Ishmael as Phallic Narrator

ISHMAEL AS PHALLIC NARRATOR Terry Roberts University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill Robert Shulman showed just how common phallic humor is in Moby-Dick in his 1961 article on "The Serious Functions of Melville's Phallic Jokes." Shulman argues that Melville "repeatedly [used] . . . understated phallic jokes in order to satirize conventional religious, economic, and social values" as well as emphasize the "White Whale's primal . . . destructive force."1 What scholars since Shulman have failed to see, however, is the degree to which Melville used the phallus in Moby-Dick to represent Ishmael's penetrating sensibility. Ishmael's voice evolves through a significant cycle of narrative stances. The series of complex phallic jokes which Melville wrote into the text of Moby-Dick suggests the nature of this narrative pattern, which is roughly equivalent to the sexual act. Ishmael as narrator evolves through a cycle of voices that suggests in turn phallic erection, intercourse , climax, and diffusion.2 Almost every commentator on Moby-Dick agrees that the novel is, as Harold Beaver wrote, "not [about] what can be learnt, but theoretically how."3 The pattern of narrative voices that Ishmael assumes during the course of the novel is the key to how things are "learnt." The phallic consciousness of the narrator Ishmael penetrates Ahab's famous "pasteboard mask" of reality time and again in the novel. The novel's primary image of the writer, the "rapt orator " of Chapter 95, illustrates this image. The mincer in this chapter is clothed from head to foot in the gigantic whale's phallus. The phallus , "a very strange, enigmatical object," is longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is: or, rather in olden times, its likeness was. The Pequod's crew skins and cures the phallic hide into an overcoat for the mincer who now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling . Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office. Melville compares the mincer's occupation to that of a "rapt" (note the pun) author of spiritual investigations. Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on bible leaves; what a candidate for an archbishoprick, what a lad for a Pope were this mincer!4 100Notes This "archbishoprick" becomes a serious analogue for the "intent" story-maker Ishmael. Ishmael's sea world is, in fact, awash in images of the erect phallus , often in terms of its penetration into a mysterious, often feminine , reality.5 This pattern begins with the title itself, inescapably a phallic joke, which suggests in turn the sperm-filled whale. In addition to those elements emphasized by Shulman, important phenomena in this pattern include the whale ship Pequod, Queequeg's idol Yojo first seen in the Spouter Inn run by Peter Coffin,6 Ahab's missing leg, the harpoons resting in the crotch of the whale boat, the needle of the compass redirected by Ahab, the coffin buoy that saves Ishmael; all the heads in the novel including whale heads and Queequeg's shrunken heads, all divers, all miners (see the subterranean miner of Chapter 41), the famous Catskill eagle, Ahab's doubloon ;7 and finally the narrative consciousness itself—the phallic letter J which heads the word Ishmael. All of this energy is directed at the mystery symbolized ultimately by the feminine ocean, the sea that Ishmael refers to as "the pelvis of the world" (p. 117).8 In Chapter 32, Ishmael compares his book to a "grand erection," the copestone of which must be left to "posterity" (p. 125). This omnipresent phallic energy in Moby-Dick is the key to its narrator, the Is-male (Harold Beaver among others notes this pun in the name) who tells the "tail."9 Viewing Ishmael as a phallic rhetor clarifies the evolving narrative stances that he assumes in succession. Ishmael's narrative voice evolves from that of a first person active agent, into a first person reflective agent, into what is commonly denoted as third person omniscience , and finally into the dramatic...