Popular Culture Review 29.2
excerpt entitled “ The Spirit of the Deep .” In it , the author , who seems to be writing about a first-person mystical experience , says of The Outsider , “ You rule my dreams , where I behold with senses I do not possess in waking life the dark splendor of your home in the deep . There the ocean rests on your back like a sleeping child on his father ’ s shoulders . In these sleepless nights of despair , you appear to me not as the mighty leviathan , but as a young man , with eyes as black as the Void .” An interesting consideration here is Catherine Keller ’ s assertion that “ The fact that atmospheric and oceanic vortices pose prime examples of the dynamic systems of chaos is not incidental to a tehomic intertextuality , which describes turbulent orders only much later legible to science ” ( 143 ). Dunwall and Karnaca enjoy scientific advancement , so a lack of knowledge is not the source of their problems or the turbulence within their walls . Indeed , it would appear that the Chaos or the Void from which The Outsider lives and emerges has been forgotten in this world , such that the reassertion of both the Leviathan ’ s might and its fickle nature proves necessary . Catherine Keller also considers the image of the Leviathan as it exists in the Book of Job . She notes , “ The author could not have imagined the current human capacity to annihilate the whales altogether , or to turn the sea into a sewer . ... The chaos monster does not seek vengeance but respect for its domain ” ( 138 ). David Dowling argues , “ The invention of the monstrous fighting whale has had a long cultural life of its own that continues to obscure the fact that the number of ships sunk by whales using their heads as battering rams constitutes a fraction of the innumerable collisions that did not harm vessels but instead left whales lacerated , mangled , and dismembered ” ( 269 ). His thoughts intersect with Keller ’ s ideas about how a creature like the whale desires not to attack or to harm but to be left in peace , respected and safe in the deep . The violation of the whale who evolves into The
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