What Melville Saw

Melville saw that Ahab projects every injury, wrong, sin, evil, insult, hurt and resentment in his body onto the white whale, deems it “unnatural” in its whiteness, and deems that he’d be better off if he could kill it, since it is one of a kind. Moby Dick is Ahab’s conspiracy theory, the super-villain who brings “all our woes with loss of Eden” and one of our legs. Melville saw that this obsession with the whiteness of the whale is ongoing, and thus worth telling.

It’s the whiteness of the whale that most offends. Indeed, “The Whiteness of the Whale” is one of the best chapters in the book, and once you read it you’ll never look at your ceiling in quite the same way.

For American Conservatives, the white whale is “Liberals.” For the crew that signs on with George F. Will, it’s Holden Caulfield, the Good Samaritan character he wishes he could have strangled in the cradle. For the crew that sails with Captain Roger Ailes, Retired, aboard the good ship Foxtrot, it’s the “Democrat Party.” You get the point.

Conservatives made “liberal” a dirty word, poured every calumny they have had to endure into it, and set out to brand it their white whale. We are living with the result of their obsessional drive to eradicate this offense to their purity of nature.

Notice the result they have achieved: the ship is sinking underneath us, its hull breached, and our little boats beaten to pieces, even as their captain, astride the whale’s back, tangled in his own ropes, is dragged to his death six fathoms under. Now for the good news: after everything is gone, those on the Right will have rid the world of their super-white super-villain.

I’m writing this to you from atop Queequeg’s coffin, the same perch where Ishmael sits at the end of Moby Dick; the seat Melville imagined in writing it. I’m just another witness. Escaped. Alone. To tell thee. What Melville saw.