In Chapter 42 of Moby-Dick, a list — of white things, it so happens, and their supposed virtue or horror — explodes into a meditation, an essay. Such musings may seem beside the point of the story to some readers, or old-fashioned, or (ironically) needlessly postmodern, but essayistic meditations have a place not just in Melville but the work of many contemporary writers, including the fiction of W.G. Sebald, Rebecca Solnit, David Foster Wallace, Andrea Barrett, Junot Diaz, and the poetry of Anne Carson and Cornelius Eady, to name just a few.

Melville explores the irony of whiteness, its potential to connote either purity or abomination, in this chapter. The relativism of the value of whiteness here, and the intense irony of it — a color means not just two different things but their Polar (pun-intended) opposites — brings to mind one of my favorite books: Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas. Douglas's book centers around the idea that order and disorder are the true principles that underlie our notions of purity and danger. Take dirt. We tend to think of the forest as a place that is natural and pure, though it is literally covered in dirt. Put just a small amount of earth from a forest floor onto your kitchen floor — and it's filthy. So, is it dirt that's either pure or dirty? Or is it us, our minds, our constructs? So it goes in Moby-Dick, with whiteness: When whiteness seems to belong innately to the thing that is white, whiteness is understood as pure, even holy. When it is perceived as aberrant — say a white whale of a species more typically gray — it becomes dangerous, horrifying, a sign of malice.

PROMPT:

Is there a topic your main character or narrator is obsessed with? Take a break from plot indulge this. Start, perhaps, with a list, as Melville lists white things, from priestly alb to great white sharks, from white storms to the White Mountains. Once you have a list, explode that list into a meditation.

Even if a meditative nonfictional passage doesn't belong naturally to your work, you may end up with fragments that can be retained, or an essay that is a companion piece to your primary work, or a better understanding of your character.

If this idea interests you, push it in the direction that injects complexity and subtlety into your work. Explore, in your meditation, the inverse of your primary topic, as Melville plumbs dualities and opposites in considering whiteness. And think about the work that could be done obliquely. Though race is so often an issue in Moby-Dick — we're just coming down from "Midnight, Forecastle," after all, in which a knife fight occurs after a race baiting incident between the Spanish Sailor and Dagoo — Melville doesn't directly refer to the whiteness of people of European descent. He hardly has to, when he's turned his white leviathan into a symbol of evil. How does the way your character understands and assigns value judgment regarding the topic of your nonfictional aside reflect their psyche? Push your meditation to include inversions, opposites, inferences and ironies.

© Elizabeth Gaffney July 2021