Whale with an H: Melville Defines a Whale

October 25, 2024

Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.

Since we recently spent five weeks (which was not nearly enough!) on Moby Dick, the next few blogs will circle around some of the enigmas that we discussed.

While I enjoy the characters of Moby Dick, they aren’t the main focus of my interest. I understand that Moby Dick is technically a great adventure story, but for me it’s a dense philosophical treatise and that’s what drives me to read it over again. Melville breaks all convention by dedicating entire chapters to etymology or dissection and yet somehow those chapters form astoundingly poignant and beautiful messages. Perhaps his point is that beauty is in everything, but I think it’s probably a little more complicated than that.

The book begins with “Etymology” and “Extracts.” In “Etymology,” Melville clearly disdains ignorance. He prefaces the book with this quote from English writer Richard Hackluyt: “‘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.’” Melville seems to say that all attempts at defining the whale have previously led to naught, but I’m not convinced that he thinks he’ll do any better. He then spells the word for whale in thirteen different languages demonstrating that there is knowledge simply in names. The given dictionary definition basically reads: “This animal is named from roundness or rolling.” So our introduction to Moby Dick tells us that whales roll and the letter h carries significance. The reader’s task is to separate out misinformation from information, to investigate the true nature of the whale. The reader’s task is to find truth.

“Extracts” continues in the same vein. Melville cites a variety of texts, both non-fiction and fiction. He includes sources such as the Bible, Cooke’s Voyages, Shakespeare, Pilgrim’s Progress, Thomas Jefferson, etc. After reading the entire collection of quotes, I have increased my definition from something that rolls to a fish of great mass. Because the terms whale and leviathan are interchangeable, I also notice how whales have been used to captivate the human imagination and have evolved from fish to metaphor. Though the reader still has no true idea of what one is, we realize that whales easily fit into imaginary metaphors as can be demonstrated by Hobbes’ Leviathan alone.

The lack of an appropriate understanding of our subject seems to be an injustice, layered upon the unjust treatment of whalers in general. On one hand, the entire novel attempts to rectify shoddy definitions, but on the other, it aspires to valorize and dignify the whaling industry. Beginning with definitions seems like a deceptively easy task, but the harder we search for the story’s antagonist the more we realize the human difficulty in comprehending something as other as a whale. Melville points this out at the beginning of “Extracts.” He writes: “[Y]ou must not, in every case, at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology.” Not only does he throw out most of these superficial associations of the whale, but Melville leads us on a blind chase in which we do not glimpse a whale until Chapter 48. And Moby Dick himself won’t arrive until much later.

How then are we to approach the whale? Melville’s answer seems to be: from all sides. Though I have more than one favorite chapter, and Melville constantly surprises me with such things as comparing the heads of whales as if they were Kant and Locke (chapter 73), he also offers in-depth legal knowledge. Chapter 90, “Heads or Tails,” describes the absurdity of the law as it tries to interact with reality. The chapter is prefaced with a legal statement (written in Latin) from the 13^th century which translates to: “The king owns the head and the queen owns the tail.” Melville clarifies:

“Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with the context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast of that land, the King, as Honorary Grand Harpooner, must have the head, and the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail – a division which, in the whale, is much like halving an apple; there is no immediate remainder.”

In other words, the royalty arbitrarily claim rights to the entirety of the catch. He continues:

“But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A reason for that, ye lawyers?

“In his treaties on ‘Queen’s Gold,’ or Queen-pinmoney, an old King’s Bench author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth: ‘Ye tail is ye Queen’s, that ye Queen’s wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone.’ Now this was written at a time when the black limber bone of the Greenland or Right Whale was largely used in ladies’ bodices. But this same bone is not in the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be presented with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here.

There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers – the whale and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations, and nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown’s ordinary revenue. I know not that any other author has hinted of the matter; but by inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the same way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic head peculiar to that fish, which symbolically regarded, may possibly be humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus there seems a reason in all things.”

This chapter ridicules not only British royalty and legal systems in general, but the ignorance of the educated. Throughout the novel, Melville asks what it means to be educated. Or at the very least, he questions the reasons for speaking about things which you have no real knowledge of. In Moby Dick, the reader must try to experience whaling, must try to see the whale in the sea, at sea, in all its various dispositions. The reader must even experience the dissection of a whale. He puts the premise to the test: can one gain knowledge by reading alone? Do we learn truths about whales through the story of Moby Dick?

With Melville’s assistance, we will further explore this profound question on next week’s blog.

Photo credit: Shutterstock/ David Havel