3. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, pp. 39-66

Chapter IX: The Sermon; Chapter X: A Bosom Friend; Chapter XI: Nightgown; Chapter XII: Biographical; Chapter XIII: Wheelbarrow; Chapter XIV: Nantucket; Chapter XV: Chowder

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Father Mapple's sermon, naturally, is an exegesis of the book of Jonah, which is the Bible's venture into absurdist comedy: God commissions Jonah to cry out against Nineveh, Jonah runs away, gets thrown overboard as a jinx, is swallowed up by the fish, prays for help and is spit out again, agrees to cry out against Nineveh and prophesy its destruction, the people repent, God changes his mind and spares the city, Jonah thinks he's been made a fool of and pouts, and God asks why shouldn't he "spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?" You kind of see God's point there, especially about the cattle.

Father Mapple, by Rockwell Kent

Father Mapple isn't much interested in anything in the story after the fish, of course. In his ship's-prow pulpit he offers "a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea" and begins his sermon "in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog." Perhaps because he's speaking to an audience of sailors, he points out that Jonah's port of departure, Joppa, is modern Jaffa, and he opines that the Tarshish he was bound for was probably Cadiz. Some of them would have been to those ports. The identification of Tarshish as Cadiz is questionable, but Father Mapple wants it to be about as far away from Nineveh as you can get, since his audience would have known something about traveling long distances at sea.

The rest is moralizing about repentance and its rewards:

Delight is to him -- a far, far upward, and inward delight -- who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him,  when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. 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. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath -- O Father! -- chiefly known to me by Thy rod --- mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?

Stirring stuff. But for all the thunder of Father Mapple's rhetoric, it seems to have no effect on Ishmael, who returns to the Spouter-Inn and the intimate companionship of the infidel Queequeg. "Savage though he was, and hideously marred about he face -- at least to my taste -- his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul." He reminds Ishmael of "George Washington cannibalistically developed." Ishmael is no "patriot to heaven" here, though the tug of disapproval of Queequeg's supposed cannibalism remains. There is even a hint of disapproval of Father Mapple in Ishmael's taking the Stoic Queequeg as having "a touch of fine philosophy": "perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have 'broken his digester.'"

And so he takes a pagan friendship in preference to "Christian kindness" which "has proved but hollow courtesy." The friendship is reciprocated, "and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be." And Ishmael seals the friendship by parting company with "the infallible Presbyterian Church" in which he was raised, and joining Queequeg in the worship of his idol. Concluding that "the magnanimous God of heaven and earth" can't "possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood," Ishmael "kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and went to bed."

Juxtaposed with the rhetorical splendor of Father Mapple's sermon, this descent into idolatry would conventionally be treated as an act of blasphemy. But Melville is anything but conventional, and the cheeky irony of an "innocent idol" is heightened by their "marriage" and then the undressing and going to bed together. Again, the homoeroticism is playful, with "Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine and then drawing them back." They behave less like lovers than like ten-year-old girls at a sleepover. Ishmael even gives up his disapproval of Queequeg's smoking in bed, sharing his tomahawk pipe and demonstrating "how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them." If other stiffnesses are involved, he doesn't mention them.

And so Queequeg tells his story about growing up on an island "not down on any map; true places never are." The son of the king, the nephew of the high priest, he is given to wanderlust. Again, in retelling Queequeg's story, Ishmael returns to squeamish judgmentalism: ""There was excellent blood in his veins -- royal stuff; though sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his untutored youth." He tells how Queequeg, "this sea Prince of Wales," got himself on a boat and became a whaleman, "like Czar Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities." (Peter the Great studied shipbuilding in the Netherlands and in London, though hardly as a common workman.) But the discovery "that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked" disillusioned him: "Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan." The experience also made him change his mind about returning home to assume the throne on his island: "he was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan Kings before him." Perhaps he would return someday, but "They had made a harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a sceptre now."

Ishmael tells him of his plan to join a whaling crew in Nantucket, and Queequeg says he will accompany him. "To all this I joyously assented; for besides the affection I now felt for Queequeg, he as an experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not fail to be of great usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly ignorant of the mysteries of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as known to merchant seamen." The next morning they pack their things in a wheelbarrow and set out for the harbor. "As we were going along the people stared; not at Queequeg so much -- for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their streets, -- but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms."

Interracial fraternization seems to have been uncommon enough for Melville to emphasize it, for the attention grows more unwelcome on board the Moss, a "little Nantucket packet schooner moored at the wharf." The passengers "marvelled that two fellow beings should be so companionable; as though a white man were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro." One lout mocks Queequeg behind his back, so "the brawny savage" tosses him head over heels in the air. During the protest that follows, the captain of the Moss comes to the defense of the "bumpkin," losing sight of the fact that the crew has lost control of the main-sail and that "the tremendous boom was now flying from side to side, completely sweeping the enter after part of the deck." The bumpkin is swept overboard, but Queequeg quickly secures the boom and then leaps overboard to rescue his adversary. "All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive." (A poignant first bit of foreshadowing.)

They arrive in Nantucket, which strikes Ishmael as so barren that he strings out tall tales about the island, such as "that people plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in the summer time." The tales, he says, "only show that Nantucket is no Illinois." And that Nantucketers have good reason to go to sea in great numbers, and especially to become whalers, having "in all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his very panics are more to be dreaded than his most fearless and malicious assaults!" (This is a curiously excessive bout of cetaphobic prose at this point in the novel. As for "Himmalehan," it's "Himalayan," of course. But the spelling isn't unique to Melville: Emily Dickinson has a poem that begins "The Himmaleh was known to stoop".) Melville goes on to laud the exploits of Nantucketers:

Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's.... The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation.... With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.

When Melville gets the old Shakespearean cadence going, he can't be stopped.

Try pots were used to render oil from whale blubber

Always alive to portents, Ishmael is startled when he comes across the inn that the landlord of the Spouter-Inn has recommended, the Try Pots, because the sign outside reminds him of a gallows.

It's ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's chapel, and here a gallows! and a pair of prodigious black pots too! Are these last throwing out oblique hints touching Tophet?

But the ominousness fades when he samples the inn's chowder.

Chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area before the house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in superior old shark-skin. There was a fishy flavor to the milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen's boats, I saw Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod's decapitated head, looking very slipshod, I assure ye. 

Have I mentioned before how funny Melville can be, and is, in this novel? It's not what he's famous for, but maybe he should be.

2. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, pp. 10-39

Chapter III: The Spouter-Inn; Chapter IV: The Counterpane; Chapter V: Breakfast; Chapter VI: The Street; Chapter VII: The Chapel; Chapter VIII: The Pulpit

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The Spouter-Inn, despite the proprietor's ominous name, is a Dickensianly cozy place with a large, "thoroughly besmoked" oil painting in the entry that Ishmael spends some time trying to make out. There "was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast.... But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? Even the great leviathan himself?" He decides is"an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, ... in the enormous act of impaling himself on the three mast-heads." (As so often in Moby-Dick, one roots for the whale.)

He finds the landlord amidst a welter of whaling memorabilia, and asks for a room. None at the inn, unless Ishmael wants to double up with a harpooneer. Ishmael overcomes his distaste for sleeping "two in a bed," and saying that it really depends on the harpooneer. But "rather than wander further about a strange town on so bitter a night," he'll put up with it. The landlord, "looking a sort of diabolically funny," says "the harpooneer is a dark complexioned chap" who "eats nothing but steaks, and he likes 'em rare."

A group of whalers just returned from the sea enters the inn and make for the bar. Ishmael observes one of them who seems to hold back from the others. "He stood full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast." Ishmael can tell from his accent that he's a Southerner, and he hears the others call him Bulkington. But he slips away from the crowd, "and I saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the sea."

The harpooneer hasn't shown up yet and Ishmael decides that rather than have some stranger get in bed with him in the middle of the night, he'll sleep on a bench. The landlord even tries to plane down the rough surface of the bench, but it's too short and too narrow, and the room it's in is too drafty, so Ishmael changes his mind again. He tries to get more information out of the landlord about his potential bedmate, but he "seemed to be mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension" and will only offer that "he went out a peddling, you see, and I don't see what on airth keeps him so late, unless, may be, he can't sell his head."

Much ado about this until Ishmael gets the point that the harpooneer "has just arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of 'balmed New Zealand heads." And since tomorrow is Sunday, he doesn't want to go about trying to sell them to people on their way to church. Ishmael gives in and lets the landlord show him to the bedroom. He inspects the possessions the harpooneer has left, including an item he can't figure out:

I can compare it to nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with little tinkling tags something like the stained porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin. There was a hole or slit in the middle of the mat, as you see the same in South American ponchos.... I put it on, to try it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I thought a little damp, as though this mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day. I went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that I gave myself a kink in the neck.

Ishmael gets in bed and dozes off, but awakes when the harpooneer enters. He doesn't speak, however, but watches as the man gets ready for bed, and is startled when he sees his face: "a dark, purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck over with large blackish looking squares." At first he thinks he's been in a fight, and then remembers "a story of a white man -- a whaleman too -- who falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them. I concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his distant voyages, must have met with a similar adventure."

Meanwhile, the harpooneer doesn't seem to notice him. He's shocked when the man takes off his beaver hat and reveals "no hair on his head -- none to speak of at least -- nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull." And "his back, too, was all over the same dark squares." Moreover, the man now takes out "a curious little deformed image with a hunch on its back, and exactly the color of a three days' old Congo baby," which turns out to be a wooden idol that he places in the empty fireplace and sacrifices a bit of ship's biscuit to. Then he take his tomahawk, which does double service as a pipe, lights it and jumps into bed.

In his surprise at finding Ishmael in the bed, he brandishes the tomahawk and Ishmael cries out for the landlord in terror. The landlord arrives and assures him, "Queequeg here wouldn't harm a hair of your head." The landlord settles them both down, and Ishmael decides "For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal." And having registered his objection about smoking in bed, with which Queequeg complies, "I turned in, and never slept better in my life."

"The Counterpane," by Rockwell Kent 

The next morning, Ishmael "found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife." The tattooed arm even resembles the patchwork quilt on the bed. The sensation of Queequeg's hug evokes a childhood memory when he was punished for trying to climb the chimney by his stepmother's sending him to bed without his supper -- at two o'clock on the longest day of the year, June 21. After pleading to be allowed to stay up but being sent back to bed by "the best and most conscientious of stepmothers," he finally falls asleep only to wake in the dark to find "a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine." He is too terrified to look at "the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged." When he awakens again "in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very hour, I often puzzle myself with it."

Several things: First, for a famous crux in the issue of Melville's sexuality, the episode of Queequeg and Ishmael in a marital hug is curiously lacking in an evocation of real homoerotic feeling. Granted, there's an element of protesting too much in Ishmael's subsequent "loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style." Especially since expressions of male-male affection were, as we now know, more demonstrative in that age before the word "homosexual" had even been coined. Do we get a sense that Ishmael, who has already objected to what was a common sleeping arrangement in those days, is a little too afraid of his own sexuality?

Second, the incident of the phantom hand is a curiously off-kilter parallel to the experience of finding Queequeg's arm around him. Has it really never occurred to him that the hand might have been that of his stepmother, come to comfort him? That is, if she really was "the best and most conscientious of stepmothers"? Granted, stepmothers are legendarily cruel, and this one was "all the time whipping me." And that "best and most conscientious" is perhaps freighted with irony, though he also calls her "mother" as well as "stepmother." The best that can be said of this memory is that it is eerie and ambiguous.

And third, recounting the experience of being sent to bed in mid-afternoon on a summer day, he says, "I felt dreadfully." Generations of prescriptivist grammarians would have objected to this use of the adverb instead of the adjective "dreadful," just as they continue to object to the common "I felt badly about that." Interesting to find this usage in the Great American Novel.

Finally, Ishmael gets Queequeg to stop hugging him, and arranges that Queequeg should get dressed first. There's more homoeroticism in Ishmael's staying in bed and watching Queequeg getting dressed than there is in the whole business of sleeping together. Ishmael justifies it as a kind of anthropological experience: "Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition stage -- neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized to show of his outlandishness in the strangest possible manners" -- in this case, putting his boots on under the bed. But Ishmael is also a prude, who is concerned that there are no curtains on the windows and that people outside can see "the indecorous figure that Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots on." And then Queequeg uses his harpoon to shave himself, which makes a distinct impression on Ishmael, although he later comes to accept it "when I came to know of what fine steel the head of harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp the long straight edges are always kept.

Monkey jacket

Ishmael goes down to breakfast with "a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns." He joins them "preparing to hear some good stories about whaling," but is surprised when "nearly every man maintained a profound silence." Queequeg, at the head of the table, uses his harpoon to reach across the table and "to the jeopardy of many heads," fork the plate of beefsteaks toward himself.

On the street after breakfast, Ishmael discovers that Queequeg is not the only outlandish figure in town: "actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh." It's probably worth noting here that the narrator is the comparatively naive Ishmael, and not necessarily Melville, whose own experience in the South Seas made him acquainted with, and somewhat tolerant of, people stigmatized as eaters of "unholy flesh" -- accusations of cannibalism were used to justify subjugating native peoples. Ishmael's use of outlandishly spelled names for his "cannibals" -- "Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and Brightggians" -- reinforces our sense of his naiveté. There are lots of people on the 'net looking for the originals of these peoples, but I'm willing to guess that Melville is poking fun at Ishmael here.

Contrasted with the cannibals are the "bumpkins," the greenhorns come to New Bedford to try their hands at whaling, the industry that has made the town "perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England." (Once again, you wonder why an inn in this wealthy town would have to serve coffee made from roasted peas.)  Its "brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?" (Alexander Heimburger, who performed as Herr Alexander, was a 19th-century magician who performed at the White House when Polk was president, and was visited in his old age by Harry Houdini.)

Seamen's Bethel, New Bedford

It's Sunday, so Ishmael visits the Whaleman's Chapel, where he reads the "frigid inscriptions on the wall," memorializing sailors perished at sea, occasioning a meditation on death and its memorials, which contains the chillingly beautiful observation that "all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city." Ishmael (and here again, it's important to distinguish Ishmael from Melville) proceeds to reflect:

Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact, take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.

Melville in his own voice is somewhat less confident about such matters.

Interior, Seamen's Bethel. The prow-shaped pulpit was added in 1961, in imitation of the one Melville invented in Moby-Dick.

Father Mapple enters. He had once been a harpooneer himself, and his pulpit is shaped like the prow of a ship. He reaches it by climbing "a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea." And when he is in the pulpit, he pulls up the ladder, "leaving him impregnable in his little Quebec." Visiting Québec, Melville had been struck by the fortified citadel, and he reinforces this impression at the end of the next paragraph by calling the pulpit "a self-containing stronghold -- a lofty Ehrenbreitstein" -- the fortress at Koblenz. After considering that the action has something theatrical about it, Ishmael decides that it's an emblem of Father Mapple's spiritual withdrawal into a place of security. And he concludes, rather too sententiously, that "the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow."