May 27, 2019 - Front Matter

If you've read this novel before, you know it begins not with the iconic quasi-opening line of "Call me Ishmael" but rather with several pages with the headings "Etymology" and "Extracts," the latter of which provides a number of quotations from literature over several centuries in which the word "whale" appears. A few things caught my interest that hadn't before.

First, while I had thought the opening line of "Etymology," referencing an "Usher," was a direct quotation from Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," I was apparently mistaken. It is not.

Second, regarding the "Extracts," while many readers know that the term commonly translated as "whale" from the Book of Jonah is actually literally "big fish" in Hebrew, it turns out the term thus translated in Genesis also doesn't mean "whale." The word in Hebrew -- tannin -- means something closer to "sea serpent." Apparently, in modern Israeli Hebrew, it means "alligator." The word used in modern Hebrew for "whale" is l'viatan, i.e., Leviathan.

Clearly, the import of these pages is to impress on the reader the extent to which whales have occupied a place in the human imagination. The question is whether this is a novel about whales, after all.

Comments

  1. UnknownJuly 23, 2019 at 7:35 PM

    if it was an alligator, the "Jonah and the whale" story just got a whole lot scarier.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

August 31, 2019 - Chapter One Hundred Thirty-five (pp. 555-561)

Lest we think we’ve seen the last of Fedallah, he appears in this, the third (and final) day of the hunt of Moby Dick – in a manner of speaking. Rather, he appears lashed to the white whale’s back when he sounds once again. Ahab cries, “"Aye, Parsee! I see thee again.—Aye, and thou goest before; and this, this then is the hearse that thou didst promise.” Ahab might believe he will survive this final encounter; he certainly believes that this third day will be the final day of the hunt. There is, after all, a certain finality about the number three.
Read more

The Idea

Image
It's a pretty straightforward idea. One novel ( Moby Dick , by Herman Melville), one summer (Memorial Day to Labor Day inclusive), around six pages per day, one blog post per day of roughly 100 words (perhaps more) on what I've read and observed. I meant to do this a few years ago and kinda pooped out. This year I'm going to try it again. Wish me luck.
Read more

August 27, 2019 - Chapter One Hundred Thirty-three (pp. 537-541)

Image
Finally, the chase begins. In the first part, which ends with the destruction of Ahab’s boat by the white whale (he said ironically), we get this: “But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia's Natural Bridge.” As we have already been told, Moby Dick isn’t actually all white, as the image below of said bridge shows us. The question is why the whale is referred to as white when it clearly isn’t. Curious readers should probably consult the chapter entitled “The Whiteness of the Whale” once again.
Read more