Poetry, Gnosticism, and the White Whale Introduction One of the most persistent interpretations of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is that it contains a fundamentally gnostic vision of reality. Gnosticism traditionally imagines the world as the creation of a flawed or malevolent demiurge and views visible existence as a deceptive veil hiding a darker metaphysical truth. The white whale has often been understood in these terms: as a manifestation of cosmic malignity, an embodimen

Melville and the White Whale Shut up Here in This Caved Trunk of a Room, On the Massachusetts Side of a Loose-Fish Land We Call America — and Feeling All at Sea In a World That Is Mad and Wet All Over I Write down This, My Heathen Language. Making waves. Much INK OIL WAX SPERM BLOOD Spilled to find the White Whale — Whose mighty tail-flukes billow the sea’s shroud; whose peck-slaps flap and flood six hundred pages of Great American Prosody; whose massive genitalia rem

The Humanzee In the heat of a celluloid American night, Doctor Franklin Ahab — host to a crowd of forty souls — walks in a stately manner through the upper rooms of his Massachusetts mansion. He descends the wide staircase, smiling and reeling off witty one-liners. An orchestra plays The Rite of Spring in the enormous dining hall. For a few minutes Ahab casually mingles among his guests, then calls for the conductor to settle down. Hester, his life partner in a transparent d