Aspects homoerotic 'Moby Dick'

Attention. If you have not read Moby Dick is possible that the text you will read below will unveil directly or indirectly, some details of the argument, perhaps you'd rather not know until reading the book. Warned stay, if transgressest this point.

When entering a few weeks ago at the House of the Book Gran Via Madrid and I was interested in the new paperback edition of the classic Herman Melville, Moby Dick, nothing made me suspect that the reading of novels of adventure par excellence would be so full of surprises.

Those who know me know my passion and love for the sea that was born very close to him and whenever I can I escape him or beaches, and if possible I get to my beloved I Formentera, an island of love par excellence and favorite tourist destination.

That same hobby sometimes transfer to reading, as I have found that books whose backdrop is the sea, when the protagonist does not have a special magnetism that I find difficult to resist. I came to this conclusion when, literally, in one breath, I eat up logbook of Captain William Bligh, head of the Bounty, famous ship that suffered one of the riots known in history back in 1789.

Well, I chose to read Moby Dick this summer, hoping to rediscover a classic children; of this book knew several adaptations for children and youth and, of course, the unforgettable film by John Huston, starring Gregory Peck and I recently acquired and reviewed.

Moby Dick was written in 1851 by the American Herman Melville. The book was not very successful in its day, and no wonder, since this is a very irregular, narrated by a character of little relevance in the story, with bouts of frantic action combined with timeless moralistic sermons nineteenth or wrongly treated marine biology, which start to classify whales as fish and not mammals, when precisely this time the debate was only resolved by the scientific community.

The book tells the story of a young man with experience in the Merchant Navy who decide to enroll in a whaler with a Polynesian harpooner who just make friends. They enroll in the whaler Pequod, led by the mysterious and authoritarian Captain Ahab (or Ahab), an old salt with a wooden leg built with whale ivory. Ahab his crew reveal that the primary purpose of trip is whaling in general, but the hunt for Moby Dick, the great white whale grabbed the leg and marked with scars all over the body for life.

An interesting plot with the naked eye, but what catches my attention powerfully from the first pages of the book is the unusual attraction to our narrator, the young Ishmael, into your bed partner (sic), Quiqueg, or Queequeg, as version, a young man of color, to be exact cannibal and harpooner for added symbolism. This is a full-fledged homosexual relationship that was forged from the first page of the book. At first there are but little sparks that can lead to the conclusion be misinterpreting the author. These winks like this: there is no free beds around New Bedford and Ishmael is forced to share a bed with the harpooner, opining that:

No man likes to sleep with another on a bed. Indeed, one would much prefer not to sleep or his own brother.

But the next morning:

[...] Never in my life I slept better. [...] I found that I had missed Quiqueg arm over in the most loving and affectionate. He would have thought that I had been his wife.

Okay, it may be coincidence, but as the story progresses the friendship of two young men becomes more and more intimate.

He seemed to accept me as naturally and spontaneously as I to him, and when we finished smoking, he pressed his forehead against mine, I hugged her waist, and said since we were married, meaning with this expression of his country, we were close friends, and die happily for me if necessary.

The relationship of Ishmael and Quiqueg not just a platonic friendship, but a homosexual love real, palpable, are clearly more than friends, and Melville uses his words carefully to describe this relationship, the intimate contact between them and all the phallic imagery, deposited in the office of a harpooner of Quiqueg.

I do not know how it is, but there's no place like a bed for confidential communications between friends. Husband and wife, they say, there open the bottom of each soul, and some old couples often tend to talk about old times until almost dawn. So on our honeymoon hearts, we lay I and Quiqueg-partner at ease and affectionate.

Ever since the most natural and sensual with a huge load, images begin to succeed without trying to hide anything:

So we had been lying in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Quiqueg, from time to time, throwing affectionately their dark legs tattooed on mine, and removing them then, so quite sociable, free and comfortable as we were [.. .]

Finished his story with the last dying puff of his pipe, Quiqueg embraced me, pressed his forehead against mine, and turning off the light of a murmur, shot one another, back and forth, and soon fell asleep.

As he advanced reading was increasingly astonished, not so much the homoerotic content of the novel, but the fact of not having heard of this aspect as unique and undoubtedly so unusual for the time, was amazed that the protagonists of this remarkable book were a domestic partnership between two men, two men who also love each other and they show repeatedly.

But not these, which I mentioned, the only references you can find in this Brokeback Mountain from the sea. There is an amazing chapter, 94, in which Ishmael with other sailors have to perform the task of handling what they call spermaceti, but that is not such as to what they really mean is the spermaceti, which is only a white wax or oil that is in the cavities of the skull of the sperm and vascularized fats all whales. However, to our hero that is real substance spermaceti.

Had cooled and crystallized to such an extent that when, with several others, I sat at a large bathtub Constantine sperm, I found it extremely condensed lumps floating here and there throughout the liquid. Our task was to re-make packages to force fluids such tightening. Sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in ancient times sperm oil was estimated as a cosmetic. What clarifier! What sweetener! What softener! How delicious softener! After your hands on it a few minutes, I noticed his fingers like eels and starting, as it were, to serpentine and spiral turning.

Eroticism unusually increases, touching the forbidden:

I sat there quite comfortable, with crossed legs on deck, after the exercise of the winch drive, under a blue tranquil sky; with the boat gliding lazily and quietly, I, as I bathed his hands in those soft and gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost in the same time, to break sustanciosamente between my fingers and download all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes release their wine, and as she breathed in the aroma uncontaminated, literally and truly as an aroma of violets in spring, I assure you that while I lived like a musky meadow, and I totally forgot about our terrible oath, washing his hands and heart in that ineffable sperm oil, and almost started to believe the old superstition that Paracelsus sperm oil is rarely effective to mitigate the heat of anger, at the same time, bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from ill will, or petulance, or malice of any kind.

Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, throughout the morning! I squeezed that sperm oil until I almost melted into him, I squeezed that sperm oil until I felt a strange sort of madness, and I found myself without realizing it, pressing it the hands of those who worked with me, mistaking them for soft cells. Such an overwhelming feeling, affectionate, friendly, loving produced this work, which finally ended up position and tighten with hands, and look them in the eyes sentimentally, as if to say, "Oh, my dear fellow men, why we will continue social resentment harboring, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy? Come, all hands apretémonos or rather, apretémonos universally in the very milk and sperm of kindness. "

How is it possible that there never heard of shady side of Moby Dick?

Moby Dick is a terribly sexist history in which there is no room for any woman, indeed, to all women to what is referred to one's Moby Dick, the greatest enemy to man, an infamous white whale. There is no doubt that Melville ojetivo is the celebration of masculinity and the triumph of man, male, over the beast. That masculinity is represented by its protagonists: Ishmael and Quiqueg.

But the closeness between them goes beyond what is known as a traditional male friendship. While the circumstances being experienced are conducive to building a noble friendship, love that grows between them goes a step further, both physically and emotionally, and is not accidental but is loaded with intentions concealed.

I have a hard time understanding how a relationship could go unnoticed by the readers of a time when something was absolutely outlawed and abhorred. How could such strict moralism skip Melville? Well he did, cleverly linking the relationship to her guardian, Quiqueg, a cannibal savage, a meat lover, an amoral evil without its own natural ignorance, but will end by knowing the wrath of God, to account for their sins, if you want to express that.

In this sense one could say that Moby Dick is a revolutionary novel and precocious: remember that the word homosexuality would not be invented until many years after the publication of this novel. However, Melville chooses an issue as thorny as he bravely faces and a healthy exercise in standardization, as if to fight for an unjust situation that must surely be of great importance to him. When you start the novel with its "Call me Ishmael," only underscores its identification with the character. Melville's Ishmael.

And both suffer from what they feel:

But that particular night I had a strange thing, and forever inexplicable. Startling a brief standing sleep, I had horrible realization that something was fatally wrong. The tiller made of whale's jaw, I hit the side that supported me in it, [...] My hands convulsively seized the cane, but with the insane idea that the cane was inverted, it is not known what, somewhat pleased. "My God! What's Up? "I thought.

However, despite this internal suffering and the terrible outcome that holds for some characters, Melville links the relationship of Ishmael and Quiqueg to something beautiful, comforting and rewarding.

We were very comfortable and at ease, especially because it was so cold, even outside of the blankets, because there was no fire in the room.

Moreover, it will be love that saves Ishmael when after the sinking of the Pequod, the ship where they travel, the coffin Quiqueg comes out and serves as a lifeboat for his mistress: united until death.

Moby Dick read between the lines will reveal a beautiful love story between two men, even more powerful than you can join in marriage to a man and a woman. Without doubt one of the surprise highlights of my reading this year and I did not want to miss and pick it up here because I'm sure it will be very interesting for many of you.

Happy summer!

-Roque.

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