The Early Chapters

Okay, this is really good. I'm already two hundred pages in, and there's a lot going on. I should have stopped to blog before this, but I'm enjoying it more than I thought I would. I thought the blogging would be a kind of chronicle/journal to help me wade through, but so far I haven't needed much in the way of self-help.

All right, the thing that is the greatest surprise is his humor. My impression of him was that he was going to be unrelentingly morose and heavy, but that's not true at all. He's actually kind of funny, esp. when using Queequeg the barbarian to expose the hypocrises of 19th C. western civilization. Queequeg is the epitome of the direct, open, loving voyager through life, his pagan religious ideas aside for the moment. Melville is having some fun using him to poke at the mores of the "civilized" people around him. I never expected such humor. So points for you, Mr. Melville.

Not that Melville is ant-religion per se: Ishmael speaks of his own deep Presbyterian roots, and one takes that as rather auto-biographical and dearly-held; the character of Father Mapple is as humble and pious as Melville can make him without him becoming caricature, deeply conscious of his own sin and shortcoming, both as a man, and as Man, quaking in recognition of an Almighty God in the heavens. I think Father Mapple's life verse would be "What is Man, that You are mindful of him?" (Ps. 8:4). What seems to matter to Melville is one's earnestness rather than propositional truth. At least, he suggests that even Queegueg is a member of a Universal congregation of Man to which we all belong, when Capt. Bildad challenges Queequeg before allowing him to sign ship's articles.

Another sign that Melville isn't taking himself too, too seriously is the chapter on cetology, where his taxonomy uses Folios, Octavos, and Duo-decimos (the three different sizes for manuscript pages) to categorize whales. But I'm not sure if his definition of a whale as "a spouting fish with a horizontal tail" is meant to be serious or evoke a smile in his contemporary readers. That's the problem reading 150yr-old tongue-in-cheek: we don't have a feel for the pulse of the audience, and much of this kind of humor relies on what is known to be true and what is known to be false in past eras. Methinks he teases, but I'm not sure. I do get the impression, at the very least, that he's poking fun at the naturalists and their contradictory, ever-changing classification schemes; and so it is today with the paleo-anthropologists: the purported "ascent of Man" by incremental links from bi-pedal ancestors is a shifting path, and yesterday's missing link today sits on the top of a trash heap of disproved previous links. Still, they toil. Still, they call every biped "hommo." Still, they create whole villages out of a jawbone or a single tooth, with the help of "artists' conceptions." If you strip away all but the actual evidence, there is very little to go on. But we dig, and arrange, and hypothesize.