Re-reading Melville's Moby-Dick
From a whale's penis to popery...
Herman Melville. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Edited by Hershel Parker. Third Critical Norton Edition, 2018 [1851]. 706 pp.
We don’t intend to add anything profound to the ocean of literature and discourse devoted to this most monumental novel, a work that has been fundamentally influential not just for literature but plastic arts and opera and beyond — as the Norton edition bountifully demonstrates with its huge archive of review essays and references to art works up to the current century.
Your host read Moby-Dick for the third time earlier this year, and it directly came up in a recent letter about Jean Giono. But I hadn’t planned to to post about it for the Sub. (That’s why I didn’t take any notes.) But I felt the need to arrange some specific passages and examples that showcase Melville’s comedy.
Moby-Dick existed in my memory as a dark romance of cosmic horror. That darkness reflected the the United States as it existed in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as the imperialist power it will shortly become. The brutal racism experienced by Pip and other Black and indigenous sailors is the clearest element, as well as the long story of the revolt on the Town Ho. And there are Ishmael’s meditations on the conquering Nantucketers, which quickly go beyond a mere satirical simile into something quasi-prophetic:
And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. 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 word “terraqueous,” uniting land and sea, is a great touch; its prosody fits nicely having come after words like “Mexico,” “Texas,” and “two thirds.”
But this letter is not about the solemn metaphysics of Melville’s epic book. Instead we’ll highlight its funny bits. For alongside Moby-Dick’s tragedy and encyclopedism there is some wonderful satire and parody at work, on multiple levels, and interrelating with those previous and well-established elements.
There’s no need to make a case that Moby-Dick contains plenty of humor and mirth. Everyone who reads and loves this work remembers the comedy of manners that take place in and around the Spouter Inn in the novel’s opening chapters.
Specifically, all the hijinx with Ishmael meeting and bunking with Queequeg for the first time. But before that there’s business between Ishmael and the landlord Peter Coffin.
I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was full—not a bed unoccupied. “But avast,” he added, tapping his forehead, “you haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer’s blanket, have ye? I s’pose you are goin’ a-whalin’, so you’d better get used to that sort of thing.”
I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with the half of any decent man’s blanket.
This exchange of words also express a clash of social classes, and Ishmael seems to be playing this juxtaposition up in part for laughs. Ishmael directly quotes the layman Peter’s speech, and reports his own through an indirect summary. But in doing so as the narrator, Ishmael is also distancing himself from Peter’s way of speaking and the social conditions that produce it, while foregrounding his own educated discourse (we pointed out in the Giono letter how Ishmael was likely “cast out” from a well-to-do family, hence his penname).
But the landlord takes the chance to put one over on Ishmael, since he knows who this “harpooneer” is and keeps Ishmael in an excessive amount of suspense waiting for Queequeg to show up. “The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to be mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension.” Ishmael probes for more info, and Peter delivers this goofy line of dialogue:
“Generally he’s an early bird — airley to bed and airley to rise — yes, he’s the bird what catches the worm. But to-night 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.”
Head? Why, a shrunken head! “I tell you what it is, landlord,” says Ishmael, “you’d better stop spinning that yarn to me—I’m not green.” “May be not,” says the landlord, “but I rayther guess you’ll be done brown if that ere harpooneer hears you a slanderin’ his head.”
Witty. And an early occurrence of declaring someone “cooked.”
In the chapter on “The Cabin-Table,” Ishmael describes the afternoon meal service in an extended simile of Ahab as the Sultan with his “Emirs” — with Flask being the lowest of them.
In this paragraph, the tableau of dinner with Ahab and his officers is built on epic similes: a pride of sealions, a mute provider surrounded by his children, a German Emperor holding court in Frankfort—specifically a coronation banquet for newest monarch of the Holy Roman Empire. It’s meant to underscore the solemnity with which these guys have to eat in front of Ahab, but it’s ironic and deflating by the same gesture.
Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion on the white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still deferential cubs. In his own proper turn, each officer waited to be served. They were as little children before Ahab; and yet, in Ahab, there seemed not to lurk the smallest social arrogance. With one mind, their intent eyes all fastened upon the old man’s knife, as he carved the chief dish before him. I do not suppose that for the world they would have profaned that moment with the slightest observation, even upon so neutral a topic as the weather. No! And when reaching out his knife and fork, between which the slice of beef was locked, Ahab thereby motioned Starbuck’s plate towards him, the mate received his meat as though receiving alms; and cut it tenderly; and a little started if, perchance, the knife grazed against the plate; and chewed it noiselessly; and swallowed it, not without circumspection. For, like the Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor profoundly dines with the seven Imperial Electors, so these cabin meals were somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence; and yet at table old Ahab forbade not conversation; only he himself was dumb.
And then Ishmael focuses back on Flask with a long set of rhythmical clauses, to wind up for the punchline:
And poor little Flask, he was the youngest son, and little boy of this weary family party. His were the shinbones of the saline beef; his would have been the drumsticks. For Flask to have presumed to help himself, this must have seemed to him tantamount to larceny in the first degree. Had he helped himself at that table, doubtless, never more would he have been able to hold his head up in this honest world; nevertheless, strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask helped himself, the chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it. Least of all, did Flask presume to help himself to butter. Whether he thought the owners of the ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his clear, sunny complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such marketless waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for him, a subaltern; however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man!
I’ll admit that I don’t like the chapters on the ship that become play texts for Shakespearean tragedy so much, but the same elevated tones and phraseologies (from Ishmael’s and Melville’s consummately Biblical education) get used in these prose chapters with subtle irony.
One late chapter called “The Pequod Meets the Rose-Bud” is a laugh-out-loud set piece of fecal humor.
The Rosebud is a French ship, and it is smelt by the Pequods before it seen! “It was plain that the whale alongside must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale,” Ishmael explains at the head of the chapter, “that is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse.”
It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent to bury the departed. So intolerable indeed is it regarded by some, that no cupidity could persuade them to moor alongside of it. Yet are there those who will still do it; notwithstanding the fact that the oil obtained from such subjects is of a very inferior quality, and by no means of the nature of attar-of-rose.
Nevertheless, Ahab hails the smelly ship as he does every whaling ship in hope of news of “the white whale.”
Stubb, the sassy second mate, speaks to a bilingual British colonial sailor on the Rosebud directly over the stinking whale carcass. He has to hold his nose. The other sailor “slings” his into a bag, and says “But what are you holding yours for?” To which Stubb banters back: “Oh, nothing! It’s a wax nose; I have to hold it on. Fine day, ain’t it? Air rather gardenny, I should say; throw us a bunch of posies, will ye, Bouton-de-Rose?”
The whole chapter is stuffed with witty flower and gardening (i.e. stinky manure) similes and puns, starting from “attar-of-rose” above. But the true clincher is when we get to the Rose-bud’s surgeon.
Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from the Captain’s round-house abaft; and looking in that direction saw a fiery face thrust from behind the door, which was held ajar from within. This was the tormented surgeon, who, after in vain remonstrating against the proceedings of the day, had betaken himself to the Captain’s round-house (cabinet he called it) to avoid the pest; but still, could not help yelling out his entreaties and indignations at times.
Ishmael’s humor delivers a great deadpan image: sailors clamoring to use the “round-house,” that is, the Head, that is, the captain’s private toilet, but it is occupied by the surgeon who has taken refuge there because it is the least-stinky place on the boat! And even the quick phrase “avoid the pest” is a chance to add humor through ironic piousness.
Shortly after this meeting comes the novel’s most famous sequences: Pip falling overboard, his body rescued but his soul taken to Davy Jones’s locker where he sees “God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom”; as well as the squeezing of the spermaceti. (“Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long;…I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me”.)
But your host now calls attention to the very short chapter that comes after these oft-quoted passages, namely Chapter 95 “The Cassock.”
The “Cassock” is “a very strange, enigmatical object,” an “unaccountable cone.” It is the whale’s penis.
And yet this brief chapter of three paragraphs and a footnote contains an allusion to I Kings Chapter 15, a little exegesis by Ishmael claiming that the false idol worshipped by Queen Maachah was indeed such an organ.
Even better, Ishmael describes the process where a sailor must flay the sperm whale’s member “cylindrically,” in the process of fabricating a penile pelt, which he must turn inside out and slip into (to stretch it out properly) and thus wear it like a religious garment. And this epic simile is capped by an epic pun.
The mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling. Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.
That office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the pots; an operation which is conducted at a curious wooden horse, planted endwise against the bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath it, into which the minced pieces drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt orator’s desk. Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on bible leaves; what a candidate for an archbishoprick, what a lad for a Pope were this mincer!
“Archbishoprick” is not a typo but the archaic spelling — and it’s in the Norton edition but not the one prepared by Virginia Tech on Gutenberg!
Now, a great deal of the comedy of Moby-Dick is generated from the fact that Ahab is a deeply unfunny man, caught up in objectively amusing circumstances. “It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward circumstance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab,” Ishmael tells us at the beginning of the Chapter “Leg and Arm.”
Ahab, who has an ivory peg leg, hails the Samuel Enderby, whose captain Boomer has an ivory prosthetic arm. Boomer’s surgeon is Dr. Bunger, and he insists he’s a teetotaler, but this is like hearing “I never smoke pot” from a man named Dr. Bong.
We need to step back and appreciate how absurd this scene is. Ahab has been sailing across the Atlantic to reach the Pacific via the Indian Ocean (heading east, toward the orient, toward romance and abstraction?). He’s encountered a whole series of ships with odd crews, and now a boat with a captain who happens to have lost an arm to the same monster that took Ahab’s leg. It’s almost like something Samuel Beckett would do a hundred years later.
What’s worse, for Ahab, is that the captain and Dr. Bunger cannot stop bullshitting him about where the lost arm and other injuries came from, for pages and pages. Bunger then launches into a discourse about whether sperm whales intend to eat human body parts, which then contains a mini-tall tale about a juggler who swallowed a knife and vomited nails:
“Well, then,” interrupted Bunger, “give him your left arm for bait to get the right. Do you know, gentlemen” — very gravely and mathematically bowing to each Captain in succession — “Do you know, gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably constructed by Divine Providence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely digest even a man’s arm? And he knows it too. So that what you take for the White Whale’s malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints. But sometimes he is like the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine in Ceylon, that making believe swallow jack-knives, once upon a time let one drop into him in good earnest, and there it stayed for a twelvemonth or more; when I gave him an emetic, and he heaved it up in small tacks, d’ye see. No possible way for him to digest that jack-knife, and fully incorporate it into his general bodily system. Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are quick enough about it, and have a mind to pawn one arm for the sake of the privilege of giving decent burial to the other, why in that case the arm is yours; only let the whale have another chance at you shortly, that’s all.”
There is a whole rapport and relationship implied in this scene: the captain and the doctor as two jokesters, competing with each other to screw with Ahab with silly yarns and Shakespearean wit. One almost wishes to abandon the Pequod to follow the Droll Voyages of Boomer and Bunger.
Captain Boomer just exudes comedy, even in the choice to whisper “Is your captain crazy?” at Fedallah, the Pequod’s stoic Persian harpooneer and the creepiest character in the narrative, at least for Ishmael.
And it’s appropriate that this clownish character is also endowed with lucidity. Tragedy wraps Ahab’s story with a certain rhetoric, but satire bases its zaniness on an appeal to reason. It’s part of Ishmael’s psychodrama in setting down the text of Moby-Dick, trying to make sense of the bizarre and traumatic voyage, of which he’s the only survivor. He has carried this story alone like a wound: when he’s hanging out with Spanish sailors, many whale voyages later, the prospect of telling them this story makes him look “faint,” as his companions point out.
The fabulous form that this novel ultimately takes must be considered through how Ishmael needs to represent this horrible experience to himself, but leads to a great inclusivity that would be taken up in the years of modernism. He refers to (Noah) Webster’s Dictionary as an “ark,” and that’s what Moby-Dick is too: an ark of vocabularies and languages, biblical, nautical, scientific, and vulgar.
And so it includes funny words too, like “diddled.”