The Power of Blackness: Richard Wright Re-Writes Moby-Dick

African American Review, Winter, 1999 by Elizabeth Schultz

For Percy Boynton, the White Whale is not only "the ghostly mystery of infinitude ... [but also the] symbol of all property and all privilege" (qtd. in Parker and Hayford 179). D. H. Lawrence, while regarding Moby Dick as an elemental power, is alone among Wright's contemporaries in associating Moby Dick specifically with race; he identifies the White Whale as "the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature" (160).

All of these interpretations of Melville's whale might well have intrigued Wright; however, Mumford's interpretation of Moby Dick, in particular, seems to predict Wright's imagery for representing the elemental omnipotence of white society in Bigger's consciousness and thus for establishing Bigger's conflict as an epic struggle. Although Melville constructs Ahab's confrontation in cosmic terms, whereas Wright constructs Bigger's in social terms, Wright mythicizes his narrative through Bigger's experiencing white society as having "the sheer brute energy of the universe," as Mumford had said of Moby Dick; he maintains that "to Bigger and his kind white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead, or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one's feet in the dark" (129). Boris Max, the Communist lawyer who defends Bigger, pleads with the court to acknowledge " 'men and women in whose minds there loom good and bad of such height and weight that they assume proportions of abnormal aspect and construction. When situations like this arise, instead of men feeling that they are facing other men, they feel that they are facing mountains, floods, seas: forces of nature' " (450). Wright describes Bigger's sensation on apprehending whiteness as one of being overpowered by a "sea of noise" produced by "faces, white and looming" (314)--and repeatedly by a "looming mountain of white hate" (333, 344, 418, 494).

Setting his novel in wintertime Chicago, through continuous reference to snow, Wright particularizes his protagonist's consciousness of white society as an elemental force. Beginning in Book I, "Fear," and through Book II, "Flight," snow falls with increasing intensity, coldness, and still indifference, frustrating Bigger's escape and making his capture inevitable. Joyce Anne Joyce argues that, "because snow surrounds, impedes, and betrays Bigger as he flees for his life and because he must fight against it to survive, this image evokes his defiance at the same time that it represents the animosity of the white world," an animosity which she interprets as "malevolence--beastlike in its force" (182). [11]

In his frequent use of the verbal participle looming to describe Bigger's perception of white society's resemblance to an elemental force, Wright obviously evokes Ishmael's apprehension of Moby Dick, the "hooded phantom" that rises "like a snow hill in the hill" (7) at the conclusion of Melville's opening chapter, "Loomings." [12] Wright's reliance upon looming to describe the presence of forces over-whelming to Bigger is especially apparent in the final scene in Book II, in which he narrates Bigger's last desperate minutes of freedom and his long-anticipated confrontation with his assailants. Drawing directly on his reader's familiarity with Moby-Dick, Wright signifies on the climax in Melville's novel, creating a parody of Ahab's final encounter with the White Whale: