ok i do have to get something off my chest re: moby dick which is that i feel.......... SO lied to about the whale sections of the book. the whale sections slap. they fuck supremely. they are the parts where melville is truly just cooking and, i usually don't like to say this about matters of taste but, people who don't like them are literally wrong. they are wrong the way that i was wrong when i was in high school and read watchmen for the first time and thought the tales of the black freighter insets were boring. i felt this way at the time because i did not pick up on the fact that every black freighter excerpt/caption/etc. in watchmen comments on the action of the story as it unfolds, sometimes thematically, sometimes just in the juxtaposition of a sentence with a panel depicting action happening elsewhere, sometimes both at once. when i reread watchmen as an adult and was able to tune into what was going on i was like, wow this fucking rules, alan moore is a genius, and when i was bored about this it was because i was literally wrong about how to read this book.
so too with the whale sections of moby dick: they are absolutely, manifestly NOT herman melville attempting to list out for you all of his incorrect whale facts which he naively believes to be unimpeachably correct because of the primitive state of whale science. they are herman melville fucking flexing as one of the best to ever do it, where "it" is "the english language." if you read them as attempts to communicate knowledge or with an eye towards getting back to "the plot" you will, yes, be bored. if you read them waiting for the next time melville does something so awesome it makes you laugh out loud and/or want to hurl yourself into the sea you will be happy all the time. also they are literally so fucking funny. here, for example, is the infamous - infamous! - proclamation that the whale is a fish:
The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnæus declares, “I hereby separate the whales from the fish.” But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnæus’s express edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the Leviathan.
does this sound to you like a guy uncritically repeating the wrongful classification of the whale as a fish? no. this is a guy writing a character who is saying, "i know the literal father of biological taxonomy said that whales 'are not fish,' but consider: fish live in the ocean; whales live in the ocean; ergo, ummmm checkmate???" he goes on to say:
The grounds upon which Linnæus would fain have banished the whales from the waters, he states as follows: “On account of their warm bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,” and finally, “ex lege naturæ jure meritoque.” I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.
literally LITERALLY he's like "who are you going to believe: the father of biological taxonomy, or My Two Friends?" hysterical!!! like i was already feeling the book but it was truly this, the first whale chapter, where i was like, is this maybe the greatest book ever written by anyone ever? and, like, i really think it might be.
