This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date.
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One of the first introductions I’ve read that made sense to me, probably because I’ve read the book twice before and I agree with most of his thoughts. I won’t dwell on it too much because I want to develop my own interpretation of this book, the book I sometimes think I could have written, the book that seems to be in some indefinable way about everything I ever wanted to write a book about and tried. That’s in fact what this exercise is all about, trying to put some definition on that sense I get when reading this book that something big, important, and utterly contemptuous of my own understanding is swimming just beneath the surface of the prose. More on that later. For now, Kazin’s conclusions seem to be:
1. Moby-Dick is not just a book about Ahab’s quest for the white whale, Moby-Dick is a quest for the white whale, a quest for an understanding of man’s place in the cosmos.
2. Melville’s characters each represent a different approach to this question—Ishmael searches for meaning from the prison of his own mind, Ahab by confronting the forces that may seek to ignore him, Starbuck by clinging fast to his Christian faith, etc.
3. That when all is said and done, no matter the approach we take towards this quest for understanding, there will always remain something deep and mysterious hidden from our view and ambivalent to our desire.
I’ll try to keep these things in mind as I go through the book, but I don’t want to become too reliant on them. They may be signposts for me, and they will probably help me find my way, but the journey ahead is mine, and I want to be careful not to let someone walk it for me.
Etymology and Extracts
Three times I’ve wondered why these things are here and three times I’m left with no good answer. The best I can come up with is that if Melville uses the whale as a symbol of nature ambivalent to man, then these two sections show that whales have been part of human history from the very beginning and, in all that time, our interactions with them have been nothing but antagonistic and violent.
I. Loomings
We are introduced to Ishmael, the narrator of our tale, who tells us that whenever he is feeling tired of life he goes to sea. As Cato throws himself onto a sword, Ishmael takes to a ship. We are, he says, all drawn similarly to the sea. It contains the ungraspable phantom of life, and somehow is the key to all our understanding. This particular time he decides on a whaling voyage, and ascribes that decision to the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has constant surveillance of him, secretly dogs him, and influences him in some unaccountable way.
II. The Carpet Bag
Ishmael travels from New York to New Bedford and misses the last transport to Nantucket, from which and no other port does he intend to sail. Nantucket is the great original—the Tyre of this Carthage—the place where the first dead American whale was stranded. Looking for a place to spend the night and with only a few pieces of silver in his pocket, he passes by two inns which seem too expensive and jolly, and he enters a Negro church by mistake, falling over an ash box in the process, where the preacher’s text is about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Wanting no part of that, he leaves and finds The Spouter Inn, which looks cheap enough to accommodate him. Before entering, he speculates on the cold wind, and how it bothers those out of doors and not those inside beside the fire, and how the fire within ourselves is not hot enough to give us the same comfort.
III. The Spouter-Inn
A switch to the second person, putting “you” in the center of the action. A description of the painting on one of the walls of the entryway of the Spouter-Inn, so thoroughly besmoked and defaced that only by careful study and popular opinion can its meaning be defined. All else is whale-related—broken lances and harpoons on the opposite wall, a bar shaped like a right whale’s head, and liquor shelves framed by whale jawbones. Ishmael speaks to the landlord, agrees to share a bed with another lodger, and is fed a cold meal of meat and dumplings. The crew of a just-docked ship, the Grampus, comes in and begins to drink and rejoice, except for one man, a brawny Southerner from Virginia named Bulkington, who Ishmael says will soon become his shipmate. Ishmael decides he doesn’t want to share a bed with a stranger, and tries to make a bed out of a wooden bench, but can’t get comfortable, and decides to wait for the harpooner to come back to the Inn so he can get a good look at him and decide if he wants to share his bed. He and the landlord get to talking about the harpooner, and after a misunderstanding about the stranger selling shrunken heads from the South Seas, the landlord decides he won’t be coming in that night and urges Ishmael to go claim the bed for himself. This Ishmael does, retiring after looking through the harpooner’s belongings, including a strange doormat with needle-like tassels on the ends and a poncho-like hole in the middle. Eventually, the harpooner comes home, and Ishmael watches secretly from bed as he undresses—his body covered in small, black, tattooed squares—and makes a small offering of a cooked biscuit to a black, little idol he produces from his coat and places on the hearth. Then the harpooner comes to bed, bringing some kind of tomahawk/pipe with him, and Ishmael leaps up and screams for the landlord—Peter Coffin—to come save him. The landlord comes, introduces Queequeg (the harpooner) to Ishmael, and quiets everybody down. In the light, Ishmael sees that Queequeg isn’t such a bad fellow—a clean, comely-looking cannibal—and decides to share his bed after all. And never slept better in his life.
IV. The Counterpane
Ishmael wakes the next morning in Queequeg’s embrace, the tanned and tattooed arm of the harpooner draped over him and blending in with the stripes and colors of the patchwork quilt they shared. He feels strange, and is reminded of a time as a young boy, when sent to bed early for misbehaving, he awoke in the middle of the night with the sensation of some invisible, supernatural hand gripping his. Ishmael manages to wake Queequeg, and they agree that Queequeg will dress first and leave, leaving the apartment wholly to Ishmael. Ishmael starts to watch Queequeg dress, but Queequeg crawls under the bed to put on his boots, somehow thinking it indecorous to do that in front of someone. Ishmael calls Queequeg a creature in a transition state—neither caterpillar nor butterfly, just enough civilized to wear boots but not enough civilized to know that you don’t have to crawl under the bed to put them on. After washing up and shaving with his harpoon, Queequeg leaves Ishmael alone in the room. How is Ishmael like Queequeg’s wife? He waits for Queequeg to come home, they sleep together, he wakes in his embrace, and waits quietly in the morning while Queequeg gets ready to leave. What kind of relationship is this going to be? And how will Queequeg’s quest for understanding differ from Ishmael’s?
V. Breakfast
Ishmael goes down to breakfast and sees all the other boarders together for the first time. He can tell how long each one of them has been ashore by how dark or light their tans are. Queequeg again is something special. But who could show a cheek like Queequeg? Which, hued with various tints, seemed like the Anoles’ western slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates, zone by zone. Much to Ishmael’s surprise, the whalemen eat in silence. Men who board great whales on the high seas and dueled them dead without winking, look round sheepishly at each other at a social breakfast table among their own comrades. A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen! Queequeg sits at the head of the table, cool as an icicle, ignoring the coffee and hot rolls, spearing rare beefsteaks with his harpoon. After breakfast, Ishmael goes for a walk.
VI. The Street
Ishmael talks about New Bedford, about how it is the strangest of all strange places in the world, about how one casually sees whalemen and cannibals and country bumpkins strolling its streets. But for all its strangeness, New Bedford is also one of the most opulent places in the world, where rich men, men made rich from whaling, build brave houses, or better still, harpoon them and drag them up to New Bedford from the bottom of the sea.
VII. The Chapel
After his walk, Ishmael decides to visit the Whaleman’s Chapel, where whalemen of all sorts stop to visit before heading out on ocean voyages. There he finds a group of worshippers—sailors, wives and widows—all sitting silently and apart from one another. Several sit staring at memorial tablets, placed beside the pulpit in memory of men lost at sea or killed in whaling. Ishmael sees Queequeg there, and Queequeg notices him, unable to read the black stone tablets which so engross the others. In observing the others he thinks faith is like a jackal feeding among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope. Ishmael ponders on them, and knows that death may await him on his voyage as it had awaited these men on theirs, but shrugs off his worry, firm is his belief that he has an existence apart from his body, that after it dies he will continue. Come a stove boat and a stove body when they will, for stove my soul, Jove himself cannot.
VIII. The Pulpit
Father Mapple enters the church, dripping in the rain and sleet which had begun to fall when Ishmael first left for the chapel. Mapple was a harpooner in his youth, but had for many years been a minister and was now very old. He now ascends to the pulpit, which has only a rope ladder for access, and then pulls the ladder up with him, leaving him impregnable in his little Quebec. Ishmael searches for meaning in this action, and decides that to Mapple, the pulpit is a self-contained stronghold, a place he can go to spiritually isolate himself from the world around him. On the wall behind the pulpit is painted a scene of a ship beating against the waves and storm, and an angel on a small island whose face shines with a beacon light. The pulpit is also built like the prow of a ship and Ishmael finds this appropriate, thinking the world is nothing but a ship on its passage out, and the pulpit is the thing that leads it out and bears the earliest brunt.
IX. The Sermon
Mapple orders everyone into the pews, offers a quiet prayer, and then speaks the words of a hymn about being swallowed by a whale and then delivered by God. Mapple then begins his sermon on the story of Jonah, telling how Jonah, having disobeyed God, decided to sail to the farthest known land, where he believed the power of God could not reach him. He finds a ship bound for Tarshish and, after the crew try to determine if he is a man wanted for a parricide, Jonah is allowed to see the captain. The captain agrees to ferry him, at three times the normal rate, and knows when Jonah pays it that he is a fugitive from something. Jonah retires to his cabin where, after spending hours wracked by his conscience and reminded of his crookedness in the world by the way his room looks crooked to a free-hanging lamp, he eventually falls asleep. While he sleeps, a great storm comes upon the ship, the sea itself in protest to Jonah’s presence on it, and remains asleep until the captain comes to raise him. Coming above deck, Jonah is frightened by the power of the storm and knows that it has been sent by God to plague him. Confessing this to the sailors, he beseeches them to cast him overboard in order to save themselves. This they do, and the storm ends as Jonah falls into the mouth and belly of the whale. There, he prays not for deliverance, but only for forgiveness, for he knows he was wrong and that God’s punishment was just. God, taking pity on Jonah, delivers him from the whale’s belly. Mapple tells his parishioners to sin not, but if they do, repent like Jonah. But Mapple reminds them that there is a larger lesson in the story of Jonah, a lesson that he, as a pilot of the living God, is more responsible to uphold than they. For once delivered, Jonah became a prophet of God, just as Mapple has become, and woe to anyone who goes back to their selfish ways after taking on that awesome position.
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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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