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Chaucerian Humor in Moby-Dick: Queequeg’s “Ramadan” SOLOMON SALLFORS JAMES DUBAN University of North Texas e propose that Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale” informs the dramatic setting, humor, and tension of Ishmael’s response to Queequeg’s W“Ramadan” (Moby-Dick, Ch. 17), and that Chaucerian characterization helps, as well, to shape Ishmael’spejorative response to Queequeg’stheology While Ishmael and John the Carpenter of “The Miller’s Tale” exhibit related frustration over what is unfamiliar, Melville transforms John’ssuperstition about scientific and scholastic learning into Ishmael’sscientific skepticism concerning meditative religious experience. Melville is known to have read Chaucer with pleasure: allusions to Chaucer abound in Melville’snovels, short stories, letters, and marginalialand then in his lengthy parody of the “General Prologue” in “The Cavalcade” canto of Clavel (11.0. In White-Jacket, Jack Chase compares John Ushant to Chaucer’s Shipman, quotes from the Shipman passage of the “General Prologue,”and then asks, “‘mustnot old Ushant have been living in Chaucer’s time, that Chaucer could draw his portrait so well?”’Moreover, foreshadowing the alignment of Chaucerian and Islamic concerns in Moby-Dick, Ushant can “reason of civilized and savage,of Gentile andJew, of Christian and Moslem.”Z Similarly,in The Confidence-Man, the narrator compares the passengers boarding the Fidele to Chaucer’s pilgrims in a way that echoes the alignment of Chaucer and the Ramadan in Moby-Dick: “Asamong Chaucer’sCanterbury pilgrims , or those oriental ones crossing the Red Sea toward Mecca in the festival month, there was no lack of variety.”3Here, then, in one of his habitual musings about cross-cultural religious correspondences,4 Melville aligns the ’See, lor instance, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick;01, the Whale, ed Luther S . Mansfield and Howard P Vincent (New York Hendricks House, 19521, p 806, Alan Shusterman, “Melville’s‘The Lightning-Rod Man’: A Reading,” Studies in Short Fiction 9 (1972): 170-71; Richard Harter Fogel, Melvillek Shorter Tales (Norman, OK. University of Oklahoma Press, 19601,pp. 32, 34; Herman Melvtlle, Clarel- A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, ed. Walter Bezanson (New York Hendricks House, 1960). p. 636; Walker Cowen, Melville’sMarginalia, Ph.D. diss.,Harvard University, 1965 (New York Garland Puhlishing Inc , 1987),p. 283. Herman Melville, White-Jacket; 01; the World in a Man-oJ-War (1850). ed. Harrison Hayfoi-d, Herahcl Parker. and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newherry Library, 1970), pp. 363, 353. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man:His Masquerade (1857),ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newherry Library, 1984),p. 9. See, in this vein, H. Bruce Franklin, The Wahe ofthe Gods;MelvifleSMythology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963); Dorothee Finkelstein, Mrlvillek Orienda (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961); James Duban. “From Bethlehem to Tahiti: Trans-Cultural ‘Hope’in Clarel,” Philological Quarterly 70 (1991): 475-83. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I I - L E S T U D I E S 7 3 S A L L F O R S A N D D U B A N Canterbury pilgrims with those of the Hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, during the “festivalmonth” of Ramadan. A similar correspondence illuminates the Chaucerian subtext of “The Ramadan” in Moby-Dick, by virtue of that chapter’sdebt to “TheMiller’sTale.” At the outset of Ishmael’s description of Queequeg’sRamadan, the association is lighthearted and good-spirited, for in both the Miller’sand Ishmael’s narratives someone worries about the health of a person locked inside a room. In “The Miller’s Tale” Nicholas the scholar occupies quarters at the home of John the Carpenter and his wife, Alison. By feigning a fast, among other contrivances , Nicholas seeks to dupe his simpleminded and superstitious host into believing that he, Nicholas, has had-through astrology-a divinely inspired vision. Falling for the ruse, John worries about Nicholas’swell being. Similarly, in Moby-Dick Queequeg locks himself in a room, though to engage in an authentic religious experience, which Ishmael crassly stereotypes as a Ramadan.5...

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