The Voice of the Whale

Throughout Moby-Dick, we look at Whales from many perspectives, considering their classification, the function of a whale's body, the whale's phrenology, the uses of various body parts, from blubber to skelaton, hide, muscle and brain, the history of whale hunting, the taste, and many more, too numerous to usefully catalog. We try to understand what The Whale is to Ahab, and what it is to Ishmael. Melville teases us throughout, however, with our failures of knowledge and the limitations of each perspective.

In the chapter, "The Sphynx", Melville very nicely has Ahab summarize the frustrations of our limitations, and highlights the one perspective we will not get: the whale's own:

"Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed - while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!"

Is the whale a divinity? Is the whale endowed with godlike power, the power of omnipresence, the power of life and death? Or is the whale simply the faceless, voiceless and ever-distant observer of history? Mid-way through the book, in a chapter that serves as a bit of a finale to the gory chapters of the cutting in and dissection of the whale (we will revisit the dissected whale and its parts later, as they are fed to the try-pots and the oil is rendered), Melville wishes only to heighten our questions, and brings Ahab on the stage to ensure we are paying attention.

Whiteness?

We have talked of many different categories of chapters: the mystical chapters like "The Mast-Head", the comic chapters like "The Cabin Table", the encylopedic chapters like "Cetology", the dramatic chapters like "Enter Ahab; To Him, Stubb". There are two things about "The Whiteness of the Whale" that stand out for me.

First, this chapter fits into all of those categories but the dramatic; it is simultaneously mystical, comical, and encyclopedic. This sudden unity of strands in a single chapter is critical to the broader architecture of the book. Yes, there are elements that predominate: the mystical, here, it strikes me, dominates the tone of the language, even as comic and encyclopedic elements are worked in, and even as bit of dramatic language, Shakespearian in character if not dramatic in presentation, also bubbles to the top.

Secondly, the chapter comes to us right after we are told, in the prior chapter, "Moby-Dick", that the Whale is not actually or entirely white.

For, it was not so much his uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other Sperm Whales, but, as was elsewhere thrown out - a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump. These were his prominent features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him.

The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden gleamings.

Whiteness is an apperance; the reality is mottled, streaked, marbled, only partly and not fully white.

In fitting with the only partial whiteness of the Whale, this chapter itself, describing what the Whale is to Ishmael, seems intensely vaccilating even while increasingly emotionally intense. The chapter begins with Ishmael's focus on how "It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me", but then immediately launches into many positive conceptions of white, from marbles and pearls to royal connotations to mythical ones. The appallingness of white is but an introduction; Melville now graces us with the beauty and splendor of Whiteness.

He then transitions into "elusive" qualities and indeterminicies, and, in a staggeringly original moment, graces us with a massive footnote on the Albatross, a footnote which at once engages in a direct literary conversation on Coleridge and his symbols, an encylopedic dicussion of birds, and a mythical exposition on angels and Abraham, all of which is resolved in the mechanics of a capture and release of the bird. It is a grand moment of foreshadowing, yet one that works neatly into the story.

It is only after we work through the long and positive discourse on whiteness that the dread-inducing aspects of it arise, and the fundamental ambiguity of the color is explored. Look carefully at the chapter: you will find in it references and anticipations of many prior and later chapters, discussions that will resound as we move through mist or as we meet a Goney of another type.

A beautiful, simple chapter, yet one that pulls strands from the whole work together, weaving them into a more complex and multi-fibered yarn.

Of Cetology and Chaos

Much has been written about Cetology.

For example, there are some for whom Cetology is what it purports to be: a Cetological classification of whales based on a review of the literature and personal observation. See, for example, this discussion in Wikipedia, which neatly summarizes the Cetological classification among different books (e.g., Folio, Quarto, Duodecimal), and contrasts it to modern Cetology, which has over ninety categories of whales, far more than known by Ishmael.

Others, however, perceive the deeper import of Cetology. In CallmeIshmael, for example, a particularly melodic blog, we can see a reading of Cetology which focuses on the chapter's exceedingly random classifications of whales as a critique of racism and the random classification of people.

Yet others classify the chapter based on its relative length, and it is, of course, among the longest of chapters in Moby-Dick. These scholars often note Melville's painstaking efforts to do everything possible to accentuate the apparent length of the chapter, just as many an "usher"(*) knows how to make the most of the last five minutes of every hour.

Still others emphasize the role played by the knowledge imparted in this chapter and its utility in the narrative sections of the book, where the discussion frequently uses terms with some technical precision in the whaling industry. Confer, for example, Howard P. Vincent, The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick, p. 123.

Finally, there are those who view all cetological discussions, and all discussions on whaling in general, as "in essence metaphorical", comparing whales and in particular the whale to the condition of man. A fine example of this is found in J.A. Ward, once of Tulane University, in his "The Function of the Cetological Chapters in Moby-Dick", which first revealed this reading to a here-to-fore unsuspecting public in the May, 1956 issued of "American Literature".

I, however, would propose that we reject each of these approaches to Cetology, and instead focus simply on one small statement at the beginning of the chapter, where Ishmael tells us what he is doing:

It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed.

Now, usually, I too would not look for answers to great questions in so plain a statement, but, in this case, I would ask that you just humor me. Ishmael describes the whales as "chaos"; could he perhaps mean that they are, indeed, chaos? Chaos is often used in two ways: a collection of disorderly things, or, alternatively, the unformed matter at the beginning of the universe.

If the whales are a collection of disorderly things, perhaps what Ishmael is doing is trying to make order of them, that is, trying to find way to make the chaos make sense to him. Perhaps this is why he classifies based on, for example, size and commercial utility. Under this use of chaos, I might suggest that the classification speaks not to us about the whale, but about the classifier.

With respect to the other definition of chaos, the disordered welter and waste at the beginning of the universe (above is a NASA image of the congealing of matter after the big bang), what can we say of it other than that it is even more unknowable than the God or natural force that ordered it? Is not this chaos, of mythological and scientific reknown, the most puzzling thing of all, and thus the task of putting order to it very much a fictional rather than scientific undertaking, one that relates more to the crafting of myths than the examination of things?

Perhaps, what Melville is trying to do here is show Ishmael doing both things, that is, not just classifying but ordering chaos; but that would put Ishmael, or perhaps Melville, at the treadle of the loom, which is too presumptuous to be believed.

This is all, of course, conjecture on my part. Luckily, Ishmael will examine whales from many perspectives, not just this cetological one, and, perhaps, when we explore these creatures, and the White one in particular, from all angles, and in all ways, we shall gain some knowledge, useful or not, of them.

* Note that the word "usher", as used in Melville's etymology, references a then-obsolete and now even more so use of the word to mean an assistant teacher in a lower school; note further that footnoting this provision through a cross-reference to an etymology does for my discourse much what Melville's thirteen pages did for his Cetology.

A Random Thought or Two on Etymology

Like many a reader of Moby Dick, I'm really not sure what to make of the frontsmatter, even now, having had half a life or maybe even more (I shan't know until I'm done, of course) to contemplate the matter. Is the little section labeled "Etymology", followed by the much lengthier section "Extracts", just a way to give us a heads-up that what follows may be a bit odd? Are these sections ways of introducing to us the dry humor and tone, what with his consumptive usher and sub-sub librarian, knowing that in the absence of a huge red flag as to what passes as funny in Melville some may just miss the humor? How many of you chuckled or guffawed at the careful distinction between the Fegee form of "Pekee-Nuee-Nuee" and the Erromangoan* form of "Pehee-Nuee-Nuee"? Or are these beginnings integral parts of the book, the first of our myriad, diverse, and generally unsuccessful and quizzical attempts to figure the Whale?

While I do not know what they all mean, I can say that one thing that is evident is Melville's extreme care with the red pen. Let us look at this first page, Etymology, and at one entry on it, the entry for Webster's dictionary. Here is Melville's entry in the Etymology for Webster's, a book which may well have been in the homes of, and available for consultation by, most American readers of Moby Dick's first edition:

"WHALE. * * * Sw. and Dan. hval. This animal is named from roundness or rolling; for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted.

Melville focuses on the Swedish and Danish word from Webster's. Here is the full entry in Webster's for the etymology (excluding the actual definition):

WHALE, n. [Sax. hwal, hwæl; G. wallfisch, from wallen, to: stir agitate, or rove; D. walvisch; Sw. and Dan. hval. This animal is named from roundness, or from rolling; for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted; hvæller, to arch or vault, D. welven.]

Some of Melville's editorial omissions are supplanted by Melville's entry for Richardson's Dictionary:

WHALE. * * * It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. Wallen; A.A. Walw-ian, to roll, to wallow.

I know not exactly what Melville is doing here, but he's telling us half the story and setting up an argument between two etymologies where none exists. And he's getting me riled and argumentative before even introducing his first character (though I know he's likely gotten some others bored and confused).

What sort of dramatic tension is built up by this odd mix of humor, confusion and low dudgeon before the narrative even begins?


* Erromango, for those without intimate knowledge of the South Seas, is an Island that is now part of Vanatu, and lies about 500 miles due west of Fiji, with little but water in between.