Episode 17: Queequeg and Ishmael in Love (with Alexander Chee, Aaron Sachs, and Caleb Crain)
The World in Time / Lapham’s QuarterlyShow Notes
“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.”
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More from The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly
“Friendship is an enormous part of my life, and it was an enormous part of Arendt’s life,” Roger Berkowitz says on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “She was said to have a genius for friendship by her friends. She was an exile, stateless for eighteen years, and she really did come to believe that friendship is what she called a ‘homeland.’ She didn’t think of herself as German, or Jewish, or American, or European. She said, ‘The only people I love are my friends.’ Friendship is hard, and she uses this beautiful metaphor. She says, ‘Friendship exists on the knife’s edge.’”
“Rabbi Luria’s Kabbalist creation story, however baroque, accounts boldly for both moral evil and natural calamity,” Annie Dillard wrote in her 1999 book, For the Time Being. “The creator meant his light to emanate, ultimately, to man. Grace would flow downward through ten holy vessels, like water cascading. Cataclysm—some say creation itself—disrupted this orderly progression. The holy light burst the vessels. The vessels splintered and scattered. Sparks of holiness fell to the depths, and the opaque shards of the broken vessels imprisoned them. This is our bleak world.”
As a companion to last week’s episode of The World in Time, we are sharing with listeners the first episode of Passages: On Morrison, a limited podcast series hosted by Namwali Serpell. The series takes the form of a traveling salon. In this first episode, Serpell and poet Tracy K. Smith read the opening of The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison's debut novel, and discuss all that the passage emits and erases. They also explore how the cultural treatment of Morrison as a literary icon or monument has obscured a true appreciation of her literary form, an appreciation that comes from turning to the page. Lapham’s Quarterly brings voices from the past up to the microphone of the present. Back issues are available for purchase on our website. To make a tax-deductible gift, visit the donation portal hosted by Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. You can find information about the Quarterly’s ongoing revival here. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
“The canon raised Toni Morrison,” says Namwali Serpell on this episode of The World in Time. “The canon is how she became who she is. Faulkner, Woolf, Shakespeare. She is much more interested in taking what’s there and reading it accurately, honestly. Let us be clear-minded and clear-sighted about what is there. But we don’t need to destroy it. And in fact, the Melville I read after reading Morrison’s analysis of the whiteness of the whale is a richer Melville.”
This bonus episode of The World in Time brings together a pair of conversations, one about the making of a movie, another about the making of an archive. Director John Kirby and producer Libby Handros talk to acting editor Donovan Hohn about their collaboration with Lewis Lapham on his 2005 "dramatic documentary musical," The American Ruling Class, now streaming on the Criterion Channel. Then writer and technologist Paul Ford, architect of the Harper's Magazine digital archive and co-founder of Aboard, a software consultancy, joins Hohn for a conversation about the new Lapham's Quarterly digital archive, whether technologists can move fast without breaking things, the gold rush origins of Silicon Valley, what Lewis Lapham would have made of our new Gilded Age, the magnificence of George Eliot's Middlemarch, and much else.