ABSTRACT
About half-way through Moby-Dick, Ishmael describes how Queequeg, in preparing a caught whale for butchering, must attach a blubber hook by inserting it into a wound on the whale’s body. To facilitate this, Queequeg has to descend ‘ten feet below the level of the deck’, on to the mostly submerged whale, with any security provided by the monkey-rope described in the passage I have just quoted (348). This mode of providing Queequeg some safety and of bonding him to Ishmael for life or in death is rst equated with popular entertainment and with the reader’s received knowledge: ‘You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by a long cord. Just so, from the ship’s steep side, did I hold Queequeg down there in the sea’. The chapter’s title is then explained by comparison with a mode of making animals perform. A parallel is drawn between men cutting whales on the Pequod and the Italian boys making apes dance for money on the streets. And this parallel reects and invokes two others, that between the Italian boys and the ape, and that between one man and his counterpart at the end of the monkey-rope. The image of the monkey-rope produces a big range of parallelisms and contrasts all related to each other by an insistent emphasis on seriality, both within events narrated and images invoked (boy to ape, Ishamel to Queequeg) and between events and images (on the one hand, boy and ape, on the other, Ishmael and Queequeg). And all this is represented through recourse to the reader’s prior invoked knowledge: ‘you have seen’.
