Pursuing the Whale from Quarantine, part 7

A lot happens in our next block of assigned reading: chapters 48-51. The structure of Melville's novel itself reproduces the rhythms of whaling voyage (an excellent observation first offered by one C. Hartman in a Harkness discussion): we get long lulls with not a lot happening, during which Ishmael speculates about fate and life and whales and philosophy, and then chapters of frenetic action, like

Chapters 48, The First Lowering

For the first time in the voyage, whales are spotted and chased! And "five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air" (Chapter 47) join the hunt. They are Fedallah and his mysterious crew, who had been secreted aboard the Pequod, whom Ishmael thought he saw flit aboard back in Chapter 19, who had laughed from the bowels of the ship when Ahab led his dark communion oath.

Fedallah by Alessandro Patrio
posted to Twitter by @ArcudiJohn

Melville is thick with the devilish diction and imagery as he describes Fedallah. He wants you to see them as Ahab's illicit aid in his fiery hunt, like demons summoned and bound to a task. But like most stories of that type, Melville's will ask who is bound and who does the binding in that relationship.

The mates' different methods for commanding and exhorting their sailors is funny and great characterization. Flask shouts furiously. Pious Starbuck whispers earnestly. Stubb laughs and jokes, but with "jollity ... so curiously ambiguous, as to put all inferiors on their guard in the matter of obeying them" (Chapter 48). Is he joking or serious? Hard to tell, so his crew were "pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for the mere joke of the thing."

The action at the end of this chapter sometimes confuses students. The boats lowered for the chase in the afternoon (Chapter 47), and Ishmael's boat (commanded by Starbuck) is capsized by the whale they are hunting just as a squall (a sudden storm) comes on. They right the boat and climb back in, but between evening and the squall, they cannot find the Pequod, so Starbuck affixes a lantern to the end of an oar and has Queequeg hold it up, hoping the ship will spot them. "There, then, [Queequeg] sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair."

The ship does not spot them, and they stay out all night long. Ishmael buries that fact a bit, but it's right there in the next paragraph: "Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat, we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on." And what do they see? The Pequod, breaking through the fog and right on top of them. They dive for safety. The boat is crushed under the ship's keel. They retrieve the boat and are brought back on deck, against all odds, for "the ship had given us up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon some token of our perishing,—an oar or a lance pole" (Chapter 48).

His first whale hunt and Ishmael got his boat smacked over by a whale, was lost all night in a heavy fog, and was almost crushed to death by his own ship! That's tough. How to respond to such a madcap dangerous life?

Chapter 49, The Hyena

What can Ishmael do but laugh?

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. ...death itself [seems] to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke.

So he asks Queequeg if this sort of thing often happens. (Yup.)
He asks Stubb whether his own officer Starbuck doesn't have a reputation as an unusually cautious whaleman. (Yes.)
He asks Flask whether "it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into death’s jaws?” (It is.)

So he calls Queequeg to help go write up his will. What else can he do.

So why is this chapter called "The Hyena," do you think? What associations do we have with the hyena? You may recall two major associations from The Lion King (94 because 19 is garbage ---I. Schumacher). Hyenas are scavengers, thus surrounded by death. And they do this:

Sometimes nothing else can be done (as good country wisdom would say, "ain't nothin for it"), and you just have to laugh in the face of death.