May 31, 2019 - Chapters Four and Five
The first short chapter concerns itself with Ishmael awakening with Queequeg's arm flung over him, Ishmael awakening Queequeg, and finally Ishmael watching Queequeg dress, wash, and shave himself with his harpoon blade. Beyond the suggested homoeroticism of this chapter with the last, there is the matter of Ishmael recalling to himself a similar experience of waking up after a long sleep and believing that a hand was holding his own, only to find upon becoming fully awake that the hand was not there. While one could normally attribute such a sensation to the fact of being only half-awake, the experience seems to have stuck with Ishmael for his whole life.
Also repeated in these chapters (the second of which details breakfast) are the racial aspects of how Ishmael (and everyone else) views Queequeg as a non-white "savage." I'm always tempted to consider Dan Carlin's dictum that racism "should be graded on a scale," i.e., that racial attitudes have evolved significantly over a relatively short period of time, and as a result, we should reserve judgment in many cases when reading about or otherwise considering the racial attitudes of people from times past. In this case, we are dealing with a person living in a country that still had legalized slavery -- both Ishmael and Melville, his creator.
That said, there were, of course, plenty of Americans in the 1840s and 1850s in America who were fully cognizant that racism was wrong. Whether we can exculpate Melville to some extent by having the racism expressed in the novel attributable to Ishmael and others is a more complex question. It's been a long time since I studied Melville critically and don't recall where he stood on the matter of race. It's clear he wasn't the equal of Poe in this matter -- Poe being unrepentantly racist and proud of it. On this matter, an interesting point of comparison are the sea tales of the two men, particularly Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, with its fantastic racism in its final pages. For anyone who hasn't read Poe's only novel, it's available here.
Also repeated in these chapters (the second of which details breakfast) are the racial aspects of how Ishmael (and everyone else) views Queequeg as a non-white "savage." I'm always tempted to consider Dan Carlin's dictum that racism "should be graded on a scale," i.e., that racial attitudes have evolved significantly over a relatively short period of time, and as a result, we should reserve judgment in many cases when reading about or otherwise considering the racial attitudes of people from times past. In this case, we are dealing with a person living in a country that still had legalized slavery -- both Ishmael and Melville, his creator.
That said, there were, of course, plenty of Americans in the 1840s and 1850s in America who were fully cognizant that racism was wrong. Whether we can exculpate Melville to some extent by having the racism expressed in the novel attributable to Ishmael and others is a more complex question. It's been a long time since I studied Melville critically and don't recall where he stood on the matter of race. It's clear he wasn't the equal of Poe in this matter -- Poe being unrepentantly racist and proud of it. On this matter, an interesting point of comparison are the sea tales of the two men, particularly Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, with its fantastic racism in its final pages. For anyone who hasn't read Poe's only novel, it's available here.
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