Queequeg's Voice: Or, Can Melville's Savages Speak?

Queequeg’s Voice: Or, Can Melville’s Savages Speak? DIRK VANDERBEKE Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Jena Q ueequeg is one of the most prominent characters in Moby-Dick, a novel that does not lack in exceptional characters. As Ishmael’s friend—and maybe more than friend—he has been described as “the priest-king and lantern bearer of Moby-Dick”1 and as a “[pagan] midwife to the Christian Ishmael’s soul.”2 In general, he is the salt of the Earth. However, Queequeg’s voice is hardly heard. Other characters like Stubb, Flask, Starbuck, and even the Carpenter or Pip are granted more lines in which to present their respective visions or delusions. In contrast, Queequeg speaks to us only in exclamations and fragments, none of which indicate his deep humanity and the high or holy thoughts admired by the narrator.3 He introduces himself with the cry: “Who-e debel you? . . . you no speak-e, damme , I kill-e” (NN MD 23), and this wild ejaculation sets the tone for almost everything he will say in the course of the novel. A few chapters later, after he assaults a “young sapling” who has mimicked him, he is accused of almost killing the man but exclaims: “Kill-e, . . . ah! him bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!” (61). Soon after, he saves the man from drowning, and Queequeg’s violent outburst gives way to a mild glance, as if he were saying to himself “It’s a mutual joint stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians” (62). But Queequeg does not speak those words; they are Ishmael’s conjecture. In a later, also comic episode, Queequeg chooses the posterior of a sleeping man for his chair and informs his audience that this is how seating is done in his land. To make up for the lack of soft seats and sofas, “the king, chiefs, and great people generally, were in the custom of fattening some of the lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a house comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 Harold Beaver, “Introduction,” Moby Dick (London: Penguin, 1983), 32. 2 Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville. A Biography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 287. 3 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988), 477; hereafter cited as NN MD. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 59 D I R K V A N D E R B E K E round in the piers and alcoves” (NN MD 100). This account is also presented through Ishmael in indirect speech. Queequeg’s only direct contribution to the conversation comes when he is asked why he keeps flourishing the hatchet side of his tomahawk pipe over the sleeper’s head: “Perry easy, kill-e; oh! Perry easy” (100). Geoffrey Sanborn detects in this passage an indication of Queequeg’s gameness and honor, which prohibit him from making an easy kill because “the only things worth attempting to kill are the things not easy to kill.”4 But to use this passage as support for the usual perspective on Queequeg as the noble savage fails to take into account that the very idea of killing a sleeping man is not particularly honorable in the first place. The pattern that emerges here is fairly obvious. The image of Queequeg as a natural philosopher and redeemer is distinctly at odds with the few remarks he speaks directly, in his own words. Yes, the bosom friends chat affectionately in their honeymoon bed, and yes, we learn that Queequeg despaired over the wickedness of the Christians and decided rather to live and die as a pagan (NN MD 56), but these emotions are expressed second hand by Ishmael. All in...