Hello cetologists. This week we’ll be reading chapters XXVI – XXXII, comprising ‘Knights and Squires’ (meeting the crew), ‘Knights and Squires’ (meeting more crew), ‘Ahab’ (a man and his leg), ‘Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb’ (dreams of sleep), ‘The Pipe’ (hot water), ‘Queen Mab’ (nursing a bruise), and ‘Cetology’ (a concept of an idea).

This week comprised a sequence of catalogues, and we began with an account of the men on deck. By way of a sort of synecdoche of the crew at large, Melville introduces us to three mates first, and then three harpooners. Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask are our ‘Knights and Squires,’ which is to say they are white, minded, capital-A Americans who represent between them the major ports of call–Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket–as well as the complete range of attitudes to whaling: Starbuck has been around the block so many times the sun has baked him hard as a biscuit, and he is no “crusader after perils” but a pragmatic and “careful” killer; Stubb is “happy-go-lucky”, an “easy-going, unfearing man” whose pipe prevents his succumbing to the melancholy of the others; Flask, finally, has nothing but contempt for “the wondrous whale”, who is in “his poor opinion is […] but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat, requiring only a little circumvention and some small application of time and trouble in order to kill and boil”. Out of many views, one crew.

The narrator speaks highly of these “selectest chapions from the kingly commons”, a paradoxical construction which harks back to the ‘royal salads’ in the last section. Our harpooners put the lie to the so-called democratic spirit of the mates, however. Where the white men “liberally provide the brains” on the ship, the harpooners are said to “supply the muscles” only. Interestingly, with them we get a similar spectrum of origin: Queequeg the Islander, Tashtego the native (whose tribes once “scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main”), and Daggoo the “gigantic, coal-black negro-savage,” before whom the tiny master Flask stands like a “white flag come to beg truce of a fortress.” We like them all.

In ‘Ahab’ we meet the man properly at last and he is cast as a heretic from the get-go when the narrator describes him looking “like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has ovverunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them.” Like Queequeg’s skin in the earlier chapters, Ahab’s body is also the subject of scrutiny among the sailors, and he is described here as a branded man, marked by some terrible scar like an old oak cleft by lightning. Already associated with Milton in the earlier section, Ahab here is quite smitten by God, a man who dreams at night of hell so “frightful hot” he cooks his own pillow. We wonder what he did to anger god so, and whether he constitutes one of Ishmael’s ‘God-fugitives’. Ahab may be part-whale, with his beautiful ivory (and very white) whalebone leg, but the ship itself becomes an extension of his body when he clicks his leg into place in holes made on the deck for the purpose. The crew, then, are there to be Ahab’s many eyes, as they look out for the “white one” on the horizon.

Across ‘Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb’, ‘The Pipe,’ and ‘Queen Mab,’ Stubb reels from the insult Ahab hurls at him (along with a whole zoo of animals: he calls him a dog, “ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass”). Yet perhaps an insult from Ahab, the “Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans,” is worth a penny, if it means being noticed by such a man?

The long chapter ‘Cetology’ is enormous fun. It begins with a description of the “unshored, harborless immensities” of the ocean, but the line also speaks to a metaphorical, and perhaps even greater infinity–the ignorance at the edge of knowledge, chaos itself, the things we don’t know we don’t know–which the book, in the shape of The Whale, attempts to grapple with. The section reminded us of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (1942) in which animals are organised into peculiar categories:

1. those that belong to the Emperor,
2. those included in the present classification,
3. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush.
4. etc.

Stephen Jay Gould famously said that there is no such thing as a fish: any such category is a fiction that human beings put upon the natural world. Melville’s system is metafictional, self-aware, and well-aware of its limitations, and it works by picking a somewhat arbitrary definition (“a spouting fish with a horiztonal tail”) and running with it, arranging the whales who fit into this sentence from the greatest (in size, in value, in commonness) to the least great, using an appropriately bookish metaphor to divide them: the Folio Whales, the Octavo Whales, and the Duodecimo Whales. Rather intriguingly, the encyclopedic cetology chapter now has its own Wikipedia page, which details where Melville went wrong: we would now call the sulphur-bottom whale the blue whale, for example, though Melville lumps the latter into the long list of named whales which he doubts the reality of. “I omit them as altogether obsolte,” he says, and “can hardly help suspecting them for mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing.” This very Melvillian allusion to Shakespeare, as well as its anticipation of Faulkner, makes this chapter feel very contemporary indeed: encyclopedic, untrustworthy, oddly postmodern, and wholly his.

Phrases of the Week:

“Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair”

“I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans”

Hello Nantucketers. This week we will read Chapters XII – XVI, comprising ‘Biographical’ (Queequeg’s princely history), ‘Wheelbarrow’ (Queequeg earns a crew’s respect), ‘Nantucket’ (a mere “elbow of sand”), ‘Chowder’ (a world of cod), and ‘The Ship’ (in which we meet the Pequod and her captains!).

We begin this week with an account of Queequeg’s history, when in his youth in Rokovoko, the sight of Christendom and its extraordinary ships unlocked a familiar water-yearning in our “new-hatched savage.” Something like a slave in reverse, Queequeg went with “naked wrists” to try and catch a ship which would sooner have thrown him back overboard. Here and in the next chapters Queequeg proves his mettle by way of various courageous and physical feats, but his merit- is at odds somewhat with the -ocracy in which he finds himself: Melville undercuts his quest to the greener side with the realisation that “it’s a wicked world in all meridians,” and there may be no escaping that, especially if Ishmael knows more than he is saying when he alludes to Queequeg’s “last long dive.”

In ‘Wheelbarrow’ Melville pairs one cultural faux pas with another, unsettling once again our sense of the ‘civilised’ and the ‘cannibal’, which terms have been treated like antonyms throughout, albeit increasingly wobbly ones. Ishmael’s trip in the little ship ‘the Moss’ reads like another nod to Melville’s essay on Hawthorne; if the latter took the former to Shakespearean heights, ‘the Moss’ takes Ishmael away from the “turnpike earth” to the “magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records.” Perhaps the sea defies description (how big would the novel The Sea have to be?), or perhaps it is only the means to an end: like the oysters in the previous section which “observe the sun through the water, thinking that thick water the thinnest of air,” Ishmael’s real interest seems to be in the life and death it holds under its surface, the whales of course and all that cod. Then again, maybe there’s some message in the medium…

Nantucket is a lonely patch of land lacking even weeds, but this works only to emphasise the extraordinary enormity of its watery empire which stretches over “two thirds of this terraqueous globe.” The imperialism in this boast is obvious, but it is tempered (a little) by the fact that the Nantucketers conquer the deep, not the shallows and the people who live there. From the perspective of the “walruses and whales” under their “pillows,” however, it must seem a terrible empire indeed. The Pequod itself is described as “a cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies.” That’s civilisation for you.

Captains Bildad and Peleg are two “Quakers with a vengeance” who form an amusing double-act with their thees, their thous, and their short thrift, and it is thanks to them that we get our first descriptions of Captain Ahab. And what a picture we’re getting. If “all mortal greatness is but disease,” it seems significant that Ahab is off-stage, “a sort of sick,” his arrival delayed. If the whale is the “mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood,” Ahab also seems to have emerged straight out of Genesis or Milton: “a grand, ungodly, god-like man” who is “used to deeper wonders than the waves,” who has “fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales.” We wonder what on earth that means…

Phrases of the Week:

“I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle.”

“Thy lungs are a sort of soft.”