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.Quoting Tocqueville s claimthat poets in America, not finding the ideal in the real and true, would flee to imaginary regions, she notes that critics depict an affinity be-tween American culture and the genre of romance rather than the real-ist novel.Like him, they see a literature of monsters and ghosts, butrather than attribute such fantastical creatures to a literary imagina-tion vitiated by its flight from social reality, she asks, [Where] is theshadow of the presence from which the text has fled? 3As she uses Melville s Moby-Dick to show how white writers do registerrace, she puts aesthetic questions in prophetic and political terms.ForMelville recognizes the moment when whiteness becomes ideology.Indeed, if the white whale is the ideology of race, what Ahab has lostto it is personal dismemberment and.his own place as a human inthe world. As a result, Ahab shows that if someone took on not aboli-tion, not the amelioration of racist institutions or their laws, but the veryconcept of whiteness as an inhuman idea, he would be very alone, verydesperate, and very doomed.Madness would be the only appropriatedescription of such audacity. 4But audacity or madness can be prophecy, for she selects Father Map-ple s thrilling sermon on Jonah as her exemplary chapter in Moby-Dick.Jonah is saved from the whale s belly for a single purpose, as Morrisonquotes Mapple:To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!.Delight is to him.who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth hisown inexorable self.Delight is to him who gives no quarter in the truth andkills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes ofSenators and Judges.Delight.is to him who acknowledges no law or lord butthe Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven.[Morrison s emphasis]5In her own voice, she adds,No one, I think, has denied that this sermon is designed to be prophetic, butit seems unremarked [in the literary scholarship] what the sin is.that mustMorrison and Prophecy 179be destroyed regardless [of the cost].Nature? A sin? The term does not apply.Capitalism? Perhaps, but capitalism is not in itself sinful to Melville.Sin sug-gests a moral outrage within the bounds of man to repair.The concept of racialsuperiority would fit seamlessly.Ahab is thus the only American heroic enough to try to slay the monsterthat was devouring the world as he knew it. 6Many scholars see Mapple as Melville s way of voicing Theodore Park-er s abolitionism, which weds moral truth to destruction in the name ofovercoming sin.In this view, Melville recoils from the violence Parkerjustifies, and he depicts Ahab as captive to the monster making by whichhe bewitches his crew.In this view, the novel creates critical distancefrom the resentful, demonizing rhetoric whose destructive impact is thesinking of the Pequod.But Morrison weds Melville to the abolitionismrunning from William Lloyd Garrison and Parker to John Brown; herMelville embraces Ahab s monster-killing project.They voice antiracistprophecy: Attacking whiteness was dangerous, solitary, radical work.Es-pecially then, especially now.To be only a patriot to heaven is no meanaspiration in Young America for a writer or for the captain of a whalingship. Rather than note the resentment that contaminates Ahab, sheimagines a prophet addressing people whose blindness dooms him tomarginality and them to destruction.7Is Morrison endorsing a theistic language of sin and so a moral abso-lutism? Does she idealize Ahabian rage as prophetic audacity? Considerher December 1987 eulogy for James Baldwin.She depicts him as oneshe calls an ancestor, a seminal or generative source, and she identifiesthree gifts he bequeathed.First, he gave her a language to dwell in by making English honest ; he de-colonized what had been forbiddenterritory so that black people could enter it, occupy it, and restructureit to accommodate our demanding beauty, tragic knowledge and livedreality. Second, he gave black people the courage to appropriate analien, hostile, all-white geography. Tellingly, she casts that courage inprophetic terms when she quotes him: A person does not lightly electto oppose his society.One would much rather be at home among one scompatriots than be mocked and detested by them.But the mockery ofthe people, even their hatred, is moving because it is so blind: it is ter-rible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own de-struction. Because he voices a prophetic pathos about choices he failedto change and suffering he cannot forestall, she credits his third gift as a tenderness whose lesson is that though I stand on moral ground.itmust be shored up by mercy. 8180 Morrison and ProphecyThoreau eulogizes Brown as a martyr to memorialize his own pro-phetic persona; Morrison memorializes Baldwin not so much to estab-lish a canon as to identify the space he created by making over a lan-guage that has never been able to recognize us. Does her invocationof loss register her vocation not only as a writer but also as a prophet?Does she forewarn a people who self-destructively cling to their idols?Does she address blacks as a protagonist in a story of collective liabilityand decision? She dramatizes the hold of prophetic language on others,but is she herself gripped by it?Surely, she recognizes an elective affinity between antiracism andprophecy in her analyses of Melville and Baldwin.In what does this af-finity consist? First, critics of white supremacy are drawn to prophecy toannounce that people, at great cost to themselves and others, deny themeaning of their history and present conduct.Such messengers makeunequivocal claims not because of theism but to undertake the consti-tutively political act of remaking the passionate frame of reference thatorients the self-reflection and action of their audiences.Correspondingly, and second, critics of white supremacy are drawnto prophecy because it offers them a language of collective liability.Theydenounce what Morrison calls sin, which injustice fails to translate,for the wrong is not only the exclusion by which a republic at once con-stitutes and betrays itself but the ongoing disavowal that this is the case
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