Chapter 94--A Squeeze of the Hand

I just couldn't help but laugh all throughout this chapter. I felt like Beavis & Butthead in the back of the classroom. He said, "sperm." I couldn't help but feel like those South Park kids, laughing at all the little phrases and sentences that just DO NOT mean today what they used to mean.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till
I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of
insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers'
hands in it...

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!

Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into
each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of
kindness.

I just can't help but laugh. I know it is childish of me.

However, this is just an example of what these chapters are about and how they do absolutely nothing to the narrative structure.

Ishmael and everybody squeezes the spermaceti back into a liquid. They also mash it with a kind of spade and he "jokes" about how some men have fewer toes.

What does this do to the structure of the book? Nothing. Delete it.

By the way, don't even get me started on Chapter 95 "The Cassock" wherein Melville tells us all about the whale penis, even how some wear the skin of it to protect themselves.

Party

My daughter Morgan says that when finish the book, we should have a Moby Dick party, complete with a vanilla cake shaped like a whale.

Moby Dick cartoon

Another Moby Dick cartoon. This is especially funny during these middle chapters that I am going through about the gam and the meeting of other boats and their tales of what they've seen on the sea. It's amazing how we get these jokes due to its being embedded in our culture and no one reads it anymore. Reprinted by permission of the author at http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1897.

Core Chapters

I was extremely curious about what I said yesterday about being able to delete whole chapters. It seems I was not the first. This website by a guy named Robert A. diCurcio lists what he calls the 80 core chapters. I still think he is being too generous.

Then I found out about Melville.org. See, I think that was always part of it for me. Melville was somehow more strangely fascinating than his writings.

I am still working it

So I am on Chapter 86. This one is called "The Tail." The previous one was all about the whale's spout. One before that was on the "crotch" that the harpoon sits in. Another was on Jonah...again!
More famous whale people, even calling the Leviathan that Perseus defeats a whale.

Mr. Melville, get on with the story!!

I'll be honest. Critically, the reader just about forgets who the heck Ahab is by this time. There was more character development in those other two captains who give Ishmael and Queequeg the lays.

Imagine if you will a novel that stops and inserts encyclopedia entries all the time. And it is not every other chapter either. I remember the novel The Grapes of Wrath where every other chapter was about the setting or the world. Yet Steinbeck wondrously came back to the main story every other chapter. Steinbeck could have inserted text about politics and poverty like Melville. Even a book like Tolkien's The Return of the King stayed with a character set for a while, a long while in Frodo's case, and then went back to the other set of characters. But the story moved on. Tolkien could have inserted stuff from his Silmarillion and his other unfinished stuff. Imagine if Tolkien inserted all that stuff from his other books? At least you can say that Tolkien was not afraid to delete.

I understand that some of these become necessary later. The chapter on the rope that whalers used (yes, a whole freaking chapter on rope) makes sense only when incorporated properly. Ishmael, for instance, could have gotten a paragraph's worth of decent information on the rope from Stubb, let's say, while moving on to something else. If I look at a list of the chapters, I figure I can delete at least 20 of the 86 chapters so far.

I am chugging along. However, I can only read one chapter a day if they are going to be like this. Sadly, looking at the chapter titles only, I think I am in for a hard time until at least chapter 106 on "Ahab's Leg." I may be surprised, but I doubt it. I mean, think of the fun I am going to have reading chapter 103 "Measurement of the Whale's Skeleton."

Keep in mind that these are NOT encyclopedia entries. These are Melville's attempts to write down only his learned knowledge of the whale and the whaling industry. He is not a scientist and I feel that some of these chapters are probably contradicted by today's zoological science. That makes it feel extra tedious to me.

How did he originally pitch Moby Dick?

In a world where most books are mostly not written unless you have a place to submit it, imagine pitching Moby Dick to a publisher.

This blogger, Rhiannon Paine, has imagined that pitch. The following is reprinted by permission of the author from http://rhiannonpaine.com/herman-melville-pitches-moby-dick. So after reading this, ask yourself if it makes any sense. Sometimes I think Melville just rambled. I know he was trying to be ambitious but...a chapter on chowder??

Herman Melville pitches Moby-Dick
June 5th, 2010

As I blog, tweet, and work on a synopsis for my novel Fall Crush, I wonder how writers in earlier ages would have fared with the social media.

Suppose Thomas Hardy had been required to pitch The Mayor of Casterbridge. “When Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter after too much rum-laced furmity, he can’t expect it to go well. But, surprise! He becomes a mayor and prosperous grain-merchant with a mistress named Lucette, only to lose it all and die (the furmity again). In a clever grain-merchant-related touch, he requests that ‘no flours be planted on my grave’.”

Sale? I think not.

Or consider what a Twitter stream might have looked like between Herman Melville and his publisher, Richard Bentley. For the sake of brevity – not a point that ever troubled Melville – I’ve omitted all but the first two @ directives, but they’ve been accounted for in the sacred sum of 140.

HerMel @RBentley Excellent news, Bentley. A notion for my next book has at last taken possession of me.

RBentley @HerMel Capital. Another “cakes and ale” tale, a sequel to “White-Jacket”! “Yellow-Jacket?” No, that’s an insect. What say you to “Blue-Jacket”?

HerMel No, no, this is more ambitious. The front matter is replete with quotations, and I define “whale” in several languages.

RBentley Do you? Why?

HerMel The book is about one man’s quest to kill a ferocious white sperm whale.

RBentley Ha ha ha! You wrote “ferocious white sperm whale”! Doubtless you meant “lion,” “tiger,” or “bear.”

HerMel No, it’s definitely a sperm whale.

RBentley Oh my.

RBentley Herman? Are you there?

HerMel #amwriting My narrator’s in bed with a purple-faced tattooed harpooner named Queequeg. He sells embalmed heads on the side.

RBentley The narrator?

HerMel No, Queequeg. Social realism. Points up how precarious finances can be for purple-faced tattooed South Sea Islander harpoonists.

RBentley Quite. That should help to capture that all-important market.

HerMel The point hadn’t occurred to me, but you’re probably right.

RBentley I was being sarcastic.

HerMel Outlining. A chapter on the history of the fishing industry … a chapter on chowder … two Quakers and a prophet named Elijah …

RBentley Is Elijah the man who’s trying to kill the whale?

HerMel No, that’s Captain Ahab. We don’t meet him until – let me see – Chapter XXVIII.

RBentley But isn’t he the main character?

HerMel Well, him and the whale. Did I mention he’s only got one leg?

RBentley *fans self with sheet of paper* It’s news to me that whales HAVE legs.

HerMel AHAB has one leg. Moby Dick bit the other one off. So he wants to kill it, but it kills him, the ship sinks, & they all drown.

RBentley All?

HerMel Yes.

RBentley Including the narrator?

HerMel Yes.

HerMel Oh.

HerMel Epilogue. Narrator gets picked up by passing albatross … pushed ashore by dolphin … finds life-preserver … something.

RBentley Lives to tell the tale.

HerMel Exactly.

HerMel So what do you think? Are you as excited as I am?

RBentley Herman. Herman, Herman, Herman.

HerMel Yes?

RBentley A SPERM whale named DICK?

HerMel I know! And subliminal advertising hasn’t even been invented yet!

RBentley Genius.

“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”

Where I Have Been

Ugh.

Yes, I put it down again. The paperback I had was falling apart so that didn't help. It was just such a chore that every time I wanted to pick it up I saw 800 other paperbacks on my shelf that looked like a heck of a lot more fun to read. I just get no enjoyment out of Moby Dick. None. When I feel like that schoolchild who has a class novel that they have to read, plus I am only assigning it to myself so I have no accountability but to myself, I feel no reason to dive into it.

But that changed again. I am back in the saddle. I received the coolest thing ever for my birthday this past January, a Sony eReader. Phenomenal invention. An iPod for books, basically. I even put Moby Dick on there as the first I loaded it with. But then the same thing happened again. With 100+ books on the eReader, those others just seem a lot more interesting.

Since then, I have read quite a few books on the device. I even read Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. And let me tell you...that is a much better and enjoyable book than Moby Dick. So it is not for want of reading.

But I am back into it again. I think I re-picked it up, on the eReader, about chapter 20 or so. I am now on Chapter 82. And these are by far some of the hardest chapters to get through. Chapters on comparing the heads of right whales and sperm whales. Chapters on the history of pictures of whales. I see some reasons behind these things. The one chapter comparing the head of the whale to a battering ram is sufficient foreshadowing for what happens at the end. I get that only with my knowledge of what happens in the book, not from any sense of urgency in the book itself. The chapter on what kind of rope is used in whaling makes sense with what I know of Ahab's fate. But the dryness of Melville's writing to my tastes...For instance, this next chapter 82 talks of the "Honor and Glory of Whaling," especially indicating Perseus as the first whaleman and stuff like that. It just reads so much more like an encyclopedia entry or a textbook than a story. And when we do get story bits, like the rumors of Moby Dick's presence in the area, there just doesn't feel like much to sustain the momentum of the reader.

But I am going to finish this book if it kills me. Moby Dick is my Moby Dick. I will kill the beast. I am reading at least one chapter a day through the eReader, if not 2 or 3.

Because it is funny to me. I am also reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I want to read all those books, some of them again. I will admit, from a literary sensibility and with my English literature training, that this is not a great piece of literature. But it is just fun. The ideas are interesting, the dialogue snappy even when Zaphod just says, "Hey, yeah," and somehow it is just written in an accessible style that makes continuing easy to do. What makes Moby Dick such a classic and Hitchhiker's a cult favorite? I bet I could get more kids to read Hitchhiker's. In fact, I actually bet more people have read Hitchhiker's than Moby Dick.

I will keep this apprised of my status. Probably not every day but weekly or so, just to maintain progress. I have to think of here as like a due date or a teacher that will scold me if I don't read.