The Dusky Entry
Ishmael enters “that gable-ended Spouter-Inn” the entrance to which remind him of “the bulwarks of some condemned craft.” He spends a great deal of time examining a muddled painting of a whale in a nightmare sea. That painting is in fact the summary of the entire story he is about to tell. Ishmael is haunted with a vast premonition; his mind’s eye focused on the ordeal ahead with a knowing precision—marking Moby Dick as a primal vision quest, a coming of age tale, a manhood ritual as maritime epic.
Ishmael wonders at the ‘besmirched’ painting:
“—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale. –It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. –It’s a blasted heath. –It’s a Hyperborean* winter scene. –It’s the breaking up of the ice-bound stream of Time.”
The Spouter-Inn is a whaling dive extraordinaire: with a ‘heathenish array’ of barbarian weapons, scalps and curios, including one peculiar weapon: “You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking horrifying implement.”
The entry way seems cut from an ancient central chimney, and the bar is placed in the open jawbone of a whale! Here Melville plunges Ishmael into the depths of his metaphor on Man and Leviathan, and describes the bar framed by the whale mouth:
“Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors delirium and death.
“Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true cylinders without—within, the villainous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered down-ward to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpad’s [thieves]’ goblets. Fill to this mark, and your charge is but a penny; to this a penny more, and so on to the full glass—the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp down for a shilling.”
Having found a warm berth in out of the cold New England night Ishmael is haunted with the vision of his coming ordeal, and sees clearly how the world of civilized avarice awaits the returning sailor. For as those who escape the ‘clinched’ drudgery of the moneyed order return, they are paid not in the currency of men, but in the currency of civilization—with money. And the town to which they return is custom built to fleece them of their temporal reward even as they seek to escape that to which they returned through ‘delirium and death’.
The entire scene reeks of what awaits our current combat veterans returning to a world that offers only one thing with consistency—intoxication. In the world of Ishmael most of the drugs that the inmates of civilization now use to achieve this coveted delirium, were yet to be refined or made available. Alcohol was virtually the entire drug trade. Ominously enough Jonah also serves as the port town doctor, prescribing cocktails for the returning sailor with an ailment.
Ishmael inquires as to a bed and is informed that all are taken, but that he might share the bed of a certain harpooner to which he muses, “…rather than wander further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with the half of any decent man’s blanket.”
At this point he begins to weaken in the face of the coming ordeal and finds more and more concern with the womanly things of the world. He is bothered by the ‘two dismal tallow candles’ that are the unheated inn’s only light source.
He is soon pulled from his self-defeating turn of mind by the entry of a group of sailors—soon to be his comrades—who engage in a festive drinking bout, and even dance, all except for the most admired man among them, a certain Bulkington, who neither drinks or dances, but stalks off on some errand to be followed into the night by the others.
*Authors of this period, emerging from ‘The Little Ice Age’ which had spiked terribly about the time of Melville’s birth, tended to be enthralled with the concept of Time as an icy-handed leviathan. See my review of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein ‘My Dead Child Walking In The Garden’ for more details.
A Plaguy Rough Board
Ishmael becomes increasingly obsessed with physical comfort, as well as a growing fear of the harpooner, who sounds like some terrible bedfellow after all, as he is said to be out on the town trying to sell the last of his string of four New Zealand cannibal heads. On the eve of his plunge into the unknown ‘watery parts of the world’ Ishmael is being called back to the cozy nest of civilization, and even engages in bizarre nesting behavior as he uses a carpenter’s plane to try and smooth out a knot on the plank bench he intends to sleep on rather than share the bed of some ‘terrible fellow.’
In terms of the subtext this is ‘the unmanning of the hero’ where the male hero of an epic [such as Jesus questioning God on the cross] questions his course in the doubting way of a mother or mate trying to divert her man from a perilous course. This is an esoteric construct that goes into preliterate storytelling and could possibly be related to the primitive obsession with separating the boy from the mother and putting him into a bloodletting ritual to compensate for the taboo menstruation of the girl becoming a woman. In these situations the mother is expected to show ritual objection to the separation, but not to succeed as is so common in our own denatured society, and which was becoming more frequent in Melville’s day, reflected by Ishmael’s words at the close of the chapter.
Teetering on masculinity’s edge Ishmael, in dread of the head-selling harpooner, decides to beat him to bed and establish himself under the blanket before the mysterious man returns for the night. He is obsessed with his roommate, representing his fear of the adventure to come. The fascination with the fact that this seaman—a harpooner and therefore an alpha male—just returned from the South Seas, is selling “…‘balmed New Zealand heads” has Ishmael on edge.
In terms of subtext this is the fear of transformation, with Ishmael sensing in the as yet unseen harpooner, that unreconcilable being that he is bound to become if continuing on his path. Ishmael is experiencing what we might call social separation anxiety.
The innkeeper reminds Ishmael that the harpooner "pays regular", gives the family history of the bed, leaves a candle on a "crazy old sea-chest that did double duty as a wash-stand" and leaves his guest to his own unsettling ruminations, which continue to focus on the furnishing, the coziness of the bed, and the outlandish gear of the harpooner.
As a protagonist, Ishmael is now emasculated enough to throw into the narrative deep end and begin his ascent as a hero.
The Infernal Head-Peddler
Well after midnight the harpooner comes in for the night and Ishmael cowers under the sheets, afraid to startle such a man who keeps a well-honed harpoon and walks the night selling a string of heads. Spying the discolored nature of the man’s face he is afraid that he has been duped by an unscrupulous innkeeper into sharing the bed of a maniac:
“Such a face! It was of a dark, purplish, yellow colour, here and there stuck over with large, blackish-looking squares. Yes, it’s just as I thought, he’s a terrible bedfellow; he’s been in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just from the surgeon.”
Ishmael [invoking the author’s own experience] then recalls a fellow sailor who had been shipwrecked among savages in the South Seas and had been tattooed by them. Softening up his opinion of the man who is preparing to climb into bed with him, still not having seen Ishmael in the half-light, he muses;
“And what is it, thought I, after all! It is only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin.”
[This last line may have done a great deal to limit Melville’s readership at the time of its publication.] His unmanly ruminations continue for paragraphs of ethnographic reflection, culminating in one of his frequent insights:
“I am no coward, but what to make of this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my comprehension. Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and confounded by the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room in the dead of night. In fact I was so afraid of him I was not game enough just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.”
When living among the Typee Melville exhibited a great curiosity concerning native customs but did not have the language skills necessary to get the answers to most of his questions, and instead had to make do with observation. My impression as a nonfiction author who has taken to fiction, is that these bizarre bedtime ruminations—so similar in so many ways to his observation of those who slept around him on the floor of his host’s house in Typee—served as a vehicle for him as an author to get into the role of Ishmael.
The man, who is now clearly a South Seas islander himself, goes about a religious ritual that involved the use of an idol that looks “exactly the colour of a three-days-old Congo Baby."
Eventually the harpooner takes out a tomahawk pipe, lights it and begins to smoke, only to be confronted by Ishmael after climbing into bed with his smoking device. After some groping, and growling and the flourishing of his lighted tomahawk pipe the islander says, “Who-e debel you?” …“you no speak-e, dam-me, I kill-e.”
With his cannibal bedfellow threatening to chop him with his tomahawk Ishmael yells for the innkeeper—who the reader by this time suspects of having served up a pretty diabolical prank—and is introduced to the harpooner by the grinning proprietor:
“Don’t be afraid now,” said he, grinning again. “Quee-queg here wouldn’t harm a hair of your head.”
After a proper introduction, Quee-queg agrees not to smoke in bed as Ishmael points out, “It’s dangerous. Besides, I ain’t insured.”
Before turning over he mused, “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”
He closes with, “I turned in, and never slept better in my life.”
The Spouter-Inn is an offbeat entrance for the character of Quee-queg, who in many ways is the soul of the story, as well as a vehicle for Melville to illustrate Ishmael shedding his resurgent doubts concerning the coming voyage, which based on the premonition in the form of the painting in the lobby depicting a whale leaping over a ship caught in a storm, might be of the most savage nature.
