighting it, “he saw God’s foot on the treadle of the loom; and spoke it” (453) Mimicking the demands placed on him as entertainer, cements Pip’s place in society that was unveiled to him during his abandonment; he gives in to his expected function in the nation, bell-boy.

Pip’s revelation of his repressed place in society is new to him, but he finds that the rest of the world has always seen him this way, as constrained performer. His first act of wisdom/sanity is reading the doubloon. While others in the crew read the doubloon and divulge elements of their character, Pip merely says: “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look… And I, you and he; and we ye and they, are all bats; and I’m a crow” (475). Ishmael shrugs this off, thinking that Pip is reciting his grammar. In reality, Pip is showing his understanding of how humanity views his role in life. All of humanity recognizes the cruelty of slavery and racism. Like Pip says, “they are all bats”, complacently hanging upside down, upholding the system with their silence, and letting the crow go about with his entertainment; cawing, pleading for unanswered help. Pip’s interpretation when reading the doubloon is that humanity has disregarded his people’s suffering.  

Pip indeed goes missing. He has forsaken his former self because “he died a coward; died all a’shiver… Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the Antilles he’s a runaway; a coward, a coward, a coward!” (523) Pip rejects his former self’s cowardice, he discards his fear because he no longer lives with expectations of joy for life. Pip, the fearful, jumps from the boat because he loves life so much. Enlightened Pip repeatedly states, “Shame upon all cowards—shame upon them!” (523) He has no favorable feelings towards life anymore, and he does not fear losing it, so he resents cowardice. Intriguingly, Pip, who seems to search for himself, actually knows where his soul must be, “Seek out one Pip… I think he’s in those far Antilles.” (522) His soul ends up in the Antilles with his ancestors who have been left for dead in the middle passage. This further suggests Pip’s newfound mindfulness of the suffering of his people and his role in society. He chastises his lost soul as a “runaway, a coward”, which explicitly cites language in reference to slavery. It provokes sentiments of the Fugitive Slave Act. Runaway, cowardice Pip, “Jerk him off; we haul in no cowards here” (567) Omniscient Pip is denying salvation towards his soul. The narrative of ‘do not save him’ symbolizes the northern man’s predicament: man must deny escaped slaves salvation into their free states. Abandoning Pip’s soul is abandoning all African Americans to toil in the south.

Ahab becomes the only friend of Pip’s. Madness hinders madness. This unlikely friendship is even more surprising when it is formed by Ahab. In witnessing Pip’s awakening, Ahab stretches out a hand to Pip: “What’s this?” Pip exclaims, “Here’s velvet shark skin’ intently gazing at Ahab’s hand, and feeling it, ‘Ah now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne’er been lost!” (567) Pip reignites a spark of hope for humanity as he experiences Ahab’s benevolence towards him. When he exclaims that “perhaps he ne’er been lost” if he experienced this compassion sooner, it reaffirms what he experienced deserted in the sea. If Pip had ever felt a sense of gentleness towards him, if he had only been treated as an equal, he would have never been exposed to the God-omnipresent harsh reality of the African American struggle. Ahab’s benevolence demonstrates humanity’s lack of decency, for Ahab has shaken off societal norms. Pip continues: “Oh, sir, let old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I will not let this go.” Using Ahab to demonstrate social cohesion indicates to the reader that it takes the complete disregard of societal conventions to produce true benevolence to their fellow man. Melville’s imploration for racial harmony reprimands society for inaction.

For Pip, the bestowment of omniscient knowledge drives him mad. This is due to his role in society as an African American during the dissension of slavery. Pip beholds the interminable suffering of his race. Discovering his lack of agency causes him to relinquish his bright self and surrender to societal preconceptions. Pip’s representation of African Americans exemplifies the crippling effects of society’s constrained roles. By forcing a free man to exist solely as entertainer, his humanity is stripped from him. Melville delivers Pip’s jovial soul to his ancestors in the Antilles but leaves his shell of insanity behind to critique the nation of the Pequod.

Recent discovery of a “Carnivorous Death Ball” I believe to be the “colossal orbs” that Pip witnessed while abandoned at sea.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a69234817/carnivorous-death-ball/

Bird of Heaven

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Ahab received his ultimate punishment in the finale of Moby Dick. It wasn’t death, he knew death was imminent: “lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine!” (590) When Ahab tells Starbuck not to lower with him it is because he wants Starbuck to return home to his family unlike him. He knew he wouldn’t. Ahab’s ultimate punishment was watching his ship go down without him. “death glorious ship! Must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely death on lonely life!” (622) It is glory for every captain to go down with their ship. It is honor. In his monomaniacal craze Ahab lost his youth, his family, his sanity but he never thought he would lose the privilege of going down with his ship. He never thought he would lose honor. He loses the chance of entering death in his American wood hearse. This enrages him, somehow heightening his hate for the whale. Which in turn, causes his predicted death by hemp.

What is interesting is though Ahab loses his chance to go down with the Pequod, a heavenly hawk, hammered to the mast-head by Tashtego, goes down with the Pequod. The hawk finalizes Ahab’s battle with nature and his destruction of spirituality. Birds have long been symbols of transcendence in this novel: “Bethink thee of the albatross: whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations?” (206) Nailing a hawk, a “bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks” (624), to the mainmast as it sinks, symbolizes a loss of God. This nation, the Pequod, and maybe one day America, goes down due to uncontrolled, monomaniacal leadership. When this happens, they take God and spirituality down to the depths with them.

The North’s Predicament

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Starbuck has so many chances to stop Ahab on this doomed hunt for Moby Dick. He could have invoked a mutiny, he could have cut his line when Ahab was posted on the mast-head, and he could have shot him with the musket. But Starbuck didn’t do those things, Starbuck the “honest, upright” man of the union hardly recognizes an evil thought when it strikes him. He begins his interior monologue by raising the concept of fairness. “But how fair? Fair for death and doom…” Through Starbuck, Melville explains that fairness does not exist, there is always someone on the other side of it. Starbuck continues on, grappling with the possible murder of Ahab: “But shall this crazed old man… drag a whole ship’s company down.. it would make him the willful murderer of thirty men and more if this ship comes to any deadly harm; and come to deadly harm my soul swears this ship will… Is heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed—” Starbuck’s contemplations when he is handling the musket in chapter 123 is an embodiment of the northern predicament. Is murder justified when it prevents more murder? Is declaring a war that will shed the most ever American blood justified to end the horrors of slavery. We all know the answer to this dilemma, and I doubt there are any rational people who would say the civil war wasn’t worth it. Though how could one know in its looming days. This is why Melville turned his mutiny story into one of doom. If it was a mutiny story, the ship would be saved, everyone would live (well maybe not Ahab) and it would be a happy ending. A happy ending that may not even be equated with American systems. But being made aware of an account, that after a continued lack of intervention, leads to the doom of a perceived nation-state, forces Americans to recognize their current state of affairs. In this case murder justifies murder. If the war on slavery was going to be ignored, this ship we call America was doomed to capsize.

Oversight of the Oppressed

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In 1850 the northern states were opposed to slavery, but The Fugitive Slave Act effectively drug the north into slavery’s messy affair. They could no longer turn a blind eye. Melville clearly comments on the unjust process that the act enforces in chapter 89 of Moby Dick: Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish. This chapter seems to aim at southerners, ridiculing their conception of property. He calls for the transfer of the uncontentious laws of the sea to become a law of the land. But Melville pushes his inquisition towards the entirety of the country in Chapter 92. For even if northerners abhorred the idea of slavery they still tended to hold racial prejudice. Melville criticizes ingrained racism when he addresses the smell of whales: “They hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this odious stigma originate?” (448) In his explanation of the origination of a stigma Melville confronts all of his readers to rethink their indoctrinated beliefs. By turning the lens of criticism from southern readers to the whole of the United States, Melville forces his readers, as much as the Fugitive Slave Act does, to acknowledge that they are part of the problem. He affirms that accepting stigma as fact when stemming from a societal lens most likely comes from one isolated incident, or from a bygone civilization. And the reader’s participation in racial stigma is participation in slavery. Melville attempts to reason with all of America by introducing the notion that all men, like whales, “that living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odor” (449).

What is significant about this contention is the chapter that follows it, The Castaway, continues to chronicle the north’s participation in the slave industry. Stubb “hints” to the reader when he warns Pip of his potential life at sea: “man loves his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.” (452). Melville replicates the United States. Deserting their fellow man to live by the exploits of slavery is Stubb’s boat leaving Pip to die, or worse, go mad at sea while chasing the bankroll of the whale. America’s capitalistic society fuels the intentional oversight of the oppressed.

The Wicked White Whale

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Herman Melville delivers Moby Dick at the most pivotal time in America’s history. It is an era of industrial and societal upheaval. Melville’s whaling novel alludes to a struggle at sea. But the theme of his novel actually resonates right on American soil. His title character, Moby Dick, serves to represent young, naïve America’s two largest pitfalls: industrialism and slavery. The demonic depiction of the “white-headed” whale brings to light these two pivotal matters in 19th century America. The whale represents the industrialization of nature, but also warns of the looming war on slavery. Ultimately, this double-sided drawing surfaces the problems of supremacy. Senseless exploitation leads to one’s own demise.

The reader is tantalized for 176 pages before even getting a drop of description of the so-called antagonist. Before this story became iconic and notoriously referenced in pop culture, the reader had no frame of mind for what this whale was going to look like. The 19th century reader, whom the morals are directed at, was blindly thrust into the demonic depiction of this massive “white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw… with three holes punctured into his starboard fluke— the harpoons lie all twisted and wrenched in him; his spout… a big one, like a whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool…”(176-177) Ahab vs. the whale is a rendition of man vs. nature. The whale mutilated with harpoons corkscrewed and wrenched in him is a picture of what nature has become at the hands of industrialization. Like the whale, she has been staked and plundered. Men have wrenched borders into the earth, tied her with fences. Train tracks have corkscrewed their way around the country; carrying smog trailing trains from waste ridden city to waste ridden city. Like the whale, nature has become ugly and evil, ravaged to fuel fiendish industries. It has become something that humans must conquer and subdue. Ahab, who seeks vengeance on this horrific creature, is the colonial hero. Ahab has been mutilated by nature and now he hates it. Nothing can soothe him. He feels justified in his revenge since its infliction is upon a monster, just as imperialism is justified. By depicting the whale as an ugly representation of nature, Melville shows the ease in which to be disgusted by nature. To be disgusted by it turns to contempt. Industrialization conditions us, like Ahab, to hate nature. We destroy and dismantle what we hate. We would “strike the sun down if it insulted” us. Yet this revenge becomes Ahab’s own demise. This ugliness is man-inflicted, giving the whale and therefore nature a sense of forgiving qualities. Melville warns his audience that continued egregious acts against the massive, powerful force of nature will not end well. Plundering nature will only drown us in the end.

The heinous rendering of Moby Dick does not only function as an allegory for industrialized nature, the whale is also a representation of another wicked white beast. One that has taken away mobility and freedom from a group of people as Moby Dick has taken away mobility away from Ahab. This frenzied quest of a boat full of savages, “noble savages”, and northern men chasing this “white-headed”, seemingly immortal whale is Melville’s representation of a war against slavery. It is a premonition of the looming civil war. Here is where the coin flips. The whale no longer has the redeeming qualities as its comparison with nature does. It is the beast that Melville portrays, and its monstrosity is self-inflicted. The harpoons twisted into him are representative of the poisoned morals that run deep in the cruel slave owner; wrenched through his very soul. The “wrinkled brow and crooked jaw” personifying the whale, reminiscent of a southern man, furrowing his brow with tobacco in his mouth as he punishes humans he thinks he owns. But what is most notable is, as the description continues, his spout, “like a shock of wheat” and him “white as Nantucket wool”. Wheat and wool, two harvests that are designated to slaves. Choosing wheat and wool in the characterization of Moby Dick explicitly invokes sentiments of slavery. Melville does not let his readers shy away from this reference. Moby Dick is the monstrous slave-owning south. Moby Dick, this massive, white, vicious brute; whom war has been declared on. A war declared by a small interracial, rebel band of knights and squires. Melville’s knights and squires represent a traditional whaling crew. This traditional whaling crew is the framework for the country’s next battle. The born and bred white New England men leading the African, Native American, and Pacific Island men to battle is almost an exact rendering of the union troops. Ahab’s restless vengeance, in this instance, holds a positive connotation. His disregard of monetary losses that the Pequod will endure while not hunting other whales is not unlike the change the American economy will have to encounter with the abolishment of slavery. Ahab’s capital dismissal is one that American’s will have to accept to end the injustices of enslavement.

The sperm whale fishery, one of the first things that constitutes America in its youngest days, is a brilliant way to present the nation with a truly American novel. But taking the beast of a whale and thrusting it into the nation’s most pivotal issues in history is absolutely profound. In presenting his audience with Moby Dick so vividly and demonically drawn out, Melville’s reader is struck with loathing. Whether it be an initial disgust for nature or contempt for the white whale the allegories are clearly present. In this focus Melville critiques the absolute supremacy that industrialization or the slave trade enforces. He warns America that dominion over nature inflicted by industrialization will go awry. Eventually nature will prevail. Parallel to this, slavery, if it continues on, will incite a war. Cruelly produced hatred will lead to violence, and America is about to face its terrible, sanguinary white whale. Melville uses the American trope of the whale fishery to warn Americans of the dangers of absolute supremacy, whether it be over men or nature.

Ravaged and Plundered

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In chapter 35 when describing the languidness induced by the mast-head Melville brings up an interesting word: Pantheist. Pantheist, meaning someone who believes that God is identical with the universe or nature. Immediately I was drawn towards the characterization of Ahab. One who is described as god-like and numerously referenced through the lens of nature: “a maned sea lion, last of the grisly bears, leader of a pack of wolves” etc. He is this pantheistic god-like piece of nature. But in his rallying speech of hate he cries out “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” He hates the whale, and he hates nature. But, he is nature. He hates himself, hates what he has become: a beast, a “pegging lubber”. Turned into a beast by a beast. And what a beast it is: “white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and crooked jaw… three holes punctured in his starboard fluke… and corkscrewed harpoons lie twisted and wrenched in him.” The whale sounds demonic. But it is a true representation of industrialized nature. A beautiful creature that has been ravaged by the need to fuel our fiendish industry. Staked and plundered. And more than a representation of nature, the whale is also a representation of another demonic white beast. One that has taken away mobility and freedom from a group of people as Moby Dick has taken mobility away from Ahab. This frenzied quest of a boat full of savages, “noble savages”, and northern men chasing this “white-headed”, seemingly immortal whale is Melville’s representation of a war against slavery. It is a premonition of the looming civil war. Is it backwards to say then, that the hate in Ahab’s heart is a warning against the hatred of the other or the monsters society creates? Perhaps it is a warning to slave owners, of the hate that grows in the heart of the cruelly treated and the vengeance that they will exact.