Moby Dick

There’s something to be said about a narrator who finds not just religious significance—but religion itself—in a whale penis. In brief chapter ninety-five, “The Cassock,” Ishmael equates whale member with paganism and Christianity alike, and in doing so describes an inherently gruesome piece of cetological anatomy as a transformative and powerful icon.

After a quick physical description of the “wondrous cone,” Ishmael launches into a mystic tangent inspired by the member, which he describes thusly:

…as jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is; or rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea, and for worshipping which, King Asa, her son, did despose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook of Kedron, as darkly set forth in the 15^th chapter of the first book of Kings.

Here, Ishmael likens the penis to Yojo, without whose influence Ishmael would have never found the Pequod, and to the pole of Asherah, a Semitic fertility goddess, for which the biblical Queen Maachah was defrocked of her widowed Queen status. In doing so, he ascribes to a squalid hunk of dead animal flesh a power capable of wisdom, fertility, and temptation. Needless to say, this is an unreasonable amount of significance for even the most dedicated whaler to derive from severed genitalia—unless, of course, Melville was trying to make a point.

[I’d like for a second to break form and make note of two things—one, that here again we see Melville toying with male sexuality (be it human or otherwise), and two, that this passage marks yet another reference to the book of Kings, this time explicitly.]

Melville’s “point,” if he has one, becomes clear in the remainder of the chapter. Ishmael takes the subsequent paragraph to describe in meticulous detail the calculated method behind the task of a “mincer,” which is to remove the pelt of the member, hang the pelt to dry, and out of it to create a protective coat. Melville describes the man after he dons the coat: “The mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling.” Melville’s choice of the word “canonicals,” with its obvious religious denotation, paints the mincer as a cleric or clergyman, whose duty is a religious one. The curious use of second person pronouns and imperative commands (i.e., “ Look at the sailor…”) in this paragraph suggests a invitation to the reader by Ishmael to bear witness to the religious event. Ishmael continues: “Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.” With this sentence, Ishmael suggests that not only does the whale-penis coat signify the performance of a religious act, but also that it is a unique and necessary component of the act itself.

The third paragraph makes a religious implication even more obvious: “Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent on bible leaves; what a candidate for an archbishoprick, what a lad for Pope were this mincer!” The penis has lived up to its promise of power by this point, having taken a normal whaling man and transformed him into (Ishmael would say so, anyway) a Papal candidate. In describing it thusly, Ishmael elevates what he admits in the first paragraph to be an oft-overlooked piece of a whale’s anatomy to a mystical, transformative icon. Melville’s aforementioned “point” might be, then, that the whale, even taken in piecemeal, is an extraordinarily powerful beast and symbol. Or maybe he’s talking about God. Or maybe Ishmael’s just sexually attracted to whales. Whatever Melville’s really trying to say, he makes a strong case for it by convincingly relating Pope and whale penis.

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