Written 136 years apart, Melville’s Moby Dick and Morrison’s Beloved explore the scriptural tension between the material and spiritual. Against two different American landscapes, each work explores incarnation as both manifestations of the divine and the Word given flesh—two uniquely separate functions. Throughout the stages of Queequeg’s and Baby Suggs life, and other characters, as well, the stages of archetypal incarnation are expressed amongst two distinct populations, similar first in their need for incarnated divinity. Ultimately, these incarnations ask us to see the divine in our physical bodies, now—new bodies for new Words.

Catholic Tradition | Language and Literature