Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
- Herman
Melville's Moby Dick:
- Ishmael and Queequeg
Editor's
Essay
- Editor's note: this essay was originally written as part of a Master's Degree
program.
- "Worshipping Toad-Stools":
- Religiosity versus Spirituality in Moby Dick
Seekers of daring, intrepid adventure will not be disappointed with Moby
Dick; indeed, this classic, in many public libraries, finds itself labeled as
"Young Adult" literature, a tacit assertion by some that Melville's enduring
triumph is to be viewed primarily as melodrama on the high seas. The book's jacket, too,
often supports this judgment with a typical scene of the White Whale, like a Poseidon
missile, launching itself from the deep, soaring to the apex of parabolic high-flight,
with nearby harpooners at-the-ready, just about to unleash their steel shafts of death.
Yes, Moby Dick is all of this, but if it were nothing more, it is doubtful that we
should be earnestly discussing it one hundred and fifty years after its birth.
Moby Dick, chameleon-like -- a characteristic of all great literature -- has the
capacity to become many things to its readers; in fact, Melville's choice of milieu, the
vast and terrible oceans of the world, and the Pequod's quest upon that trackless
desert, may suggest part of the author's thesis: humankind's uncertain voyage through and
the exploration of the vicissitudes of life. In the spirit of McLuhan's "the medium
is the message," the very layout and structure of the book -- disjointed story-flow;
insertions of seemingly non-germane material and "unnecessary detail" (Jaeger
2); occasional undue emphasis on technical information; long chapters and very short
chapters, some, curiously, sharing the same title (all of which gave 1851 critics severe
fits) -- seems to be Melville's attempt to create additional metaphor, not only of the
wild and undisciplined ocean but of the raw and undefined nature of life itself.
With all of this in mind, we begin to understand why Melville never allows us to stray
too far from an allusion to the metaphysical. References, direct and indirect, to God and
humankind's attempt to apprehend both him and ultimate issues of life, abound in Moby
Dick; moreover, by these numerous references, Melville succeeds in making at least one
point in his work very clear: God is honored and humankind is elevated not primarily by
the hollow forms and rubrics of religion -- not by mindless and mechanical
adherence to bureaucratic rules and private dogma but by spirituality, a
heartfelt concern for all human beings, a respect for each person's right to approach
existential issues as he or she sees fit.
Long before Mahatma Ghandi confessed, "If it weren't for Christians, I'd be a
Christian," we find the noble Queequeg expressing the same sentiment. We sense
Melville's purposeful irony and excoriation of institutional Christianity as he speaks of
the "fine young savage" as one who had once harbored a "wild desire"
to learn the ways of Jesus, in order, no less, to advance "his people."
"But, alas!" contact with some, those purporting to be Christians, was enough to
quickly inoculate him against any further such notions: "I'll die a pagan."
Disillusioned, Queequeg, nevertheless, in his heart, understood the difference between
agent and primary source; though he feared that "Christians" had corrupted him,
making it more difficult for him to properly assume his father's tribal throne, he sensed
that true "Christianity" was altogether different. Melville's message to those
who would preach the gospel, in effect, becomes this: "There is little point in
sending missionaries to the far corners of the earth until the messenger, himself or
herself, becomes the message; indeed, Jesus' message of love is so potent that
many of your clients will seek you out -- but even that happy occurrence will
come to nothing if they witness a hardness and hypocrisy in your eyes."
When Queequeg, during a Ramadan fast, fails to open the door of his room, the mistress
of the Spouter-Inn, fearing the worst, quickly dispatches a servant to a local
sign-painter to produce a proscription: "No suicides permitted here." This is
laughable. Melville, here, subtly communicates to us his disdain for legalism's impotency,
its frequent attempt to produce virtue by decree; the unspoken dictum becomes, "If
growth of the human soul were just a matter of external command, we should all be saints
by now." Yet, this brief snapshot of the inherent weakness of command-style authority
is juxtaposed with the glories of voluntary and selfless friendship, the marriage of the
"cozy, loving pair," Ishmael and Queequeg, even, "my
Queequeg." Melville, I think it is clear, suggests nothing untoward by such
terminology. No, far from it, their friendship is utterly natural -- a model for all to
emulate -- one of self-sacrifice and complete devotion to the other, even to the point of
death. In one of literature's most touching scenes, we witness - in contrast to Ahab who
will later roar, "this gold is mine" -- the "savage" Queequeg dividing
all of his earthly belongings with and pledging himself to his new brother Ishmael. The
heartfelt dialogue between these new soul-mates stands in sharp contrast to the later,
frustrated attempts of Starbuck -- "Oh, my captain, my captain!" -- to reach the
shriveled inner-person of Ahab.
We sense that here, with Ishmael and Queequeg, and in many other similar references,
Melville is upbraiding the loveless demons, the religionists of his day who talked
but did not walk in their message. It is easy to surmise that the author's
purpose, especially in the Ishmael-Queequeg brotherhood, is one of underscoring the
service-oriented nature of true religion (James 1. 27); a plea for universal love and
empathetic tolerance (John 15. 12, 13). Queequeg, for Melville, becomes a living metaphor
illustrating the pure man of the heart, the ideal human spirit -- a
"non-Christian" but only in the religious sense. Melville wants us to
know that the "noble savage," a devout member of "the great and everlasting
First Congregation," one disdained by official Christendom, is more like Christ than
anyone that we shall meet in Moby Dick. Messiah-like, Queequeg, even when facing death,
exhibits an inner strength "which could not die, or be weakened"; he even
displays a certain godlike mastery over physical demise when, remembering a duty to
another, he asserts that "to live or die was a matter of his own sovereign will and
pleasure," that "mere sickness could not kill him."
We find many of the characters in Melville's work "named with Scripture names."
Much could be made of this; for example, "Ahab" quickly reminds us of the wicked
king of Israel (I Kings 18). But the most significant example here, I think, is that of
the very narration-voice of the novel, "Ishmael," a reference to Abraham's son
by the slave-girl, Hagar (Genesis 21). St. Paul in his letter to the Galatians finds
allegorical significance in Ishmael as a representative of Old Covenant law as opposed to
the Spirit of Jesus. He quotes Genesis: "Cast out the bondwoman and her son"
(Galatians 4. 30), to mean, "Legalism runs contrary to the essence of
Christianity." In all of this, Melville seems to suggest a great irony: Abraham's
son, Ishmael, the illegitimate son of bondage, had been ostracized as one having
no part in the Covenant Family -- but Melville's Ishmael, a man of brotherly love, is one
who now begins to separate himself from traditional, so-called Christianity, a
despoiled version of its former Spirit-led self.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer once remarked, "There is nothing quite so terrible as evil
masquerading as virtue." Melville's reference to this kind of hypocrisy -- that of
corrupted religion -- reaches for high moment in the character of Captain Bildad. Ahab, it
is true, treats the reader to a special brand of evil; but -- as Churchill might have it,
to "put in a good word for the Devil" -- at least, the wooden-legged fanatic
exhibits bold fortitude in his "madness maddened," an insanity of "hatred
for the great white whale" (Dunne 22). Bildad is little more than a two-bit huckster,
a snake hiding in the religious tall-grass. We cringe in utmost discomfort at his
outrageous interpretation of Scripture: "Lay not up for yourselves treasures
upon earth"; Bildad will skin men as he skins whales. But, he will presumably tell
us, the "seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay" is divinely ordained for seven
is God's own number; his covetous designs allow him to see what he wants to see. The pious
Bildad decries the thought of hiring a heathen seamate -- unless, of course, a skilled
harpoon sharpshooter like "Quohog" comes along. It takes little imagination here
to notice Melville's antipathy toward stone-hearted, hypocritical religiosity. And it is
also not an accident that this tawdry business serves as backdrop for Queequeg's gallant
icy-water rescue of a buffoon-detractor.
In a book bursting with metaphor and runic message, it seems that Melville desires for us
to juxtapose Father Mapple and his sermon with the events of the Pequod's last
days: Mapple exhorts, "if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves," but Starbuck,
on the final day of his life, begins to turn this admonition on its head with, "I
disobey my God in obeying him." These are different, even opposing, messages; yet,
Melville, as he is wont to do, seems purposefully intent upon pitting one against the
other, a kind of dialectic, requiring the reader, as a result, to consider a new view of
life, one poly-dimensional in nature. Melville wants his readers to understand that life
cannot be reduced to a set of simple approved slogans or imprimatur dogmas.
Further, just as Father Mapple hoists himself to the chapel's elevated pulpit, Ahab climbs
the Pequod's masthead; both Pilots appear to be gifted with special vision, Mapple's
spiritual views and Ahab's sightings -- curiously, it is Ahab himself, on successive days,
who is the first to spot the White Whale. Also, Mapple's sermon speaks of Jonah's three
days, a New Testament reference to Christ's resurrection; Ahab, too, for three days sends
his shuttle-craft to meet Moby Dick and speaks of the whale in foreshadowing terms:
"Moby Dick -- two days he's floated -- tomorrow will be the third. Aye, men, he'll
rise once more -- but only to spout his last." Ahab, "plumbing the depths of
obsession and revenge" (Toth 73), predicts a resurrection, but one of death, not
life. Finally, Mapple speaks in a chapel-setting heavy laden with sorrow, a place ever
mindful of the deaths of fathers and sons who have been given up to the deep, with plaques
commemorating their painful absence; Ahab conducts his single-eyed, maniacal work while
grief-stricken others, the seamen of the Rachel, search for their fallen
workmates and family members -- it is difficult to imagine that Melville might have failed
to snatch, for his own purposes, the allusion to the biblical "Rachel weeping for her
children" (Matthew 2. 18).
Melville's Ishmael has journeyed a long way from his home-village of Manhatto. Any
well-traveled seaman will claim that he has "seen the world"; but, we sense
something more in Ishmael -- Nantucket and New England can no longer hold him -- he has
become a true citizen of the world and, possibly, beyond. The author prods us to
understand, as did Werner Karl Heisenberg, that "not only is the universe stranger
than we think, it is stranger than we can think." Melville's Pequod,
circumnavigating the dangerous oceans of life, has taken us on a voyage in search of
reality. The oft use of conflicting metaphor and polar opposites tell us, frankly, that
the universe, and life itself, is not as it appears to be.
At book's end, Melville makes no audacious claim to know or to have found truth, and
the many odious references to religion are his way of saying that the institutional Church
is even farther from such absolute knowledge. Understanding, as he does, humankind's
inability to apprehend final truth, Melville holds sacred the individual's right, each in
his or her own way, to pursue, to explore, God and ultimate things -- the author's
metaphorical picture of which, expressed in a comment by Ishmael, is "a congregation
of ants worshipping a toad-stool."
Works Cited
Dunne, Susan. "Moby Dick." Hartford Courant 13 Aug. 1998: 22.
Jaeger, William. "TSL Show Draws Inspiration from Moby Dick." Times
Union 21 Jun. 1998: I2-3)
Toth, Luann. "Moby Dick." School Library Journal 44.7 (1998): 73.
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