The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [259]
But on a second `below the line' level we gradually learn more about whales, these wondrous, mysterious creatures of the deeps inhabiting the `inferior realm' below the surface, to whose death and destruction the whale hunters devote their lives. As we do so, the picture we are being given of whales subtly changes.
A highlight of the book, for instance, is the time when the crew find themselves caught up in and surrounded by a vast becalmed armada of whales, covering several square miles. On the outer rim, where they lower the whaleboats, the monsters are threshing about in panic and violent commotion. But when Queequeg harpoons a whale, it draws his and Ishmael's boat `into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake'.
Here, in an `enchanted calm', they have an almost mystical vision, as they see the mother whales and their young calves coming up so close to the boat that Queequeg is able to `pat their foreheads'.
`But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers.'
As they watch in amazement at these mothers `quietly eying us, while their offspring gambolled around in the translucent waters,
`some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep. And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments, yes, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight.'
It is a vision of peace, joy and innocence, all the more shocking because it is an almost unique glimpse of the world of the soft, loving feminine in this otherwise hard, dark, one-sidedly masculine story. So relentless is the masculine colouring of the book that it contains almost no female characters at all (apart from a busybodying `Quaker woman' who tries to provide homely necessaries when they are still in port). Even the masculine-feminine balance in human relationships has to be squeezed into a solely masculine straitjacket, as in the almost overtly homosexual companionship between Ishmael and Queequeg, when they sleep in each other's arms like a 'cosy, loving' married couple. Only when we catch a glimpse of the mother whales and their offspring do we see the `feminine' presented openly and unambiguously, although even here it is only in the `inferior' form of an animal world seen below the surface of the sea.
In fact we almost immediately have a rather different sight of the hidden lifegiving values the whales represent when, by a trick, the crew of the Pequod manage to wrest the stinking, decaying corpse of a whale off a French boat, on the suspicion that, buried in its depths, may be ambergris, that substance so precious that is worth `a gold guinea an ounce'. Sure enough, suddenly, from the heart of this rotting mass, `there stole a faint stream of perfume'. Out come handfuls of sweet-smelling ambergris, all the more powerful for the contrast with the reek of putrescence which surrounds it.
Again we move on to the strange scene where, having captured and decapitated a sperm whale, and removed the `sperm' from its head, `The Baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case, we see Ishmael and others sitting on deck, rolling and squeezing the soft sperm in their hands, so transported by their `sweet and unctous duty' that it is like another mystical vision:
'As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion