“But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”
–Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 32, “Cetology”
*
I can’t remember the first time I read Moby Dick. Most people encounter this book in a class, usually on American Literature, or on The Novel. They read it for its symbolism; for its eerie evocation of American nationalism, on the cusp of Civil War; for its just barely—not even!—sublimated homoeroticism. They read it—or are told to read it—as a Modernist novel written half a century before the first glimmerings of “Modernism” as a movement in art and literature.
And they hate it. At least, many of them hate it, forced to plow through acres of narrative in which nothing much happens. The sailors wait and watch, and we wait and watch, as the whales harvest their oceanic fields: “As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea” (chapter, 58, “Brit”). For the vast majority of this novel, we are at sea; sometimes we’re up in the Crow’s Nest, looking out on billows upon billows of foamy water. Sometimes the narrator is telling us about each of the many parts of the ship or giving us a minutely detailed account of the whale’s anatomy. For those that like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing that they like; for those forced to read the novel in a classroom, under constraint, not so much.
These are the very moments of the book that haunt me. Melville describes being at the top of the mast, waiting, waiting, waiting, for the distant watery spout that signals the presence—the distant presence—of whales. “Perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon,” he writes, “but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul” (chapter 35, “The Mast-Head”). Watch out! You might fall in; you might drown in this bottomless blueness.
*
I have read (and loved to read) Moby Dick for a long time: I can’t remember my first time reading it, so completely is it layered in my memory. The book always feels different, even while it is also comfortingly familiar. Sometimes I read large parts of the book in a single sitting; one spring, I read tiny bits of it, day by day, over three months. This wasn’t a purposeful decision: I just found myself drawing out the reading for as long as I possibly could. I still have no idea why.
The book keeps time for me, measuring out the different turning points in my own experience. The earliest memory I have of Moby Dick is mixed up with another book I read as a child, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio. This is not the Pinocchio of the Disney movie: it’s a very dark story, about childhood and loss, and hunger, and violence. And it includes a whale; this led me to the biblical story of Jonah, which I was reading during the same period, as a Jehovah’s Witness; and these two stories—somehow—led me to Moby Dick.
This community of readers stretches out over time, linking those who have loved this book’s queer spoutings in the past and those who will love them in the future, all of those readers who feel certain that Melville is speaking to them alone.My earliest memory of actually reading Moby Dick, where I know which pages absorbed me, consists of its first lines—not, I hasten to add, the words that many people think are the novel’s first, “Call me Ishmael,” but the pages that come before, featuring etymologies and short extracts from a wide range of books, from the Bible to Milton’s Paradise Lost, offering information—scattered scraps of knowledge, fragile leaves of the Sibyl—about the whale. This encyclopedic impulse rang a bell within me: there really was order just beneath the surface in this apparently chaotic world!
*
Time is a way of keeping track of things, of making order. You can be on time; you can allot the right amount of time; you can time events to be synchronous, or to avoid overlap. This kind of time does not appear in Moby Dick. Time expands and contracts, so that long periods go by in the novel where nothing happens—we wait, and look at the horizon, and look down, and daydream—and then suddenly we lurch into action. Time is not the principle of order in this book; it is a manifestation of chaos. Instead, the principle of order in Moby Dick is that of the encyclopedia, foreshadowed in the book’s first pages and then bursting forth exuberantly in the classification and the anatomy of the whale.
Encyclopedism promises that there is a system of order, but it doesn’t necessarily provide the reassurance of completeness and harmony you might expect. Melville lays this out, both the promise of completeness and its utter unattainability, in his magnificent chapter 32, “Cetology.” He divides and classifies the various species of whale, drawing upon a wide range of sources, both written and oral, in many languages. The heterogeneity of his sources is anticipated in the opening of Moby Dick, the pages I first fell in love with, from “Extracts” about the whale ranging from Genesis and Job to Owen Chase’s account of the wreck of the whaleship “Essex” and what Melville calls “whale songs” from Nantucket. These “Extracts” are in turn set up by a section on “Etymology” that names the whale in a spectrum of tongues, from “Anglo-Saxon” to “Fegee.”
The interplay of multiplicity and unity, and the role of systems of ordering, and the promise of capacious completeness, are all right there from the book’s first moments. This aspect of Moby Dick is like the encyclopedia—both the red-bound volumes of the children’s Encyclopedia Britannica that I so loved to read at that time, and the medieval encyclopedias that I would research as an adult. The encyclopedia offers a synoptic overview of everything: All The Things. The difference is that, in Melville, all the things are focused through the singular lens of the white whale.
The narrator classifies the whale by magnitude and form into folio, octavo, and duodecimo whales, each class epitomized by a particular species: namely, the folio Sperm Whale; the octavo Grampus; the duodecimo Porpoise. Each class is made up of several species—so, for example, among the folio whales, we find the sperm, the right, the fin-back, the hump-back, the razor-back, and the sulphur-bottom. Yet this system, however graceful, is not complete; it is open-ended, prepared to accommodate new species and, perhaps, some surprises. Melville promises that, “If any of the following whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked, then he can readily be incorporated into this System, according to his Folio, Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:—The Bottle-Nose Whale; the Junk Whale; the Pudding-Headed Whale; the Cape Whale; the Leading Whale; the Cannon Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Coppered Whale; the Elephant Whale; the Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale; &c.” Then he closes with the architectural metaphor that appears at the head of this little essay, which reiterates and emphasizes his opening disclaimer: “I am an architect, not a builder.”
What does this mean, to be the architect and not the builder? It is to offer the idea, the plan, the outline, but not the finished object itself. Melville says, “I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty.” What he will provide instead is an “essay,” in the literal sense of the term, an attempt. As Melville puts it, in closing the chapter, “My object here is simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder.”
Melville again dangles before us the tempting allure of capacious completeness in his chapter 68, “The Blanket.” This is one of a series of chapters that explore the encyclopedic impulse along another axis: not the classification of all whales, but the body of the individual whale. Every part of its anatomy is explicated—head, heart, genitals—until we get to the “blanket,” the surface or “integument” of the whale. Like the many subspecies united under the single name of “whale,” this apparently singular covering also proves to be multiple in nature, with the “thick walls” of the whale being made up not only of “blubber” or “skin,” but also an extremely delicate and fine translucent layer that is like “isinglass” (thin sheets of the mineral mica). This integument can be seen through, but imperfectly. The integument of the blubber, by contrast, has another marvelous property: when melted in the boiling hot “try-pots,” it becomes “a lake of liquid,” solid matter that shifts its nature.
This union of capaciousness with melting incoherence is strangely similar to the 13th-century Medieval Latin encyclopedia of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, which shares several features with Melville’s encyclopedic novel: the open-ended quality of the theory of everything; a fascination with things that are mutable or open to transformation; and emphasis on “virtue,” the transformative power, or quickening agent of life, that runs through all of the natural world. I’ll just touch on the first of these: open-endedness. As we’ve seen, Melville’s system of Cetology, laid out in chapter 32 of Moby Dick, is open to accommodate additional, unexpected, species of whale. A similar combination of capaciousness and open-endedness appears in Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (“On the Properties of Things”).
The encyclopedia provides a place for everything: sections on God, angels, the soul; human physiology and anatomy; the life cycle, illness and disease; earth and the planets; time; matter and form; birds, fish, stones, plants, animals—all the things. There is a place for everything, in this system; and there is even a place for the things that don’t fit. In Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum, this is book 19, the final book. The medieval encyclopedia’s table of contents tells us that the topic of book 19 is accidental qualities (as opposed to essentials): that is, color, scent, flavor, things that are liquid or borne on the air. But what we find there isn’t just accidental qualities, but a grab bag of all the things that can’t quite be categorized: musical notes; number, weight, and measure; wax, honey, whey and butter, things that change from solid to liquid and back again.
I won’t go deeper into the points of comparison that link Moby Dick to this medieval encyclopedic text, though there is so much to say! About the whale’s blubber, and the encyclopedist’s wax; about the vivifying power of “sperm” described in the chapter “The Try-Works” and the multiple meditations on eggs found in Bartholomaeus’s book 19. What I’ve tried to do here instead is to open up my own private fascination with Moby Dick—at least one aspect of that fascination, the encyclopedic. I could as easily have told you all about the passages on the blueness of the sky and sea, or the whiteness of the whale, or the melancholy of the narrator, each of which opens out into an emotional landscape that is at once individual and universal. I could expound that landscape in philosophical and theological terms, especially the apophatic or negative theology of Marguerite Porete or Meister Eckhart. But that, like an account of the encyclopedism of Moby Dick, would be private, idiosyncratic, and arcane—except for those readers who are similarly captivated by these aspects of the novel. I’m sure that each of us feels that we are alone in this.
*
Alone, and yet not alone. As readers, we inhabit a peculiar place in time, both anchored in our own time and also adrift within the time of the book; moreover, we are linked to the time of all those who have also entered into the temporal stream of the book, or who will enter into it at some future point. I’m always faintly surprised whenever I read one of the many articles that avow the writer’s love for Moby Dick, because even though I know that the world is full of fans of this novel, I keep imagining that the book is for me alone. I can’t believe that anyone else is absorbed by the same strange details that I am, although I know that they must be. They too love the encyclopedism, or the oceanic landscape, or the codicological metaphor that sees different types of whale as different types of book format. I feel alone in my love for this book, and yet I know that I am not alone. This community of readers stretches out over time, linking those who have loved this book’s queer spoutings in the past and those who will love them in the future, all of those readers who feel certain that Melville is speaking to them alone, whether in 1851 or 1951 or 2019.
My earliest memory of actually reading Moby Dick, where I know which pages absorbed me, consists of its first lines.This paradox—the fact that reading is both intensely private and completely shared—has been the focus of my thinking over the last year or two, expressed in two ways: a collection of essays titled How We Read: Tales, Fury, Nothing, Sound (punctum, 2019), and a podcast on literature titled “The Spouter-Inn.” In How We Read, 13 writers recount their personal trajectories of reading, in ways that highlight their shared points of experience. (The exquisite opening essay of this collection, contributed by Irina Dumitrescu, was recently reprinted by Longreads.) Many of the essays are deeply personal; each one opens up the rich interiority of readerly experience, in ways that evoke a sense of familiarity and kinship. Reading is deeply private, yet it is also in some sense profoundly communal.
In “The Spouter-Inn,” Chris Piuma and I have conversations about literature. Each episode centers on one literary work, often a “great book,” by which we mean one of two things: a book that is canonical, long recognized as important and influential (Homer! Dante! Shakespeare!), or a book that one of us really loves. Some of our book choices fit both of these categories, and we talk about the suppositions and biases that lead to a book being labeled “great”; we also talk about our affective response, what makes the book seem “great”—or at least important, beautiful, meaningful—to us. What time do we inhabit, when we read this book? What do we share? The collection and the podcast do related work, but through two distinctly different means: the podcast is aural rather than written; and it is iterative—unfolding step by step, over an extended period of time—rather than singular. But both works are part of a single project: to revive the love of reading, and to remind readers—and hearers—of its many pleasures.
It’s not a coincidence that the podcast takes its name from a chapter, and a location, in Moby Dick. The Spouter-Inn, in Melville’s novel, is a “public house,” a bar where people eat and drink and, if they ask the landlord in time, get a bed for the night. Ishmael is an unexpected guest, and so can only be accommodated in a shared room. There, he meets Queequeg, who will become his unexpected companion, his intimate partner, his other self. There so much to say about this encounter, and the doors it opens.
This moment in time, this bicentennial date, marking the 200th anniversary of Melville’s birth, feels to me like a dark shadow of another bicentennial date: 1776. I was eleven that year, old enough to remember the celebration of “America’s birthday”—and soon would be old enough to discover Moby Dick, along with its oceanic cousins in Pinocchio and the book of Jonah. This bicentennial feels dark perhaps because it reminds us how much we remain tethered to the unresolved business of the 19th century. Melville, at 200, opens a door for his readers that looks back to the tumultuous decades before the Civil War, and also looks forward into our own 21st-century moment.
Unlike the bicentennial of 1976, Melville’s 200th birthday offers a much bleaker retrospective glimpse—a piece of isinglass, an integumental lens—of our American past, and into our American future. What will we make of it? Who are we, together? And what are we, alone? Happy Birthday, Herman Melville, and thank you so much for the book. I loved it.
