Note: This is the second of a series of commentaries on Melville’s novel.
Ishmael intends to sail from Nantucket, “the great original” of American whaling, where local Amerindians first ventured on to the water to hunt Leviathan. In returning to the point of whaling’s genesis in what would become the United States of his lifetime, Ishmael reminds himself and his readers that the hunt predates the arrival of Europeans here. The hunt began before the ‘age of exploration,’ modernity, capitalism. The hunt is human, not time-bound or ‘culture’-bound.
It is December and it is cold. He stops in New Bedford, another whaling town, to spend the night before proceeding to Nantucket. His search for cheap lodging on the freezing night takes on a boundaries-pushing, slightly phantasmagorical character, as he wanders from hotel to hotel, even stumbling into a black church, where pilgrim and parishioners behold one another with mutual surprise and incomprehension. Arriving finally at The Spouter Inn, he remarks the irony of the proprietor’s name, Peter Coffin; the rock of this establishment hardly invokes eternal life. (As events come to pass at the end of the yarn, a coffin will nonetheless save him, as this Coffin saves him from frostbite.) Ishmael reminds himself of Lazarus, the beggar at the doorstep of the rich man in Luke 16, self-pityingly imagining that even Lazarus did not need to suffer through a freezing New England winter. But he immediately recalls himself to his mission and enters the inn.
There he sees an oil painting done in dark, Turneresque shades, seemingly an attempt by the artist “to delineate chaos bewitched,” to control chaos rather in the way of the witches on the blasted heath in Macbeth. Sublime if not beautiful, the painting “froze you to it”—doing for the mind what a Massachusetts winter does to the body—”till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what [it] meant.” Ishmael cannot be sure, but he comes to “a final theory of my own,” that the picture represented a ship sailing around Cape Horn in a hurricane, with “an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft… in the enormous act of impaling itself upon the three mastheads.” Destruction of both ship and whale, hunter and hunted: chaos come again, as a Shakespearean character might say. Having reached one of those boundary lines he had determined to test, “I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a looker-on.”
A crew newly arrived from a whaling expedition is the first thing to see. As the men drink and caper at the bar, Ishmael notices a man named Bulkington, a Southerner; he too separates himself from the company and looks on. He discreetly withdraws from the scene altogether; when his mates notice his absence, they go in search of him. They respect him, perhaps as a natural ruler or aristocrat. He will sign on with the Pequod expedition, but will attract little notice on that ship, which will remain firmly in the grip of a tyrant. In socially egalitarian or democratic America, aristocrats natural and artificial do not rule. There is a place for them, sometimes, in small portions of American society, but they will not rule the New America.
Landlord Coffin would rent him a room and bed, both to be shared with a harpooner who, Coffin cheerfully reports, is at the moment out trying to sell the last shrunken head he had acquired on a voyage to New Zealand—New Bedford being a commercial town, after all, and America a commercial republic. (It should not go unnoticed that commercial transactions require not only a willing seller but a willing buyer, and Queequeg has been selling shrunken heads to the local Christians.) He assures Ishmael that the bed was his marital bed, big enough for two. Unassured by the arrangement, Ishmael retires, awakened by the sight of Queequeg, tattooed from head to foot, surely “some abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the south Seas, and so landed in this Christian country.” Foreshadowing his encounters with several Quakers in the months to come, Ishmael shudders: “I quaked to think of it.” He calms himself somewhat by thinking, “It’s only his outside. A man can be honest in any sort of skin.” This doesn’t quite work, as fear returns; yet, he insists, “the parent of fear” is ignorance. If the Bible teaches that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, Ishmael counters that ignorance is the parent of fear; hence his boundary-pushing. Indeed, these chapters of the novel show Ishmael succeeding in overcoming fear, and getting “on friendly terms” with the tattooed, idolatrous, shrunken-head-selling cannibal with whom he will spend the night.
After some mutual alarm and a timely intervention by Mr. Coffin, Queequeg takes the measure of his new roommate and commands him to get into the bed. “He really did this in not only a civil but a really kind and charitable way”; accordingly, Ishmael tells himself, “the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” Having “never slept better in his life,” Ishmael awakens to find himself in “the comical predicament” of having sleeping Queequeg’s massive arms around him—a bit more of a marital bed than either had planned. This recalls Ishmael to a childhood incident when he was sent to bed by his stepmother as punishment and dreamed that “a supernatural hand was placed in mine.” Real or imagined, the sensation, puzzles him “to this day.” But the current dilemma is natural enough, and after finally awakening his bedmate he continues his role as looker-on, as Queequeg “and his ways were well worth unusual regarding.” He concludes that Queequeg is no savage but rather “just civilized enough to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manner,” dressing himself from the head down, for example, and shaving himself with the edge of his harpoon’s steel head. They go down to breakfast, where the landlord regards him with the amusement of a congenial prankster. Ishmael doesn’t mind: “A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing.” No need for wounded pride at being laughed at. “The man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for” an aphorism equally applicable to Queequeg and Ishmael himself. His future tyrant-captain, Ahab, will sometimes laugh, but never at himself. The whalemen eat their breakfast in silence, punctuated by Queequeg’s spearing of lightly-cooked steaks with his harpoon.
Thus cheered, Ishmael finds more comedy in the streets of New Bedford, too, where he strolls later that morning. It turns out that Queequeg isn’t so unusual, here, as “in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright, many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh.” “Still more curious, certainly more comical,” are the young New Englanders in town to sign on for a whaling voyage, “all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery.” Here, the Americans are in some ways as outlandish as the savages—in a way, even more so, as they have yet to go to sea. Americans and foreigners alike contrast with the men who invest in the ships, men as wealthy as any in America, whose wealth enables them to “superinduce bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation’s final day.” Ishmael had arrived on Saturday night, just before the Sabbath commemorating God’s day of rest after creation, and now sees the seeming omnipotence of human art to transform that creation. Foreign savages, green boys from the Green Mountains, and prosperous merchants all seek the conquest of the nature that gives them little to work with. Ishmael will watch them try; Ahab will channel their energies into another, wilder quest. And so to church.
Ishmael enters the Whaleman’s Chapel. The Chapel is for whalemen, their wives, and their widows, who sit apart from one another, “as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.” This is the second appearance in the novel of human beings closed off from one another—”isolatoes,” as Ishmael later will call them—the silent sailors at breakfast being the first. Awaiting the preacher, the parishioners solemnly read plaques on the wall memorializing dead sailors, each reader recalling her own dead, or considering his own possible death at sea. They find no consolation in what they read, only more intense isolation in suffering or in fear. Aside from Ishmael, the only one present who pays attention to the others is Queequeg, who sits with “a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity in his countenance”; Queequeg, a ‘wonderer’ as well as a ‘wanderer,’ in this resembles Ishmael. In his case, however, wondering without believing comes from an inability to read; reading physically isolates the reader from his surroundings, including other people, and, it will transpire, reading pious inscriptions and even the Bible can prove isolating, too. “What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave.”
In all this Ishmael detects contradiction in Christian souls. If we really believe that the dead now dwell “in unspeakable bliss,” why do we mourn them? Either our faith is weak or the Biblical promise of immortality is an illusion. “But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope”—perhaps the hope of seeing the departed loved one, again. Does Faith bring eternal life, through God’s grace? The Biblical Ishmael is the one not among those chosen by God, and Melville’s Ishmael will fare no better.
Ishmael thinks, “the same fate may be thine,” namely, death at sea. “But somehow I grew merry again,” not through faith in salvation in God, but through nature conceived Socratically. “Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death.” If “what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance,” and if our bodies prevent us from clearly seeing “things spiritual,” then “my body is but the lees of my better being”; when death takes my body, it won’t take me. Death is like a wound that punctures a barrel, releasing the wine. Death will “stave” my soul; the pun on “save” also includes a double thought on the barrel, inasmuch as staving refers not only to barrels but to ships, which sink when staved, bringing soul-liberating death to those on board.
The whalemen call the preacher “Father” Mapple, respecting him as Catholics would respect a priest, although he is a Protestant. The Whaleman’s Chapel refers not only to the congregation but also to him, as he has hunted whales. Neither Ishmael nor Melville himself could dismiss him as a landlubber, a man clueless concerning the harsh and chaotic sea and its denizens. On land, he still retains the habits of a sailor, arriving after walking to his church in the freezing rain, little concerned with his own comfort. ‘I am your captain, the Bible our orders, God our general,’ his demeanor seems to say.
Before recalling the sermon, Ishmael describes two more features of the church. One is a painting. In contrast to the entirely dark painting at the Spouter-Inn, this picture shows an angel with a radiant, sun-like face, overlooking a ship. The guardian angel replaces the destroying angel, the whale hovering above the masts of the ship. The other feature is the pulpit, modeled on a mainmast, complete with a rope-ladder. Ishmael understands this symbolically: “the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete: and the pulpit is its prow.” Thus the pulpit leads the world.” Father Mapple offers Ishmael an alternative captaincy to that of Ahab.
The service begins with a hymn. American literature scholar David H. Battenfeld identified this as an adaptation of a hymn sung in the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, the church Melville had attended with his mother. [1] But the hymn sung in the Whaleman’s Chapel has all references to Jesus removed. Father Mapple does indeed speak for God the Father, not the Son, offering an interpretation of the Old Testament story of Jonah and the whale. There, Jonah (whose name means “dove,” carrier of messages) disobeys God, who commands him to go to Nineveh and prophesy against “their wickedness” (Jonah 1.1). Contradicting the meaning of his name, Jonah disobeys, paying ship passage to Tarshish, instead. God sends a storm; the sailors interrogate Jonah and learn that he is fleeing God. They call out to God to spare them, as they are innocents. To appease God, they throw Jonah into the sea, where he’s swallowed by “a great fish” (1.16). From the belly of the beast Jonah prays for deliverance; God does deliver him and he proceeds obediently to Nineveh. Far from being killed, Jonah succeeds; the Ninevites repent, and God repents of His intention to destroy them. Angry with God for sparing the evil Ninevites, Jonah relents when God teaches him to discriminate between the good and the evil, the innocent and the guilty. Not all of the Ninevites are guilty, and the many who were have now repented of their evil ways.
Father Mapple interprets the yarn. “If we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the harness of obeying God consists.” Like the Ninevites, Jonah much prefers to disobey God and follow his own lead. “Jonah sought to flee world-wide from God”; he might resemble some of the sailors, indeed Ishmael, although unlike Jonah Ishmael does not pay his own way. Mapple says that the fugitive Jonah’s conscience provides his first punishment, torturing him spiritually while aboard the ship. But he confesses to the sailors. They initially show him mercy, turning first to prayer and only then to action, when God chooses not to answer their prayer. Mapple adds to the Biblical account with a vivid description of Jonah sinking into the sea and the jaws of the whale, then describes Jonah’s prayer from the whale’s belly as repentant, not self-justifying. “And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.” In retelling and embellishing the Biblical yarn, Mapple exhibits “an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility.” He could never be considered a poor-spirited or ‘effeminate’ Christian of the sort Machiavelli derided.
Mapple then draws his final lessons from the yarn: “preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood”; and, turning now to himself especially, “woe to the pilot of the living God who slights it” by succumbing to the “charms” of the world instead of adhering to “Gospel duty.” “Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall! Woe to him whose name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation!” Such a pilot, such a seeker of popularity and honor, a man who would lie to save his life, fails to follow the example of “the great Pilot Paul,” eventually a martyr for God. Such a false pilot, “while preaching to others is himself a castaway!” Father Mapple is preaching to himself, examining his own soul and finding it sinful. He is, after all, a man who ascends to a mast-like pulpit, and evidently makes no objection to being called “Father” by his listeners. He attempts to rally his spirits, saying that not misery but “Delight—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven.” He tells his congregation and perhaps most of all himself that the patriot of the Kingdom of God will find joy, unlike the patriot of any kingdom of man. He blesses the congregation; they depart, “and he was left alone in the place.” However impressive and moving, the Bible message has united neither the congregants with one another nor the messenger with his congregants. Is this a dilemma following from the absence of Christ from the sermon, or does it follow, in Ishmael’s and perhaps Melville’s judgment, from the radically anti-natural teaching of the Bible itself?
Ishmael returns to the Spouter-Inn to find Queequeg, like Father Mapple, “quite alone,” having left the Whaleman’s Chapel before the benediction. He busies himself with his idol. Although Ishmael finds Queequeg’s tattooed face hideous, “his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul.” Honesty, courage, nobility, and liberty: his head “reminded me of General Washington’s head”; “Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.” The underlying nature of a human type shines out from the tattoos of convention, custom. Initially “overawing” (the ‘H’, again), “savages” or men close to nature exhibit “calm self-collectedness of simplicity” evincing “a Socratic wisdom.” Queequeg is a man of nature, a sort of philosopher, in contrast with Father Mapple, whose God commands us to resist our (fallen) nature. Thousands of miles from his home, “thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter,” Queequeg nonetheless “seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy….” Has Father Mapple achieved the delight he hopes for? Or the serenity?
On this cold December night, Ishmael “felt a melting in me.” “No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it.” Ishmael finds himself redeemed not by Mapple’s religion but by Queequeg’s philosophic character, “speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits.” He decides, “I’ll try a pagan friend… since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.” They “left as cronies,” “naturally and unbiddenly”—that is, with no need for commands divine or human. Queequeg announced that “henceforth we were married,” meaning, “we were bosom friends.” He presents him with the shrunken head and half his money as gifts—charitable by nature, Christian without Christianity. Ishmael syllogizes theologically: surely the “magnanimous God of heaven and earth” could not possibly “be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood,” Queequeg’s idol. Given that worship is to do the will of God, and that “God wills to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me,” since Queequeg is “my fellow man,” why would I not want to reciprocate his attendance at a Christian religious service with my assistance in kindling the shavings he burns in homage to his “innocent little idol”? He even lets Queequeg smoke in bed: “How elastic our stiff prejudices become when love comes to bend them.” [2].
In a further Socratic-Platonic touch, the natural philosopher turns out also to be a potential king, the son of a Pacific island chief and nephew of a high priest. He left the island to “learn among the Christians”—to learn both their arts and their religion. “But alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father’s heathens.” Going against nature can produce prodigies of both good and evil; Scripture stokes the grandest ambitions. Ishmael (and Melville) make it plain, through Queequeg’s testimony, that religious customs are indeed customary, conventional—a characteristic teaching of the philosophers. Ishmael sets himself against convention, against the ways of landsmen: “How I spurned the turnpike earth!—that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea….” Philosophy and (aristocratic) morality both beckon him, as he chooses the natural friendship offered by Queequeg against the unnatural, isolating revealed religion of Father Mapple; fraternity wins his soul, not fatherly authority. As they are ferried from New Bedford to Nantucket, their fellow passengers “marveled that two fellow beings should be so companionable, as though a white man were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro”; natural equality undergirds natural friendship. It is now no wonder that Jesus had been excluded from the hymn at the Whaleman’s Inn: The brotherly, down-to-earth Person of God who obeys His Father’s command to die on the Cross combines fraternity and the authority of fatherhood, calling into question the dichotomy Melville wants to establish.
Notes
- David H. Battenfeld: “The Source of the Hymn in Moby-Dick.” American Literature, XXVII (November 1955) 393-396. The Norton Critical Edition of 1967 reprints the article on pp. 607-610, but it was removed from subsequent editions.
- Given the imagery of marriage Melville deploys to describe the friendship of Ishmael and Queequeg, several commentators have alleged that their relationship is sexual. The method deployed to consider the evidence for this is dubious, consisting of taking several passages in ways that confuse intimacy with sex. What Melville actually does, very characteristically, is to leave things in a state of ambiguity, suggesting a sense of testing if not crossing the boundaries, very much in the manner that Ishmael valorized at the beginning of his yarn.
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