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IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD ... "WHALE" ... THE LETTER H ..." (1) ('MOBY DICK') |
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by Gordon V.
Boudreau Publication:
Melville Society Extracts COPYRIGHT 2002
Melville Society Why is it that Melville opens his book of such seemingly prohibitive length with such forbiddingly detailed lexicographical matter, likely ignored by most first-time readers? If we suppose a Melville lurking behind the persona of Ishmael as narrator of the entire book, these gleanings from dusty "old lexicons and grammars" by a "Late Consumptive Usher" (xv, my emphasis), and "random allusions to whales" grubbed out from "long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth" (xvii) by the "Sub-Sub," suggest Melville's appropriations from the resources of the editor of The Literary World: as Geoffrey Stone remarked, Melville's third novel, Mardi, started out to be a continuation of the South Sea's voyage of Tommo/Omoo, then turned into "a voyage through Evert Duyckinck's library." (3) Leaving aside the autobiographical implications in these opening pages, consider those linguistic and etymological factors. The quotation from Hakluyt under "Etymology" calls attention to "the letter H [in `whale'], which alone maketh up the signification of the word ... " (xv). Then follows a list of "whale" in various languages, the first in Hebrew, the second in Greek. The editors of the NN Moby-Dick contend that Melville made a mistake in transcribing these words, and therefore correct his "errors" to accord with his source. (4) But other explanations about Melville's so-called errors have recently been proliferating in the pages of the Melville Society Extracts. In both the Hebrew and the Greek words for whale, Melville's mistake was the addition or substitution of an equivalent H. Dorothee Metlitzki writes about how "visibly important" is the letter H in Melville's "conscious or unconscious" misreading of Hebrew and Greek words for the whale. She sees the "open secret" of Melville's imported H as a "hieroglyphic" reduction of YAHWEH, the "ineffable name of God." (5) Neal Schleifer, noting Melville's "skills as lexicographer and linguist," sees Melville's transcription of the Hebraic word for whale not as an error, as the editors of the NN text contend, but as a deliberate and learned pun which gives to the Hebraic "whale" the meaning of "grace." So too does he see the substitution in the Greek as rendering the whale name "Christos." By such word-play in association with the power displayed by the whale, Melville "establishes a dichotomy between grace and retribution" that denotes the major polarity of the forces in Moby-Dick as well as "the spiritual forces manifest in the world." (6) Batsheva Dreisinger sees Melville's version of the Hebraic word as signifying "behold," or "wonder," rather than "polarized" symbols of "positive or negative connotation" advanced by Schleifer. She argues that any attempt to find particular meaning in Melville's whale should be resisted, citing Ishmael's attempt to draw out Leviathan with a hook: "Behold, the hope of him is in [sic] vain." But her misquotation -- several times -- suggests that such attempts are fruitless, "in vain," rather than presumptuous, or "vain," as Ishmael actually states. (7) Ben Rogers finds Melville's rendering of the Hebraic term for whale a "calculated error," the imported H a "sign of the divine covenant." He adduces the surfacing of H in the name change of Abram to Abraham, as well as Sara to Sarah, as indicating a "divine covenant which was to shape the rest of his [Abraham's] life." Similarly, Rogers contends, "Melville gave his Greek and Hebrew whale an `H,' a symbol of the cetacean's divinity and the nature of his prophesied struggle with Ahab (prophesied both by Elijah and the connotations of Ahab's name)." (8) Schliefer's learned and highly intricate assessment of H extruded into a dichotomy of grace and retribution in Moby-Dick is indeed perceptive. However, it takes no notice of Melville's intuitively visceral and kinaesthetic probings into his "whale." But as F. O. Matthiesson astutely observed: The great phitologian Jacob Grimm ... arrived at mythology through his investigation of speech. Words and fables became finally inseparable for him, and he sought their common source in the most primitive and most profound instincts of the race, in its manner of feeling and imagining. It may be said of Melville that he intuitively grasped the connection. In his efforts to endow the whaling industry with a mythology befitting a fundamental activity of man in his struggle to subdue nature, he came into possession of the primitive energies latent in words. (9) In The Wake of the Gods: Melville's Mythology, H. Bruce Franklin seems to sustain Matthiessen's assessment of how Melville's imagination, abetted by readings in comparative mythology, fused words and fables. Franklin argues that Moby-Dick is "An Egyptian Myth Incarnate," Ahab being an Osiris figure intent on destroying the evil Egyptian divinity Set or Typhon, a monster of the sea who symbolizes ocean and everything in nature destructive to man. In this myth, Osiris sails out annually to hunt down Typhon, representing assailable evil, but is himself mauled and defeated. Franklin's argument is based in part on etymology, that the name of the monster of Greek mythology, Typhon, "in later use partly suggested by TYPHOON," is therefore also "a whirlwind, cyclone, tornado; a violent storm of wind, a hurricane" (OED). Franklin notes that while early in Moby-Dick "typhoon" appears several times in lower case, late in the book the word appears capitalized, soon after which the destructive "Typhoon" strikes the Pequod, and at that stage is addressed by Ahab as a god. (10) As interesting as this interpretation is, and as revealing of Melville's familiarity with ancient mythologies and religions, Franklin's findings stop short of more primitive sources in Melville's imagination, for he discusses Melville as a user of myth, not a myth maker. But while Melville's borrowings from various myths are manifold, as a myth maker his own linguistic imaginings and instincts delved into a little lower layer. In quoting Hackluyt's claim that in "whale," the letter "H" is all-important, Melville was reaching towards a source "most primitive and most profound," that is, in "feeling and imagining." And he did so with an instinctive feeling that was "linguistic" in that word's primitive, radical sense, a feeling of the tongue. That Melville savored the sound and feel of words is manifestly clear; and Richard Brodhead is beautifully on the mark in regarding Moby-Dick as "a book in love with language. It is so in love with the sound of words that it savors their spoken heft as it writes them." (11) Examples abound of Melville's tongue-caressing words: in "The Spirit-Spout" labials and sibilants blend to produce a wraithlike, hushed entrancement: It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves roiled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. (232) In the chapter "Brit," his description of grazing whales makes use of sibilants to mimic the sound of scythes mowing succulent grass: 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. (272) In "The Chapel," on the other hand, plosives emphasize Ishmael's dejective and rejective mood: "... ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes" (36). Sometimes Melville seems carried away by the mere sound of words, gaming with them, exploiting his easy mastery over them. In Chapter 46, "Surmises," Ishmael muses: "Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private purpose of the Pequod's voyage, Ahab ..." And this is followed immediately with "From even the barely hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible consequences of such a suppressed impression gaining ground, Ahab must of course have been most anxious to protect himself" (213). Here the plosives -- voiceless p's and voiced b's -- seem self-indulgent, throw-away lip exercises, warm-ups for cetological jousts dead ahead. (12) Newton Arvin has isolated numerous instances of Melville's word coinages, the meanings of which resist confinement within normative forms: nouns are dynamized into verbs-- "he tasks me, he heaps me," or verbals -- "to serpentine and spiralize"; verbs into nouns--"regardings" and "intercedings"; nouns extruded into adverbs--"sultanically," "diagonalically"; and adjectives and adverbs negated--"unensanguined" and "uninterpenetratingly." (13) These occur most often at those moments in the narrative when the rhetorical forms are themselves too restrictive to contain the intensity of actions or emotions they attempt to express. When storms break--internally, those of man (Ahab in "The Quarter Deck"), or externally, those of nature (typhoons)--the conventional narrative form erupts into the dramatic, with accompanying stage directions and speech tags. To return to the lexicographical opening of the book, "whale," regarded as a printed word in a dusty volume, is a mere counter, a dead word whose etymology--its "fossil poetry," as Emerson would have it-- was compiled by a dead ("Late") usher. Considered phonetically, however, it is animated, "inspired" in the radical Emersonian sense--that is, through wind, breath, currents of air. (14) This is because the letter H is an aspirate letter, "aspirate" being: Phonetics. 1. The speech sound represented by the English h. 2. The puff of air accompanying the release of a stop consonant. 3. Any speech sound followed by a puff of breath.... [Latin aspirare, to breathe upon, aspirate ...]. (15) Thus in the word "whale," the h is the "spirit" and principle of its animation into sounded language. As such, it is also a similitude of the living whale's sign and expression of its animation, its spouting. Moreover, spouting is a defining characteristic of the mammalian whale as a species: Ishmael defines a whale as "a spouting fish with a horizontal tail" (137). Further, the sighting of a whale is signaled by the cry "There she blows!" And the unique occurrence of "aspiring" in the book is in Ishmael's apostrophe to the spouting whale, ironically, in the act of its expiration: "Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed jet!.... I am buoyed by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but water now" (491). When in "The Fountain" Ishmael attempts to describe the whale spout, he cannot determine whether it is an expulsion of water or of air, and is reduced to hypothesizing that it is mist. He then considers the spout as a revelation of the whale's profound intuitions and aspirations. No shallow diver, the sperm whale sometimes reveals by its spouting "a certain semi-visible steam" that it is "thinking deep thoughts" (374). Occasionally its spout is "glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts." Ishmael then reflects (in a double sense) that once when "composing a little treatise on Eternity," he saw in a mirror he had set up, a similitude of the whale's spout in the mist rising from his own reflected head. To him such a cunning duplicate gives ri se to thoughts that, Through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye. (374) (16) If one expression of the aspirate "h" in "whale" is the spout of the living whale, its antithesis is a fabricated spout from a dead whale. In "A Bower in the Arsacides," Ishmael reports his examination of the skeleton of a whale which had been converted into a temple and worshipped by native priests. A storm had beached the dead whale with its head butted "against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings seemed his verdant jet" (449). With its flesh stripped away the whale skeleton was transported to Pupella glen where it was enfolded within a luxuriant arboreal temple to serve as a virtual sanctum sanctorum. There from the skull fashioned into an altar tended by worshipful native priests, "artificial smoke ascend[ed] from where the real jet had issued" (450). Skeptical Ishmael, taking the measurements of this temple, "saw no living thing within; naught was there but bones." To him this temple was a sham lacking inspiration, a dead "w-ale" whose articulated bones were linguistically inarticulate, fit only as an extract for a Late Consumptive Usher. That the letter "H" in "whale" suggests inspirations in the radical Emersonian sense of "spirit" as wind has analogues relating the whale to Ishmael, to Father Mapple, and to Jonah. Crossing an implied threshold from life in a dictionary to the dictionary of life, Ishmael at the outset follows funeral processions and walks through blocks of blackness past coffin warehouses (containing dictionary entries? stacks of extracts?). Pausing at a "sharp bleak corner" where stood the Spouter Inn, he is pummeled by "that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon [which] kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul's tossed craft" (10). (17) Once inside he learns, as did Jonah seeking passage at Joppa, that there is no place for him. His attempts to improvise a "bunk" on a wooden bench prove ineffectual, for "a draught of cold air" from beneath the window sill and "another current from the rickety door" (17) make sleep impossible. So driven by the wind, Ishmael in desperation relentingly agrees to bed with a pagan cannibal-harpooneer who sleeps with his weapon. But the foul breeze that drives Ishmael to such menacing shelter eventually proves fair, for it brings about a friendship with Queequeg, who will indirectly be the agent of Ishmael's salvation. Thus Ishmael qualifies his assessment of that threatening wind: In judging of that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon ... it maketh a marvelous difference, whether thou lookest at it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier. (10) Father Mapple's entrance to the whaleman's chapel is likewise out of the teeth of a howling gale. Once inside, he mounts to a pulpit shaped in "the likeness of a ship's bluff bows," a vantage point from which "the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favorable winds" (40). As Ishmael's spiritual pilot, Father Mapple peers into "the storm of God's quick wrath" that lies ahead, then lingers, not over a dictionary entry, but over the Bible as the inspired word of God. Drawing his finger down its opened page, he places it at the beginning verses of the book of Jonah, then begins his stormy sermon on the reluctant prophet whose journey foreshadows Ishmael's, further extending the significance of the aspirate "H." Jonah fled from his appointed task of delivering the word of GOd by boarding a ship, only to find himself tempest-tossed by an angry wind, and then, after drawing his fateful lot, being cast overboard into the raging sea where he is swallowed by a whale, whereupon the tumultuous seas grow calm. For Jonah, the word of God, his inspiration as a recalcitrant prophet, came as an insistent word in the form of a gale and a whale, until he accepts his appointed task to preach the word of repentance that had been delivered to him. Just so does Father Mapple as a pilot of the living GOd exhort his congregation to repent: "Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah" (47). And so too Ishmael, who will sin in committing himself to Ahab's Quarter Deck oath ["I, Ishmael, was one of that crew" (179)], but later repent and cleanse himself in the balm of the spermacetti ["I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it" (416)]. (18) The other strand in Father Mapple's two-stranded sermon, "To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood!" (48), weighs upon Ishmael as well as Jonah. This involves Ishmael's attempt to construct an accurate and comprehensive exposition of the whale, even while acknowledging that absolute truth is unattainable. In "Cetology" Ishmael approaches his subject by invoking an extended classification scheme of whale species as books of different sizes. But he will later confess that in its vital and comprehensive formulation, the whale can be contained neither in a dictionary, "Noah Webster's ark" (240, my emphasis), nor in the artistry of man, though it might be discerned if not apprehended as the "ungraspable phantom of life" (5). The "ungraspable phantom" is Ishmael's dream-like formulation of the whale, not yet in the realm of his experience, a premonition yet to be seen, and even when seen, not to be grasped by observation, nor by ossified articulations, whether skeletal or verbal. In American Renaissance, F.O. Matthiessen quotes Emerson's 1831 journal that "in good writing, words become one with things"; at a further step, Thoreau wrote in his journal that "A history of animated nature must itself be animated." (19) When Melville was at the height of his intuitive grasp of the connection between language and things, even the letters of words interanimated with things: In Moby-Dick, "whale" was not a dead word in a dusty library's antiquated lexicons, but a living word articulated by aspiration, the breath of life. The full quotation from Hackluyt in the "Etymology" section reads: 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. (xv) Thus Moby-Dick begins with a paraphrase of the opening of St. John's Gospel: "In the beginning was the word"; and the letter H that Melville incorporated in both the Hebrew and Greek words for whale was intentional. In the succeeding pages of this great sea story, Ishmael plunges into the depths of the whale in his earnest and unrelenting pursuit of "the ungraspable phantom of life." No "shallow diver," in sounding and trying out his "whale" Melville--with Ishmael, Jonah and Father Mapple -- was determined "To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood" (48). (20) (1) John 1:1. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1988), xv. Unless otherwise indicated, future references are to this edition, cited parenthetically. NN indicates this edition. (2) In the English edition of Moby-Dick, the "Etymology" and "Extracts" appeared at the end of the book. See Mob?Dick, 782-83. For "dick" as slang for "dictionary," see John S. Farmer and W.E. Henley, eds., Slang and Its Analogues (1890-1904; rpt. New York, 1965), 3 vols. (rpt. of 7 vols.), I (vol. II of original), 280. Howard P. Vincent. The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), ignores the introductory materials on the etymology and extracts. (3) Geoffrey Stone, Melville (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1949), p. 90. (4) John Kitto, ed. A Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature (Edinburgh, 1845; New York. 1.846) II, 947), cited in NN Moby-Dick, 814. Melville's so-called errors appear in both the English and the American first editions. (5) Dorothee Metlitzki, "The Letter `H' in Melville's Whale," Melville Society Extracts 47 (September, 1981): 9, states that in Melville's transcription, "the first letter of the word for whale in Hebrew (t - `tan,' a singular form of the biblical plural `tanim') and in Greek (k in `kytos') are mistakenly mined into `h,' resulting in Melville's inaccurate forms of `han' and `hytos.'" (6) Neal Schleifer, "Melville as Lexicographer: Linguistics and Symbolism in Moby-Dick," Melville Society Extracts 98 (September, 1994): 1-6. (7) Batsheva Dreisinger, `"Behold the Hope of Him Is in [sic] Vain': A Hebraic Reading of Moby-Dick," Melville Society Extracts 114 (September, 1998): 1-4. (8) Ben Rogers, "More on the Letter `H' in Moby-Dick" Melville Society Extracts 114 (September, 1998): 5-6. Schleifer explicitly (2), and the others implicitly, argue against the policy of the editors of the N-N of "retaining forms and details that appear in Melville's sources," in this instance Kitto's Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature, II, 947, which ,Melville used. See NN Moby-Dick, 814-15. (9) F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), 423, (10) Actually, "typhoon" occurs but once in N-N (90), "typhoons" once as well (69). "Typhoon" occurs seven times [497, 503 (2), 504, 513 (2), 514]; "Typhoons" twice (474, 476). As evidence in his argument, Franklin notes Melville's knowledge of comparative mythology, and in particular passages from Frederick Maurice's Indian Antiquities, such as: "By Typhon, I have repeatedly observed, must be understood whatever in nature was gloomy and malignant." (111, 243); and "The Egyptians `considered Typhon, to whom, among other symbols, was alloted that of the Ocean ... as every part of nature which can be considered as noxious and destructive to mankind. Like time and death, Typhon devoured all things" (III, 255). (11) Richard H. Brodhead, "Trying All Things: An Introduction to Moby-Dick," in New Essays on Moby-Dick, ed. Richard H. Brodhead (London and New York: Cambridge U Press, 1986), 1-22; 6. (12) Elizabeth Renker, Strike through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U Press, 1996), discusses how Melville conveys meaning by focusing on letters alone. Consult her index for Melville's use of "C," "F," "M," "P," and "W" as used chiefly in Pierre and The Confidence Man. For a more recent discussion of Melville's playing with the sound of words, see Renker's `"A--!': Unreadability in The Confidence-Man,"in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge U Press, 1998), 114-34. She here argues that "Etymology, word relationships, and.., letters as such held great interest for Melville," who in The Confidence Man plays games "not only with whole words (`charity,' `character') and with individual characters (`P,' `W,' `F,' `C'), but also with syllables" (125-26). (13) Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York: Viking, 1950), 162-65, provides numerous examples of Melville's diction in this connection. (14) In Nature Emerson exemplified instances of the "fossil poetry" of words, one of which was that "Spirit primarily means wind," the subject and title of his penultimate chapter in that provocative book, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), 18. That "Usher" is derived from Medieval Latin "ostium, entrance, river mouth, from os, mouth, orifice" (AHD) suggests that Melville's "Late Usher" is the caretaker of a cemetery of words, formerly oral, now deceased (dead words). Cf. Henry David Thoreau's statement that a written word is "carved out of the breath of life itself." (Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971], 102). (15) The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Boston: American Heritage Pub. Co. and Houghton Mifflin, 1973). (16) The second of two Extracts from Milton's Paradise Lost suggests the importance to Melville of the whale's spout. Milton's original version is: there Leviathan Hugest of living Creatures, on the Deep Stretch 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. (VII, 412-16) Melville had rendered the final line as "Draws in. and at his breath spouts out a sea" (my emphasis). While Hendricks House rightfully, it seems to me, retains Melville's version, the N-N editors regard it as a substantive error, one which "can be checked against the cited sources" (794). They argue that "there is no reason to suppose in these instances that Melville was purposely altering his extract" (795), and on that basis emend it by restoring "Trunk" to conform to Milton's wording. I dissent. (16) Cf. Thoreau, Walden. 325: "The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its literal monument alone remains. The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures." (17) Cf. Walden, 102: "It [a written word] is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;-- not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself" (my emphasis). (18) The bar of the Spouter Inn, "a rude attempt at a right whale's head," is tended by a withered old man "like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him)" (14). Here, of course, inspiration came from fermented spirits. For a fuller discussion of the Ishmael-Jonah-whale relationship, see my "Of Pale Ushers and Gothic Piles: Melville's Architectural Symbology," ESQ 18.2 (2nd Qtr. 1972): 67-82, especially 71-73. (19) F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941) 30; The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906) 13:154. (20) In a letter to Evert Duyckinck, 3 March 1849, Melville once wrote "I love all men who dive." Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth vol. 14 of The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern UP and Newberry Library, 1993), 121. Melville, given his Dutch ancestry, must have known that "Duyckinck" means "diving duck," as Laurie Robertson-Lorant points out in Melville: A Biography (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1996), 183. Gordon V. Boudreau
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