Moby-Dick, Encyclopaedias and Encyclopaedism

Katrina Zaat

Supervisor: Dr Bruce Gardiner

Length: 16 400 words

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor

of Arts (Honours)

Department of English

University of Sydney

October 2008

2

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to my supervisor, Dr Bruce Gardiner, for his patience and his

invaluable guidance, particularly regarding encyclopaedias and periodicals of the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the philosophy of Francis Bacon. I am also

grateful to Professor Richard Yeo of Griffith University and Professor Peter Anstey of

Otago University for generously providing me with unpublished papers and aiding my

research into Enlightenment encyclopaedism. Finally, for their generous assistance

with editorial matters, I owe thanks to Rev. Dr Tom Ryan SM, of the Australian

Catholic University and Griffith University, and to my family.

Cover image: Thomas Beale’s sperm whale, marked to indicate the method of the

whalemen’s cutting-in. “By great odds … the best” outline of a sperm whale, in

Melville’s opinion (M-D 56:265). From The Natural History of the Sperm Whale …

to Which is Added, a Sketch of a South-Sea Whaling Voyage (London: Voorst, 1839),

23. This image is reproduced in the Penny Cyclopaedia’s entry on whales (PC

27:293). Sourced from Stuart M. Frank’s Herman Melville’s Picture Gallery

(Fairhaven, Mass.: E.J. Lefkowicz, 1986), 61.

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Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1. The encyclopaedic legacy of the Enlightenment 2

2. “Leviathan is the text”: Moby-Dick’s encyclopaedic strategies 17

3. “Unwritten lives”: discourse and authority in Moby-Dick 37

Conclusion 51

Appendix: images 52

Bibliography 53

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Introduction

It will be the purpose of this thesis to trace the encyclopaedic impulse in Herman

Melville’s Moby-Dick with attention to the rhetorical strategies and philosophical

concerns that shaped the development of the encyclopaedia through the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries. Melville focuses these aspects of the encyclopaedic through

his own particular narratological lens, such that they serve rather than delimit the

novel’s epistemological explorations. Moby-Dick does not seek simply to emulate the

encyclopaedia form but to unpack its structural and tonal possibilities, along with the

ways in which it both legitimises and destabilises contemporary narratives of

authoritative or expert knowledge. Chapter 1 will give a brief history of the

development of encyclopaedias and philosophies of encyclopaedism from the

Enlightenment through to Melville’s day. Chapter 2 will offer a reading of the

encyclopaedic impulse in Moby-Dick in light of the philosophical and rhetorical

approaches of the texts discussed in the first chapter. Finally, in chapter 3, I will

devote some attention to Melville’s contemporary literary environment and its

implicit values. By examining some of the discourses around authoritative textual

practices in the novel form and in extra-literary genres, I will demonstrate the ways in

which Melville engages with and critiques the cultural myths embedded in these

authoritative discourses. This is exemplified in the biographical treatment of the

character of Queequeg, which will be submitted to close analysis. I have consulted the

excellent Northwestern-Newberry edition of Moby-Dick in my research,1 and all page

numbers refer to this edition.

1 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: or, The Whale., ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, G. Thomas

Tanselle, The Writings of Herman Melville, the Northwestern-Newberry edition; v. 6 (Evanston,

Chicago: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1988).

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1. The encyclopaedic legacy of the Enlightenment

In order to identify the key elements of the encyclopaedia that form the ground for

Melville’s investigations of knowledge, authority and narrative, this first chapter will

present a brief account of the evolution of the modern encyclopaedia through a series

of watershed texts that emerged in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My

reading of this process is indebted to the scholarship of Richard Yeo, since I share his

interest in “the assumptions behind the encyclopaedic project and … how these

influenced coverage and format.”2 Participating in a greater conversation about the

ends of knowledge and its effective management, the encyclopaedias of the

Enlightenment and their successors reveal an engagement not just with each other but

with the changing philosophical climate in which they were created.

In his eponymous article for the fifth volume of the Encyclopédie,3 Denis Diderot

declared that “only a philosophical century could attempt an encyclopedia.”4 The

eighteenth century was not the first to see the publication of texts that were

encyclopaedic in name or in ambition. This chapter will examine the grounds on

which Enlightenment encyclopaedists claimed to have produced something essentially

novel. Encyclopaedia-like books of the middle ages and Renaissance were different in

their scope and didactic concerns. As Richard Yeo notes, they were intended as

compendia of what an educated person ought to know, and were seen as reflecting a

perfect, unchanging system of knowledge, informed by the classical worldview with

its convictions of enduring order and stability. They therefore did not raise the

problems that were to preoccupy compilers of subsequent encyclopaedias: that of

keeping up with new information, and that of attempting exhaustive coverage of all

possible fields of human knowledge.5 Inspired by philosophical works, various

metaphors were ventured to express the systematic interconnection between areas of

2 Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2001), xvi.

3 1755.

4 The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Ed. Dena Goodman,

Jennifer Popiel, Sean Takats. Michigan: University of Michigan, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/

(accessed 26 March 2008), s.v. “Encyclopédie” by D. Diderot, trans. Philip Stewart, page 47 of 77.

Note that the entries are unpaginated, a small flaw in an otherwise excellent scholarly resource. Page

numbers cited in Diderot’s “Encyclopédie” entry are taken from a printout of the article. Other articles

are brief enough to make pagination unnecessary.

5 Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 5-7.

6

knowledge, frequently those of maps and trees, but each system implied a hierarchy

of the nobility or worth of various fields of enquiry.6 The question of what one ought

to know became increasingly contentious in the seventeenth century, marking the

beginnings of a shift in focus from scholasticism’s stable order to a historical

worldview encompassing ideas of change, discovery and diversity. To maximise

individual participation in this new epistemological order, encyclopaedists felt

compelled to comprehend in their works, not what one individual could reasonably

learn in a lifetime, but concise and reliable coverage of all the branches of human

knowledge for reference purposes.7

The appearance of three immensely popular dictionaries of the arts and sciences

around the turn of the eighteenth century heralded a new engagement with the

problems of the proper scope of a technical and philosophical reference work.

Antoine Furetière’s Dictionnaire Universel (3 volumes, 1690), John Harris’ Lexicon

Technicum (2 volumes, 1704 and 1710) and Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia (2

volumes, 1728) appealed to an audience beyond scholarly circles by offering not only

concise accounts of facts and theories from the physical and natural sciences, but also

entries on the arts and trades.8 In contrast to encyclopaedias of the nineteenth century

and beyond, these texts deliberately excluded historical and biographical material, in

part because specific historical and biographical dictionaries already existed9 (Pierre

Bayle’s 2-volume 1697 Dictionnaire Historique et Critique was widely known, and is

frequently cited in biographical articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s early

editions, which are among the first encyclopaedias to include dedicated biographical

entries). These technical dictionaries also differ from previous encyclopaedic texts by

being arranged alphabetically, rather than thematically.10 Among these three,

Chambers’ Cyclopaedia stands out for its extensive reliance on cross-references to

restore the coherence that alphabetisation threatened to undermine, and for including

more of the humanities within its purview. 11 This encyclopaedia, a major

achievement in its own right, has important historical and structural links to the

6 Ibid., 22-23.

7 Ibid., 7-9.

8 Ibid., 15-16.

9 Ibid., 17-18.

10 Ibid., 25.

11 Robert Collison, Encyclopaedias: Their history throughout the ages, 2nd ed. (New York: Hafner

Publishing, 1966), 103-104.

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French Encyclopédie, which was first conceived by its consortium of publishers as an

attempt to translate Chambers’ work, but became under Diderot and Jean Le Rond

d’Alembert a work with its own philosophical agenda.12 Chambers had, in their

estimation, ploughed his furrow “shallow, but even and straight.”13 The

Encyclopédie’s editor-philosophes intended to take things further: not just to

“examine” everything, but to “stir [it] up, … without exception and without

cautiousness.”14 The encyclopédistes viewed their task as more than the recording of

present knowledge—they intended to challenge it, where challenge was warranted,

and to invite their readers to engage critically with what they read.

The great encyclopaedias of the Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie (32 volumes, 1751-

1780) and the Edinburgh-based Encyclopaedia Britannica (first edition 3 volumes,

1768-1771), both developed their own organisational principles around alphabetical

order. As Richard Yeo argues, alphabetisation had the advantages of accommodating

amendments as new knowledge came to light, and of being accessible to a wider

readership, by avoiding the necessity of being conversant with scholastic systems of

classification.15 The technical dictionaries and the encyclopaedias that followed them

thus indicated in their very structure two key elements of the Enlightenment approach

to knowledge management: the portability of knowledge across boundaries of

profession and class; and the need to keep up with new knowledge rather than just

providing accounts of the old.16 In his entry on the “Encyclopedia,” Diderot writes of

the encyclopaedist’s imperative "to compare discoveries and reorganize them, so that

more men are enlightened, and each may participate, according to his abilities, in the

enlightenment of his times."17 The encyclopaedic project was responding in part to the

intellectual needs of the Republic of Letters, which was characterised by the

widespread exchange of letters within a community of educated individuals

(including, increasingly, those beyond the academies and universities) that was

dispersed across geographical, religious, language and class boundaries, and also by

the rise of journals that aimed to summarise and review books that were not easily

12 Robert Shackleton, “The ‘Encyclopédie’ as an International Phenomenon,” Proceedings of the

American Philosophical Society, Vol. 114, No. 5 (1970), 390; Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 125-28.

13 Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” page 33 of 77.

14 Ibid., 47.

15 Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 25, 26.

16 Ibid., 12, 57.

17 Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” page 5 of 77.

8

accessible outside the European capitals.18 The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in

1685 had seen the emigration of great numbers of Huguenot French into the

Netherlands and England, who relied on correspondence to keep up with intellectual

developments in France.19 Literacy rates were rising across Europe and postal routes

becoming more numerous and reliable.20 According to Dena Goodman, Europe’s

intellectuals in the eighteenth century “did not simply write letters. Instead, they

employed and deployed an epistolary genre in the public sphere,” where it “became

the dominant medium for creating an active and interactive reading public.”21 The

printing press became a way of sharing correspondence on a larger scale: “the letter

was transformed into the newsletter and then into the journal.”22 Announcements,

reviews and extracts of new books connected a geographically dispersed reading

public. Lively intellectual debates were fostered, and the periodical became, as

Jeremy Popkin puts it, “the nervous system of the ‘republic of letters’.”23

Dena Goodman notes that Denis Diderot drew an explicit connection between the

project of the Encyclopédie and the ideals of the Republic of Letters. The intellectual

community in Europe had previously been organised around various academies,

learned societies and universities, which precluded the participation of those who, for

reasons of class, profession or geography, were not attached to these institutions.24 In

his “Encyclopédie” article, Diderot argued that this situation made academies and

universities unfit for the task of compiling a genuinely comprehensive

encyclopaedia.25 Shifting philosophical enquiry outside these insular structures to

embrace a wider public of scholars, artisans, scientists and readers, the Encyclopédie

styled itself as “a sort of central bureau” for gathering knowledge and facilitating

debate.26 The periodicals of the time, however, were not limited to the French

18 Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 40-41; Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in

the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Jeremy D. Popkin,

“Periodical Publication and the Nature of Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Europe” in The Shapes of

Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Donald R. Kelley and Richard H. Popkin

(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 203-214; Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: a

Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

19 Goldgar, 10.

20 Popkin, 208.

21 Goodman, 137.

22 Ibid.

23 Popkin, 212.

24 Goodman, 28.

25 Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” pages 4-5 of 77.

26 Goodman, 28.

9

diaspora. Scholarly journals produced across Europe in English, French, Italian, Latin

and German were quick to translate articles and review books published in other

languages, and English periodicals such as Michael de la Roche’s Memoirs of

Literature27 and The Present State of the Republick of Letters28 provided a lifeline to

readers in America, who were otherwise entirely dependent on the advertisements in

the backs of books and private correspondence to keep informed about recent

publications and intellectual exchanges across the Atlantic.29

At this time, attitudes to the collection and transmission of knowledge were

characterised paradoxically by both an idealistic vision of universal enlightenment,

and growing information anxiety. Diderot anticipates a Borgesian nightmare and

proposes the compression of knowledge into reference works as the only solution:

As centuries pass by, the mass of work grows endlessly, and one can foresee a

time when it will be almost as difficult to educate oneself in a library, as in the

universe, and almost as fast to seek a truth subsisting in nature, as lost among

an immense number of books …. There will be those who read little and

immerse themselves in new research or what they take to be new ... the others,

workmen incapable of producing anything, will be busy leafing through these

books night and day, and separating out what they deem worthy of being

anthologized and preserved. And are not several of our men of letters not

already busy reducing all our large books to small ones in which we still find

much that is superfluous? Let us now suppose that their analyses are correct,

and are distributed in alphabetical form into a number of volumes organized

by intelligent men, and we will have the materials of an enyclopedia.30

In the preface to his Cyclopaedia, Ephraim Chambers writes:

In effect, a reduction of the body of learning [into an encyclopaedia] is

becoming every day more and more necessary; as the objects of knowledge

are increasing, books becoming more numerous, and new points of dispute

and enquiry turning up.31

The exponential growth of periodicals that reviewed books and facilitated

conversation in the nineteenth century, and the expansion of the scope of

27 March 1710 to September 1714, followed by a second series, New Memoirs of Literature, from

January 1725 to December 1727.

28 January 1728 to December 1736.

29 Norman S. Fiering, “The Transatlantic Republic of Letters: A Note on the Circulation of Learned

Periodicals to Early Eighteenth-Century America,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 33,

No. 4 (1976): 642-660.

30 Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” pages 48-49 of 77.

31 Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia: or, an universal dictionary of arts and sciences, 4th ed., 2 vols.

(London: D. Midwinter, M. Senex, R. Gosling et al., 1741), 1:xxiv.

10

encyclopaedias in that period (notably in the inclusion of dedicated entries on

biography and social geography), indicate that these concerns were only to intensify

in Melville’s day. The importance of encyclopaedic reference works was quickly

recognised across the Atlantic as well. Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette

(founded 1729) regularly reprinted articles from Chambers’ Cyclopaedia32 and he

recommended the inclusion of the French Encyclopédie in the collection of the

Library Company of Philadelphia.33 The expense and difficulty involved in importing

books from Europe made reliable and wide-ranging compendia of information

indispensable to the intellectual community of North America.

This new urgency surrounding information management was not just a question of

scope, but of epistemological approach. Enlightenment thinkers were passionately

concerned with what Peter Anstey identifies as the division between “experimental”

and “speculative” philosophy. Experimental philosophy “was opposed to hypothesis

and to vain speculation … [and] to systems based upon metaphysical principles and to

armchair natural philosophy.” Instead it advocated “the need for observation and

experiment, for collaborative effort and the gathering of matters of fact.”34 He notes

that this distinction was widely adopted in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries in discussions of both natural and moral philosophy, including the major

works of David Hume and John Locke,35 and appears in a closely synonymous form

in the first English translation of d’Alembert’s “Discours Préliminaire” of 1758,

which argues for the “Division of the Science of Nature, or Natural Philosophy, into

Speculative and Practical.”36 In the “Discours” d’Alembert also echoes Locke in

criticising Descartes’ notion of “innate ideas” on the grounds that “[a]ll our direct

knowledge can be reduced to what we receive through our senses; whence it follows

that we owe all our ideas to our sensations.”37

32 Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 56.

33 Benjamin Franklin, Letter to Messrs. Thomson and Mifflin, 7 July 1769; Letter to Benjamin Rush,

26 December 1783. http://www.franklinpapers.org (accessed 27 June 2008).

34 Peter Anstey, “The Experimental History of the Understanding from Locke to Sterne,” Eighteenth-

Century Thought, forthcoming, typescript supplied by author, page 6 of 26.

35 Ibid., pages 3-8 of 26.

36 Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, The Plan of the French Encyclopædia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts,

Sciences, Trades and Manufactures. Being an Account of the Origin, Design, Conduct, and Execution

of that Work. (London: Printed for W. Innys, T. Longman et al., 1752), 175, cited in Anstey, 5 of 26.

37 Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. and

introduction Richard N. Schwab (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 6.

11

For the compilers of encyclopaedias, this empiricist commitment was relevant not

only for the content that they selected, but for the ways they organised their material.

Encyclopaedias’ ever-expanding scope, and the dispersal of entries across the

alphabet, threatened to turn these works into hotch-potch miscellanies or render them

unnavigable. This risk was nevertheless agreed to be preferable to the cramming of

information into the artificial systems that characterised later medieval scholastic

philosophy.38 Francis Bacon, an early advocate of empiricism (and an early victim of

its problematic effects on taxonomy: he feared his Sylva Sylvarum “may seem an

Indigested Heap of Particulars”39) was an example to Enlightenment encyclopaedists.

D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie article on Bacon’s philosophy is dominated by praise for

his advocacy of empirical procedures in scientific investigation and his rejection of

artificial “scholastic logic,”40 his “Discours Préliminaire” acknowledges the

Encyclopédie’s “principle obligation for our encyclopedic tree … to Chancellor

Bacon,”41 and Ephraim Chambers names him among the pioneers who have

“open[ed] new tracts” of knowledge.42

A true commitment to empiricism meant acknowledging the arbitrary nature of any

attempted systematisation of knowledge. All the major encyclopaedias of the day

acknowledged this problem, though none found a perfect solution, and some strove to

find positive value in the sometimes incoherent results. Ephraim Chambers compared

the traditional scholastic division of the arts and sciences with the chance division of

the globe under Alexander, Caesar and Genghis Khan.

38 The focus of this thesis is on Enlightenment thinkers’ perceptions of scholastic thought and their

reactions to its perceived inadequacies. Recent scholarship has reclaimed a more balanced view of

medieval scholasticism, noting its sophisticated investigations of the self, its refinements to the

scientific method and its openness to other cultural and philosophical traditions such as Islam. See

Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual (London: SPCK, 1972; 1987); M. D. Chenu, Nature,

Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essay on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West,

trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968; 1983); Richard E.

Rubenstein, Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom

and Reilluminated the Dark Ages (Orlando: Harcourt, 2003).

39 Cited in Paul Kenny’s Palace of Secrets: Béroalde de Verville and Renaissance conceptions of

knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 29.

40 Malcolm Eden (trans.), “Baconism, or the philosophy of Bacon” in The Encyclopedia of Diderot and

d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/ (accessed 27 October

2008) .

41 D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, 159.

42 Ephraim Chambers, Preface to the Cyclopaedia, 4th ed., (London: D. Midwinter, M. Senex, R.

Gosling et al., 1741), 1:ix.

12

Yet the regard we bear to the antient adventurers [scholars], and the

established division, has made us take up with it, under all its inconveniencies,

and strain and stretch things, to make our later discoveries quadrato thereto. I

do not know whether it might not be more for the general interest of learning,

to have the partitions thrown down, and the whole laid in common again under

one indistinguished name. Our enquiries, in such case, would not be confined

to so narrow bounds; but we should be led to explore many a rich tract, now

doomed to lie neglected because without the pale.43

To avoid promoting a false system that restricted new discoveries, Chambers favoured

alphabetical arrangement of the articles, but with the judicious use of cross-references

to alert the reader to related subjects and thus avoid making “a confused heap of

incoherent Parts.”44 He nevertheless found “advantages” in a “general and

promiscuous” reference work: “Where numbers of things are thrown precariously

together, we sometimes discover relations among them, which we should never have

thought of looking for,” perhaps even promoting the kind of happy accident by which

most new knowledge comes about: “In effect, a new observation in some peoples

minds prepared for it, is like a spark in a heap of gunpowder, which may blow the

whole mine.”45 Chambers did, however, include a visual representation of the

interrelations between disciplines with the frontispiece “View of Knowledge,”

drawing on medieval and Renaissance experiments in diagrammatical or map-like

arrangements of the sciences.

Diderot likewise conceded that there is any number of plausible ways to order an

encyclopaedia:

Does not all we know derive from the use of our senses and our reason? …. Is

it not either words, or things, or facts? It is therefore impossible to banish

arbitrariness from this broad primary distribution.46

Again favouring alphabetisation and relying on references, which Diderot called “the

most important aspects of encyclopedic ordering,”47 the compilers of the

Encyclopédie saw in cross-references the possibility to promote critical thinking:

43 Ibid., 1:ix.

44 Ibid., 1:ii.

45 Ibid., 1:xxv.

46 Diderot, “Encyclopédie”, 29.

47 Ibid., page 38 of 77.

13

The entire opus would gain … internal force and unseen utility, the silent

effects of which would necessarily be perceptible over time. Whenever a

national prejudice commands respect, for example, that particular article ought

to set it forth respectfully, and with its whole retinue of plausibility and

persuasion; but at the same time it ought to overturn an edifice of muck, dispel

a vain pile of dust, by referring to articles in which solid principles form a

basis for contrary truths. .... It is the art of tacitly deducing the boldest

consequences.48

A system of judiciously cross-referenced, alphabetical articles was promoted as being

both practical and rhetorically powerful, making connections that promoted rather

than restricted the development of knowledge. Despite the editors’ avowed

confidence in the system of cross-references, the Encyclopédie also included a

diagram showing the relations between the sciences49 modelled on Bacon’s division

of knowledge into Memory, Reason and Imagination, and from 1780 added an

engraving of a tree of knowledge which in turn utilises the same taxonomy, placing

Reason in the centre as a sturdy trunk from which the arts and sciences branch.50

D’Alembert’s “Preliminary Discourse” describes the encylopaedist’s project as that of

raising the enquirer high above a “vast labyrinth” or “world map,” from which

vantage point he “can discern the general branches of human knowledge, the points

that separate or unite them; and sometimes he can even glimpse the secrets that relate

them to one another.”51 Diderot’s later “Encyclopédie” entry ventures several

metaphors for the organisation of knowledge, including the Porphyrian tree, avenues

in a city grid, a collection of maps to different scales, and a landscape in which the

various features catch the light in different ways and reveal their harmonious relation

to each other.52 The sheer variety of metaphors proposed suggests that none were

entirely satisfactory to the Encyclopédie’s compilers.

The preface to the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica derided as

“presumptuous” scholastic attempts both ancient and modern “to contract the whole

furniture of the human mind into the compass of a nutshell,”53 and unlike Chambers

and Diderot and d’Alembert, the compilers of early editions of the Britannica chose

48 Ibid.

49 The “Systême figuré des connaissances humaines,” facing page 1 in the first volume.

50 Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 27-28.

51 D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, 47.

52 “Encyclopédie,” pages 31, 34 and 63 of 77.

53 [Bell, Alexander and Macfarquhar, Colin, eds.], Encyclopaedia Britannica 3rd ed., 18 vols.,

(Edinburgh: Bell and Macfarquhar, 1788-1797), 1:vii.

14

not to include any diagrammatical representation of the sciences. The preface to the

third edition also expressed dissatisfaction with the Encyclopédie’s cross-references,

which were so numerous that they become, it was argued, very difficult to follow.

“The work, therefore, with all its improvements, was still a book of shreds and

patches.”54 The Britannica proposed to remedy this problem, while still making use of

alphabetical arrangement, by combining two kinds of entries: longer treatises on

scientific and technical disciplines and on the various arts, alongside shorter articles

on more specific topics. Richard Yeo points out that this approach resulted in a work

that was perhaps more coherent but less flexible in keeping up with advances in the

sciences and technical arts.55 Jeff Loveland argues that while the adoption of a system

of longer treatises was suited to the autodidact, it also “threatened readers’

independence,” as the reader would inevitably be guided to follow the systematisation

of the discipline set forth by the treatise’s author.56

This warning returns us to Ephraim Chambers’ vision of the creative potential in

hotch-potch miscellanies: the felicitous juxtaposition of disparate ideas might often

supply the “spark in a heap of gun-powder” to the receptive mind. Diderot’s advocacy

of critical cross-referencing suggests that it is the encyclopaedia’s contributors and

editors who must teach the reader to think. But the arbitrariness imposed by

alphabetisation, alongside the sheer size of such texts, which entirely precludes the

sequential reading of the whole, suggest that encyclopaedias may be seen as the

Barthesian “text” par excellence: “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable

centres of culture” whose “unity lies not in its origin but in its destination,” that is, in

the mind of the individual reader, on whom the responsibility for the making of sense

ultimately falls.57 For Hillary Clark, encyclopaedias are fundamentally characterised

by their “unreadability,” and always exist in a tension of order and disorder,

information and noise, for all that they marshal the rhetorical strategies of selection

and organisation.58 There is something of the carnivalesque in encyclopaedias’

54 Britannica, 1:viii.

55 Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 170-194.

56 Jeff Loveland, “Unifying Knowledge and Dividing Disciplines: The Development of Treatises in the

Encyclopaedia Britannica,” Book History 9 (2006): 68.

57 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” trans. Stephen Heath, in The Norton Anthology of

Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001), 1468-

69.

58 Hillary Clark, “Encycledic Discourse,” SubStance, Vol. 21, No. 1, Issue 67 (1992): 95-110.

15

mammoth scale, their piecemeal selection from a variety of authorities, and their

grandiloquent claims of exhaustive coverage, prompting Jed Rasula to argue that

“[t]he encyclopedic impulse is not to be accredited strictly to Enlightenment

rationality” but is also “a gesture of textual insubordination, an act of defiance against

the authority of scripture.”59 The discontinuity between the ideal of ordered, utilitarian

selection and the reality of massive works that took years to produce, that quickly

became redundant, that necessarily reflected the tastes and epistemological programs

of their compilers, and that would be consulted by a diverse public in unpredictable

ways, inspired the encyclopaedists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to a

variety of ingenious if imperfect solutions. Nevertheless, the encyclopaedia as a

distillation of the most useful knowledge is always haunted by the spectre of the

heterogeneous, the accidental, the book of “shreds and patches.”

Considering the sheer diversity and volume of information that Enlightenment

encyclopaedias were striving to comprehend, it is not surprising that encyclopaedias

after Chambers’ were not the works of single authors, but of editorial committees and

expert contributors. Compilers felt the responsibility to be both comprehensive and

up-to-date in the information they provided, and this was beyond the capabilities of

any one individual. Alphabetised reference works by a single compiler continued to

appear, although usually restricted to specific topics, as did thematically-unified

works with an encyclopaedia-like ambition of scope, such as Robert Chambers’

Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844).60 This work is remarkable in its

own right for its author’s attempts to reverse the trend towards the division of the

sciences into specialised fields that were growing more remote from each other and

from the understanding of the general public.61 It sought to trace causal connections

between the isolated findings of the leaders in various scientific disciplines to propose

a grand narrative of progress for creation itself.62 The work and its sequel

Explanations (1845) were both controversial, widely-read and frequently revised,

their less “dangerous” sections (that is, those that gave less attention to the

atheistically-tainted idea of organic evolution or “transmutation”) often discussed in

59 Jed Rasula, “Textual Indigence in the Archive,” Postmodern Culture Vol. 9, No. 3 (1999): 12.

60 Originally published anonymously in London for John Churchill. Chambers was identified as the

author in the posthumous 12th edition of 1884.

61 James A. Secord, introduction to Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Other Evolutionary

Writings, by Robert Chambers (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), x-xi.

62 Ibid., xii.

16

popular periodicals such as the Penny Magazine, Tait’s Magazine and Chambers’s

Edinburgh Journal.63 However, by the early nineteenth century the collation of the

encyclopaedia as general reference work was seen as the proper task of a large

editorial committee, with authority attributed to expert contributors64 or respected

primary sources, rather than urbane philosophes.

With the introduction of dedicated biographical entries for statesmen, philosophers

and other eminent individuals in the second edition of the Britannica,65 the transition

of the encyclopaedia from the scholastic compendium of the Renaissance to the allpurpose

information source of Melville’s day was nearly complete. The Penny

Cyclopaedia (1833-1843), which Melville almost certainly consulted in the writing of

Moby-Dick,66 differs most markedly from its eighteenth-century predecessors in its

tendency to give summaries of, or quotes from, several textual sources in succession

without any attempt at synthesis, even where this results in redundancy. Nineteenthcentury

editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica do not credit as many specific

sources in the body of the text, but major articles conclude with short bibliographical

lists. As Richard Yeo notes, the rationale of nineteenth-century encyclopaedias was

something akin to the project of eighteenth-century periodicals like the Monthly

Review that offered extracts and reviews of new books, not only to facilitate

conversation but to familiarise readers with ideas they might not have the opportunity

of encountering in the books themselves. The “circle of sciences” that encyclopaedias

aimed to comprehend had changed.

[It had become] an abstract field of knowledge that could not be grasped by

any individual mind. Now the aim was to ensure that knowledge was carefully

summarised in order to be accessible as an objective record, available in the

present and the future to both specialists and general readers.67

63 Ibid., xvi.

64 Richard Yeo, "Reading Encyclopedias: Science and the Organization of Knowledge in British

Dictionaries of Arts and Sciences, 1730-1850," Isis, Vol. 82, No. 1 (1991): 46.

65 The preface to the third edition of the Britannica acknowledges a precedent in the Encyclopédie, but

biographical material is relatively scarce in the latter work. The entry on Calvinism, for example, gives

no information about Calvin except his connection with the city of Geneva. (The Encyclopedia of

Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, s.v. “Calvinisme”, trans. Susan Emanuel;

Britannica 3rd ed. (1788-1797), 1:x.)

66 Kendra Gaines makes a compelling case for Melville having consulted the Penny Cyclopaedia in

writing “Cetology,” “The Fossil Whale” and other chapters in Moby-Dick in “A Consideration of an

Additional Source for Melville’s Moby-Dick,” Extracts: An Occasional Newsletter 29 (1977): 6-12.

See chapter 2 for further discussion.

67 Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 60.

17

Although it was inevitable that these deliberately concise and maximally accessible

compendia would be criticised as superficial sources of information that might tend to

confuse rather than edify the incautious reader,68 encyclopaedias were increasingly

important as entry points into disciplines in which the body of primary sources was

growing at a bewildering rate. Where the great encyclopaedias of the eighteenth

century replaced static visions of knowledge and metaphysical speculations with

meticulous expert contributions and literary tours de force, the encyclopaedias of the

nineteenth century took the Enlightenment’s empiricist ethos and polymath

aspirations to their logical conclusion by giving precedence to the collation of the

most current and reliable sources on a given subject. In this way they provided readers

with either a reasonably accurate overview of the current state of a discipline, or a

reading guide for those in search of a more profound understanding of the topic.

Pierre Bayle, and Samuel Johnson and Ephraim Chambers after him, had

acknowledged the contempt in which the compiler drudge might be held by learned

men,69 but the vast committees of contributors that constructed later encyclopaedias

carried this division of intellectual labour one step further, ceding expert authority

almost entirely to their sources: elegant synthesis and analysis decreased in

importance, and discernment in bibliographical selection became the yardstick of

usefulness. This trend is particularly evident in the Penny Cyclopaedia of 1833-43.

The strange moments of echolalia and dissonance that occur where multiple sources

overlap and diverge might well have dismayed the editors of earlier encyclopaedias,

but what the Penny may have lacked in elegance it made up for in concision,

comprehensiveness and respectable sources.

Some historians have interpreted the post-Enlightenment encyclopaedic project as an

essentially conservative one: in the wake of the French Revolution and subsequent

Reign of Terror, they argue, the Enlightenment ideal of a society of educated people

in dialogue gave way to a hierarchical view of a minority of experts and a politically-

68 Richard Yeo points to Dickens’ satire of inappropriate approaches to encylopaedia consultation in

The Pickwick Papers: a character boasts that he knows all about Chinese metaphysics after looking up

the entries on China and Metaphysics and combining the information (51:719, cited Encyclopaedic

Visions, 27).

69 See Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 44 for an overview of the compiler as drudge trope.

18

unstable general public to whom expert knowledge must be carefully mediated.70 It is

in terms of this political shift that critics such as James A. Secord, Robert Maniquis

and others explain the rise of “popular science” books and treatises and the

comparatively neutral tone of encyclopaedias of the time. This reading, however,

tends to minimise the influence of Enlightenment strategies of information

management on later encyclopaedias. Condensed and organised information

necessarily reveals the processes of editorial mediation—but it need not be concluded

that the editorial program is always a conservative one, nor that the reader who

accesses encyclopaedic texts is entirely constrained within their editors’ intentions.

With their project of presenting for quick reference the current state of scientific

knowledge, alongside generally useful information on the arts, history, biography and

geography, nineteenth-century encyclopaedias can equally be seen as a new epoch’s

response to the Diderotian imperative “that more men are enlightened, and each may

participate, according to his abilities, in the enlightenment of his times.”71

As will be seen in my subsequent discussion, Herman Melville evidently made use of

the popular Penny Cyclopaedia, but he also owned Chambers’ Cyclopaedia and a

translation of Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary.72 His work reveals an

abiding interest in the philosophical concerns and organising strategies of the

Enlightenment encyclopaedias and their successors. Melville’s engagement with these

tendencies of thought in Moby-Dick is shot through with ambivalencies, perpetuating

a heteroglot epistemological investigation in which no authority remains stable. The

following chapter will consider the intertextual resonances of the encyclopaedic form

in the novel. Most critics who have investigated these connections have tended to

argue that the novel’s encyclopaedic elements are included only as satire that exposes

their rhetorical inadequacy compared with other, more intuitive ways of knowing, or

else that they demonstrate an underlying despair at the incapacity of information to be

commensurate with the reality it purports to represent. I will argue, however, that

70 See, for example, Robert M. Maniquis, “Encyclopedias and Society: Order, Disorder and Textual

Pleasure,” in The Encyclopédie and the Age of Revolution, ed. Clorinda Donato and Robert M.

Maniquis (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1992), 77-90; Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of

Science: Early Years of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1981).

71 Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” page 5 of 77.

72 Merton M. Sealts, Melville’s reading: a checklist of books owned and borrowed (Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 39, 48. See below for a discussion of Melville’s borrowings

from Chambers’ preface.

19

Melville’s essays into encyclopaedism, and other extra-literary discourses, result in a

more complex epistemology in which the narratological project can find in these

sources both rhetorical utility and fertile ground for sociocultural critique. The final

chapter will investigate in more depth Moby-Dick’s engagement with contemporary

ideas of expert knowledge, authority and the novel form.

20

2. “Leviathan is the text”: Moby-Dick’s encyclopaedic strategies

Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behoves me to

approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise .… Give me a

condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my

arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they

weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of

sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations

of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the

revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe,

not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and

liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must

choose a mighty theme.73

In his chapter on “The Fossil Whale” Ishmael/Melville declares his encyclopaedic

ambitions. He also identifies several of the encyclopaedist’s most thorny difficulties.

One is that of scope, and location of the part within the totality. The dream of

producing not only a massy but a “mighty” book is at once alluring and wearying. The

attempt at “exhaustive” treatment of a single subject pushes outward beyond the

immediate field of enquiry into a vertiginous infinity of related themes. “Leviathan is

the text” (104:455) and the whale becomes a world. Edward Mendelson identifies

Moby-Dick as a specifically encyclopaedic novel and argues that it shares with texts

such as the Divine Comedy and Ulysses the feature of addressing a particular science

in comprehensive detail, to stand synecdochically for the encyclopaedic treatment of

the sciences in their entirety.74 But the synecdochic relation here becomes unstable: in

“expand[ing] to [the] bulk” of the topic, the enquirer discovers its boundaries to be

elastic, until they seem to comprehend a universe. The part cannot stand for the

whole, because the part contains the whole in its potential for endlessly discursive

enquiry. Ishmael faces the challenge of the Enlightenment encyclopaedists before

him: the circle of sciences is no longer the comforting symbol of a divine unity after

which earthly science is patterned; details proliferate on the map until it is no longer

navigable; the tree of knowledge tangles into a labyrinth without a centre; 75 all

possible systems of organisation strain towards collapse.

73 104:455.

74 Edward Mendelson, “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon,” MLN 91, no. 6 (1976):

1267-75.

75 Umberto Eco describes this process by which the Porphyrian tree resists unidirectional taxonomy in

Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 80.

21

Hillary Clark argues that encyclopaedias are characterised by their unreadability.

Their size and their ambition to contain all that can be known stymie the would-be

reader. They exist in a tension between order and disorder, information and noise,

marshalling rhetorical strategies of selection and organisation to impose structure on

the chaotic field of knowledge and render it accessible. The encyclopaedist’s task

necessarily becomes a self-reflexive one as he or she grapples with the insufficiency

of any system to organise such a bulk of information. Thus “discourse becomes

encyclopedic when it takes as its subject the process of knowing, and the body of

human knowledge.” It “speculates on its own discursive processes of retrieving,

rearranging and refiguring” knowledge.76

This description is certainly applicable to Moby-Dick, but the novel’s engagement

with the problems of “rearranging and refiguring” information is most explicit when

Ishmael embarks upon a classification of “the whale in his broad genera”(32:134).

Chapter 32, “Cetology,” shifts between homage and parody of two systems of

information management: Linnaean classification and the strategies of organising

encyclopaedia entries. Kendra Gaines makes a convincing argument for Melville

having used the Penny Cyclopaedia entry on whales77 as a direct source for this and

other chapters in the novel. “Cetology” follows the same broad structure as the Penny

Cyclopaedia, beginning with a survey of writers on the whale, all of whom, except Sir

Thomas Browne78 and some writers after Linnaeus, appear in the encyclopaedia. It

deals with the question of whether the whale is a fish or a mammal, quoting exactly

those words of Linnaeus that the encyclopaedia uses, goes on to consider various

species for inclusion and exclusion in the same order as the encyclopaedia, and draws

heavily on two authoritative sources, Scoresby’s An Account of the Arctic Regions

(1820) and Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839), that the

76 Clark, 107.

77 George Long, ed., The Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 27

vols. (London: C. Knight, 1833-43), s.v. “Whales,” 271-98.

78 Having borrowed two volumes of an 1835 edition of Browne’s Works from his friend Evert

Duyckinck in 1848, Melville was sufficiently taken with them to purchase the first collected edition in

folio (London: Basset, 1686) in 1849 (Sealts, 44). The collected Works that Melville owned contained

“Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors,” a sprawling collection of fables that were once

considered fact, which may well have partly inspired the sceptical yet celebratory spirit in which

Ishmael/Melville collects myths and tall tales surrounding whales and whaling.

22

encyclopaedia also quotes at length.79 It is possible that Melville conformed so closely

to the Penny’s arrangement and selection of information because he found the

structure useful, but he might also have expected at least part of his readership to pick

up on his specifically encyclopaedic procedure and to take pleasure in it as parody.

Quoting verbatim from Linnaeus, and following the Penny’s own quotation,

Ishmael/Melville considers the case for designating whales as mammals and not fish.

Linnaeus favours a mammalian classification “on account of their warm bilocular

heart, their lungs, their moveable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem intrantem feminam

mammis lactantem” and “ex lege naturae jure meritoque.” Ishmael then pits Linnaeus

against the pragmatism of two whaling friends from Nantucket, in a contest between

practical knowledge and scholarship (“I have had to do with whales with these visible

hands” 32:136) which recurs throughout the novel, and finally sides with the

whalemen. His dismissal of Linnaeus is accomplished through a deft syllogistic

elision: how can Linnaeus “separate the whales from the fish” when fish are “still

found dividing the possession of the same seas” (32:136)? Linnaeus’ authority must

of necessity be undermined in order to open the way for Ishmael’s innovative

classification system. And while Ishmael’s alternative is delightfully absurd—he

proposes to sort them primarily by size—his reasons for prevaricating with existing

systems are not without basis. Features like “baleen, hump, back-fin and teeth” are

“indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of whales” and “form such irregular

combinations … as utterly to defy all general methodization formed upon such a

basis” (32:140).

His difficulty is one that Linnaeus and his followers have been only too aware of—

recent DNA sequencing suggests that some of the now best known whale species, the

blue, humpback and gray whale, may need to be reclassified.80 The zoologist faces the

same problem as that which Diderot identified for the encyclopaedist:

79 Gaines, 6-9. She also points out that “Cetology” and other chapters like “The Sperm Whale’s Head”

(74), “The Fountain”(85) and “The Grand Armada” (87) mention precisely those anatomical details,

and in strikingly similar terms, as those paraphrased in the Penny from Scoresby, Beale, Bennett,

Cuvier and Hunter—all of whom are mentioned in “Cetology” among the “lights of zoology and

anatomy”(32:135). Ishmael/Melville assures us that he has “swam through libraries and sailed through

oceans” (32:136) but he has almost certainly disciplined his wide bibliographical meanderings with the

help of the Penny Cyclopaedia’s concise account of the subject.

80 Derek Paul Ohland, Eric H. Harley and Peter B. Best, “Systematics of Cetaceans Using Restriction

Site Mapping of Mitochondrial DNA,” Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 4, no. 1 (1995): 10-19.

23

It is therefore impossible to banish arbitrariness from this broad primary

distribution. The universe offers us only individual beings, infinite in number,

and virtually lacking any fixed and definitive division there is none which one

can call either the first or the last; everything is connected and progresses by

imperceptible shadings.81

In the mid-nineteenth century natural history was held in low esteem compared with

the mathematical sciences, partly because of controversies surrounding which system

of classification to adopt.82 Robert Chambers’ Vestiges suffered for its promotion of

William Sharp Macleay’s “quinarian” system, discredited in 1843, which prompted

Chambers to some hasty rewrites.83 In botany, the Linnaean “sexual” system,

prevalent in the eighteenth century and still popular among amateur botanists, was

criticised for its inattention to the internal structures of plants.84 In his “General

Introduction or Preliminary Treatise on Method” for the Encyclopaedia

Metropolitana (1817-1845),85 Samuel Taylor Coleridge expresses his frustration with

the classificatory sciences. On zoology he writes:

We have said that improgressive arrangement is not Method: and in proof of

this we appeal to the notorious fact, that zoology, soon after the

commencement of the latter half of the last century, was falling abroad,

weighed down and crushed as it were by the inordinate number and

multiplicity of facts and phaenomena apparently separate, without envincing

the least promise of systematizing itself by any inward combination of its

parts.86

81 Diderot, “Encyclopedie,” 29.

82 Jim Endersby, “Classifying Sciences: Systematics and Status in mid-Victorian Natural History,” in

The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain, ed. Martin Daunton (Oxford: Published for the

British Academy by Oxford University Press, 2005), 61-86. Endersby gives a convincing account of

the prejudice against “mere systematic” botany and zoology in the Victorian Era, but d’Alembert’s

“Discours Préliminaire” registers a century earlier the growing censure of “that multitude of naturalists

… whose energies have been ceaselessly devoted to dividing the productions of Nature into genera and

species, consuming an amount of time in this labour which would have been employed to much better

purpose in the study of those productions themselves” (D’Alembert, 50).

83 Secord, introduction to Vestiges, xiv.

84 Endersby, 66-73.

85 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “General Introduction; or a Preliminary Treatise on Method,” in

Encyclopaedia Metropolitana: or, Universal Dictionary of Knowledge, ed. Edward Smedley, Hugh

Hames Rose and Henry John Rose, 26 vols. (London: B. Fellowes, F. and J. Rivington, Duncan and

Malcolm et al. 1817-1845), 1:1-28. This encyclopaedia is notable for its ill-starred attempt at

resurrecting a thematic or “philosophical” arrangement. The publishers approached Coleridge to devise

its system, write a preface and preside over editorial decisions, but the relationship was marred by the

publishers’ decision to alter Coleridge’s system before the first volume went to print and by

Coleridge’s health problems. The venture was commercially unsuccessful, with the original publisher

going bankrupt in 1819, and it was sold to a consortium of booksellers and publishers. It is difficult to

know how effective Coleridge’s “philosophical” system would have been if carried out according to his

plan. (Collison, Encyclopaedias, “Appendix 1: The Encyclopaedia Metropolitana,” 229-237.)

86 Coleridge, 8.

24

And on botany:

Yet after all that was effected by Linnaeus himself, not to mention the labours

of... other heroes… what is Botany at this present hour? Little more than an

enormous nomenclature.87

Ishmael/Melville echoes these sentiments when he laments that “It is by endless

subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that some departments of

natural history become so repellingly intricate” (32:139).

Ishmael’s solution is “nothing but to take hold of the whales bodily, in their entire

liberal volume, and boldly sort them that way” (32:140). “Volume” is taken in both its

meanings: divided by size, cetacea are assigned to the categories “Folio,” “Octavo”

and “Duodecimo.” This proposal goes to the heart of many of Moby-Dick’s thematic

preoccupations: the world (or object) as text, bulk as sublime greatness, the size of

books as physical objects related to the overwhelming bulk of knowledge that the

thinking person feels pressured to assimilate, and the relationship between first-hand

experience and authoritative testimony. This last will be taken up in the following

chapter. The remainder of the present chapter will consider the ways in which “bulk”

is figured as both monstrous and sublime in the novel, with relation to whales, to

books as objects and to masses of information. I will also explore in this chapter the

ways in which Moby-Dick engages with specifically encyclopaedic rhetorical

strategies.

There is much play in the novel between the physical bulk of the Pequod’s quarry and

that of books as objects, both of which are related to the writerly task of man-handling

a vast body of information into comprehensible form. Books of epic proportions turn

up with surprising frequency for a novel set on a ship which is apparently furnished

with little reading matter besides two copies of the bible, a few old log books and “a

small choice copy of Watts in each seaman’s berth”88— presumably as popular

among most of the whalemen as Aunt Charity’s other gift of ginger jub. Melville’s

87 Ibid., 9.

88 22:103: Isaac Watts, Sermons on Various Subjects, Divine and Moral (Bungay: Brightley and Childs,

1814), accessed in digital facsimile from http://www.books.google.com, 12 October 2008.

25

reference to Johnson’s Dictionary illustrates the connection he draws between the heft

of a book and its fitness as a reference work:

Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the weightiest words of the

dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult

one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto

edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous

lexicographer’s uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon

to be used by a whale author like me. (104:455-56)

Books as physical and metaphysical objects appear in the “old lexicons and

grammars” that remind the consumptive usher of his mortality (“Etymology” xv), in

the Vedas that Vishnoo rescued from the ocean’s depths by incarnating as a whale

(82:363), and even in the “bible leaves” that the mincer is enjoined to make of the

sperm whale’s flesh in preparation for the trying-out (95:420). When Ishmael, ashore

in Lima, has occasion to swear to the truth of a story of mutiny, he calls for “the

largest sized Evangelists” his friends can procure (54:259). And behind the books that

enter directly into the novel’s imagery are gathered the vast array of philosophical,

religious and whaling texts ferreted out of “the long Vaticans and street stalls of the

earth” (xvii) by Ishmael and his alter-ego the Sub-Sub librarian, in order to furnish the

narrative with its ground of scientific facts, gossip, maritime law, sociological

statistics, mythological allusions and so on. These books, Ishmael reminds us from

time to time, are also real objects, and have a certain fetishistic quality. He marks their

pages with the dried epidermis of the sperm whale, and notes the “musty whaling

smell” of a particular “ancient Dutch volume” he consults (101:445). Moby-Dick

palpates a strange mixed feeling of vertigo and pleasure surrounding the excessive

size of encyclopaedic books, and it is my feeling that this affective current is central

to the novel’s engagement with the legacy of encyclopaedism. It is rare that the

Enlightenment encyclopaedists make direct reference to the size of their opuses, but

this is perhaps to be expected—their self-set task was to render an impossible bulk of

information accessible, and as such, the rhetoric of their prefaces, advertisements and

other self-reflexive writings was focused on the manageability of this enterprise. One

need only think of Ephraim Chambers’ years of largely solitary labour under the

cover of an imaginary “Society of Gentlemen;” of the toils of the young and

underpaid compilers of the first two editions of the Britannica; or of the maelstrom of

practical and political difficulties surrounding the publication of the Encyclopédie to

26

imagine both the exultation and exhaustion that these compilers must have felt when

confronting the scale of their task.89

The most finely drawn relationship in the novel, that between Ishmael and the

harpooner Queequeg, is cemented by their mutual poring over “a large book” in the

Spouter Inn. Ishmael reports, “I endeavoured to explain to him the purpose of the

printing, and the meaning of the few pictures that were in it”(10:51). The meaning of

the word “purpose” is equivocal here: addressing as he does a person whose own

society does not have books (or, at least, not printing—we know from Queequeg’s

tattoos that it has written language), the purpose Ishmael attempts to explain may be

either the text’s meaning or subject, or else the point of producing such objects in the

first place. Queequeg, in any case, is more impressed by the book’s size than its

content, counting the pages in what Ishmael assumes to be groups of fifty, and

frequently “giving utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment.”

Ishmael observes that “it was only by such a large number of fifties being found

together, that his astonishment at the multitude of pages was excited” (10:50). This

description evokes Kant’s notion of the “mathematical sublime,” whereby the

imagination’s attempt to grasp the magnitude of a vast object by means of multiplying

familiar units of measurement is momentarily defeated, leading to an intuition of an

absolutely great whole.90

According to Kant, it is not possible to reach a “pure” judgment on the sublime (that

is, unmixed with the operations of understanding or reason) regarding a man-made

object or an object in nature, such as an animal, “whose concept already brings with it

a determinate end.”91 Such an object can rather be called monstrous, “if by its

magnitude it annihilates the end which its concept constitutes.”92 The spectre of the

outsize book as monstrosity haunts Moby-Dick as it haunts the would-be compiler or

reader of an encyclopaedia. The carnivalesque aspect of the monstrously large text is

addressed by Isabell Lehuu in her analysis of the antebellum American popular press.

89 See Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 38-40 and 176-83; Douglas H. Gordon and Norman L. Torrey, The

Censoring of Diderot’s Encyclopédie and the Re-established Text (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1947).

90 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric

Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ss. 25 & 26.

91 Kant, S. 26 p. 136

92 Ibid.

27

Large-size papers of wildly miscellaneous content such as Brother Jonathan, New

World and Universal Yankee Nation—The Largest Paper in all Creation produced

extra large holiday editions advertised as being in “mammoth quarto” and “leviathan”

formats. One masthead image from another outsize paper, the Boston Notion, depicts

a crowd of readers gathered before its massive pages, held up at the corners in the

mouths of giraffes.93 This is curiously evocative of the much-imitated lithograph

“Baleine d’Ostende, Visitée par l’ Éléphant, la Giraffe, & les Osages” (c. 1828),94 in

which the land animals are presumably included both for relative scale and their

contribution to a festive atmosphere. Melville may have had this image in mind for

his description of depictions of strandings in chapter 55, “Of the Monstrous Pictures

of Whales” (263). This appealing possibility is perhaps encouraged by

Ishmael/Melville’s immediately adjacent comments on the limited usefulness of a

picture of a beached corpse to a student of the living whale: “Though elephants have

stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself

for his portrait.”

Nevertheless, the line between monstrosity and sublimity is not an easy one to trace in

Moby-Dick, either for whales or for books. In the passage quoted at the head of this

chapter, the epistemological scope of Ishmael’s book expands to comprehend the

entire phenomenal world, suggesting an interference into the boundaries of the text by

an infinite field of actual and potential knowledge. For the modern reader this

necessarily invokes Derrida’s assertion of rien hors du texte. In other places resolutely

empiricist, Ishmael seems here infected by the medieval scholastic dream of binding

into a single volume the divine system behind all animate and inanimate nature, but

no sooner does this vision suggest itself than he feels “weary” and faint, enacting that

moment of the imagination’s suppression that precedes the delighted assertion of

reason in Kant’s dynamical sublime. Neither is Ishmael’s authorial project without

that suggestion of potential annihilation that Kant sees as central to an encounter with

the sublime. His allusion to Vesuvius reminds us of the fate of classical

93 Isabell Lehuu, “Mammoths and Extras: Staging a Spectacle in Print” in her Carnival on the Page:

Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000),

65.

94 Stuart M. Frank, Herman Melville’s Picture Gallery (Fairhaven, Mass.: E.J. Lefkowicz, 1986), 43.

See Appendix for these images compared.

28

encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder, who stood calmly observing the shape and colour of

the ash cloud that was to kill him within 24 hours.95

The whale, repeatedly connected metaphorically to texts, is a likewise unstable

quantity in the novel. Queequeg may be the butt of comedy when he counts the large

book’s pages, but it is made clear throughout the novel that the attempt to

comprehend the whole by measuring the parts is an essential strategy for both the

naturalist and the properly sceptical reader of an adventure romance that deals with

unfamiliar subject matter. The “Extracts” tell us the weight of the whale’s liver in

“cartloads,” that a barrel of herrings can be extracted from its belly, and that its

severed head will run aground in twelve or thirteen feet of water. The heart of a whale

(in the Sub-Sub’s parenthetical observation, “A small sized one”) will throw out “Ten

or fifteen gallons of blood” from an aorta “larger in the bore than the main pipe of the

water-works of London Bridge” (xix, xxi, xxiii). Elsewhere Ishmael furnishes

numerical measurements for, to name just a few examples, the right whale’s mouth

and tongue (75:334-35), the sperm whale’s tail (86:377), and its ribs and vertebrae,

which he claims to have examined first hand from a skeleton preserved on an island in

the Arsacides, tattooing “the valuable statistics” onto his own right arm in the absence

of other means of preserving them (102-03:448-54). It is not just Ishmael who appeals

to numerical evidence—it is, of course, essential to natural history accounts of the

whale, and recurs in various credited and uncredited, canonical and apocryphal

borrowings from Scoresby, Beale, Bennet, Cuvier, Lacépède and others.96 The

cumulative effect of these repeated attempts to apprehend the whale in its entire bulk

by computing its parts is, ultimately, one of defeat. This serves a certain generic

imperative in the novel: whatever else Moby-Dick might be, it is certainly an

adventure romance (“Now then, thought I, … here goes for a cool, collected dive at

death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost” 49:228). The readership that

had been attracted to Melville on the basis of Typee and Omoo might well have been

expected to relish the incomprehensible excesses of the exotic world of the whale

fishery. Nevertheless, when this rhetorical tendency is considered in terms of

95 Letters 6:16 and 6:20, Pliny to Cornelius Tacitus, in The Letters of the Younger Pliny, trans. and

introduction by Betty Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 166-68, 170-73.

96 See chapters 32, 103, 105, among others, for numerous examples.

29

knowledge in general rather than whales specifically, the encyclopaedic sublime

comes into play.

It is a major mimetic challenge of the novel to render the sperm whale as an organism,

with an “end” both in its biological purposiveness and as a raw material of industry,

and simultaneously as the formless natural force that incites Ahab into a frenzy of

hubris and makes Moby Dick a candidate for sublimity. Ishmael/Melville’s accounts

of the whale shift deftly between the whale’s physiological and metaphysical aspects.

As James Guetti notes, the sperm whale’s nature and intentionality are made

ambiguous by the amassing of hearsay from various sources which Ishmael can

invoke without completely committing himself to. He cites the concatenation of

rumours on the ferocity of the sperm whale as a species and supernatural powers

attributed to Moby Dick in particular that make up the chapter “Moby Dick” (41),

which are arranged so as to leave unclear in each case how reliable each source might

be.97 For Guetti, Ishmael’s borrowing of the voices of hearsay is a particular case of a

more general affinity for “special vocabularies,” such as those of whaling, zoology

and myth.98 He inhabits these vocabularies with pleasure, and with great

narratological precision.

A review of Ishmael’s comments on the sperm whale’s face and head serves as an

example. Chapters 74, 76 and 77 offer a wealth of precise anatomical description.

These are of interest in themselves, but they also contain essential information for the

reader if she is to understand and credit both Tashtego’s near-drowning while baling

the case and, later, the staving of the Pequod’s hull with a blow from Moby Dick’s

head. A brief dramatic chapter recounting Tashtego’s brush with death separates these

zoological chapters from two chapters examining the head through the “semisciences”

of physiognomy and phrenology. “The Prairie” and “The Nut” are scathing

in their satire of these discourses, but are also redolent of the ineffable. The sperm

whale’s face and head are notable for their blankness and unreadability. Its brow is

comparable to “the Rock of Gibraltar,” or a mountain, its wrinkles like deer tracks. A

few humans approach this “mighty god-like dignity”—notably Ahab, whose brow is

97 James Guetti, The Limits of Metaphor: A Study of Melville, Conrad and Faulkner (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press.,1967), 13.

98 Ibid., 18.

30

also likened to a mountain, to which clouds of melancholy are attracted by very dint

of its loftiness (28:125)—but in the sperm whale this quality is

so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the

Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object

in living nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is

revealed; no nose, eyes, ears,or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing

but that one broad firmament of a forehead. (79:147)

Returning to this theme six chapters later with an obsessive accumulation of

epistrophe and anadiplosis, Ishmael/Melville demands: “how comprehend his face,

when face he has none? …. and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no

face” (86:379). As an object of sublime mystery, Moby Dick has a counterpart in the

giant squid. It, too, is without “perceptible face or front,” and it, like the whale’s

forehead, is “unearthly, formless” (59:276). It is equally a figure of superstition for

the whalemen, and like Moby Dick, it is white: a window onto the horrific, dazzling

and undifferentiated field of ultimate truth upon which the incautious arctic traveller

or the youth who lifts Neith’s veil is in danger of staring himself blind.

James Guetti argues that the essential attitude expressed in “The Whiteness of the

Whale” is that “Language can only illuminate itself; … never reaching away from

itself toward the reality, whatever that might be.”99 According to Guetti, the various

“special vocabularies” that Ishmael takes up over the course of the novel—those of

natural history, the tragic, hearsay, superstition and so on—function primarily to

allow him to avoid narrative commitment. These vocabularies, he argues, prove

remote and arbitrary when applied to “essential matters,” such that Ishmael’s

language ultimately “functions to display its insufficiency.”100 For Guetti it is Ahab

who represents the novel’s “essential matters,” with his determination to “strike

through the mask” of appearances and grasp the truth. Ahab’s attitude may be hubris,

but at least it is committed. And this commitment, it is implied, is inimical to

Ishmael’s digressive tactics.101 Ishmael is the wiser of the two, but his final message is

one of extreme epistemological indeterminacy. Indeed, most of the critical

investigations into Moby-Dick’s encyclopaedic tendencies tend to define them

negatively against Ahab’s inexorable progression to his tragic destiny. This is

99 Guetti, 28.

100 Ibid., 18, 41.

101 Ibid., 36, 41-42.

31

encyclopaedism as interruption, as diversionary tactic, as a way putting off the real

business of being. At its most simplistic, this tendency of thought amounts to what

Betsy Hilbert has described as the “Ballast Theory of cetology in Moby-Dick”: any

information that doesn’t contribute directly to the plot, or that is not presented in the

standard adventure-romance mode, is included as either a red herring or a refreshing

change of pace.102

More sophisticated variations on the theme include the analyses of John Seelye and

Jed Rasula.103 Seelye also interprets the “cetology” chapters in terms of an opposition

between Ahab, who for Seelye is “associated with the kinetic, linear element of the

story,” and Ishmael, the “exponent of circular views.”104 The “cetology” chapters “act

to block and impede the forward movement of the narrative.”105 On Seelye’s reading

the figures of line and circle “dovetail … into an impervious unity, an organic puzzle

which contains the complexity of the world.”106 This notion, while appealing, is

nevertheless something of an ontological chestnut, and Ishmael’s diversity of

discursive modes is sorely compressed to fit the tidy descriptor of “circularity.” Jed

Rasula argues that Ishmael/Melville’s “tactical narrative expedient is one of delay,

meander, filibuster.”107 His reading engages explicitly with Moby-Dick’s

encyclopaedism, influenced partly by Edward Mendelson’s notion of “encyclopedic

narrative.” Mendelson places Moby-Dick in this tradition, alongside Ulysses, the

Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, and selected others, all of which offer a picture of a

national culture by “mak[ing] use of all the literary styles and conventions known to

[the author’s] countrymen.”108 For Rasula, Moby-Dick’s encyclopaedism must be

understood in terms of the “archive”: the fantastical convergence of all that is known

or able to be known. By dint of its sheer bulk, the archive creates its own “entropic

102 For an overview of this critical position see Betsy Hilbert, “The Truth of the Thing: Non-Fiction in

Moby-Dick,” College English, Vol. 48, No. 8 (1986): 824-831. She cites F.O. Matthiessen’s American

Renaissance (New York: Oxford UP, 1941), Howard P. Vincent’s The Trying-out of Moby-Dick

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1949; reprint, Kent: Kent State University Press, 1980), and

Newton Arvin’s Herman Melville (Westport: Greenwood Press 1972, 1950).

103 John Seelye, “Moby-Dick: Line and Circle,” in The Ironic Diagram (Evanston: Northwestern

University Press, 1970), 60-75; Jed Rasula, “Textual Indigence in the Archive,” Postmodern Culture

Vol. 9, No.3, (1999).

104 Seelye, 63, 65.

105 Ibid., 63

106 Ibid., 65.

107 Rasula, 23.

108 Edward Mendelson, "Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon," MLN, Vol. 91, No. 6

(1976), 1258.

32

undertow …. Plenitude leads to intransigence, to wandering in circles or meandering

without purpose.”109 Ishmael’s narrative “wallow[s] in its archival resources” as a

way of “deferring the chase.”110

The implication of all such readings is that encyclopaedias’ fragmentary and

heteroglossic procedure amounts to an evasion of epistemological commitment—a

claim with which the staunchly Baconian encyclopédistes might well have taken

issue. Pursuing empiricism with courage caused controversy for Diderot and his

contributors, and Pierre Bayle before them.111 The conservative turn of the Britannica

in the wake of the Terror led to a scathing attack on the Encyclopédie “for having

disseminated far and wide the seeds of anarchy and atheism,”112 but this distancing

tactic would not have been necessary had the Britannica’s editors not been concerned

about the reception of their own work. And Robert Chambers felt the need to publish

his Vestiges anonymously, despite the conciliatory tone the work adopts toward

scientific and religious orthodoxies of the day.113 In contrast to such oppositional

readings of Moby-Dick’s encyclopaedic impulse, it is my view that this aspect of the

novel expresses an empiricist epistemology that is to be taken seriously, and has rich

narratological potential in its own right.

Part of what Ishmael/Melville gleans from the encyclopaedic project is the necessity

of confronting his text’s arbitrary arrangement. This bears on both his conception of

the text as system, and on his arrangement of its individual elements. At the

macroscopic level, the novel aligns itself with the model of the labyrinth or map,

rather than the porphyrian tree.114 Labyrinths appear on the skin of the sperm and

right whales, and on the “chart” of Ishmael’s brow (68:306, 73:327, 44:198). These

centreless networks recall Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the infinitely

interconnectible and self-generating rhizome. It is in the nature of the rhizome that it

109 Rasula, 10.

110 Ibid., 23.

111 Frank A. Kafker, “The Role of the Encyclopédie in the Making of the Modern Encyclopaedia,” in

Clorinda Donato and Robert M. Maniquis, eds., The Encyclopédie and the Age of Revolution (Boston:

G. K. Hall, 1992), 22.

112 George Gleig, in the dedication to George III of the 1801 Supplement to the Britannica’s third

edition, cited in Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, 240.

113 Secord, introduction to Vestiges, xvii-xviii, xxiii-xxiv.

114 Although Ishmael occasionally essays this model too: “Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of

them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters” (63:289).

33

must be experienced from within since the observer is herself bound up in its

conceptual field, even though d’Alembert speculates about the encyclopaedia’s

potential for “placing the philosopher … at a vantage point … high above this vast

labyrinth.”115 In Moby-Dick, the highest vantage point attainable is in the mast-heads,

from which the viewer is “almost omniscient” (105:460). The “Mast-Head” chapter

(35) warns that, in sailors of a romantic turn of mind, the mast-head watch is liable to

bring on a philosophical trance—as is appropriate to a position above the confusion of

daily life that is also enjoyed by Simon Stylite, and the monumental figures of Nelson,

Washington and Napoleon. However, Ishmael discovers, as did the Enlightenment

encyclopaedists, this omniscient viewpoint is difficult to sustain. In writing about “the

tumultuous business of cutting-in,” he comments that

There is much running backwards and forwards among the crew …. There is

no staying in any one place; for at one and the same time everything has to be

done everywhere. It is much the same with him who endeavours a description

of the scene (72:319).

This recalls Jeremy Bentham’s observation, in the Second Preface to his

Chrestomathia (1815-1817), that the problem of attempting a scientific classification

of knowledge is that it is “impossible to form any tolerably adequate judgment on, or

even conception of the whole, without the means of carrying the eye, with unlimited

velocity, over every part of the field.”116 Such infinite velocity is ultimately

unattainable, and this fact shows itself in the contingent arrangement of an

encyclopaedic text’s component parts.

Although in places Ishmael toys with the possibilities of orderly classification, he

elsewhere acknowledges that “There are some enterprises in which a careful

disorderliness is the true method” (82:361). With a certain editorial insouciance, he

prefaces a series of horrific stories about sperm whale attacks with the comment, “I do

not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make mention of one or two

other things, which to me seem important” (45:205). His claim for the importance of

this information is not an idle one: the evidence he gathers in this chapter is essential

to sustaining the reader’s belief in the ferocity of sperm whales through the three-day

115 D’Alembert, 47.

116 Jeremy Bentham, “Second Preface to the First Edition,” in M. J. Smith and W. H. Burston (eds.),

Chrestomathia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 15. I am indebted to Richard Yeo for drawing

attention to Bentham’s observation.

34

chase that closes the novel—perhaps more crucially, the testimony in the “Affidavit”

and other chapters goes to the heart of the dilemma about Ahab’s right to seek

“Vengeance on a dumb brute” (36:163). The novel repeats this pattern of assigning

chapters to particulars of the whale and the mechanics of the hunt which will later

prove essential to the reader’s understanding of events. “The Line” (60) anticipates

both Pip’s terror in the whale boat and Ahab’s death by “hemp;” “The Chart” testifies

to the credible possibility of finding “one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of

this planet” (44:199). In each case Ishmael/Melville explicitly flags his proleptic, or,

occasionally, analeptic, intent: “All these particulars are faithfully narrated here, as

they will not fail to elucidate several most important, however intricate passages, in

scenes hereafter to be painted” (63:290). These claims refer forward and backward

across the body of the text, linking the novel’s dramatic and philosophical discourses

with the science, history, technical specs and whale-men’s hearsay that support or

complicate their implicit claims. In this way, they function much as the crossreferences

in an alphabetised encyclopaedia, to convene a semantic unity out of an

arbitrary arrangement of fragments.

The “Extracts” section that precedes chapter one is of course entirely fragmentary and

entirely borrowed from other sources. The extracts anticipate many of the novel’s

central claims and thematic preoccupations, but they offer a singular aesthetic

pleasure in their own right. Too brief to give a sense of leisurely browsing, too

decontextualised to be “informative,” too random in their distribution of themes to

provide an aid to memory, the Extracts simply accumulate, blending together into a

formless mass of ideas that confound the systematising faculties of the mind and open

into intuition and speculation. It is a great pity that they were consigned to the back of

Volume 3 in the first English edition, because it is the mesmeric cumulus of Extracts,

more than the “snow hill in the air,” that “looms” over the opening chapters of the

novel. The Extracts are present as a phantasm behind many key moments in the text.

To take one example, the mysterious character of Bulkington, like a “storm-tossed

ship,” is compelled to “fly all hospitality,” shunning the lee shore for “the open

independence of [the] sea” (23:106). By contrast, “the wounded whale” of Spenser’s

Fairie Queen “to shore flies from the maine” (xix). Some readers may not recognise

this reversal; others might assiduously return to the Extracts to trace the

foreshadowing to its source; but it is perhaps conceivable that many readers will be

35

roused to an imperfect memory of the Spenser quotation, feeling intuitively the

comparison of the aptly-named Bulkington to the whale, and the implication of his

being the greater creature. In this way the Extracts enact the dream-like experience of

remembering something that one has read and yet not remembering where one has

read it. These fragments reimpose themselves unexpectedly on the consciousness,

confounding encyclopaedic rationality: they are ghosts in the archive.

The heaping up of testimony from a variety of sources is not confined to the Extracts,

however, as it is central to Ishmael/Melville’s carefully disorderly method. In some

cases this procedure is attended by a reasoned evaluation of each source, as in his

analysis of the “Monstrous” and the “Less Erroneous” pictures of whales (chapters 55

and 56), or the sources are adduced as evidence for a logical argument (as chapter

105: “Does the Whale Diminish?”). Elsewhere, however, he “do[es] not choose to

approach [his] task methodically,” rather offering “separate citations of items” from

which “the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of itself” (45:203). Ishmael’s

narrative procedure here implies a transparent empiricism, inviting the reader to trust

the massed body of “reliable” testimony over the rhetorical tricks of a sophisticated

treatise. Of course, a little reflection and some scant knowledge of Melville’s

biography turns up proof that some of the first-hand experience that Ishmael professes

is not Melville’s own. Melville cannot, for instance, have seen the same harpooner

strike the same animal in incidents three years apart unless merchant ships and

frigates were in the habit of lowering for whales. This problem is complicated by the

text’s invitations to conflate Ishmael with Melville, such as the reference to the bitter

come-down experienced by an ex-school teacher turned midshipman, or Ishmael’s

stout declaration that “A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard” (1:6;

24:112). For a readership that had received Typee and Omoo as largely factual

accounts of a sailor’s adventures, this claim can hardly fail to lend a certain amount of

testimonial weight to the narrative.117 But if Ishmael’s “affidavits” are in some cases

fictional, the reliability of the claims of his shipmates and sundry Nantucket

acquaintances, often unnamed, is even more dubious. Ishmael/Melville uses this very

117 For an account of Melville’s travels, see Thomas Farel Heffernan, “Melville the Traveller” in A

Companion to Melville Studies, ed. John Bryant (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986), 36-52, or Jay

Leyda’s indispensable biographical resource, The Melville Log, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace

and Company, 1951). For the reception of Melville’s early works as quasi-factual, see Nina Baym,

“Melville’s Quarrel with Fiction,” PMLA, Vol. 94, No. 5 (1979): 909-11 and John Samson, White Lies:

Melville’s Narratives of Facts (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), 1-4.

36

dilemma as a satirical lens through which to inspect all kinds of claims to authority, as

when Ishmael sides with two whale-ship acquaintances against Linnaeus and declares

the whale to be a fish (32:136). To develop the analogy of cross-references further,

this is perhaps an instance of the subversive Diderotian reference: the position that the

text ostensibly supports might not, on closer examination, be that which presents the

strongest case.

It is not just far-fetched hearsay that is called into question by the unstable authority

that might be attributed to given sources. Ishmael/Melville launches vociferous and

highly comical attacks on certain sources taken for “experts” among landlubbers and

“armchair naturalists,” to use Anstey’s phrase. Aristotle, Pliny, Goldsmith, Frederick

Cuvier, John Hunter and other “lights of zoology and anatomy,” whom contemporary

readers were likely to have known through encyclopaedias or popular science books

and periodicals, are given short shrift.118 Even Scoresby and Beale, whom Melville

acknowledges as “justly renowned” for their first-hand experience of whaling, are

mocked for their perplexity over the problem of classifying and describing the cetacea

(56:267; 32:134). In short, it is impossible to consult an encyclopaedia after reading

Moby-Dick without reflecting on the tracts of uncredited information between expert

sources, and on the reliability of those sources that are identified. Conversely, the

reader familiar with the seductive rhetorical manoeuvres of encyclopaedic

discourses—whether the elegant polemic of an Encyclopedié entry or the bare

sillogismus carpentered out of multiple sources in the minor Penny articles— will

recognise the new uses to which they are put when they enter into a work of fiction.

If, as Hillary Clark argues, discourse becomes encyclopaedic when it takes as its

subject the process of knowing and the body of human knowledge,”119 the

encyclopaedic impulse in Moby-Dick must be acknowledged not just in its structural

particulars but in its epistemological procedure.

118 One of the most pleasurable ways to compare Melville’s sources with his assessments of them is a

perusal of Stuart M. Frank’s Herman Melville’s Picture Gallery (Fairhaven, Mass.: E.J. Lefkowicz,

1986). Its plates, all sourced from the artworks described in chapters 55 to 57, are testament to

Melville’s ekphrastic genius. The whale in a bowdlerised nineteenth-century Goldsmith’s Animated

Nature (for which Goldsmith himself was not responsible), looks just precisely like “an amputated

sow”(Frank 28-29; M-D 55:262).

119 Clark, 107.

37

Neither is this claim limited to those chapters which focus on natural history, whaling

technology, history and mythology. The novel’s unruly heteroglossia extends beyond

the official languages of the encyclopaedia to essay the Shakespearean lyric, the sea

shanty, the dramatic monologue and countless other genres. This ought not to be

considered as inimical to the encyclopaedic spirit, for the Enlightenment

encyclopaedists were aware of the challenges and the potentialities involved in the

inevitable heterogeneities of style that must occur in texts as wide-ranging as theirs

were. Diderot embraced the inevitable “effect of diversity” in the encyclopaedic form:

“Every labor, every science, every art, every article, every subject has its language

and style. What is the harm of preserving them?”120 Yet there was more at issue than

“inevitability.” The question of literary style was evidently linked closely to the

Encyclopédie’s empiricist program, for he draws a direct analogy:

We needed a time of reasoning, when we no longer look for the rules in

authors, but in nature, and when we can feel what is false and what is true in

all those arbitrary poetics; I am taking the term poetics in its most general

sense, for a system of given rules, according to which, in whatever genre,

people pretend you must work in order to succeed.121

For Melville, as for the Enlightenment encyclopaedists, genre was something to be

mobilised in the service of epistemological investigations, rather than an absolute that

ought to determine their limits. Bakhtin has observed that the dialogic interaction

between a variety of autonomous styles or “languages” is indeed essential to the novel

form’s narrative procedure. Each incorporated language expresses its own point of

view and values, which, subordinated to the novel’s stylistic unity, form a system that

determines what the novel will be able to express, and thus, what it will be able to

know.122

It has been noted previously that Ephraim Chambers saw potential in “general and

promiscuous” collections, because the juxtaposition of ideas might open new

120 Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” 63-64 of 77.

121 Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” 47 of 77. Melville’s much-discussed 1851 letter to Hawthorne seems to

indicate that he felt the frustration and pressure of being judged according to “arbitrary poetics:” “What

I feel most moved to write, that is banned, — it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I

cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.” Lynn Horth, ed.,

Correspondence, The Writings of Herman Melville, Vol. 14 (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern

University Press and The Newberry Library, 1993), 191.

122 M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and

Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259-422.

38

possibilities of thought. As Bakhtin has shown us, the same is true of the juxtaposition

of genres. Chambers notes, too, “that every art, every system, tends to give the mind a

particular turn; and that the only way of maintaining it in its natural rectitude, is by

calling in other opposite ones, by way of counter-balance.”123 Ishmael harbours a

Baconian scepticism toward the idea of “balancing” the mind by accumulating ballast

on all sides. Reflecting on the Pequod’s situation when it has a right whale head

hoisted on to portside and a sperm whale’s to starboard, he observes:

So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but

now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very

poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish!

throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right

(73:327).

If “balance” is not Ishmael/Melville’s ultimate goal, he would nevertheless seem to

have sympathy for Chambers’ professed object:

to the extending of our views, and opening new tracks, new scenes, new

vista’s. We have endeavoured not only to furnish the mind, but to enlarge it,

by placing it in a great variety of situations and presenting to it the sentiments,

notions, manners, customs, &c., of most ages, people, sects, &c., that have

anything new, unusual, or original in them.

While for Ishmael/Melville there is a sheer aesthetic pleasure in clustering together “a

great variety of situations and … sentiments,” and a certain dizzying thrill in the

(inevitably unfulfilled) quest “to be exhaustive,” Moby-Dick’s encyclopaedic legacy

also shows itself in its ambition to widen the limits of what a book, and its readers,

can know. Diderot called it “the character which a good dictionary ought to possess:

that of changing the common mode of thinking.”124 Ephraim Chambers expressed it

thus:

And what chiefly makes new ideas of any significancy, is their extending and

enlarging the mind, and making it more capacious and susceptible.—But

neither is this enlargement the last aim; but is chiefly of use, as it contributes

to the encreasing of our sensibility, to the making our faculties more subtile

and adequate, … and thus enabling us to judge clearly, pronounce boldly,

conclude reasonably.125

123 Ephraim Chambers, Preface to 4th edition of the Cyclopaedia, xxv.

124 Diderot, “Encyclopédie,” 38 of 77.

125 Ephraim Chambers, xxv.

39

Although Melville is known to have owned a copy of Chambers’ Cyclopaedia, little

attention has been paid to its possible influence on Moby-Dick. One passage in

particular seems to suggest that Melville had read and reflected on Chambers’

preface, as passionate and cogent a manifesto of encyclopaedism as Diderot’s

celebrated “Encyclopédie” entry or d’Alembert’s “Discours Préliminaire,” for

Ishmael asks:

Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through

so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a

hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and

his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any

longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.—Why then do you try to

"enlarge" your mind? Subtilize it (74:331).

The encyclopaedic legacy of Moby-Dick reveals itself in a complex interplay of

parody, homage, philosophical enquiry and the critical adoption of rhetorical

strategies. It is not just the phantom of the white whale that haunts the novel, but the

phantom of a vast, complex and discursively questioning book, of which the version

the reader holds in her hand is “but the draught of a draught.” But Ishmael/Melville

has a purpose in “leav[ing] the copestone to posterity” (32:145): since the testimony

of others forms such a large proportion of the raw material of the reasoning mind, his

narrative is left uncapped the better to interrogate the assumptions behind knowledge

which is taken to be authoritative. I have somewhat anticipated my succeeding

chapter in my discussion of the equivocal authority granted to both textual sources

and purported first-hand experience in the novel. I will go on to consider Moby-Dick

in terms of contemporary discourses around both the novel form in general and other

genres in which this particular novel takes part, suggesting that Moby-Dick engages

with discourses of authority in order to reconfigure them, opening up new spaces for

social and political critique.

40

3. “Unwritten lives”: discourse and authority in Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick’s juxtaposition of contrasting subject matter and genre, and its complex

relationships to the primary sources to which it alludes, cannot be considered

independently of the text’s construction of Ishmael/Melville’s writerly persona(e), nor

of the very real problem of Herman Melville’s contemporary reception. With the

publication of the formally experimental Mardi (1949) and again with Moby-Dick

(1851), Melville found himself inhabiting a precarious liminal position. He had first

been presented to the public as a writer of quasi-journalistic maritime adventures; by

the time he came to compose Moby-Dick he was offering works of vastly extended

literary and material range, and knew that he ran the risk of being accused of

presumption or superficiality, or at least of public confusion in the face of his

metaphysical turn.126 In Moby-Dick, Ishmael/Melville undertakes to construct a

double case for his defence: he has to establish his authority as an experienced

whaleman, which grounds the more fantastical elements of the plot, and against which

he evaluates many of the supposedly expert sources he makes use of; and he has to

argue for his authorial versatility, his right to deal confidently with abstruse

philosophical and scientific concerns. Ishmael/Melville works from this liminal

position to critique the assumptions underlying the attribution of authority in a variety

of authoritative discourses.

Ishmael’s explicit, if factually unstable, claims for first-hand authority were touched

on in chapter 2. Aside from his borrowings from Melville’s seafaring biography, he

frequently offers metaphors for knowing which are related to touching or grasping: he

has dealt with whales “with these visible hands” and expresses his quest for perfect

knowledge of whales as the need “to grope down into the bottom of the sea after

them; to have one's hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of

the world” (32:136). The strategy of the “Affidavit” chapter, with its titular

connotations of a legal oath, is that of opposing first-hand testimony, either his own or

that of other experienced whalemen, to the scepticism of lay readers who can “have

nothing like a fixed, vivid conception” of “the general perils of the grand fishery”

126 For cogent discussions of Melville’s engagement with challenges of genre and public reception from

Typee (1845) to Moby-Dick, see Baym, Samson, and Hershel Parker, Section II of “Historical Note” in

the Northwestern-Newberry Moby-Dick, 587-617.

41

(45:205). This recourse to legal language is an indication of how high the stakes are:

if the reader is not prepared to enter into the probability of the novel’s events, the

narrative project fails. It is curious that Ishmael/Melville should take this position,

given that Moby-Dick is a work of fiction and could legitimately be presented as a

fantasy. It is possible that Ishmael/Melville is invoking the language of sworn oaths

for atmospheric effect, but this focus on reliable testimony is also something of a

bridge between Moby-Dick and Melville’s successful early works, Typee (1845) and

Omoo (1847), which entered more explicitly into the generic conventions of what

John Samson calls the “literature of exploration,”127 such as Charles S. Stewart’s A

Visit to the South Seas128 and William Ellis’ Polynesian Researches.129 According to

Samson, every narrator in this genre “insists that his is a true account, a narrative of

facts,” as a matter of convention.130 Samson also contends that the readership of such

narratives expected, even demanded, “an unartistic, even amateurish relation of

experiences” to enhance the sense of reassuring verisimilitude.131

It is finally indeterminate whether Moby-Dick invites the reader to identify Ishmael

with Melville, and to regard his “affidavits” as having a basis in fact, or whether these

are to be interpreted strictly within the novel’s fictional frame.132 But regardless of

whether Ishmael is read as the alter ego of Herman Melville, writer of maritime

adventures, or as an entirely fictional character, he faces a problem: having aligned

himself with the pragmatic and unscholarly Charley Coffins of the world, “how may

unlettered Ishmael hope” (79:347) to write authoritatively on matters of philosophy

and natural history? The figure of the whaleman/naturalist, in the persons of William

127 Samson, 3.

128 New York, 1831.

129 New York, 1833. For a discussion of these two works and other similar texts as sources for Typee,

see Parker, 590.

130 Samson, 4.

131 Samson, 1-2.

132 That Melville’s contemporary readership might have been more troubled than the modern reader by

this ambiguity is suggested by the review of Moby-Dick by Melville’s friend and sometime publisher

Evert Duyckinck, who noted a “difficulty” in “the double character under which [Melville’s fictions]

present themselves. In one light they are romantic fictions, in another statements of absolute fact.” New

York Literary World, no. 251 (22 November 1851): 403-04. By contrast, the reviewer for the London

Morning Post (14 November 1851), who considered Moby-Dick “a book of extraordinary merit,” was

more sanguine: “The work comes before us simply in its literary aspect …. The adventures, whether

genuine or apocryphal, are so deliciously exciting … that we cannot hesitate to accord to Mr. Melville

the praise of having produced one of the cleverest, wittiest, and most amusing of modern books.” Both

reprinted in Kevin J. Hayes, ed., The Critical Response to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (Westport,

Conn.; London: Greenwood Press, 1994 ), 9, 19.

42

Scoresby, Jr. and Thomas Beale, is an attractive model for merging erudition with

experience. Scoresby’s 1820 Account of the Arctic Regions and Beale’s 1839 Natural

History of the Sperm Whale were two watershed treatises of nineteenth-century

cetology, both of which were written after the authors spent considerable time aboard

whaleships. Melville had Scoresby on extended loan during the writing of Moby-Dick

and owned a copy of Beale.133 In chapters 55 to 57 of Moby-Dick Ishmael/Melville

offers a critical survey of images of whales from antiquity to his own time, and is

especially complimentary of the images from Scoresby’s and Beale’s opuses, being

“by great odds … the best” (56:265) of their respective species of specialisation, the

right whale and the sperm whale. The Extracts also quote Beale at length:

It is a matter of great astonishment that the consideration of the habits of so

interesting, and, in a commercial point of view, of so important an animal (as

the Sperm Whale) should have been entirely neglected, or should have excited

so little curiosity among the numerous, and many of them competent

observers, that of late years must have possessed the most abundant and the

most convenient opportunities of witnessing their habitudes” (xxv-xxvi).

The implications for Ishmael’s authority are manifold: not only is making a whaling

voyage an excellent opportunity to study the whale, but the transition from ordinary

sailor to celebrated naturalist might be as simple as the exercise of “curiosity” and

competent observation. With this quotation, Moby-Dick echoes the encyclopédistes’

dream of extending their circle of experts beyond the leisured intellectuals of the

universities and academies. From this position the novel is free not only to assert

Ishmael’s (and possibly Melville’s) authority in the field of cetology, but also to

challenge the assumption that all lauded works of natural history are equally worthy—

since Ishmael has “had” so much “to do with whales,” he is qualified to criticise those

images of the sperm and right whales offered by eminent naturalists such as

Lacépède, James Colnett and Frederick Cuvier as “incorrect,” “blundering” and,

(calling Scoresby as his expert witness), having no “counterpart in nature”

(55:262).134

133 Leyda, 377, 414, cited Frank, 60, 66.

134 Perusing the various pictures of whales side by side with Ishmael/Melville’s commentary, it

becomes clear that he was, as Stuart M. Frank observes, by and large quite generous and accurate with

his assessments, if a little harsh on Colnett for drawing the sperm whale’s eye too large (“Ah, my

gallant captain, why did ye not give us a Jonah looking out of that eye?” 55:262). See Frank 26-34 for

the images mentioned here.

43

A related narrative strategy employed both to destabilise authoritative discourses and

to vouch for Ishmael’s own authority is the opposition of experience to abstract booklearning.

The “consumptive usher” who supplies the “Etymology” polishes his

grammars with a handkerchief “mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of the

known nations;” (xv) the “mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil

of a Sub-Sub” librarian is stuck in the thankless grind of collating information from

among “the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth” (xvii). But Ishmael, too,

“ha[s] swam through libraries” (32:136), and the Sub-Sub and usher are only alter

egos of the author, such that Ishmael/Melville is himself satirically identified with the

figure of the compiler drudge who dogged the great encyclopaedists’ dreams of

erudition and glory. Nevertheless, Ishmael is something of a maverick among

compilers, willing to tattoo himself with important information if no paper and pen

are to be got. Ishmael turns his hand philosophically to whatever interesting work is

available, be it research or cutting-in. Preparing to hold forth on the fossil whale,

Ishmael “present[s his] credentials as a geologist” thus: “in my miscellaneous time I

have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals and wells, winevaults,

cellars and cisterns of all sorts” (104:456). However comical the tone, in such

statements Ishmael is presenting himself as Emerson’s versatile and self-sufficient

American Scholar, who represents “Man Thinking” and not a hyper-specialised,

intellectually enervated bookworm.135

Ishmael/Melville nevertheless remains in an unstable position of intellectual and

literary authority: not artless enough for a straightforward romancer, yet perhaps not

scholarly enough, as some of Moby-Dick’s first reviewers protested, to sustain and

justify his forays into more abstruse matters of science or philosophy.136 But this

135 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar” (1837), reprinted in Kenneth Sacks,

Understanding Emerson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 131-46.

136 The review from the New York Albion (new ser. 10, 22 November 1851), which introduces Melville

as “a practical and practised sea-novelist” and, on these grounds, generally “worth the reading,’

considered Moby-Dick to have been seriously marred by “a vile overdaubing with a coat of booklearning

and mysticism.” The London Spectator (no. 24, 25 October 1851) declared the “truthful and

interesting” “nautical parts” to have been injured by “a variety of digressions” wherein “a little

knowledge is made the excuse for a vast many words.” These reviews seem to suggest not just that

Melville is at fault for presenting the fantastical as a matter of fact, but for overreaching his capacities

as a dependable but intellectually limited author of sea yarns. Other critics were more welcoming of

Melville’s blending of genres and discourses. George Henry Lewes of the London Leader (8 November

1851), puzzled that “the book is not a romance, nor a treatise on Cetology. It is something of a both: a

strange, wild, weird work …. no criticism will thwart its fascination.” And the reviewer from the New

York Daily Tribune (22 November 1851) seemed prepared to take Ishmael/Melville at his word on

44

instability is parlayed into a complex critique of authoritative discourses of all kinds.

John Samson’s White Lies focuses on the ways in which Moby-Dick uses the

conventions of the literature of adventure to expose the white cultural myths implicit

in its generic conventions and open up new possibilities for figuring white/non-white

cultural encounters. I would argue that this critical project is also furthered by the

novel’s manipulations of the conventions of biography. Ishmael/Melville’s position

on the fringe of intellectual respectability allows him to observe unsung things. Part of

his task in the narrative he unfolds is to sing them. He is the sole elegist of Bulkington

and, as he reminds us in the Epilogue, of all the Pequod’s crew. Part of the

responsibility—and part of the pleasure—in his undertaking to describe the sperm

whale “exhaustively” is in the fact that “the Sperm Whale, scientific or poetic, lives

not complete in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten

life” (32:135). The remainder of this chapter will focus on the biographical treatment

given to the character of Queequeg in the novel, examining both its intertextual

resonances with encyclopaedic conventions and the spaces it opens up for the critique

of cultural myths.

The dedicated biographical chapter of Queequeg that Ishmael interpolates into his

early account of their friendship broadly follows the structural conventions of

biographies of eminent historical persons in Encyclopaedias of the day. This sets it

apart from the novel’s treatment of other characters, and foregrounds the complex and

ambivalent process of the borrowing of authority across genres that characterises

Melville’s approach to intertextuality. Apart from Bulkington’s “six-inch chapter” of

elegiac prose, which in any case stands out more for Bulkington’s conspicuous

absence from the subsequent narrative than for its form, the text’s other key secondary

characters are introduced in more conventional novelistic terms. In the adjacent

chapters both entitled “Knights and Squires,” Starbuck, Stubb and Flask are each

introduced with an account of their heritage, character and appearance, involving

extensive access to their private thoughts and philosophies. Little information is given

about their careers prior to the present voyage. Tashtego and Dagoo are presented

from an entirely external perspective, their individual characters conflated with those

sperm whale fishery matters: “Mr. Melville gives us not only the romance of [the whale’s] history, but

a great mass of instruction on the character and habits of his whole race, with complete details of the

wily stratagems of their pursuers.” All reviews reprinted in Hayes, 3, 12, 15, 17.

45

attributed to their respective races, their “pagan virtues” affirmed but not expanded

upon. The animalistic—even elemental—epithets attached to them in their initial

portraits (Tashtego’s limbs are “snaky,” his eyes “Antarctic”; Dagoo is “lion-like” and

“coal-black,” and later boasts that he is “quarried out of” blackness itself 27:120-21;

40:177) continue throughout the text, flagging these characters as at once closer to

nature and further from the interpretive codes of psychology than are the characters of

European or white American origin. Yet in the early chapter “Biographical,”

Queequeg is granted a more comprehensive biography than any other character in the

novel: a narratological decision that may seem eccentric but that, I would argue,

demonstrates the text’s profound reliance on borrowed generic conventions for

structural and thematic purposes.

The structural parallels I am attempting to trace are specific to biographical articles in

encyclopaedias of the nineteenth century. Whether it is attributable to the influence of

German Romanticism’s bildung theory of biography, or to a changing conception of

the role of the encyclopaedia from a systematic arrangement of the natural and

technical sciences to a reference work of broader scope for the time-limited aspiring

polymath, encyclopaedias of Melville’s day such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica and

the Penny Cyclopaedia treat biographies as the valid subjects of entries in their own

right, rather than as parenthetical asides in articles describing the development of a

science or a philosophy. The “Biographical” chapter on Queequeg (12) shows close

parallels to the encyclopaedic approach to biography. For the purposes of detailed

comparison, I will be examining Queequeg’s biography in light of that of George

Washington in the 1843 Penny Cyclopaedia.137 This comparison seems apt given

Ishmael’s provocative statement that, phrenologically speaking, Queequeg is “George

Washington cannibalistically developed” (10:50). That this allusion is appropriate to

Queequeg’s personal qualities becomes evident as the novel progresses, but George

Washington is evidently a touchstone of eminence for Melville, naturally enough for a

nineteenth-century American writer. But this eminence is itself an invitation to liberal

iconoclasm. Thus Melville in a letter to Hawthorne flaunted his “ruthless democracy”

by asserting that “a thief in jail is as honourable a personage as Gen. George

137 The Penny Cyclopaedia s.v. “Washington,” 27:99-105.

46

Washington. This is ludicrous. But Truth is the silliest thing under the sun.”138 Unlike

the hypothetical thief, Queequeg has heroic qualities in his own right: his skills as a

harpooner are unsurpassed, he saves two people from drowning in the course of the

novel, and his courtly manners, however idiosyncratically manifested, are worthy of a

medieval romance. So in the comparison of Queequeg to Washington,

Ishmael/Melville’s rhetorical strategies initiate a flow of authority in two directions:

they indicate that George Washington’s personal excellence should be the democratic

aspiration of all men; at the same time, Queequeg’s “pagan virtues” tell us something

new about Washington. My final reason is a pragmatic matter of sources:

Washington’s biography appears in the same volume of the Penny Cyclopaedia that

Melville used extensively in researching cetology for Moby-Dick.

Both biographies begin with an account of the subject’s family background (in

Queequeg’s case, royal: he is the son of his tribe’s king) and of his character and

conduct as a child. Both childhood selves demonstrate early signs of the qualities that

will drive their excellence as adults: Washington, the future warrior and statesman

“was fond of forming his schoolmates into companies, who paraded and fought mimic

battles,” and “won the deference of the other boys, who were accustomed to make

him the arbiter of their disputes.” The young Queequeg has an “ambitious soul” and

“a strong desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or

two,” and proves his determination in a dangerous stowaway attempt when he is

rejected as a crew member by a visiting whaleship. Both biographies then go on to

give accounts of the subjects’ careers, interpolating comments about their character

strengths as explanations for their achievements. In Washington’s case this goes on

for some pages; Queequeg’s doings from his stowing away to his meeting with

Ishmael are compressed into two short paragraphs—but his is a noble career

nonetheless. Queequeg is motivated by “a profound desire to learn among the

Christians” whatever secrets this foreign culture might yield to improve his own

people’s quality of life and moral fibre. He is compared with Czar Peter in his

willingness to do lowly manual labour in exchange for this opportunity to gain

knowledge that will enrich him as a statesman.

138 Herman Melville, letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 1851. Correspondence, 190.

47

Washington’s biography goes on to cover his retirement from politics and his death,

since Washington is located in the historic past. The portrait of Queequeg, whom

Ishmael and the reader have just met at this stage of the narrative, captures him

midway through a romantic quest for redemption: having become disillusioned with

Christian culture and morality, he cannot return to ascend to the throne until he has

purged himself of Christianity’s corrupting influence.139 Washington’s entry in the

Penny Cyclopedia concludes with an independent section on his chief achievements,

personal qualities, appearance and bearing, including a character sketch by Jefferson

quoted in its entirety. Jefferson’s comment that “he was incapable of fear, meeting

personal dangers with the calmest unconcern”140 or his observation of his “easy, direct

and noble” deportment would not be amiss in Ishmael’s account of Queequeg—which

is not appended directly to his biography, but occurs over a series of chapters as

Ishmael first observes and then befriends him. The “Biographical” chapter forms the

rhetorical centre around which all other references to Queequeg are organised, and the

importance of establishing his character in this succinct but formal mode will be

demonstrated below.

Chapters 3 to 18 of the novel cover Ishmael and Queequeg’s journey from New

Bedford to Nantucket and their shipping with the Pequod, but devote more words to

an extensive sketch of Queequeg’s character than they do to the forward thrust of the

narrative. These chapters are marked by dizzying shifts of perspective from Ishmael’s

cultural viewpoint and to Queequeg’s and back again, borrowing authority from a

diverse array of epistemological discourses along the way. Anecdotes of travellers

making cultural missteps are presented from both sides of the pagan/Christian divide

in the chapter on the wheelbarrow and the punchbowl (13:59). Queequeg’s calm selfpossession

as he grapples a plate of beefsteaks towards himself with his harpoon

shows him to advantage against the awkward silence of the other mariners lodging at

139 It would not go unremarked by the reader familiar with biographical conventions that Queequeg’s

life story is thus truncated. There is something of the pre-emptive obituary in Queequeg’s formal

biographical treatment, and while his death remains, for the moment, unwritten, it is the negative

ground against which his personal qualities are defined. An allusion to Queequeg’s death at sea is made

soon after the “Biographical” chapter. Ishmael refers to Queequeg’s death as “his long last dive”

(13:61), echoing the two occasions on which Queequeg dives into the ocean to save somebody’s life.

Death at sea is regarded with dread by the Pequod’s crew, not just because of its likelihood but because

of the indignity of “placelessly perish[ing] without a grave” (7:36). But for Queequeg diving is already

associated with heroism: however pathetic the fate of the Pequod, Queequeg’s is a noble death.

140 Penny Cyclopaedia 27:104

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the Try-Pots, irrespective of the occasional faux pas, for “to do anything coolly is to

do it genteelly.”141 On reflection Ishmael concludes that Queequeg’s seeming

“Socratic wisdom” is “a touch of fine philosophy” in actual fact, and more authentic

than that espoused by “any man who gives himself out for a philosopher.”142 Ishmael

can express fears that Queequeg’s royal blood has been vitiated by his cannibalistic

indulgences, and yet take seriously Queequeg’s conviction that he has been defiled by

mixing with Christians. Observing Queequeg’s respectful if bewildered presence in a

church service, Ishmael in turn executes a virtuoso sequence of theological reasoning

to justify burning offerings to Queequeg’s idol Yojo in a spirit of fellowship. This,

then, is Ishmael’s response to the Montezuma paradox: the virtues he observes in

Queequeg are not seeming but actual, and worthy of respect on their own terms.

Some affinities of language in certain passages of the text suggest that Melville was

familiar with at least some of the more popular Indian captivity narratives.143 While

many of these narratives demonised native Americans for various propagandistic

purposes, some, such as that of John Jewitt,144 describe a process of at least partial

transculturation145 in which the underlying logic, the social and ethical codes of the

captors’ society is revealed. Melville’s own early novel Typee146 presents itself as a

quasi-factual captivity narrative, describing a society that may appear “savage” to

Eurocentric eyes but that actually runs on purer virtues than does the anthropologist

observer’s own. The remarkable popularity of literature of captivity and exploration,

and of course the social philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau which haunts such

literature, meant that the sensitive contemporary reader was not encountering entirely

alien ideas in Moby-Dick’s representation of Queequeg. That a cannibal chief could

display the virtues of bravery, tolerance, generosity and self-sufficiency, Moby-Dick

141 Ibid., 5:30

142 Ibid., 10:50

143 See, for example, the initial description of Tashtego: “you would almost have credited the

superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and half believed this wild Indian to be a son of the Prince

of the Powers of the Air” (27:120), which takes up a common trope of Puritan capitivity narratives, and

specifically seems to allude to the words of Cotton Mather: “These Parts were then covered with

nations of barbarous Indians and infidels, in which the prince of the power of the air did work as a

spirit” (Magnalia Christi Americana, 1702), cited in Katherine Zabelle Derounian-Stodola and James

Arthur Levernier, The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550 – 1900 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993),

18.

144 John R. Jewitt, Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings of John Jewitt (1815?) (Fairfield, Wash.:

Galleon Press, 1967).

145 For a discussion of captives who refused to leave their captors’ societies when rescuers arrived, see

Derounian-Stodola and Levemier 5-8.

146 Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1845; London: Penguin, 1972).

49

is not the first to attest. What is new here is a kind of transculturation across genre

lines: if “savage” is a misappellation, as the narrator of Typee asserts and as Ishmael

more obliquely implies, then the literatary trope of the “noble savage” in turn

becomes inadequate. Queequeg must colonise biographical forms previously reserved

for the idols of European and Euro-American society to claim his full humanity.

Any process of transculturation, be it textual or experiential, involves ironic

juxtapositions of conflicting values. The earnest tone of intersubjective revelation can

hardly avoid irruptions of the comic. In the Jewitt narrative, the captives’ fear of death

or eternal exile is sometimes entirely eclipsed by their more immediate yearning to

season their meat with salt rather than pungent whale oil, and the daring plan which

eventually restores Jewitt to his own society has overtones of farce.147 Moby-Dick

embraces the comic’s capacity to undermine and transform hierarchies, in the manner

of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque. As I have mentioned previously, Ishmael cannot

resist venturing into phrenology in a broadside that takes in not only popular

pseudosciences but one of the great heroes of the American republic: “Queequeg was

George Washington cannibalistically developed.”148 Ishmael later applies both

phrenology and physiognomy to the head of the sperm whale itself. With a

characteristic and multidimensional ambivalence, Ishmael can declare "physiognomy,

like every other human science… but a passing fable,”149 and yet discover in the

sperm whale’s brow “that horizontal, semi-crescentic depression in the forehead’s

middle”150 that is the mark of genius, and read in a rear view of the whale’s skull a

sign that “this man had no self-esteem, and no veneration”: a simple statement that

offers “the truest… conception of what the most exalted potency is.”151 The same

could of course be said of any animal, indeed of any non-human element of the

natural world, but buried in this apparently flippant double negation is perhaps the

novel’s strongest argument for the anthropomorphic attribution of intentionality to the

whale, and confers a tortured logic on Ahab’s styling himself as Moby Dick’s

nemesis.

147 Jewitt, 42-44, 144-156.

148 10:50

149 79:347

150 79:340

151 80:349

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Ishmael/Melville’s rapid-fire rhetorical contortions generate a satire that is

multivalent and dynamic. It does not rest on a single target but is compelled onwards

through conflicting significations, with a jollity that is, like Stubb’s exhortations to his

crew, “so curiously ambiguous” that it “act[s] like a charm” on its audience even as it

“put[s them] on their guard” (48:219). Logic as such, and the internal logics of

various genres, are twisted—not solely for the pleasure of it, but to extract new,

unstable and seductive meanings from the tissue of the known. The invocations of

phrenology and physiognomy in the novel are a case in point. When Ishmael

compares Queequeg to George Washington via phrenology, he is simultaneously

extending the claim to sovereign personhood implied in Queequeg’s formal biography

and indulging in an iconoclastic thrill. But the ambivalence implied towards

phrenology and its sister theory physiognomy is later extended to “every other human

science”—they are all so many passing fables. Writing at a time when scientific and

technical discoveries were superceding previous orthodoxies apace, Melville/Ishmael

aligns himself with empirical rather than speculative approaches to knowledge. But

his scepticism toward “systems” of knowledge might betray a more fundamental

anxiety about science’s capacity to capture the phenomenal world. Benjamin Franklin

wrote to Sir Joseph Banks in 1783:

the Progress of human Knowledge will be rapid, and Discoveries made of

which we have at present no Conception. I begin to be almost sorry I was born

so soon, since I cannot have the Happiness of knowing what will be known

100 Years hence.152

The narrator of Moby-Dick is not so sanguine about the growth of human knowledge:

the novel’s incessantly ludic intertextual resonances place as much emphasis on

disintegration and obsolescence as they do on progress. Fedallah’s superstitions have

as much sway over the seasoned mariners as they would over the greenest landlubber,

if not more; Linnaeus may declared the whale a mammal, but Charley Coffin of

Nantucket maintains it is a fish—and Ishmael would have us believe that his money is

on Charley.

Having described in great detail Queequeg’s character and his ardent friendship with

Ishmael in the chapters that precede the Pequod’s voyage, the novel does not return to

152 July 27, 1783 (Unpublished), The Packard Institute of Humanities: The Papers of Benjamin

Franklin, http://www.franklinpapers.org, accessed 27 June 2008.

51

Queequeg with great frequency. Where he is present, he is usually seen in action, as

are the other two harpooners. Indeed he often features not as an individual but as part

of that trinity, whose imperturbability and courage is usually rendered with a

psychological opacity that serves more to overawe and intimidate their shipmates than

to reveal individual character. He returns as a psychologically complex individual in

the chapters recounting his near-fatal illness and the making of his coffin—yet the

personal philosophy he reveals in these chapters is entirely of a piece with what the

reader understands of him from his appearance in the early chapters. Queequeg’s arc

of development is completed prior to his meeting with Ishmael and his boarding of the

Pequod and has nowhere further to go. Even his pragmatic response to his brush with

death suggests that it is a situation he has faced before, and with the same philosophy:

“In a word, it was Queequeg’s conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere

sickness could not kill him” (110:480).

The inclusion of a meticulous biography for a character who does not go on to feature

as a dynamic protagonist is understandable if Queequeg is seen as standing in a

synecdochic relation to the entire crew of the Pequod, and to the sympathetic “other”

in general. He is introduced as being fundamentally and terrifyingly other to the white

American narrator, yet Ishmael goes from fearing for his life to being impressed by

Queequeg’s gracious manners in the space of a few minutes. His identity is by turns

subsumed into racial generalisations (“savages are strange beings” 10:50) and

rendered heroically individual (“Queequeg was the son of a king, and Queequeg

budged not” 12:56). His apparently contradictory roles as a cultural stranger and as a

psychologically comprehensible person are never reconciled, and the incongruity of

these two notions is a rich source of satire: perhaps most clearly demonstrated in the

symmetrical parables of the wheelbarrow and the punch bowl, but also evident in the

parodies on the biographical form and on phrenology and physiognomy discussed

above.

Queequeg is figured in terms of the most intimate relationships to Ishmael. He is not

just a “bosom friend” but a “bride-groom,” and after proving his courage in rescuing a

young man knocked overboard on the Nantucket packet, Ishmael “[cleaves] to him

like a barnacle” for life. Most significantly, Ishmael experiences a complete, almost

supernatural, fusion of identity with Queequeg in “The Counterpane.” Ishmael has

52

previously noticed “how elastic… our stiff prejudices bend” where affection prompts

tolerance: here the very boundaries between self and other become elastic and

uncertain. “The Counterpane” prepares the way for the mystical union that Ishmael

will experience with the entire crew of the ship in “A Squeeze of the Hand.” In both

chapters there is a pantheistic melding of human and non-human substance that

precedes and seems to inspire the intense intersubjective connection, but this is not

pantheism merely—not one to drown in Plato’s honeyed head, Ishmael recognises the

pragmatic social implications of these connections with otherness:

Oh! My dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social

ascerbities, or know the slightest ill-humour or envy! Come; let us squeeze

hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other.153

The progression from “The Counterpane” to “A Squeeze of the Hand” elucidates

Queequeg’s synecdochic function as the sympathetic other: it is his very strangeness

that, overcome by friendship and inherent human virtues, makes the strongest possible

argument for universal brotherhood. Other references by Ishmael to himself and the

crew at large anticipate and challenge readerly resistance to claims of interracial

equality:

Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that

condition in which God placed him, i. e. what is called savagery. Your true

whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage;

owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any

moment to rebel against him (57:270).

…be it said, that at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men

before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans

born… How it is, there is no telling, but Islanders seem to make the best

whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call

such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato

living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel,

what a set these Isolatoes were! An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the

isles of the sea (27:121).

A direct reference to Clootz and strong overtones of Rousseau in these passages align

Ishmael and the crew of the Pequod with the spirit of the Englightenment, opposing

the “savage” (or the virtuous labourer) not only to the complacent racism of polite

society but to unreflexive monarchism and dogmatic christianity. This allows for a

153 94:416.

53

double bond of brotherhood between Ishmael and the white and non-white “others” he

ships with: they are united not only in their humanity but in their self-sufficiency and

disdain for artificial hierarchies (though the ship’s denizens largely defer to the

pragmatic hierarchies built into the whaling industry, content in the knowledge that

“the universal thump is passed round” 1:6).

Of course, Ishmael’s rhapsodising on racial equality is troubled by his cheerful

observation that in American warfare and industry “the native [that is, white]

American liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying

the muscles” (27:121), and complicated again by his ambivalently ironic references to

Queequeg’s royal birth and resemblance to Washington, and his reliance of racial

stereotypes, however idyllic, in his characterisation of Dagoo and Tashtego. His

claims for the whaleman’s natural independence of spirit (and, by extension, for the

democratic dignity conferred by honest labour) are likewise challenged by the crew’s

immediate willingness to enter into Ahab’s monomaniacal quest. Their unthinking

assent reframes the allusion to Donne’s 17th Meditation in Ishmael’s “Isolatoes”

metaphor, suggesting that those who choose not to “acknowledg[e] the common

continent of man” risk becoming beholden to less exalted authorities.

It is not within the scope of this chapter to investigate the complex, prismatic

treatments of race, labour and political philosophy in Moby-Dick (to say nothing of

Melville’s larger oeuvre)—my purpose here is simply to identify the structural

contribution of Queequeg’s biography to the novel’s subsequent philosophical and

thematic developments. And I would argue that without its part-ironic, part-honorific

borrowing of the conventions of contemporary biographical writing, this novel-wide

resonance could not have been achieved. Like other writers of encyclopaedic ambition

before him, Ishmael/Melville turns the prefabricated structures of authoritative

discourses to new ends. The selection and juxtaposition of a heterogeneity of material

and genre is what gives the encyclopaedic impulse its critical power, allowing for

irruptions of novel thought into the field of orthodoxies: Ephraim Chambers’ match to

the gunpowder of a receptive mind, Diderot’s determination to overturn an edifice of

muck. If Ishmael’s philosophical stance is more elusive and openly ambivalent than

54

those of the encyclopaedists whose labours inspire his own, this only intensifies the

tantalizing draw of his leviathanic draft of a draft.

55

Conclusion

Reflecting on the place the novel occupied in the modern American literary

imagination, poet Hettie Jones has a disheartening vision of “Moby-Dick, solid and

dependable, with all these critics sliding down its sides.”154 Edward Mendelson

observes that “each major national culture in the west, as it becomes aware of itself as

a separate entity, produces an encyclopaedic author … who takes his place as a

national poet or national classic, and who becomes the focus of a large and persistent

exegetic and textual industry comparable to the industry founded upon the Bible.”155 I

have added my enquiries to the rest partly because I am fascinated by the

transformation of a novel—one book in one man’s body of work; a book its author

feared was a “botch”— into this overawing monolith that draws successive

generations of critics back to palpate its hieroglyphic tracery again and again. It’s as if

the phantom of the sublime and monstrous book that haunted the writing of Moby-

Dick has finally taken up residence in its pages and is exerting an ineluctable

mesmeric force. I suspect that, as Mendelson implies, it is the encyclopaedic instinct

in Moby-Dick that sustains this exegetic attention. Behind the cultural edifice is

another, somewhat uncanny text—the book of shreds and patches which, like the

counterpane that fuses mystically with Queequeg’s tattoos, seems to open onto

vertiginous new possibilities for apprehending the world. Its boldly heterogeneous

fabric allows for the essaying of an endless range of critical positions, for the spirit of

sceptical enquiry, of fertile contingency, is woven into the text itself. As a mercurial,

satirical homage to the encyclopaedic project, and an investigation into the

narratological potential of its structures, rhetorics and philosophies, Moby-Dick is a

work in which the boldest Enlightenment encyclopaedist would have found much to

admire.

154 Hettie Jones, How I Became Hettie Jones (New York: Grove Press, 1990), 45.

155 Mendelson, 1268.

56

Appendix: images

“La Baleine d’Ostende, Visitée par l’ Éléphant, la Giraffe, & les Osages,” Lithograph, Paris, circa

1828. Sourced from Stuart M. Frank’s Herman Melville’s Picture Gallery (Fairhaven, Mass.: E.J.

Lefkowicz, 1986), 43.

Masthead ornament, Boston Notion, February 1840.

Sourced from Isabel Lehuu’s Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America

(Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 65.

57

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