Morrison writes of Melville

Here are some of Toni Morrison’s thoughts on blackness in 19^th century American literature that may inform our upcoming reading of Moby Dick:

“It only seems that the canon of American literature is “naturally” or “inevitably” white…Perhaps some of these [19^th century white American] writers have much more to say than has been realized.  Perhaps some were not so much transcending politics, or escaping blackness, as they were transforming it into intelligible, accessible, yet artistic modes of discourse.  The reexamination of founding literature of the United States for the unspeakable unspoken may reveal those texts to have deeper and other meaning, deeper and other power, deeper and other significances.  One such writer, in particular, it has been almost impossible to keep under lock and key is Herman Melville.”

“…if the white whale is the ideology of race, what Ahab has lost to it is personal dismemberment and family and society and his own place as a human in the world.  The trauma of racism is, for the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self, and has always seemed to me a cause (not a symptom) of psychosis…”

“I would not like to be understood to argue that Melville was engaged in…simpleminded black/white didacticism, or that he was satanizing white people…What I am suggesting is that he was overwhelmed by the philosophical and metaphysical inconsistencies of an extraordinary and unprecedented idea that had its fullest manifestation in his own time in his own country, and that that idea was the successful assertion of whiteness as ideology.”

Morrison, Toni. The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations. Alfred A. Knopf., 2019.