Modernity at Sea

[Dave Monroe]

>From Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea: Melville,
Marx,
Conrad in Crisis (Mpls: U of Minnesota P, 2001), Ch.
3, "White Capital; or, Heterotopologies of the Limit,"
pp. 63-183 ...

   "To say that the obsession with the color white in
the literatures of the United States--which is present
already with Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, haunts
Poe in the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Melville
in at least White-Jacket and Moby-Dick, and returns to
constitute itself as a veritable poetic tradition
through Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Robert
Frost, and so on--is eminently driven by anxiety
regarding the question of race is to state the
obvious.  At one point in his excursus on the color
white, Ishmael reflects on how this color's 'royal
pre-eminence' 'applies to the human race itself,
giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky
tribe.' [...] it is not here that one ought to look
for the racial impulse of Melville's obsession with
the color white.   Such an impulse becomes more
manifest in Ishmael's dread in the face of whiteness,
or, more precisely, in the irresolvable
representational impasse he runs into when attempting
to explicate and justify that dread.  Even as it
complicates racist discourse by exposing the impasse
upon which it is founded, Ishmael's horror of
whiteness is not readily explained as antiracist
sentiment.  What appals him about this 'colorless, all
color of atheism' is the realization that the
suffocating and ubiquitous power of such a 'monumental
white shroud [!] that wraps all prospect around him'
is in a symbiotic relation with its 'heartless voids
and immensities,' its 'blankness, full of meaning,'
its inability to signify, its unwillingness to
represent or be represented.  That the supreme power
of the white race might function through self-negation
and self-dissolution, might signify only and
exclusively itself, might indicate no intrinsic,
stable, and essential value of superiority, and might
hence be treading dangerously on the brink of an
incommensurable and unfathomable historical
abyss--these are indeed the components of Ishmael's
horror at the dizzying sight of whiteness, this is
what causes his 'Descartesian vortices.' [!]  Melville
here has sensed the constituting contradiction of
power that rules by decree, of self-teleological power
taht exploits and annihilates simply because it can
and exclusively because it exists.  Ultimately, it is
not even the brutal modus operandi of such a power
that terrifies Ishmael as much as the fact that,
already implicit in its very modalities of being, he
can sense the possibility of its self-destruction,
that is, the virtual, violent, and complete
dissolution of that power and of its attendant social
order.[...]  The urgent question one can hear echoing
in Ishmael's dread of whiteness is how and for how
long can absolute power last as a tautology for
itself?  Or, what will finally be the modalities and
the schedule of disintegration of such a power?" (pp.
94-5)

http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/C/casarino_modernity.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0206&msg=67658&sort=date

Very first page I flipped it open to, I swear. 
Anyway, Casarino cites here ...

Morrison, Toni.  Playing in the Dark: Whiteness
   and the Literary Imagination.  Cambridge, MA:
   Harvard UP, 1992.  New York: Vintage, 1993.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0207&msg=68017&sort=date

And see as well ...

Dyer, Richard.  White.  NY: Routledge, 1997.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0105&msg=55316&sort=date

Not to mention ...

Meikle, Jeffrey L.  American Plastic: A Cultural
   History.  New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1995.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0108&msg=58272&sort=date

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&keywords=meikle&page=10

"Poaching"?  "Violation of fair-use"?  Au contraire,
mes freres.  Think, on the one hand, public (or, at
least, listic) service, on the other, free
advertising.  Wanna talk tactics here?  Howzabout
those left- to offhanded dismissals of the valid,
relevant, perfectly legitimate, and perhaps even
interesting contributions of others.  Sheesh ... 

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