Born from white, dead in white

Elizabeth Renker's discussion of the violence Melville explicitly took against "white" or "pristine" elements in his life – whether his wife, women in general, and his page – could be said to relate in some ways to the question raised last week: why isn't Ahab treated ironically? He isn't because, it would seem, the very act of writing for Melville, as is for Ahab, is, transformative, formative for him, while destructive, violent for something else, something white.

Renker describes Melville as anxious about despoiling, mutilating the pristine whiteness of a page, of mutilating things as they are, in their beauty, by writing of them. That somehow, the act of writing has a power of destroying that which it writes of. In the Ahab-ian sense, this means that Ahab's search for meaning is destructive for something else, an outside agent – a pristinely white whale.

And yet, write he does, just as Ahab goes after the whale. To take Renker's page metaphor further, he seeks to strike at the page by turning it white again. The white that precedes the act of writing is a danger, a threat that must be destroyed, transformed, and changed in such a way as to make the white coming after the act of writing (the end of the novel) to be the same (it's still white) but somehow different.

And this is, in a way, why Melville can't be ironic toward Ahab, because Ahab represents this primal, unconscious, personal response to the threat the white presents. In a way, to parody Ahab would be for Melville to parody himself or what he sees (or doesn't) as the telos of the act of writing itself and the meaning it has for him.

For, like Ahab, the destruction inflicted on the world, as violent as it is, gives meaning, purpose, maybe life, and definitely a product (a novel). Ahab is handicapped, with one leg missing, but walks, talks, commands to the point of a dictatorship with the use of a white prop.

Through this prop, through this attack on the white, by killing it, there's art. This, of course, does not mean excusing Melville's violent behavior towards his family, his wife mainly, nor does it make it rational to attack "the universe" through the "first creature that crosses one's path," and it is quite possible that Melville, as described by Renker was, for the lack of a better word, crazy.

However, it does seem the attacking of the white is what gave him life, and, conversely, the lack of which for him could have meant death.

And that, to me, doesn't seem like something someone would parody.