Some Thoughts After My First Quarter of Moby Dick

I got the first quarter of Moby Dick down and am moving along at a decent pace. So far in the book we are finally at sea bound for the Indian Ocean and we finally get the actual appearance of Ahab in the last (29th) chapter. Also so far: we get a look at coastal New England at the mid-19th century, we learn how one goes about getting on a fishing vessel back then, and most importantly we really become part of the mind of Ishmael. Ishmael would be an interesting character today, he must've really stood out when this book was published in 1851. Pertaining to my interests, it is intriguing to see his journey from a 19th century version of a "non-racist" to what we may call now "antiracist" (in no small part due to his partnering up with the Austronesian harpooner Queequeg). It is a very much in-process transformation, but even a quarter of the way in, it is noticeable his change since the beginning of the book. As I am reading this book according to Toni Morrison's recommendation in Unspeakable Things Unspoken, this gives the book an interesting feel to it that I'm guessing most people who read this novel don't have.
 

 It only seems that the canon of American literature is “naturally” or “inevitably” “white.” In fact it is studiously so. In fact these absences of vital presences in Young American literature may be the insistent fruit of the scholarship rather than the text. Perhaps some of these writers, although under current house arrest, have much more to say than has been realized. Perhaps some were not so much transcending politics, or escaping blackness, as they were transforming it into intelligible, accessible, yet artistic modes of discourse. To ignore this possibility by never questioning the strategies of transformation is to disenfranchise the writer, diminish the text, and render the bulk of the literature aesthetically and historically incoherent - an exorbitant price for cultural (whitemale) purity, and, I believe, a spendthrift one. The reexamination of founding literature of the United States for the unspeakable unspoken may reveal those texts to have deeper and other meanings, deeper and other power, deeper and other significances. - "Unspeakable Things Unspoken by Toni Morrison

 
Many folks want to be like Toni, but ain't really trying to be like Toni—at least in the way she was as a reader. I decided after reading The Source of Self-Regard last year that I would take-up Morrison's suggestion of reading this book (and others of "the canon" with new eyes for a deeper meaning—what she called the "Afro-American presence in American Literature." I suspect I may have been doing this subconsciously with classic literature for awhille anyway, but Morrison articulated this in a way that I have not been able to forget since I read The Source of Self-Regard last year.