Episode 17: Queequeg and Ishmael in Love (with Alexander Chee, Aaron Sachs, and Caleb Crain)

“There is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends,” Ishmael tells us in “A Bosom Friend,” chapter ten of Moby Dick, excerpted in the “Friendship” issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. “Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon lay I and Queequeg—a cozy, loving pair.”

In an extended, three-part installment of our intermittent series on Moby Dick and the history of the sea, this episode of The World in Time considers the novel’s love story—the story of Queequeg and Ishmael’s friendship and marriage—as well as the novel’s dedication to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Novelist and essayist Alexander Chee joins Donovan Hohn to talk about chapter four, “The Counterpane,” in which Queequeg and Ishmael, having just met, spend the night together. Melville scholar and historian Aaron Sachs closely reads the ideological, philosophical, political, and ecological implications of chapter 72, “The Monkey-Rope,” wherein we find Ishmael and Queequeg tethered to each other by a hemp line, Ishmael aboard the Pequod, Queequeg balancing perilously atop the carcass of a slaughtered whale. Finally, novelist Caleb Crain goes swimming around in the Platonic mysteries of chapter 110, “Queequeg in His Coffin.” Both Chee and Crain propose that the entire novel, dedicated to Hawthorne, might be read as “a love letter.”