Melvilles Moby Dick: Defining Violence in Literature :: Moby Dick Essays

Melvilles Moby Dick Defining Violence in LiteratureTwo stories were belatedly told to me, independently of one another, and although I was struck by each, it was a triplet taradiddle that emerged from the collision of the first two that most challenged me. The first story is about the fierceness of literary works Thats my current exposition of literature a destructive event, one that disrupts what we think we so-settle-edly-know... (Dalke). The second story is a definition of force-out that I heard used in the context of a conversation about racism. Violence is the denial of humanness. Although the implication seemed to be that sympathy is denied to the victim of furiousness, I also suggest that violence diminishes the humanity of the perpetrator. Looming at the point where these two stories encounter each other is a pit of screaming questions. 1) What does it mean to deny humanity? And 2) How can this definition of violence be reconciled with the assertion that literatu re/storytelling is violent when storytelling is a implausibly human phenomenon? Initially, I was compelled by Dalkes definition of literature as cataclysmic and violent, partly because my immediate reaction was to disagree. Is not literature a cock that we use to cling together and to ever more profound implication? Must literature deconstruct in order to recreate and inflate? In concert with this skepticism is another story about literature which maintains that the actual number of stories is very few. All stories can be trim back to, at most, a dozen types or formulas within which storytellers maneuver creatively in order to extract new things from the old patterns. Violence suggests that something is creation destroyed or detracted (I will turn to the specific target of humanity in a moment), so if literature is violent, must we conceive of these variations on a formula as somehow depleting the underlying structure? Alternatively, violence suggests that literature is a proc ess of cannibalizing old formulas in the creation of new. This adaption creates the space for an infinite number of story types. So, is literature violence or clinging? Or are these two things ultimately the same? The story of violence as the denial of humanity is where I begin to search for an answer. The basal gesture of humanity is the desire to transcend itself, to know the universe, to grasp the positive truth. But, this clinging to meaning, to greater meaning, is destructive because it implies something incomplete about humans and sets us up for failure.