The Great White Whale: Cynara and PurlPoet read Moby Dick

Charlas75 Books Challenge for 2014

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The Great White Whale: Cynara and PurlPoet read Moby Dick

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1Cynara
Editado: Ago 2, 2014, 11:25 am



Hi, all! This is the space where PurlPoet and I (and others, I hope) will be writing about reading Moby Dick. Neither of us has read it before. She's a more accomplished reader and writer than I am, so I'm really looking forward to getting the benefit of her ideas on this.

Why Moby Dick? We're both English Lit types, and eventually some unread books get embarrassing. Or, because we're looking for a challenge this summer. Or, because sometimes Great Books are great books? We're worried it's going to be dull, or at least I am, and I know this is going to motivate me and be a lot of fun (hi, Rosalita, if you're around!). At least this way we can laugh at ourselves and share ideas.

I thought we might check in every two chapters? All are welcome, and we have at least one more person planning to join us.

I have already broken my first resolution (in the thread title no less) which was not to make any cheap jokes about the book being a whale.

2Cynara
Ago 2, 2014, 11:31 am

I'm so happy to have a thread again that I'm revisiting it and admiring it and beaming approvingly at it. Apparently I've missed LT?

3drneutron
Ago 2, 2014, 7:51 pm

:) Nice choice!

4PiyushC
Ago 3, 2014, 6:20 am

Ah, I have been meaning to read it for a long time, but I won't be able to join you guys at this point of time, due to prior reading commitments. Best of Luck with your read.

5Cynara
Editado: Ago 4, 2014, 12:05 pm

Before the book: Etymology and Extracts

So, Moby Dick. "Call me Ishmael"? Not yet. Instead I read "Supplied to a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School," whatever the red hell that means.

Fine, it means that this usher died of TB and left the text (the whole book, or just this front-matter?) to a school. Please note that searching the word "usher" on Google will not get you a job description. A little more digging on Wikipedia gives me this, in addition to the showing-people-to-their-seats job: "an assistant to a schoolmaster or head-teacher; an under-master, assistant-master." Okay, that makes more sense than the theatre-usher sense of the word.

I like the note that the whale "is named from roundness or rolling," "arched or vaulted." I suppose a whale is arched and/or vaulted, but I never thought of it before. This gloating over words and their origins is very writerly, and I like it.

Then, I'm on to the extracts by the Sub-Sub-Librarian. Melville is indulging himself with all these "ye"s and "thou"s, but I hope he's getting it out of his system now. I think he's laughing at his own painstaking research here, comparing himself to this humble etymologist and sub-sub-librarian while valourising the work.

The extracts themselves are a testament to that research. I could put this list of quotations together on Google in half an hour, but Melville found these books (and that was more difficult then) and read them. Why are they here, though? Because he'd found them and couldn't bear to leave them out? Because we had to know all the work he'd gone through? To give us a sense of the ancientness and mythic stature of the whale? To give us a compressed education in Whales in Western Culture? Melville tells us that they're here to give us "a glancing bird's eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own."

I am happy to know about the "sea-gudgeon," who "retires into" the whale's mouth "in great security, and there sleeps."

Some of the extracts give a sense of scale, some tell of beliefs about whales - but some of them seem to be there because they are from Famous Works and include the word "whale" - e.g. "Very like a whale" from Hamlet. I also smiled at the despairing bibliographic note (SOMEWHERE) by a quotation from Edmund Burke, and the hands-in-the-air note "FROM "SOMETHING" UNPUBLISHED." Always note your sources, Herman.

I came away with this. Whales are huge. They are ancient. They are dangerous. And people seek them from Nantucket.