Moby-Dick (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (7 page)

When published,
Moby-Dick
received a good many reviews favorable in whole or in part as well as some dismissive ones, and brief approving accounts continued to be published from time to time into the next century. But it is interesting to ask why the great attention devoted to the novel and to Melville in general developed in the 1920s. Source studies have shown that Melville drew heavily on the popular literature of his day and that his readers found in the book much that was familiar to them; but this only makes more interesting the question about the slow general recognition of a great masterpiece.

This came about in part because the study of American literature was by then beginning to be respectable in university English departments, but it is no accident that the “rediscovery” of Melville coincided with the new experimentalism in all the arts in the years before and around 1920. The innovative work of artists like Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot made fresh demands on methods of interpretations. Change was in the air; Joyce’s
Ulysses
appeared the year following Weaver’s study. In literary study there began to be less emphasis on historical context, and more attention to the character of a writer’s rhetoric, the suggestiveness of symbolic structures, and the apparent fragmentation of traditional patterns of organization. When this kind of interest was given to
Moby-Dick
it stood up to every scrutiny that the period we call modernism could bring. It was not that Melville and his major novel were “before their time”—they were very much part of it—but that certain kinds of literature came to be examined in somewhat different ways.

Since that time, a large body of historical and critical work has enabled us to understand Melville much better than was possible more than eighty years ago, much less a century and a half ago when
Moby-Dick
appeared. This inquiry shows no sign of diminishing in our day, testimony to the continuing fascination he holds for us. As always with the greatest works, the novel is so many-sided that over time it mirrors back the shifting concerns of those who read it, and that is the definition of a classic.

 

Carl F. Hovde
is Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at Columbia University, where he served as Dean of the College from 1968 to 1972. He has also taught in Brazil, Germany, and Sweden. Specializing in American literature, he was principal editor of Henry D. Thoreau’s
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
for the Princeton University Press, and has been particularly concerned with the implications of high rhetoric in such figures as Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and William Faulkner.

IN TOKEN

OF MY ADMIRATION FOR HIS GENIUS THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED TO

 

 

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
¹

[The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.]

“While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.”

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

“WHALE. * * * It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger.
Wallen
; A.S.
Walw-ian
, to roll, to wallow.”
Richardson’s Dictionary.

[It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from it. As touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a glancing bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own.

So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong; but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness—Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless! Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together—there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses!]

“And God created great whales.”

“Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the deep to be hoary.”

“Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.”

“There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to play therein.”

“In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword, shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.”

“And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this monster’s mouth, be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all incontinently that foul great swallow of his, and perisheth in the bottomless gulf of his paunch.”

“The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are: among which the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balænæ, take up as much in length as four acres or arpens of land.”

“Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a great many Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared. Among the former, one was of a most monstrous size. * * This came towards us, open-mouthed, raising the waves on all sides, and beating the sea before him into a foam.”

“He visited this country also with a view of catching horse-whales, which had bones of very great value for their teeth, of which he brought some to the king. * * * The best whales were catched in his own country, of which some were forty-eight, some fifty yards long. He said that he was one of six who had killed sixty in two days.”

“And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that enter into the dreadful gulf of this monster’s (whale’s) mouth, are immediately lost and swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in great security, and there sleeps.”

MONTAIGNE.—
Apology for Raimond Sebond.

“Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if it is not Leviathan described by the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job.”

“This whale’s liver was two cart-loads.”

“The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling pan.”

“Touching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have received nothing certain. They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an incredible quantity of oil will be extracted out of one whale.”

“The sovereignest thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward bruise.”

“Very like a whale.”

“Which to recure, no skill of leach’s art
Mote him availle, but to returne againe
To his wound’s worker, that with lovely dart,
Dinting his breast, had bred his restless paine,
Like as the wounded whale to shore flies from the maine.”

“Immense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful calm trouble the ocean till it boil.”

“What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned Hofmannus in his work of thirty years, saith plainly,
Nescio quid sit
.”

“Like Spencer’s Talus with his iron flail He threatens ruin with his ponderous tail.

Their fixed jav’lins in his side he wears,
And on his back a grove of pikes appears.”

“By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or State—(in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man.”

“Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a sprat in the mouth of a whale.”

“That sea beast
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean stream.”

___ “There Leviathan,
Hugest of living creatures, on the deep
Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims,
And seems a moving land; and at his gills
Draws in, and at his trunk spouts out a sea.”

“The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of oil swimming in them.”

“So close behind some promontory lie
The huge Leviathans to attend their prey,
And give no chace, but swallow in the fry,
Which through their gaping jaws mistake the way.”

“While the whale is floating, at the stern of the ship, they cut off his head, and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come; but it will be aground in twelve or thirteen foot water.”

“In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in wantonness fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which nature has placed on their shoulders.

“Here they saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced to proceed with a great deal of caution for fear they should run their ship upon them.”

“We set sail from the Elbe, wind N. E. in the ship called The Jonas-in-the-Whale. * * *

Some say the whale can’t open his mouth, but that is a fable. * * *
They frequently climb up the masts to see whether they can see a
whale, for the first discoverer has a ducat for his pains. * * *