Due to its ubiquitous influence, its cultural gravity, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is one of those novels that exists in a sargasso sea of cultural preconceptions and associations you have to swim through to get to the actual book in the center, which, when I finally read it for the first time earlier this year, enchanted me with its surprisingly unstraightforward structure: a morass of deferral and detour, hopping between a variety of literary styles—speculative cetacean phrenology, literary criticism, armchair biology, anthropological studies, taxonomic diatribes, and meticulously detailed, diagrammatic expositions on the technologies, practices, and lifeways of whaling. Ishmael, Moby-Dick’s first-person narrator, takes more than 400 pages to get to the only bit of the story I knew about going in: the epic struggle between Captain Ahab and the white whale, the dreaded Moby-Dick, that I’ve seen depicted in dozens of illustrations and homages. (Never mind that the climax is actually less “epic struggle” and more “your obsessed boss leading his employees into a death spiral.”)
Ultimately, I find that Moby-Dick reads like a memoir in perhaps a purer sense of the word than we sometimes mean. Just as memory fragments as soon as it forms, always already in a state of decay, so Ishmael’s tour of his ivory mind palace strays and doubles back and skips certain rooms altogether. By the end of the journey through Ishmael’s salty halls, I looked back the way we had come and half-remembered the many times he had reached for a doorknob to usher me in but shook and faltered and hesitatingly led me onward, leaving me pretending out of overly generous deference that perhaps there hadn’t even been a door there after all.
Ishmael’s hesitation begins, I think, in the first chapter’s opening line. “Call me Ishmael” almost reads like an obfuscation. At best, I take his identity to be unstable. Perhaps “call me Ishmael” is merely a resignation to his fragmentariness, a shrug of an introduction. And yet we find the most coherent Ishmael in these opening couple dozen chapters,1 in which the plot is consistently told from his first-person perspective without the constant disruptions of essays, metacommentary, and diagonal memories.
It is also here that Ishmael forms his special relationship with the harpooner Queequeg, beginning with annoyance at having to share a bed at the Spouter-Inn (“The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the thought of sleeping with him.”), rapidly advancing to homoerotic affection (“I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife.”), and thence advancing to companionship:
He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; 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.
Despite Ishmael’s weak minimization of the “marriage,” he seems to warm to it a bit later as they lie in bed, giggling and conversing in each other's arms.
How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.
Signing onto the crew of Ahab’s fated Pequod, joining the mad captain’s quest to avenge himself upon the white whale, marks the foreboding end of Ishmael and Queequeg’s queer honeymoon, as the harpooner rapidly fades into the story’s background.
One of the few times Queequeg resurfaces in the jagged plot is on death’s door with a a fever contracted from working in the muck of whale-product below decks. During this episode, adrift in the middle of the Pacific, Queequeg requests the ship’s carpenter to make him a coffin-canoe, so that his body might be set adrift in the style of his homeland. Though Ishmael himself is notably absent from the narration of the sickness that takes his “poor pagan companion, and fast bosom-friend,” it’s hard not to sense his pained concern, even as he distances himself from it by substituting “you” for “I”:
Poor Queequeg! when the ship was about half disembowelled, you should have stooped over the hatchway, and peered down upon him there; where, stripped to his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage was crawling about amid that dampness and slime, like a green spotted lizard at the bottom of a well. And a well, or an ice-house, it somehow proved to him, poor pagan; where, strange to say, for all the heat of his sweatings, he caught a terrible chill which lapsed into a fever; and at last, after some days' suffering, laid him in his hammock, close to the very sill of the door of death. How he wasted and wasted away in those few long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die, or be weakened. And like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died.
Queequeg’s sudden recovery stands in the story as a pale irony, Ishmael’s narration being told from the standpoint of being the sole survivor of the ill-fated voyage. When he sums up Queequeg’s ethic, the shadow of the white whale—and the Pequod’s doom—looms overhead: “[I]t was Queequeg's conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.” This chapter ends with a poignant reflection on Queequeg’s tattooed body, a body that is ungraspable to the mind and, alas, to the touch:
[T]his tattooing, had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last.
The encounter with Moby-Dick occupies only the last three chapters of the 135-chapter novel. The chase is long, the ensuing struggle fierce and brief. Ishmael describes the action methodically, coldly, and without the feeling that underscores the telling of Queequeg’s illness a dozen chapters before. Ishmael does not mention Queequeg’s death specifically. Only in the tiny epilogue does Queequeg emerge as a deathly hollow absence when, as the ship sinks below the waters, his coffin-canoe, since repurposed as a life-buoy, rises from the wreck to save his partner Ishmael from the deep.
Ishmael’s pocked, zigzag, wave-tossed (perhaps we could say queered?) narration suddenly makes emotional sense to me as it comes to its close. Looking back across the sweep of the book, I see a pattern of anxious deferral, a telling that stops and starts precipitously, attempting to delay reaching the tragic end for as long as possible. Ishmael takes refuge in the corners of the narrative, evading retraumatization by indulging in the constant detours of his own fascinations, assuming the position of a scholar continuously reinterpreting the world until the categories of experience become subsumed within the taxa of the whale and those who hunt him.
Did Queequeg know Ishmael as Ishmael? Or did Ishmael’s “true” name drown in the same sea as his beloved?
If you think that’s a lot, it isn’t: the book has 135 chapters.