#i also think it's telling that in the long list of 'sources' malloy lists in the program

[seagodofmagic]

tried to write a post about the way the musical adaptation of moby-dick handles race and i had way too much to say.

i’ve seen people criticize tambourine but i actually kind of like it--it’s big, it’s weird, and with very few changes it could have been a great way to pull pip’s story into the meta narrative the show (almost) tells about melville’s failure of imagination when he writes about race. if we’re keeping the book’s metaphor of pip’s soul going wandering when he’s alone in the ocean, why shouldn’t it wander out of the 1840s?

but tambourine doesn’t work because of the stuff around it. i absolutely hate the first song ishmael sings in act iii--it’s such a pointless, unexamined reuse of racist 19th century tropes from the book (pip loves christmas and the fourth of july???? are you fucking kidding me????). the song quickly goes over-the-top so maybe it’s meant to be a commentary on the superficiality of ishmael’s grief for a kid he actually didn’t know at all but if so that needs to spelled out a LOT more clearly/connected up with the rest of the act in a more meaningful way. as it is the song just comes across as deeply, deeply lazy writing.

in general, it feels like the show wants to engage with the racism in the book but it often does so in such a superficial way that it forgets that the book, for all its flaws, is actually a pretty decent primary source on how 19th century racism works, and how even fairly liberal white people saw poc and particularly black people in the 1840s. it’s a grim picture--ishmael is presented as someone who is willing to look past race (whatever that means) in some circumstances but he more often doesn’t do that at all or only does so at a very 101 level even by his own decade’s standards. personally i think the best way to adapt the book for a 21st century audience is to separate ishmael the character/concept (uneducated, apolitical white guy from new york state who genuinely wants to get out from under his rock and connect with other people) from melville the author, and for the most part i think the show does take that approach, which is great! but then when they keep so much of ishmael’s original racist description of pip, i get whiplash! (again, if they did this deliberately it would be another story and i’d still be interested--i just don’t think they actually thought it through.)

the problem starts in the prologue, when actor!ishmael says he wants to re-cast moby-dick the way he wishes america was. that’s a bizarre critique to make of a book where approximately half the characters are poc. melville’s problem isn’t in representation-by-numbers, it’s imagining an inner life for non-white characters (especially Black characters) that isn’t totally dominated by stereotypes. the way the show elides this feels like the (white) creators are weirdly patting themselves on the back for something a white 19th century author already did for them, or perhaps they think race-appropriate casting for non-white characters is somehow something other than the lowest of low bars (????)

that said, in a lot of ways i like the musical’s approach to embodying melville’s characters and giving them more developed inner lives, and i think it usually works pretty well: tashtego and daggoo doing rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead on the masthead; queequeg’s song taking over ishmael’s narrative of their first meeting; fedallah breaking the fourth wall to point out (among other things) that it might not be enough to quietly update the characters if the racism behind them is so bad to begin with.

but then there are other times when melville is clearly a better authority on his era’s own racism than the white people writing the update. pip’s story doesn’t come out of nowhere. even in the scene they got the tambourine idea from, pip is bullied by the crew to play for them, and he tells them his tambourine is broken because he doesn’t want to have to dance and sing for a bunch of drunken sailors! they make him do it anyway! immediately next in that scene someone picks a racist fight with daggoo! the show clearly understands that pip gets left behind in part because he’s Black--yet it doesn’t pick up any of those dropped cues from the book and instead uses that sequence to construct a mostly invented musician identity for Pip. i get the meta temptation--it’s a musical, so why not keep the detail that pip is a musician, it’s another way for the audience to relate to him! but it’s also like......lmao are we really at the same level as Racist Sailor #3? if we’re going to depart from the book and rewrite pip as a whole new character, why not actually do that, free of the racist minstrel trope?

back to the book: in the part of the story where stubb leaves pip behind, it’s clear that it’s not just stubb being personally horrible (though he is) as compared to the rest of the crew--it’s violent racial hierarchy rearing its head on the pequod the way it rears its head everywhere else in 1840s america. of course the person most likely to be left behind is a Black kid who doesn’t have a skillset that would set him apart and keep him safe on the ship. (there’s a strong implication this wouldn’t have happened to dough-boy, the pequod’s actual most useless/annoying crew member, because dough-boy is white and there isn’t a literal price tag on his life.) pip getting left behind is simultaneously stubb’s fault, no one’s fault, and everyone’s fault. (it’s also kind of tashtego’s fault, which could have been an interesting thread for the show to pull on in a couple different ways, but they don’t go there). anyone on that whale-boat could have pulled a queequeg and either jumped in after pip or cut the line--but they don’t, because of who pip is. it’s a violently racist accident.

(melville is fucking clueless about a lot of things but he is not clueless about how violence operates in closed environments--moby-dick is arguably much less violent than some of his other books because the ever-present lurking threat is the whale, not the other people on the boat. but i do think this episode is fundamental to the book and it’s very, very believable as something that could have actually happened--including the collective, confused guilt of everyone else afterward.)

anyway this part of the book is a hot mess but honestly i don’t feel i’m extrapolating much here. and yet none of what i just wrote about comes across coherently in act iii of the musical. pip never came alive for me as an individual character in the show even though so much stage time was spent on his story--which is a pity because the concept of giving his character an entire act is so beautiful and i was really rooting for them to make it work! i want many other parts of the show to stay exactly as they are but i hope the rewrite of act iii is substantial.