Violence, Totalitarianism and Purity

Herman Melville, as delineated by Elizabeth Renker, is not 'just' a violent husband and father. Her description depicts a prototypical figure of a totalitarian dictator who didn't only use brutal violence, but also prevented his wife from freely corresponding with friends and family, censored her letters, maintained a strict regime of secrecy (in trivial matters, as if for secrecy's sake), and practically sentenced her and the children to hard labor (of copying his books). To top it all, he forbade punctuating, thereby making their toils a jabbered sequence of no meaning, and leaving for himself the final scrutinizing of their work (by that, terrorizing them.)

Renker holds that this violent, obsessive temper of Melville's permeates his writing and conditions his relation to writing and moreover – to the material aspect of it which is depicted in book and paper. Her argument is undoubtedly powerful but her evidence are scarce: none of them is from Melville's masterpiece Moby Dick, which if anything is totally contradictory to her argument, being so abundant of the spirit of liberty and egalitarianism.

How is that gap, between the totalitarian Melville and the democratic Moby Dick, to be explained? Well, a possible answer might be found in a motif which prevails in the first part of Renker's essay, as well as in Moby Dick – the interplay between 'clean' and 'dirty'. In Renker we see it mainly in those scholars and descendants of Melville who didn't know how to deal with all the 'dirt' they found on him (Renker's essay in itself is somewhat of a purification act). In Moby Dick, we have just encountered it in chapter 98 depicting the obsessive cleaning of the ship after extracting the spermaceti (described as the ultimate purifier).

This monomania for cleanliness, the compulsive fear of dirt, may be seen as the line connecting between the totalitarian – always horrified from the idea of dirtiness, of imperfection – and the manifest of freedom that expresses the wish that has become a monomania for purity, for total liberation of all things impure.