The whale fact chapters in Moby-Dick are among the most memorable | Hacker News Reader

The whale fact chapters in Moby-Dick are among the most memorable

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76 pointssamclemens76 comments

Moby Dick hit me like no novel before or since. A poem in prose form. Attention paid to the littlest of details on the ship, searching for meaning or purpose. A meaning or purpose unveiled in one chapter, but then refuted in the next. Ahab a profound character, who modern critics and teachers will often simply label as “evil” or the “bad guy”. He is a man who has experienced injustice and seeks to pierce the very veil of God/justice to find out why. Is that mad? Yes…but mad in a radically honest sort of way. The White Whale…so many things all at once: a fierce creature, our mortality, injustice, justice, natures power, God Himself. And then the ending…an apocalypse that one survives because of..a coffin. I still think about that novel every couple of weeks. Just stunning.

> Moby Dick hit me like no novel before or since. A poem in prose form.

Also +1, I was familiar with the book only through exposure to it's symbolic representation in popular culture I.e. a boring 10 pages of plot "diluted" in 1000 pages of autistically compulsive descriptions of whale biology

So one random night before bed I finished the ebook I was reading, felt a little burned out halfway through the 40 book terry pratchet collection, had moby dick on the ereader since it's public domain idk and opened it up because why not ... And stayed up most of the night, read it at every opportunity going forward, and probably highlighted every other sentence as an example of absolutely delightful prose

Amen. The prose is some of the best English one will ever encounter. There are lines in there that stop you in your tracks for their beauty, depth, surprise, etc.

I will say that there were several paragraphs/run-on-sentences where I recall saying to myself “Ok Melville, you’ve gone a little too far this time”…only to find, come the final line, that against all odds he would tie the whole thing together.

> experienced injustice

What was the injustice?

well a whale bit off his leg. lets ignore what he and his countrymen did to other whales and that they started the fight. if you start from the point where he lost his leg, ahab is a hero hell bent on revenge against an evil agressor.

But I mean, who picks an arbitrary point in the middle of a protreacted conflict and decides thats where the score starts being kept from right?

> But I mean, who picks an arbitrary point in the middle of a protreacted conflict and decides thats where the score starts being kept from right?

One of the fun things about the book is it does comprehensively explicate the context, from the perspective of an explicitly unreliable narrator; covering economics, labor relations, division of labor in general, biology, taxonomy, racial/cultural relations, slavery, leadership, technical details of shipping, use of language, obsession and other psychiatric matters, history, law, and lots more

> if you start from the point where he lost his leg, ahab is a hero hell bent on revenge against an evil agressor.

iirc the revenge is explicitly written as doomed from the beginning, the loss of a leg is explicitly treated as a natural consequence of whaling, and there is a bunch of text discussing whether revenge against a whale is even possible (involving the degree to which whales are sentient/moral creatures etc). (also there is some discussion of whether the revenge constitutes a breach of fiduciary responsibility to the vessel owners that would justify a mutiny against the captain, plus discussion even more moral grey areas). Like it is presented as total insanity from a multitude of perspectives

at one of the final meetings between ships towards the end, Ahab encounters a ship sailing in the opposite direction, away from the white whale, and finds out the white whale ate the other captain's arm (iirc). Ahab asks him why he's not chasing down the whale for revenge and the other captain is like "he already got one of my limbs, no need to give him a second".

(A different captain earlier also says i.e. "the risk/reward ratio of chasing 1 tough whale vs many easy whales is not in our favor and our goal is to make money/oil")

More than that, the whale is symbolic of the subconscious, coming to the surface every now and then. The White Whale is Ahab's subconscious, and white is the color of sickness. His obsession, his sickness, came to the surface and killed them all except Ishmael.

There's an entire chapter on "The Whiteness of the Whale." It was the hardest for me to get through, but it kind of beats you into understanding what the author is getting at.

"Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels."

Is that a direct quotation from the novel?

Yes, it's actually Ahab speaking, lol. He goes on to muse that thinking is probably the exclusive domain of God, since thinking requires "a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that." This is the first couple paragraphs of chapter 135, "The Chase. — Third Day".

The words "chapter 135" fill me with dread.

That is a great question. The injustice was that his leg was bitten off by a whale. But the perfectly valid rejoinder would be "well that's just an event, not an injustice, as it was done by a non-moral creature because a whale can't be moral". But that is exactly why Moby-Dick's is so unique: the "bad guy" in the novel is not a human, but the universe itself. A tragic event happened to Ahab and bears resentment against a universe that allows it. Ahab seeks not to defeat man, but nature (and one could say by extension the Creator).

And how did that work out for him?

Why yes, that's the point. It is a tragic tale of hubris, but one of much more existential depth than what teachers will simply label as "Ahab is the bad guy".

I agree that Moby-Dick [1] is “far funnier, weirder, and gripping than you likely imagine.” But that is in contrast not only to contemporary novels that might—or might not—have been influenced by television. The vast majority of English-language novels published in the 19th century were also driven by plot and character and lacked long digressions about the author’s obsessions. Thousands of such novels, most of them no longer read, are now available at the Internet Archive [2]. Some of those might be worth reading, too.

[1] There’s a hyphen on the title page of the first edition but not in the body text or page heads:

https://archive.org/details/mobydickorwhale01melv/page/n7/mo...

https://archive.org/details/mobydickorwhale01melv/page/196/m...

[2] https://blog.archive.org/2021/07/14/forgotten-novels-of-the-...

It’s been over 20 years since I’ve read the book, but it really struck a chord with me as a teenager. I choose it for a book report assignment, my English teacher advised against it but I managed to convince her I was up to the challenge. Ended up getting an A and loving the book. I took meticulous notes and spent weeks studying its intricacies.

I don’t remember now much except these long chapters of “useless” whale facts. They stood out then and were so memorable I still vaguely remember them the most today. Just like how Tolkien could diverge from the story to tell the history of a single tree for a dozen pages. I “accidentally” read The Lord of The Rings because the French translations of the books had cool covers, and I had no idea what they were and were way above my level at the time but I loved them also.

Mellville was on another level when it came to the world building in Moby Dick, even for such a self contained story it felt completely immersive and real.

I really should read it again one day.

It's a cute thought, and a good point. But the author is exclusively relying on "English major novels" for making this point (even though they ignore things like the very cool long chapters in Hunchback of Notre Dame that are about the Paris sewer system).

For many of us on this website, we'd probably think of Neal Stephenson, who might have long digressions about cryptographic schemes, or Lagrange points, or whatever other "cool science fact" might be tangentially related to the plot.

But the novel, as an art form, is effectively dead. At the high end of the market, it is at the mercy of the industry gatekeepers, and at the bottom end it has been given over to influencers; bring a guaranteed audience, and you get to publish your fanfic (names of characters having been modified to avoid legal action). There's no room anymore for genuine experimentation, and "good writing" is no longer the measure of a potential best-seller. Was that ever the case, anyway? Probably not.

I'd love to see an article like this, but focusing on how to bring the cool parts of novels into some new type of writing, rather than pretend that writing advice might actually affect the success of a novel.

Your third paragraph is no different from how it was when Moby Dick was published. And really, there's plenty of experimentation in modern literature. While it's a bit old now, House of Leaves was very different from anything else on the market, but it got published and sold very well.

It was almost a century (1938) after Moby Dick was first published, but a historical case lamenting the same money-driven attitude is in The Principles of Art.

"The fact is becoming notorious; publishers are ceasing to be interested in the reviews their books get, and beginning to decide that they make no difference to the sales."

Before its 1919 "Melville revival", very few people would have been able to read Moby Dick, because gatekeepers would not have subsidized its availability. Moby Dick was a failure due to many chance events, such as reviews based on an unfinished version that did not include among other things the epilogue that explained Ishmael.

What would make the novel as an art form dead or alive? Do you believe that the novels of the late-nineteenth century that enjoyed the most late-nineteenth readers are the same novels that influenced later writers the most, or the novels that had the most impact on people's thoughts 170 years later?

Since it sounds like you are maybe not a regular book reader, my point may make more sense in the context of film. Go back 50 years, compare which movies earned the most, which were mentioned the most in the press of the time, and which ones won Academy Awards. Then if you think that says anything, compare that to which movies are considered important now, and you'll find that in fact none of those three metrics is more reliable than the others.

> the novel, as an art form, is effectively dead

How many novels have you ever read that were published in the last decade?

> high end of the market, it is at the mercy of the industry gatekeepers, and at the bottom end it has been given over to influencers

It took history’s greatest writers at least a lifetime to find acclaim.

I'd argue otherwise. With electronic self-publishing, you are completely free to experiment, and have an audience potentially all over the (English-speaking) world.

But it's not going to make you world-famous, save for unique exceptional cases. It will likely will not directly bring you wealth from sales, or actually any considerable money. Ah, and the printed book is a gimmick that only a part of your audience would still appreciate; literature and paper are much like music and vinyl.

You can still become truly world-famous and well-off if your book becomes a basis of a movie, or ideally several; see e.g. Harry Potter or The Song of Fire and Ice. Granted, they not a completely realistic, but neither is Moby-Dick, or Hundred Years of Solitude, or, say, Don Quixote, which basically started the whole "novel" thing.

Did you mean les mis? It had a lot of sewer system exposition (such praise for night soil!), but I don’t remember any such discussion in hunchback.

Of course, it’s very possible I’m forgetting something.

I think he did mean Hugo's Les Miserables. I remember that chapter where he described the city's "cloaca", referring to it as the "third level substage". Goes on for quite a while and was indeed memorable.

So was the long chapter about Waterloo which was seemingly unrelated to the book's plot until the final paragraph or so.

The description of Fantine's life before she fell goes on with florid language, but it captures the "golden hour" of life when youth is at its peak.

And lastly I'll mention the chapter where Marius' grandfather (I think) goes on a terribly long rant about the Jacobins. Those brigands...!

My favourite interegnatory chapter is the one advancing the argument that the cobblestones of Paris are the guarantor of democracy: if le regime too much offends les miserables, they dig them up for barricades and missiles! The notable fact in that regard is that following the 1968 student riots, the authorities paved over the cobbles of the left bank. (Or so I'm told.)

Interestingly I think that is the original meaning of cloaca, and the anatomical use is a euphemism based on it.

I think he ment Hunchback of Notredame only, it has long long chapters describing how the architecture of the Cathedral evolved over centuries, and many other highly entertaining digressive chapters from the main plot.

> For many of us on this website, we'd probably think of Neal Stephenson, who might have long digressions about cryptographic schemes, or Lagrange points, or whatever other "cool science fact" might be tangentially related to the plot.

Or about wisdom teeth, or furniture fetishes. I think about those two digressions about once a week and I’m still not sure what was going on.

I just had my wisdom teeth taken out (being relatively elderly for the procedure). I had headaches I thought might be related, and I seem to be lucky in that regard as I was cured instantly(my oral surgeon didn't think it would help). My tongue and mouth are still kinda numb and it's been almost 2 weeks. I think I'll eventually get sensation back.

The rectangle of Perl that allegedly does encryption in Cryptonomicon haunts me to this day.

I don't know why I never put two-and-two together for this. I find both Melville and later Stephenson to be equally tedious. The similarity is how many words they spend just showing off how good they are at writing.

You'll definitely want skip past the military strategy sections of War and Peace.

Eh, I tend to avoid abridged versions (or self-abridging); there are enough good books out there that I am willing to encounter on the author's terms that I don't feel the need to do otherwise.

One of my favourite dialogs in the book was where the second mate admonished the cook about how to properly do a whale steak.

"I’ll tell you what to do so as not to spoil it by overdoing. Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the other; that done, dish it; d’ye hear?"

It's these small passages that make the book.

Tolkien is another prime example of an author who happily diverges away from the story at hand, bursting into songs and poems; any wonder that LotR is such a popular and often reread book? Or the Hobbit which is quite a short novel, spending pages telling riddles!

The full unabridged Moby Dick is a real treat. Knowing the gist of the story is fine but all of the various diversions in the full novel turn the novel into a really surreal otherworldly experience. Patience really pays off when reading Moby Dick.

I've read some long and convoluted fiction, but I keep getting stuck on Moby Dick. It just seems to go nowhere for the longest time.

Much like sailing around looking for the white whale.

There are some parts of story-space that cannot be expressed, because the audience would not bother to read them

I kept getting lost in the diversions so much I felt they took away from the story. I'd love to read a version with them all removed. I feel like it would be 1/4 as long.

There are a lot of abridged versions available, but I can't recommend them. I read one when I was a young teen and was left unimpressed.

I'm glad I'm not alone in finding the people who insufferably whine about things in a creative work not directly serving "the plot" to be wasting the time of whoever happens to consume their "critique" far more than any author or filmmaker could ever manage

This is why abridged versions exist.

It’s a shame for them though, as often so much is lost by omitting digressions. When I was younger, and Walden’s was the only source of books for me, I would sometimes buy one, only to later notice the “abridged” label in ultra fine print

I'm with you there, but there are also readers who insufferably whine about typos and weird turns of phrase. Thus, books need editors, who limit the size of a book to the budget of the author or the editorial to pay editors.

We really, really, need better automatic grammar-checkers. I'm for one quite happy with the latest developments in that area, but it's not yet possible to eschew human editors even for rote tasks like line-editing or proof-reading.

Moby Dick more or less ruined Melville, who was until that point a relatively popular author of exotic adventure stories. It made no money and fell into obscurity for 70 years before being rediscovered by a new generation of critics whose goal was to identify and champion "the great American novel."

Keep this in mind when you make your novel more like Moby Dick.

If your goal is financial success, there's a million and one easier paths to take than becoming an author of novels.

Moby Dick will probably still be read in a thousand years, and that's the kind of success most authors dream of. Even if cash-flow is king, it's not the primary motivation for most artists.

BTW I looked it up, and it seems like Melville was never very financially successful from writing during his lifetime. Moby Dick might have been the nail on the coffin - it didn't become popular until after his death - but it can't be entirely blamed for his financial troubles, and pooh-poohing the idea of writing weird and interesting novels because one author 150 years ago wasn't financial successful is a really dislikable form of gatekeeping.

How did one failed novel become ruin?

Nothing he wrote after it experienced more than modest success, while much of his output was rejected or criticized. His health and finances declined. He was forced to abandon writing as the main source of his income. His family worried for his sanity. He was little read at the time of his death.

But was that because of Moby Dick?

No. It was followed by the highly experimental flop Pierre. Maybe the closest he came later to getting back to his marketable sea-adventure formula was Benito Cereno.

Aside: There's a grossly unjust moral presumption in Cereno, one that can perhaps most charitably be accounted for by a desperation for book sales on Melville's part, and his assumption of benighted social attitudes among the intended readership.

Sounds like a fairly common case of late stage authorship.

Actually a pretty good point in an era when marketability is more important than ever.

moby dick was written in my city (new bedford, ma - former whaling capitol of the world and #1 fishing port in the usa today). the author stayed here downtown after moving from nantucket in order to write and was not famous until after he died, sadly. he was a fisherman in real life and the book is excellent if you're familiar with the history of whaling.

I recently finished it for the first time after many false starts.

It definitely shocks, hits, and roils you about the decks of that cursed ship.

It’s exactly the fact chapters that play such an interesting emotional trick on us. Almost like a wave of anxiety before the wild, unknown force of impending doom comes for us out of the depths of the sea. The narrator takes stock of every detail. Distracting themselves from what’s coming. What we know must come.

And given the the time in which Melville was writing. He and few others were plying new narrative structures and were sadly… mostly ignored.

If you liked Moby Dick be sure to give Figuring by Maria Popova a try. Ever wonder why there was such an illustrious dedication to Nathaniel Hawthorne? Who else Melville was connected to at the time? There’s that and more.

Parts of the story I’m sure haven’t aged well. Ismael’s inconsistent use of derogatory terms for non-Caucasian people in spite of the close relationship he has with Queegueg. There are a few passages where Ishmael seems to struggle with these thoughts. It doesn’t seem to me that this part of the story has aged well… or at least it’s hard for me to understand what Mellville was hoping to put light on (or perhaps was simply ignorant of like so many people were).

It’s a challenging book. Im not sure it deserves veneration these days. But it was these chapters that I found fascinating.

>Ismael’s inconsistent use of derogatory terms for non-Caucasian people in spite of the close relationship he has with Queegueg.

>it’s hard for me to understand what Mellville was hoping to put light on

Like the part about the whaling, this is not a commentary, it's a description of what happens.

Given how subversive Mellville was trying to be with other parts of the story, what he chooses to write and present is part of his license as an author and will show his biases and prejudices.

I am not the first person to note the prejudices and racist undertones of the book.

I don't think it's worth of praise for being a "classic, must read," book on this basis. I think it's worth reading for many reasons but it's a heavy work and folks should know, going in, that it has many challenging and problematic aspects among the good parts.

> close relationship he has with Queegueg

Nothing strange about that, but still, I was not expecting this book (and many of that era) to be gay romance.

It was a heavily queer-coded book. And if you read Figuring by Maria Popova you'll learn the reason behind the illustrious dedication to Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is quite fascinating in this regard!

Especially "the squeeze of the hand"

I forced myself to read it, to see what the fuss was about. I found the fact chapters annoying because I wanted a story and got an outdated biology lesson.

I still don’t understand what the fuss is about. It didn’t seem like a profound story to me. Maybe the themes just don’t intersect with my own life.

Just goes to show that reactions to literature are highly personal, I guess.

I refuse to read any creative analysis of Moby-Dick that doesn't take a serious stand as to WTF was going on in Melville's head when he wrote Chapter 94, A Squeeze of the Hand. Or is it just meant to be a hidden treat for the freaks whose eyes didn't glaze over during the whale-facts portion?

https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/42/moby-dick/775/chapter-94-a-squ...

While it's funny to think of people reading this completely out of context, I'm obliged to mention that "spermaceti" is a waxy oil found in the heads of sperm whales, and the industry bent on harvesting this substance was basically the entire point of hunting the species nearly to extinction.

If that gives you pause, the very next chapter is literally all about the whale’s penis (and I don’t want to hear any Moby-Dick puns unless they’re exceptionally clever)

https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/42/moby-dick/776/chapter-95-the-c...

If you're interested in the true story that inspired Moby Dick, read In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick. It's the story of the Nantucket whaleship Essex that was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale.

I tried reading Moby-Dick a couple years ago and it was very hard as a non-native English speaker. The only book who made me want to pick up either a dictionary or a translation.

Will try again, maybe I've gotten better!

Here's my suggestion.

Find a good audiobook version at your local library through Libby or Hoopla. The one I listened to was about 24 hours in length, but shorter at 1.25x.

After every chapter or so, check out the annotated version here and read/skim what you just listened to: http://www.powermobydick.com/

I found it helpful to listen to the language and flow first, then seek out the explanations in the annotations of the old language or the nautical terms.

This made it far more approachable with respect to the jargon. Helped even this native English speaker!

Reading in vernacular is probably really hard if you’ve never heard people speak like that. I think you have to read it in the accent to realize what they are actually saying.

I remember reading Moby Dick back in high school, and being totally taken aback by how much of it was about whaling and how very little of it had anything to do with captain ahab

I tried. Could not get through it. Too wordy, language too archaic.

I remember them because that's where I gave up reading it.

Especially the part about the guy who wears a whale penis.

P.S. I'm serious. It's in there.

If you like this sort of thing try Wellness by Nathan Hill.

I wish there were more facts in modern novels as well. Fiction’s alleged communicative purpose is to entertain the reader but I gather it’s too simplistic. Dostoyevsky’s Crime & Punishment seems to be to be an analysis on the soul. It entertains because it captivates.

For example, “Where the wild things are” has captivated both my child and I since we first read it sitting on the floor of a bookstore. It’s the kind of book I had been dreaming of writing myself.

It is an illustrated album explaining children’s psychology to children of all ages.

We can read it over and over again for the next few years.

I wish there were more illustrated albums explaining very complicated or abstract concepts using beautiful drawings and simple, rhyming verses per page.

Most educational books are too informative, they explain lots of concepts on a page. And most children’s books are puerile or too patronising.

Sometimes there still is, for example Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities goes into great depths into how bond markets work.

Also James Michener novels are a good introduction to the history of different geographical location.

Well sure… that’s every author’s white whale

"And, yes, what would Moby-Dick be without the digressions? "

A book more people read, I'd wager.

And, no, more authors should not digress, except for those writing a piece that people will be talking about for hundreds of years.

Far fewer people would read it I think, because the book wouldn't be touted in the first place. The abridged versions are widely available today specifically because the original is recognized as great yet filters many readers. If one of the abridged versions was the original, I think nobody today would have heard of it.

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