Symbolic Rhetoric and Political Fictions of the Nation

Ishmael offers an alternative, more humane political vision to Ahab's command. Within his narrative, both in its content describing his friendship with Queequeg and in its form as a discursive democracy, people can interact politically without engaging in the exploitative symbolism Ahab uses. However, instances like "The Counterpane," in which Ishmael transcends prejudice to accept Queequeg's bridegroom embrace, vanish as the fascination with Ahab usurps control of the narration. The drama of democratic human interaction reappears only in isolated moments like "The Monkey-rope" and "A Squeeze of the Hand." Having dispersed his narrative authority among the crew, regardless of race or class, Ishmael presents the possibility of a political society that privileges, rather than obscures, the truth of each citizen's cultural difference. In turning from pistol and ball, in ceasing to loiter around coffin warehouses, Ishmael dedicates his narrative to what John Schaar calls "an ethic of action" in which each citizen is responsible for the tangible fulfillment of universal fraternity, in which it is incumbent upon every member to make the words of the Declaration of Independence come to life in the flesh of his or her companion.^[37] Ishmael might succeed, too, if the false demagogue did not seize the narrative's polyphonic authority, wresting it away from this sea-going Anacharsis Clootz deputation to further a journey marked by an intended domination over nature,

sultanlike command, expansion, and death. Pushing Ishmael aside, Ahab reduces the diverse potentialities of the crew into a uniform mission of vengeance. Once power and narrative are centralized, Ahab convincingly argues that the white whale—and closure—are in his grasp.^[38]

Ahab's mastery expands as the narrative expands, absorbing Ishmael as his spokesman for his quest. What had once been the heterogeneous course of narrative, moving from anatomical discussion of leviathan to weighty metaphysical revelations, becomes the chronicle of reprisal and retaliation. Digressive and diversely grouped chapters, like the story of the Jeroboam followed by "The Monkey-rope" and then by "Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale," give way to the severe teleology of "The Chase—First Day," "The Chase—Second Day," and "The Chase—Third Day." Queequeg and Ishmael, as individuals wedded in "a joint stock company of two," in a universal fraternity, are lost amid the confusion and spray of the pursuit (253). Yet they both shoot to the surface once more. Pitched overboard, Ishmael avoids the vortex, finding salvation in the coffin / life buoy. Queequeg, however, is humanly absent, able to appear only symbolically via the coffin he prepared for his own death. His natural body sinks with the Pequod , but his alienated and figurative corpus rises to float upon the surface of the waters. Ishmael mentions the coffin without remembering the human, his bosom friend, to whom it belonged. Although carved with the same mystical designs tattooed upon Queequeg's body, the coffin does not impel Ishmael to assess the truth of this cannibal who taught him the value of human devotion and friendship. The essence of intercultural understanding and interracial fraternity contained in Queequeg's body has been hollowed out, made prone to carry some other meaning. The tattoos that "had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth," remain undeciphered, now ignored by Ishmael (368). Perhaps only Pip, in his divine idiocy, could perceive the truth of Queequeg's human essence. Before the sinking of Pequod , Pip approaches Queequeg in his coffin, and implores him: "Seek out one Pip, who's now been missing long: I think he's in those far Antilles. If ye find him, then comfort him; for he must be very sad"—seek out and succor one Pip, the slave boy, whose value at auction Stubb estimates is thirty times less than that of a dead whale (367).

Ishmael forgets his bosom friend, dropping neither word nor tear to lament his disappearance. Why does Ishmael fail to recognize the type of politics Queequeg intuitively articulates with his body? To answer this question, we must reexamine Ishmael's role as narrator. Ishmael gives in to Ahab without a murmur, content to watch Ahab decipher and control the legendary symbolism of leviathan. Indeed, Ishmael seems somewhat complicit with his captain; his nonaction leads to a narrative repetition of Ahab's drama, duplicating the hunt for the white whale on a metaphysical level. Even after Ahab has gone down with the Pequod and can no longer enforce obedience, Ishmael still puts his narrative at his captain's disposal. Although aboard the ship, Ishmael the sailor may have been prevented from pursuing his friendship with Queequeg, in the text, Ishmael the narrator should be able to tell his tale under the auspices of his own authority. In fact, he nods toward Job in the epilogue to endow his position as an isolato storyteller with authority. Like Job, only Ishmael has "ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE " (432). He seemingly acquires by default the authority to tell a narrative; no one lives who can dispute or amend or preface what he says. Yet even in the autonomy of memory, by at last narrating only the chase, Ishmael defers to Ahab, allowing his dead captain to structure the narrative of remembrance. Like Stubb, who pushes on in the chase and strands Pip, Ishmael abandons any counter-memories of Queequeg in which dignity and interracial community override the dictates of nationalism; he surrenders any narratives that depart from Ahab's impervious ends. In forfeiting his narrative authority to Ahab, Ishmael also forfeits his Job-like status of aloneness. He becomes part of an American community that has forgotten glimpses and memories of equality and fraternity.

As if the rituals of "The Quarter-Deck" and the electrical storm needed reaffirmation, Ishmael again agrees to Ahab's quest, now pursuing the white whale in narrative. Following Ahab's course, Ishmael is "rescued" by the discourse of American politics. It is the symbolic, politically demonized, spiritually empty coffin-body of Queequeg that buoys Ishmael. Ritual and symbolism, political practices that deny and exploit human beings, functioned as a principal mode of narrative and political discourse in antebellum America. Like Ahab, Ishmael floats upon the alienated body of blackness that is the coffin / life buoy, ignoring the human truth of Queequeg's body he

once knew so intimately. He forgets the promise of "truth"—or democracy—encoded in the tattooed body by relinquishing his memory of Queequeg.

Willing to compromise the integrity of his former friendship, Ishmael finds many colleagues in the American political arena, where the adoption of the Compromise of 1850 subjected the founding fathers to the delusive memory of symbolism. Echoing Harvey Birch in The Spy , who produces from his shirt the name Washington as he prepares for death, echoing Ishmael as he finds salvation in Queequeg's coffin, Henry Clay dramatically ended his appeal for the Compromise Resolutions by drawing a symbolic talisman from his pocket. But unlike Birch, who eats the signature, Clay freely divulged his "precious relic":

And what, Mr. President, do you suppose it is? It is a fragment of the coffin of Washington—a fragment of that coffin in which now repose in silence, in sleep, and speechless, all the earthly remains of the venerated Father of his Country. Was it portentous that it should have been thus presented to me? Was it a sad presage of what might happen to that fabric which Washington's virtue, patriotism, and valor established? No, sir, no. It was a warning voice, coming from the grave to the Congress now in session to beware, to pause, to reflect; before they lend themselves to any purpose which shall destroy the Union which was cemented by his exertions and example.^[39]

Something of Ahab lingered in Clay, as it does in Ishmael. Clay adopted the role of political shaman, symbolically exploiting Washington in an effort to assuage disorienting ideological struggles. He conducted politics through symbolism, just as Ishmael performs his narrative act by relying on symbols; both employ symbols that hollow out the body and drag it into the political field as Foucault's body politic, where it has no memory of the promises it once signified.

Queequeg, we must remember, in Ishmael's "unconditional" democratic consciousness doubles as Washington. Not only does this cannibal bear a physical resemblance to the founding father, but he also functions in Ishmael's narrative as did Washington in American national narrative. Each man's corpus delivers a narrative to an ending. The coffin of Queequeg leads Ishmael away from the doomed ship, and the fragment from Washington's coffin carried the Compromise of 1850 that was supposed to heal the national schism

between freedom and slavery. Although Queequeg and Washington instill the promise of closure, they are little more than political bandages that hopelessly attempt to save the ship of state from sinking. Given their equivalent uses of symbolic coffins, Ishmael and Clay seem to share the Ahabian tendency to practice a political sorcery that conspires to make human forms the vehicle for resolution and unity. Both speakers tell stories of survival that take bodies and transform them into Hobbes's "Artificiall Person," who represents the covenant and without whose authority civil society has neither foundation nor hope of preservation. Within these allusive bodies, patriotism and parricide converge: Clay's filial worship of fatherly relics segues into Ishmael's annihilating amnesia, his forgetting of Queequeg.

Even more resemblance between Ishmael and Clay as political actors appears when we remember that Melville gave voice to his narrator at the time of the debates surrounding the Compromise of 1850. I am not arguing for a one-to-one correspondence between Ishmael and Clay; instead, the discursive similarities between these two figures leads to an understanding of the disastrous course of an American politics that navigated the most profound of ideological struggles by appealing to symbolism.^[40] We must not forget that Moby-Dick , whatever its allusions to real historical politics, is a work of fiction, and that, in contrast, Clay's Compromise speech, whatever its degree of fictional license, remains a work of politics. This is not to say, however, that Moby-Dick performed no political commentary; indeed, Ishmael's telling provided a critical truth about the American political scene. Yet it is to say that as opposed to Melville, who politicized his fiction in order to utter some snatches of covert truth here and there, Clay represented an American culture that practiced what is only a fiction of politics. He engaged in the symbolic rhetoric of an American politics that sought to efface the intense contradictions between democratic ideals and democratic institutions, between the commitment to freedom and the practice of slavery. Though it may seem Ishmael at last enters Ahab's tent of political symbolism and encounters Clay, through his mode of telling he approaches the Melville who yearned after truth in "Hawthorne and His Mosses." Recasting Clay's adulteration of Washington's memory as Ishmael's disregard for Queequeg and his coffin, Moby-Dick subtly implies how the fiction of politics spoken by antebellum America obscured and dishonored its noncitizens as well as its originary

citizens. Just as Ishmael will never understand the "mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth" inscribed upon Queequeg's body, so, too, America was never to decipher the truth or "ruthless democracy" in Washington's legacy. Whereas the lie of Washington proclaimed that slavery, if not one of the cornerstone ideals of the founding fathers, was at least a favorable means to achieve those ideals, an unauthorized counter-memory of Washington's potential truth silently stood in a legacy of the forgotten apparition of freedom.