When reading Moby Dick by Herman Melville for the very first time (as I am) the emergent relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg becomes a marveling point of perplexity within the story-line. Their friendship is a point of interest because it can be investigated on innumerable planes of thought; similarly, a variety of metaphorical interpretations can be made surrounding Ismael and Queequeg’s “marriage”.
A video: Die Bettde
cke by Katharina Zimmerhackl (2009)
Picture: thumbnail from video
This video is one particular interpretation of the relationship amongst the two men in the story that is both imaginative and artfully entertaining.
The artist seems to provide a more intimate observation of Ishmael and Queequeg beginning with their unusual introduction followed by a display of visual adaptations of the men’s following friendly moments together. Additionally, it highlights the silent affinity Ishmael experiences towards Queequeg (emphasized in the reading by Bryan Wolf, “When Is a Painting Most Like a Whale?: Ishmael, Moby Dick, and the Sublime”)
In the book, we share our first encounter of Queequeg with Ishmael. As Ishmael lays in the bed at the Spouter Inn, Queequeg enters totally unaware of his presence and yet Ishmael continues to lay, observing the man, in total silence. He becomes speechless as he analyzes Queequeg who is non-nonchalantly performing nightly rituals and preparing to smoke his beloved tomahawk. His silence prevails as far as the point where Queequeg hops into bed still unaware that Ishmael even exists. Perhaps his zipped-lips are truly fear as written in the text, “I was so afraid of him that I was not game enough just then to address him” (Melville 34) or perhaps he was purely in awe at the tattooed, bald man…”I thought is was high time, now or never, before the light was put out, to break the spell in which I had so long been bound (34). The video precisely emphasizes this ideology surround Ishmael’s speechlessness, as the video itself lacks words or language. Instead, the video relies heavily on visual details to convey a message, representative of the excessive detail surrounding Queequeg in Ishmael’s descriptions of him.
Bryan Wolf’s writing provides commentary involving Ishmael’s lull in speech, making an association between this silence and Ishmael’s first instance of a lack of “visionary self”: “Language is what allows Ishmael to retain his visionary status, or, to be more precise, it is the lapse of language that subjects Ismael to Queequeg’s bodily interrogation” (Bryan 91). Swiftly after they first speak to each other, Queequeg starts to touch and feel Ishmael. Initially he may have been subjected to this interrogation, but over time Ishmael starts to show a change of heart towards the man that he first sees as an ugly “savage.” The video certainly alludes to the change of heart, literally illustrating moments of intimacy including a game of footsies and intense eye contact preceding the illusion of a kiss. Consequently, I see the video as a literal visualization of the homosociality via homo-eroticism that is prominent in the written relationship between the two men. Eventually, after a negative initial impression/judgment of Queequeg, Ishmael admits to look beyond his savage-ness and “saw the traces of a simple honest heart” (Melville 55). He offers his innermost emotions saying that he “began to be sensible of strange feelings” and the narrative continues…”I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it” (56). In bonding with Queequeg, especially over a shared smoke that unites them into a kind of marriage, Ishmael comes to stand-up and signify a unification of humankind in general. It seems to represent an idea (maybe that of Herman Melville, himself) that all men should be considered equal amongst one another and that they need each other in life.
Ultimately, the relationship can be analyzed upon many different fronts. It is intriguing, amongst many other ideas, to consider these avenues of awestruck silence and homosociality to explain and exemplify this aspect of the novel. The video, sweetly named “Die Bettdecke” meaning The Bedspread, is a clever visual perception of the bond originated within the initial chapters of Moby Dick between Ishmael and Queequeg.
-Jaime K.P.
