THROUGH A L 'OOKING GLASS
THE WHITE WHALE
That prosaic image of one's life as a Ship on the Open
Sea becomes more painfully poetic as one matures, as one's focus
is
sharpened and as it becomes clearer that the surrounding landscape
is
actually floating debris, that there has actually been a shipwreck,
and that one
is
actually still afloat; painful, because such a moment
of clarity must inevitably force to the surface of one's mind the most
excruciating evaluation of that very survival. To survive anything
is
to question and ultimately understand what
it
is
one has survived,
and why. Such an examination may reveal the frightful truth that
one has not, in fact, survived, but has rather really drowned.
In
Muby
Dick,
Ishmael's understanding and questioning of
his
"survival"
is
so conspicuously absent that one is tempted to conclude
that it was he, and not Ahab, who went down with the white whale.
His
attempt to explain
his
part in that notorious incident ("I cannot
tell why exactly that those stage managers, the Fates ..•")
is
so
vacuous as to be soporific, and it
is
with pleasure that one dons
his
angry-biting satirist-persona: oh, man, stop the literary bu1lshit;
because
we
know why you survived, you survived because you were
white; because you didn't pay your dues, survived because physically
you were not even on the ship, you survived because when Queequeg,
Tashtego and Daggo, those niggers, were actually in there dealing
with that whale, actually
risking
their lives, actually
using
their
bodies,
while they were actually involved, your disembodied intel–
ligence, your white ghost, as it were, was off somewhere contem–
plating, in a moment of crises, the significance of Plato and
Aris–
totle, you survived because you never invested any soul, survived
because you were never really vulnerable hence never really alive,
