Hester Blum has an OUPBlog piece on the oddness of the language of Moby-Dick:
There are a lot of peculiar phrases in Moby-Dick. My new introduction to the second Oxford World’s Classics edition of Herman Melville’s novel highlights the startling weirdness of the book, both in its literary form and its language. Weirdness extends beyond strangeness: weirdness also invokes enchantment, fate, curiosity, and the supernatural. In other words, when I say that Moby-Dick is weird I mean that in the best imaginable way. The novel’s weirdness does not subvert its monumentalism (nor its monumental reputation!) but serves as a sly sidelight on Moby-Dick’s ambitious attempts to create meaning. […]
In what follows I share some more of the most delightfully weird phrases or descriptors in the novel, in rough categories. First is the playfully, animalistically weird:
• “It tasted something as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros [Louis VI] might have tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison season”
• “anonymous babies”
• “a sort of badger-haired old merman”
• “an eruption of bears”
• “immaculate manliness”
• “the coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs”
• “how I wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the forecastle”
• “that unaccountable cone” [the whale’s penis]
Tnere’s more at the link, including a list of Melville’s “baroque adverbs”: wastingly, suckingly, rivallingly, inspectingly, and the link. I posted on Moby-Dick and its language back in 2016 (1, 2).
A lot of the (unfamiliar to some) language is seaman’s/whaler’s argot.
“a sort of badger-haired old merman”
What’s supposed to be weird there? — presuming we allow mermen in our bestiary.
What does a “heart-stricken moose” sound like when it “sob[s]”?
Large beast known to bellow across mountains: entirely reasonable question/metaphor.
I don’t find the language any more odd than in Rabelais (“when he sneezed, it was buckets of mustard”) or in Tristram Shandy. I suppose OUP has to fill column-inches.
And Season’s Greetings to all.
“that unaccountable cone” [the whale’s penis]
I think you need only check wikipedia
Hence “unaccountable”.
Has Blum ever been to sea? Or even to Sea World?
Blum appears to be recycling this sobbing moose meme.
Also has recycled “unaccountable”.
outsized weirdness of this image, [the moose]
Well it’s friggin’ literature, not an auditor’s report. Sheesh!
The weirdness is part of what makes Moby-Dick enjoyable, but I say that as someone who does not really see a ton of depth in the novel. In my high school American Literature class, we didn’t read Moby-Dick, only some shorter pieces by Melville. However, the class textbook did have a brief discussion of the novel and its significance. I remember that it said that the narrative could be read at three levels: as the story of the fateful voyage of a whaling ship, as the tale of a man’s obsession with vengeance, or as a sensitive exploration of mankind’s relationship with nature. However, when I read Moby-Dick, I was surprised how little of the book is about the second and third topics on that list. The story of Ahab’s quest for revenge comprises a relatively small portion of the plot, and there are only occasional gestures toward the question of how humanity interacts with the natural world. To me, Moby-Dick is mostly a compelling narrative telling of a particular setting and the kind of individuals peopling it. Many of the characters—including the ones central to the drama—are relatively flat, with only one or two traits that basically define their entire characters. In these respects, Moby-Dick seems quite a bit like The Good Earth, or adult versions of the “regional” works of Lois Lenski, such as Strawberry Girl.
wastingly, suckingly–I do not think this is weird for late 19th C; you can find examples in the British Newspaper Archive. What is so different about these to, say, touchingly or tellingly?
I’ve been wondering for quite a long time: just what does the name of the whale, Moby-Dick,
mean?
The uber-weird thing about Moby-Dick, to a modern reader, is that it has so many chapters that seem to be purely travelogue, scientific discourse, explanations of all the elements of the art of whaling, right down to their dissection and processing, and so forth. All that seems unnecessary, or at least overly detailed, to us, because they don’t particularly advance the plot, which is what we’re used to. But one reason they are there is that the average 19th century reader was not likely to know much about whales and whaling. This kind of explicatory novel style was typical of Melville (another example is the way he lays out the workings of a battleship and its crew in White-Jacket), but was also used by others, including much later in 1897, Kipling, in his nautical classic Captains Courageous. But now, it seems weird. Can we imagine Hemingway expanding The Old Man and the Sea with chapters about the biology of marlins and sharks or the construction of the old man’s skiff?
Years after I’d read Moby Dick (and Bartleby, and Billy Budd, and Benito Cereno) I learned that Melville had a second career – even more unsuccessful than his career as a novelist – as a poet. I’ve read a sampling of his poetry and, although the Library of America thinks it’s worthy of a volume and it’s been said that he makes up a triumvirate with Dickinson and Whitman as the greatest 19th c American poets, IMHO the poetry is dreadful. But that’s neither here nor there. The relevant point is that it’s so earnest! And the emotions and values are so conventional!
For example, “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander” (he wrote a lot of poetry about the Civil War) begins, “Ay, man is manly,” and you think, we’re about to get some sardonic commentary, aren’t we? But no! He means it! “Nothing can lift the heart of man/Like manhood in a fellow-man.”
And this is troubling. I’d thought of Melville as full of irony and mordant humor, sometimes inscrutable, always questioning, distancing – that he was as deep as his whale.
For years I’ve been afraid to reread the novels. Will what appeared to be oceanic depths turn out to be teaspoons? Or did whatever happened that caused him to turn to poetry also drain him of everything that make the novels worth reading?
And as for his weird word choices and turns of phrase – are these uttered with a slight smile and a knowingly raised eyebrow – or are they the sincere and hapless efforts of an autodidact, and meant to be taken straight?
You mean like The Eye of Argon?
or are they the sincere and hapless efforts of an autodidact, and meant to be taken straight?
That’s how M-D registers with me. It is the reason I could never read more than a few pages of it (I tried again every decade or so). Life is too short to spend time reading things I don’t like, merely in order to gripe knowingly about them when finished.
I found Moby-Dick to be hilarious and exciting. It’s the excited spirit of the writer that comes through, and also his fundamental oddness.
@iakon: There was an actual white sperm whale bull named “Mocha Dick,” after Mocha Island where he was supposedly first spotted. Besides being white, he was also supposed to be very large, powerful, and crafty. He was harpooned many times, but he was not killed until 1838, decades after his last sighting. Along with the 1820 sinking of the Essex by a whale, the published tale of Mocha Dick was one of Melville’s historical inspirations.
That doesn’t explain where “Moby” came from though. Maybe to Melville “Mocha” just sounded like a nonsense word, so he chose another similar-sounding one. Of course, by happenstance, mocha has become an everyday English word, through the Island’s connection with coffee, and then as a color. In fact, seeing the name “Mocha Dick” today, and knowing he was an unusually colored whale, one might guess that he was brownish, not white.
Of course, by happenstance, mocha has become an everyday English word, through the Island’s connection with coffee, and then as a color.
What connection with coffee? The name of the island is a Spanish word, pronounced [ˈmotʃa], and has nothing to do with the port in Yemen whence the coffee gets its name. We discussed the issue back in 2006.
So I finally looked it up, and am quite disappointed that al-Muḫā (the city and thence the coffee) ended up with ch in English but with kk in German.
I imagine mocha with a ch dates to the spread of Italian-style coffee to anglophone countries, or to the Italian occupation of East Africa.
@languagehat: My mistake! Not having seen that 2006 thread and been disabused, I thought the coffee term was related to the island.
That would have produced c or cc (> German kk, always a transcription of foreign cc), but not ch in the absence of a following front vowel.
Right. That was duh of me. So ch as in loch.
So, not a very satisfactory meaning for the name. Relatedly, perhaps, can anyone recall if Melville mentioned a whale’s penis-bone?
can anyone recall if Melville mentioned a whale’s penis-bone?
Cetaceans do not have a baculum.
Here is the chapter dealing with the whale’s penis. Here is commentary on that chapter.
I can’t remember if any mention is made of the whale’s pelvic bone.
That commentary is great:
D. H. Lawrence knew: Go read ‘Whales Weep Not!’
It’s interesting that Melville, while he drew extensively on his personal experience on a merchant seaman and whaler, also included a substantial amount of seafaring folklore in Moby-Dick. For example, it is unlikely that he ever encountered a giant squid, and his description of the creature in the novel is lacking in several respects (for example, the animal’s color). His descriptions of eating parts of the whale also draws on things that Melville had merely heard tell of, not that he had experienced himself. To some extent, he admits this:
However, I am also suspicious of some of his other descriptions—as of Stubb’s whale steak and whale brain pudding. Melville knows that whale muscle is extremely tough (something I have also heard from people who lived in Japan in the 1940s through 1960s, when whale nuggets were considered practically the lowest form of meat). The toughness and lack of intramuscular fat was indeed probably why sailors did not gorge themselves on whale meat after a kill; if whale steaks were any good, the sailors would presumably have been clamoring for them when they were available, as a change from salt fish and ship’s biscuits. Yet in the story, the whale steak gets overcooked, which makes it too tender for Stubb’s liking; admittedly, the whole scene is a comic one, but it doesn’t ring true to me at all.
I’ve been wondering for quite a long time: just what does the name of the whale, Moby-Dick, mean?
This reminds me of one weirdness of the book, that, for whatever reason, has always stuck with me.
As I recall, there is a discussion in the book on the naming of whales, which describes how some other notorious whales got their names. Given this discussion, the fact that the meaning/origin of the name Moby Dick is never once mentioned is an extremely conspicuous omission.
I know of that era’s fondness for hyphens, but is the one in “Moby-Dick” merely decorative? Would the novel-naming conventions of that time allow for a semantically distinct “Moby Dick”?
@Y: It’s not known for sure, but there is a reasonable chance that the hyphen in the title was simply an error. The original name of the novel was The Whale, when it was published in England. And in the text, the title character’s name is simply “Moby Dick.” The hyphen only appears (and only in the title) when the book was re-edited and republished in America.
As a impecunious student in Cambridge MA in the 1950s, I often had the 99 cent whale steak dinner at a restaurant whose name I forget. Tasted somewhat like beef liver, I don’t remember it as particularly tough.
@Martin: “But one reason they are there is that the average 19th century reader was not likely to know much about whales and whaling.”
It’s worldbuilding. Melville sets up a world of whalers and whales; 20th-century fantasy writers would set up realms inhabited by orcs and goblins, or by dragon kings and night walkers. In the 19th century, Jules Verne included lengthy asides in his sci-fi adventure novels – essential to their fabric but deadly boring at times. Apparently that didn’t hurt their sales.
@Bloix: Note the two ABCBAC sexains – not too common – and the last stanza in full:
Nothing can lift the heart of man
Like manhood in a fellow-man.
The thought of heaven’s great King afar
But humbles us—too weak to scan;
But manly greatness men can span,
And feel the bonds that draw.
Not entirely conventional for 1864, and not too far from Whitman. It reminds me of Ishmael sharing a bed with Queequeg.
“…are they the sincere and hapless efforts of an autodidact, and meant to be taken straight?” Dostoevsky didn’t have an MFA, either. Is Cervantes to be taken straight? Or Rabelais?
@Brett: “It’s interesting that Melville, while he drew extensively on his personal experience on a merchant seaman and whaler, also included a substantial amount of seafaring folklore in Moby-Dick.”
He also included some obvious, leg-pulling BS, such as his flat-earth chapter “proving” the whale to be a fish. That’s part of the novel’s charm. Melville was under no self-imposed obligation to educate the public – unlike Jules Verne.
“Melville knows that whale muscle is extremely tough…” The toughness/tenderness of whale meat depends on the cut, just as with beef.