Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Catalano, Joseph S.

Titel

No Need to Rush

Ist Teil von

• In Pursuit of Moby-Dick, 2023, p.1-10

Ort / Verlag

Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• I take my readers on a personal tour through Melville’s great novel, Moby-Dick. I do not assume any knowledge about the book as I share more than twenty years of reading. In reply to a letter by Richard Henry Dana Jr., author of Two Years Before the Mast, published about ten years before Moby-Dick, Melville gives us the first known reference to his forthcoming book. About the “whaling book”—I am half way in the work, & and am very glad that your suggestion so jumps with mine. It will be a strange sort of a book, tho’, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho’ you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;—& to cook the think up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, one ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this. “I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.” What truth? Why simply this, that the poetry comes from the blubber? Yes, and from the truth about the blubber. This is the clue to the proper reading of Moby-Dick. And, it is more than a clue. On every page we witness the marriage of poetry and blubber; on every page we witness truth being born from their marriage. If you separate these three—the poetry from the blubber and both from truth—you then hold in your hand not one great book but three novellas loosely pasted together. The vastness and complexity of the literal meaning of Moby-Dick—the way poetical, religious, and philosophical reflections are intertwined with the flesh and skeleton of whales and the details of American whaling ships—has confused not only its early critics and readers but many of those of today. It was not Ahab that drew me back to reading Moby-Dick on and off, at times only a chapter here and there, but, from beginning to end, at least ten to fifteen times. Nor was it my philosophical career, for aesthetics was never my forte. It was the story itself! Poetry and truth I could find elsewhere, but not as they are one with whales. These leviathans, traveling through all the oceans of the earth as easily as we walk our pathways and streets, spout not merely vapor but a story of the planet Earth itself.There LeviathanHugest of living creatures, in the deepStretch’d like a promontory sleeps or swims,And seems a moving land; and at his gillsDraws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea These words from Milton’s Paradise Lost are on the title page of the true first edition of Moby-Dick; and, further, its title is simply, The Whale. As I collector, I have always wanted to own that book, but it was beyond my means, for only 500 copies were printed in England by Richard Bentley in October 1851. Its production was strange and somewhat contradictory; for, while it came out in three impressive-looking volumes, it was incomplete. Bentley trimmed Melville’s classic by thirty-five passages that he thought offensive. He also put the two preliminary sections of the book, “Etymology,” and “Extracts,” at the end; and he left out the last page, “Epilogue,” describing Ishmael’s escape from the doomed ship, Pequod, with the result that the British readers and critics wondered how this tale of more than 600 pages could have been narrated. A short time after its publication in England, Melville delivered a complete and properly organized manuscript to Fletcher Harper, one of the Harper brothers, of Harper & Brothers in America. There was one important change. Harper had recently published Henry T. Cheever’s, The Whale and His Captors, and, perhaps, anticipating complaints, Melville altered the title to Moby Dick; or, The Whale. Notice the semi-colon; it does not point to a redundant expression: Moby Dick=The Whale. Rather, the title means Moby Dick, and the Leviathan, The Whale. It is the true complete title of the book in the first American edition, although it is seldom repeated. It is more convenient to refer simply to Moby-Dick, and I will frequently follow that custom, although I cannot wonder if our reading would have been guided more properly by the original title, The Whale. Do not be a reading-Ahab hastening toward that fast-passed concluding chase; if that is what you desire, see the movie, which is fun, and has its place.