Whiteness And Novelty

          Firstly, a brief explanation of the connection between the words whiteness and novelty should be stated before I endeavor to dissect the bowels of an immortal creature. In this case the term whiteness refers to a sometimes subtle, or in other cases blindly obvious, trait like absence of clarity; what is white until it has been contrasted? In my belief, it builds to nothing. Now as for the word novelty, all I mean is something original and inspiring, so it appears possessing a novel or new idealism is inherently married to the subjective ambiguity of whiteness. Allow me to entertain this notion in greater scope.

Skimming through most of Melville’s Moby-Dick one gets the feeling that all of his details are unnecessarily burdensome. “To grope down into the bottom of the sea after [whales]… this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should essay to hook the nose if this leviathan!” (Melville, 147). Here the isolated author is describing a vain attempt to decipher and contour a palpable portrait of something like the Sperm whale. Yet what seems to make his craftsmanship such a fathomless and unjustifiably lengthy work of art is because of its obvious tangents of seemingly random catalogu-ing. So while preserving the heart of fiction that is a novel, Melville also manages to synthesize his book in which several essays are composed like non-fiction; and this unwonted facet is something I find rather interesting. It’s been taught that the infantile genre known as creative non-fiction has only recently emerged from a coldly object-tive chrysalis of rhetoric like research reports, journalism, and traveling catalogues.  But apparently this isn’t so, for even just the slightest dip of an eclectic spirit can easily impute a vast array of flowery facts suffused across Melville’s descriptions of whaling, and in this way I believe the writer gives the novel genre a sort of intrigue or novelty. That literary achievement is notable isolated, but I believe there lays another deeper, more pervasive idea that expands its roots throughout every aspect of life and throughout that Shakespearean sea-voyage: whiteness.

That color, or rather shade, is a noun, adjective, and even sometimes a verb in which the human culture has used to describe the indescribable or lack of existence. Confusing? I agree. In any case it seems as though there are few ways to pin down and flesh out the true definition of such an ineffable topic, but this is where I think Melville shines without comparison. “Is it by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind… when beholding the white depths of the milky way?” (Melville, 212). And there you have it, by creating something out of nothing one finds that they themselves are manu-facturing a terror out of nothing. Or is it possible that the terror already existed and we simply discovered it haphazardly? Honestly I prefer neither choice considering I acknowledge that while bliss may require ignorance, I at least am vouchsafed the opportunity to choose which areas to apply my lack-of-knowledge.