{"id":734,"date":"2012-08-19T19:13:29","date_gmt":"2012-08-19T19:13:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=734"},"modified":"2012-09-03T16:19:09","modified_gmt":"2012-09-03T16:19:09","slug":"ishmael-and-queequeg-the-original-pan-cultural-odd-couple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=734","title":{"rendered":"Ishmael and Queequeg: the Original Pan-Cultural Odd Couple?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>Ishamel, the narrator of Moby-Dick, and\u00a0The Pequod’s first harpoonist Queequeg may be literature’s original odd couple. Illustration by Mark Summers from Moby-Dick (facing p 78) Barnes & Noble Books.<\/em><\/p>\n

Readers of this blog will be aware of my Melville enthusiasms.\u00a0 (Ahoy, another white whale sighting dead ahead!)<\/p>\n

I recently responded to a discussion of Moby-Dick<\/em> on the Goodreads website, and then decided to share my thoughts here, slightly enhanced.<\/p>\n

Julia,
\nI am very happy you’re giving Moby-Dick<\/em> another chance. Each time I read the book I gain a fresh and amazing experience. I wonder why Ruth gave up after 50 pages \u2013 what she mainly read was the budding friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg. Is she put off by that? I find it the most humanly engaging relationship in the book, a rare and fascinating 19th-century example of a pan-cultural brotherhood, and what Leslie Fielder once called one of the great American love stories.<\/p>\n

Ishmael reflects: \u201cI began to be sensible of strange feelings.\u00a0I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. So the soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits.\u201d1<\/p>\n

Admirably homosocial dynamics aside, I see an almost mystical love hidden in Queequeg’s request for his coffin to be built.\u00a0 He recovers from his\u00a0fatalistic gloom, but he has intuited the demise of the ship. After all their bonding,\u00a0Queequeg has also intuitively created the richly symbolic means for his best friend to survive. In the novel’s famous last scene, the wooden coffin pops up out of the water as the ship sinks and Ishmael grabs\u00a0hold of it for dear life.\u00a0That “orphan” survives alone, to tell the grand tale. We all have plenty to thank Queequeg for.<\/p>\n

I recently read Uncle Tom’s Cabin<\/em> and — as much as that book offers commendably provocative (but rhetorically heavy-handed, for a storyteller) portrayals of slavery\u2019s evil — by comparison Melville’s handling of race is far more interesting and nuanced, and insightful about the complexities of multicultural relations.<\/p>\n

Those examples range as broadly as the comic byplay of Stubb and Fleece the black cook over the hunger-crazed sharks (CH 64),* to the classic racial confrontation and masterful pan-cultural interplay of “Forecastle — Midnight” (Ch. 40), to the devastatingly cruel treatment of Pip followed by the stunningly unexpected paternal adopting of him by Ahab, even as the black cabin boy has become psychologically disabled by his trauma at the hands of his mates and the unfathomably indifferent ocean.
\nAnd of course, there’s the delightfully odd couple, Ishmael and Queequeg (who walked away from a cushy life as\u00a0Polynesian royalty to\u00a0adapt to Western culture while retaining his own traditions), and Ishmael’s visit to the black church service.<\/p>\n

Nor does Melville shy from strong storytelling by avoiding possibly stereotyping characterization, with the mysterious and ominous Asian harpooner Fedallah. But Ahab\u2019s covert hiring of him and his gang clearly reflects the captain\u2019s deranged monomania. We all know today thugs come in all colors.<\/p>\n

All this is amazing for a mid-19th century author, and set a cosmopolitan standard to this day and sociologically explains part of the book’s greatness.<\/p>\n

Further, the novella Benito Cereno<\/em> brilliantly demonstrates how Melville dramatizes the tragedy of slavery while demonstrating that no race is above savagery. One question he asks here is, to what ends savagery is used and when is it ever justified? Time has shown that perhaps no author of any color or gender did better on these topics and I’m not sure if any have since.<\/p>\n

Another thing I love about Moby-Dick<\/em> is Melville’s clear and complex fascination with (and love for?) \u00a0whales, which permeates most of his writing about them (e.g. \u201cThe Grand Armada\u201dCh. 87, or \u201cDoes the Whale Diminish?\u201d Ch. 105 and \u201cThe Dying Whale\u201d Ch. 116), even aside from the purely cetological material and his one chapter of defending the \u201cglory and honor of whaling,\u201d which seems almost obligatory and understandably a bit defensive. Thus, the powerful and moving vividness of the Man and\/vs. Nature theme.<\/p>\n

To venture into deeper waters implicit in this theme, Melville may have chosen a white sperm whale as a symbol of what Edmund Burke called “the dynamic sublime,” and “in Ahab, Ishmael and others we see different human reactions to it,”\u00a0 according to a Harper’s magazine\u00a0essay written\u00a0after the BP oil spill, which treatened and may have harmed, among many other creatures, the endangered sperm whale, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.<\/p>\n

“Modern man of power\u00a0fears the whale, feels threatened by it, and is obsessed with his destruction. Modern man\u00a0is driven by the desire to dominate his environment and chafes at those aspects of the world cannot control…The vision of Melville’s narration,\u00a0 however, appreciates the beauty and majesty of the forces of nature even as he reckons with their power and unpredictability.” 2<\/p>\n

Unlike Ahab, Ishmael and Queequeg especially\u00a0appreciate these forces\u00a0because\u00a0their daunting task to kill these gigantic, magnificent creatures, for the sake of the precious oil that lights\u00a0lamps and street lights. This is part of what Ishmael,\u00a0a fledgling whaler as the story begins,\u00a0learns from Queequeg.<\/p>\n

Only a master harpoonist like Queequeg\u00a0knows truly what a great creature he is grappling with. In one extraordinary scene ( which no filmmaker has ever managed to stage) he\u00a0literally dives into the water and crawls inside a fresh whale carcass to pull out a crew member who has accidentally fallen into a cavity cut into the whale. So he’s also a sort of Jonah turned hero.<\/p>\n

All I can say is, dive in someday yourself– say, during a damp, drizzly November in your soul or a sun-blessed August afternoon on your shoulders.<\/p>\n

(For those who feel the\u00a0need to get their feet wet first, or for a wonderful young person’s illustrated condensation of the book, I recommend\u00a0Moby-Dick<\/em> presented by Jan Needle and illustrated by Patrick Benson, Candlewick Press 2006. The\u00a0book\u00a0offers marvelously evocative artwork and a reasonably good condensation [down to 33 chapters] with explanatory chapter intros\u00a0by Needle, who has been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian<\/em> children’s fiction prize. See book cover below)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0In the novel, it is Fedallah, not Ahab, who gets accidentally entangled in the harpoon lines on Moby Dick.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Notes<\/p>\n

1 Chapter 10 – \u201cA Bosom Friend\u201d Moby-Dick\u00a0 or, The Whale,<\/em> Herman Melville, \u00a0A Longman Critical Edition, Ed. John Bryant and Haskell Springer, Pearson Longman 2007, 62<\/p>\n

*a good discussion of Fleece\u2019s black dialect is in the\u201drevision narrative\u201d footnote (p 265) to the Longman Critical Edition, mentioned in my footnote above.<\/p>\n

2\u00a0 Melville — What the Whale Teaches Us — \u00a0http:\/\/harpers.org\/archive\/2010\/05\/hbc-90006992<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ishamel, the narrator of Moby-Dick, and\u00a0The Pequod’s first harpoonist Queequeg may be literature’s original odd couple. Illustration by Mark Summers from Moby-Dick (facing p 78) Barnes & Noble Books. Readers of this blog will be aware of my Melville enthusiasms.\u00a0 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-www-kevernacular-com"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hJWE-bQ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=734"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":741,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734\/revisions\/741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}