Essay On Moby Dick: Defining Violence In Literature

Melville's Moby Dick: Defining Violence in Literature

Two stories were recently told to me, independently of one another, and although I was struck by each, it was a third story that emerged from the collision of the first two that most challenged me. The first story is about the violence of literature: "That's my current definition of literature: a cataclysmic event, one that disrupts what we think we so-settle-edly-know..." (Dalke). The second story is a definition of violence that I heard used in the context of a conversation about racism. "Violence is the denial of humanity." Although the implication seemed to be that humanity is denied to the victim of violence, I also suggest that violence diminishes the humanity of the perpetrator.

By clinging we become reliant on something that is unreliable and we therefore inevitably experience rending, deconstruction- violence. The implication that follows is that in order to survive we must drift, release. But what is the difference between being out to sea (drifting) and being unmoored (the inevitable fate of clingers)? A circularity emerges in which we ask: What is the value of survival in the absence of meaning and what is the reason for clinging if it is

Ishmael's dissipated, reabsorbed self is the epitome of drift and release. At the end of the book, Ahab dies (I would argue that the other deaths are part of Ahab's - the characters and ship all serve as lenses to focus Ahab's monomania) and Ishmael survives. But what we know of survival is very changed. Survival is the immutability of an invisible, infinitely expanded character who has gradually and almost imperceptibly divested himself of meaning in the course of the story. Meaning survives only if it continues to dissipate, to spread and percolate and become ungraspable yet malleable. Meaning which is clung to becomes a grave, as Ahab so magnificently