Whale of a Tale on the Trail . . .

'Mobile Trick'

NYT

The writer, critic, and editor Verlyn Klinkenborg, in "A Back-Seat Narrator by the Name of Ishmael" (New York Times, January 26, 2013), asks a couple of questions after a road trip across the US from New York State to Los Angeles, California with a friend and also 'Ishmael':

Is there a stranger figure in American literature than the narrator of "Moby-Dick"?

Why this question? Because:

He says, "Call me Ishmael" -- the very first words of the book -- but that isn't exactly the same as saying "My name is Ishmael." He could be anyone, of any name, but Ishmael is what the reader must agree to call him before the book can get under way.

Such is the first question and its reason. Perhaps Klinkenborg is right in his implied answer, namely, no stranger name than "Ishmael." And 'Ishmael' remains a stranger no matter how much we discover about him, for he has a very strange story to tell. Moreover, though he begins as Ishmael, one whom the Bible in Genesis 12:16 calls "a wild man," untameable, he appears at the tale's end as a servant, possibly, but we'll see about that in a moment. For now, the second question:

Why does Ishmael survive in italics?

I'd never noticed, but Klinkenborg must be right, so the question is a worthy one, and he notes:

The rest of the book is set in roman type, but the epilogue is not. What manner of being is this italicized survival?

That sounds like a third question, but what does Klinkenborg mean by "being"? Does he mean entity . . . or state? Anyway, I'm interested in the answers to these two -- or three -- questions because I allude to Melville's strange masterpiece in my novella, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, quoting from the ending of Moby Dick:

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

That's also a quote from the King James Version of Job chapter one, a line repeated in verses 15, 16, 17, and 19, and it seems to imply that the one in each verse delivering the message of disaster to Job is one of Job's servants. The citation of this line at the end of Moby Dick perhaps implies that the one who called himself Ishmael -- or, rather, suggested that we call him that -- is no longer the wild man but a mere servant . . . except that in reporting the story of disaster, the first thing he tells us is to call him Ishmael. Moreover, the passage in Job does not explicitly refer to the one delivering the message of disaster as a servant, but as a messenger, literally a "mal'ak," a word that can also mean "angel." Was Melville aware of all this? He does offer the Hebrew word for "whale" in his etymologies, but he gets the Hebrew wrong. We are left with more questions.

Here's yet another: Was I aware of these things when I quoted from Job in part six of my story as a way of referring to both Melville and Job, within the context of a cursed canoe, a legend of old Quebec? Read my story to find out. There's a preview here, and if that interests you, the book can be ordered here.

Anyway, dear readers, any thoughts as to the answers to Klinkenborg's questions?

Rugged, Rugged Melville . . .

Moby-What?

The Moby-Dick Collection
of
W. O. "Bill" Pettit

Avast! (Whatever that means.) Here be a wander-full, errant whale of a cover! (Note the missing hyphen in the book-title.) I came across this boys' book by clicking onto the online version of an International Herald Tribune article by Kathryn Harrison reviewing Nathaniel Philbrick's defense of Herman Melville's magnum opus, the novel Moby-Dick. That online copy of Harrison's article appears in the New York Times as "How to Read Moby-Dick" (October 21, 2011)

Go there to read about Philbrick's advocacy of Melville -- the great author needs no defense here on Gypsy Scholar! I first read Moby-Dick entire while living in Berkeley and putting off my doctoral-thesis application -- therefore in the mid-1980s -- indicating that I read that novel in Stephens Lounge under the watchful gaze of the Professor Stephens portrait hung high up on the wall.

I recall being amazed at how 'modern' the novel was, how entertaining it could be! True, there was a lot of whaling terminology to master, but Melville himself elaborated much of that. I don't recall the cover on my copy, but it certainly didn't have the appearance of the cover above, that 'homosocial' image of stalwart, sturdy, upper-class teenage boys dressed in their semi-formal attire, the tallest boy bearing a football and leading shorter boys as they float down a flight of ethereal, blue steps toward a game of something like rugby . . . except that the sport will have to be far more rugged, "fishing for whales," involving a Scottish Terrier, for some odd reason . . .

Moby-Dick Revisited?

Moby What?!

(Image from New York Times)

Janet Maslin, of the New York Times, has recently offered an amusing but serious review of an apparently amusing but serious book: "The Siren Song of the Bath Toy" (February 20, 2011), on Donovan Hohn's Moby-Duck.

Here's the book's extended subtitle, a lengthy subtext worthy of the 19th century: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them.

Bath toys? Lost at sea? As explained in an opening statement that also proves Ms. Maslin not the sort of writer to skimp on commas:

On Jan. 10, 1992, a container ship traveling south of the Aleutians, in the region once quaintly known as the Graveyard of the Pacific, en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma, Wash., took a steep roll and lost part of its cargo.

Playthings. And we already know what kind of playthings. Exactly "7,200 packs of bathtub toys." But there's a twist of fateful misunderstanding that was to prove decisive for Mr. Hohn decision to go to sea:

Each four-piece set included a blue turtle, a green frog, a red beaver and a yellow duck. This came to be erroneously understood as the story of 29,000 rubber duckies set adrift and washing up all over the globe.

Duckies are close enough, and the mythical 29,000 of them surely equal one great white whale in significance. Finding them was a job for a "modern-day Ishmael"! But the trail was cold, for Hohn only learned of the loss after 2007, when the 'duckies' had experienced "more than 15 years as castaways." So, why did he set out on a quixotic quest to find the ducks? Ms. Maslin explains:

Here's an important point about Mr. Hohn's many and varied subsequent travels and observations: He was not one of those journalists who dream up make-work projects and seek out exploits that can be turned into amusing reading. "Moby-Duck" makes him sound genuinely open-minded, inquisitive and eager to expand his own understanding of the freakish event on which he'd grown fixated. And he was eager to enhance his secondhand ideas about how the world works with firsthand images and experiences, which he eagerly incorporates into "Moby-Duck." As he puts it, he was not someone, like the explorers of old, who sought to turn the world into a map. "Quite the opposite," he says. "I wanted to turn a map into a world."

All that, yes, but he had also loved toy ducks as a child and had even borne the nickname "Donovan Duck." As Wordsworth put it, "The child is the father of the man," and Hohn's a typical nonexception that proves the rule. That must have been one hardy child, for the tale apparently takes a rough turn as he nears the end of his quest:

The last and most definitive parts of this book take Mr. Hohn to the apparent heart of darkness of his story: up through the Bering Strait and across the Northwest Territories. He is on board an icebreaker headed from Resolute to Cambridge Bay. And it is here that his strength of will as well as his boyish faith in the bath-toy armada will be tested. He is on the route that Floatees would have followed if they really got through the ice and voyaged all the way to Kennebunkport, Me. But he is now wise enough to realize that the Floatees may not have behaved exactly as expected, and that their actual fate is almost beside the point. What matters is that Mr. Hohn is now being addressed as "You! On the winch!" He has made himself a participant in a bona fide adventure. And he has done this without cheapening the great love of "Moby-Dick" that suffuses "Moby-Duck."

But not all is dark and seriously adventuresome, for the journey has its light, literary moments:

He has even found a ship's second officer who greets him with Ahab's famous question: "Hast seen the White Whale?" It's a rare English teacher who has been asked that question while at sea and has been able to answer: "Hast seen the Yellow Duck?"

But to see, or not to see . . . Or rather, to sea, or not to sea. That was the real question. And a marvelous quest seems to have followed.

Culminating in a book as provocatively titled as its 19th-century inspiration . . .

How Graceful is Melville's Whale?

Rockwell Kent, "The Chase"

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville

(Image from Plattsburgh State Art Museum)

I've tentatively begun re-reading Herman Melville's masterpiece, Moby-Dick, and one word kept puzzling me, preventing me from making progress: חן.

This word, "chen," looked like the Hebrew word for "grace," but Melville defined it as "whale." I couldn't dredge up a whale for that, so I finally pulled my Gesenius Hebrew dictionary from its shelf and checked. Only "grace."

So . . . what's this about a whale, I wondered.

I went to Google Books and found a snippet of explanation:

[The] most accurate Hebrew word for whale was תנין, used in Genesis i,21 and Job vii,12, which is transcribed in the Roman alphabet as tannin. What Melville apparently wrote was תן (tan), the hypothetical singular, which did not occur in the Old Testament. (Melville, Moby-Dick, University of Michgan, 1952, with introduction by Nathaniel Philbrick, page 579)

Mystery solved . . . or is it? This snippet implies that Melville got it right but an editor got it wrong. But perhaps Melville inadvertently misperceived "sea monster" (תן = tan) as "grace" (חן = chen), mistaking the letter "tav" (ת) for the letter "heth" (ח). Or did Melville perhaps intentionally conflate "grace" (חן = chen) with "sea monster" (תן = tan) in some deeper irony? Such is the opinion of Michael West:

Moby-Dick begins with a bogus Hebrew etymology, causing editors no little confusion, but it is perhaps no accident that the Hebrew characters Melville supplied form the word not for whale but for grace. (West, Transcendental Wordplay : America's Romantic Punsters and the Search for the Language of Nature, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2000, page 333)

West cites pages 1-6 of Neal Schleifer's article "Melville as Lexicographer: Linguistics and Symbolism in Moby-Dick" in Melville Society Extracts (Volume 98, September 1994), which can be read in full online. Schliefer's analysis is speculative but intriguing, for he notes on page 2 that the letter "heth" (ח) of the word "grace" (חן = chen) introduces an "h," and he suggests that a quote from Hackluyt supplied by Melville shortly prior to the erroneous "grace" offers a clue that the 'error' is intentional:

While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.

Is Schliefer correct? Possibly, given the Hackluyt quote, but Schliefer's following, overly ingenious reading of Melville's 'erroneous' Greek as a miswritten "Christos" is about as hard to swallow as the story of Jonah.

So who is right, and where lies the truth? Such questions never end . . .