Sometimes you overthink things; sometimes you mistake a wrinkle in the sea for a serpent, and you stand and stare, waiting for confirmation that you have seen what is not there. Moby-Dick’s narrator may or may not be Ishmael, but he is an Ishmael. And we should assume by Ishmael we are speaking of the Biblical Ishmael, the outcast, the victim of a Sarah’s jealousy. But I can’t leave it at that.
The Ishmael of Islam is ordered into the desert by God, not forced out by a family dispute. Melville’s Ishmael “exile” is self-imposed (“it is a way I have of driving off the spleen”) or driven by a sort of divine authority (“the invisible police officer of the fates”). The Ishmael of Muhammad is a seeker of water, saved by the Zamzam Well; and though it is a great stretch, it is tempting – jumping ahead to the novel’s end – to find a connection there with Queegueg’s coffin bubbling out of the sea to save our narrator. What is a sailor, anyway, but an ocean nomad?
There is reason to believe Melville was familiar with the Koran, but none to think many 19th century readers were. If I’m going to read this book I’ll have to remember not every fish is a whale.
Anybody fancy Melville's Jonah as a model for Orwell's "Inside the Whale"?
Melville, in the voice of the New Bedford preacher:
"...Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord out of the fish's belly. But observe his prayer, and learn a weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to God..."Orwell, on Henry Miller:
"......there is no question that Miller himself is inside the whale. All his best and most characteristic passages are written from the angle of Jonah, a willing Jonah. Not that he is especially introverted -- quite the contrary. In his case the whale happens to be transparent. Only he feels no impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, *accepting*.
It will be seen what this amounts to. It is a species of quietism, implying either complete unbelief or else a degree of belief amounting to mysticism. The attitude is "Je m'en fous' or 'Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him', whichever way you like to look at it; for practical purposes both are identical, the moral in either case being 'Sit on your bum'. But in a time like ours, is this a defensible attitude?..."Posted by: Martha Bridegam at November 14, 2005 11:59 PM