PARTISAN REVIEW
459
threatened to
kill
only moments before, Ishmael thinks: "Was there
ever such unconsciousness?" There is something in Ishmael's attitude
toward Queequeg that reminds one of that verbose and poorly
written pamphlet,
The White Negro.
In deed, Ishmael is the precursor of the modern white liberal–
intellectual.
It
is, for example, Ishmael's own preoccupation with
the whiteness of the whale that makes his own complexion so con–
spicuous. Mter he surmises what the whale meant to Ahab - he
could never really know Ahab's mind - he devotes a special chap–
ter to what the whale meant to him, the liberal: "What the white
whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what ... he was to me, as yet
remains unsaid. . . . It was the whiteness of the whale that above
all things appalled me."
The really beautiful people in this book: are Ahab and his
relationship to crazy Pip; Tashego, Queequeg and Daggo; Starbuck
and Stubb are beautiful, and beautiful because they go down with
Ahab.
If
there is any value in reading this book today, it is in un–
derstanding the very deep, the very black thing that drives Ahab.
And it
is
in spite of Ishmael's literary allusions and intrusions that
we get a portrait of Ahab, yet
it
is
the characterization of the dying
old man with bad dreams that makes the book great. When Ahab
went down he went down beautiful because he went down fighting
the very forces that killed him; in our minds he lives as a paragon
of how to die - and live.
It
is
Ishmael's death that is so horrible, for he
is
dead without
knowing it. The irony of his "survival" is that he
is
the only charac–
ter who doesn't survive.
Who will survive America?
Few Americans
Very few Negroes
No crackers at all
But the black man will survive America.
His survival will mean the death of America.
LERoI JONES
Ishmael was a cracker. Now, dig that.
Cecil M. Brown
