What you still need to learn/do for your final project?
So, I already have a strong idea of what creative project I want to do for my final paper, I’m just solidifying my thesis statement for the paper portion of it. I’m planning to re-read Chapter 42: The Whiteness of the Whale in the next couple of days so that I can have a solid foundation to build upon.
For the creative project, I found a beautiful set of book ends that are the head and the tail of a sperm whale. I was initially thinking of taking the head and using Paper-Mache to envelop it in every page from Chapter 42, then have the forehead read “It was never about a whale.” It would be set either inside of the book at Chapter 42 or — using both ends — I would have them as the literal book ends on a copy of Moby Dick. This works as a kind of physical manifestation of what people perceive Moby-Dick to be about, wrapped in the chapter that is the most well known of the book.
Through this project, I argue that Melville uses the whale to critique the expectations readers bring to the symbols – showing that the whale is never simply a whale, but a surface onto which meaning is compulsively imposed. The whiteness that terrifies Ishmael arises not from the animal itself but from the human impulse to project significance onto what fundamentally resists understanding. By wrapping the whale in the physical text of Chapter 42, my artwork materializes Melville’s insight that the White Whale’s terror is generated through the very act of interpretation.
As a kind of related aside: I read once that to understand the social commentary of a horror novel, you need to remove the monster from it. Whatever story you have left is really what the story is about. With Moby-Dick, which monster would you have to remove to understand the commentary on — Ahab or Moby-Dick? Or are either of them truly to blame for the events of the novel?
My biggest takeaway from this novel is that there is so much we cannot ever know, but there is so much that we can miss on our first read through. There are so many strands that Melville is weaving here, from the aspect of race, slavery, nation, capitalism, obsession, etc. there’s so much that you can see in this book. I want to try and read the book again with a different focus each time so that I can see what changes in my perception of the book.
