Moby-Dick Introduction by Larzer Ziff

by Melville, Herman; Ziff, Larzer

• ISBN13: 9780679405597
• ISBN10: 0679405593
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1991-11-26
• Publisher: Everyman's Library

Summary

Introduction by Larzer Ziff

Author Biography

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) is the author of many books and essays, including Herman Melville (Penguin Lives), American Fictions, and Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature.

Table of Contents

Etymology	7	(1)
Extracts	8	(13)
Looming	21	(6)
The Carpet-Bag	27	(4)
The Spouter-Inn	31	(14)
The Counterpane	45	(4)
Breakfast	49	(2)
The Street	51	(3)
The Chapel	54	(4)
The Pulpit	58	(3)
The Sermon	61	(9)
A Bosom Friend	70	(4)
Nightgown	74	(2)
Biographical	76	(3)
Wheelbarrow	79	(5)
Nantucket	84	(2)
Chowder	86	(3)
The Ship	89	(13)
The Ramadan	102	(6)
His Mark	108	(4)
The Prophet	112	(4)
All Astir	116	(3)
Going Aboard	119	(3)
Merry Christmas	122	(4)
The Lee Shore	126	(2)
The Advocate	128	(5)
Postscript	133	(1)
Knights and Squires	134	(3)
Knights and Squires	137	(4)
Ahab	141	(4)
Enter Ahab; to him, Stubb	145	(3)
The Pipe	148	(1)
Queen Mab	149	(2)
Cetology	151	(13)
The Specksynder	164	(3)
The Cabin Table	167	(6)
The Mast-Head	173	(6)
The Quarter-Deck	179	(7)
Sunset	186	(2)
Dusk	188	(2)
First Night-Watch	190	(1)
Midnight, Forecastle	191	(7)
Moby Dick	198	(9)
The Whiteness of the Whale	207	(9)
Hark!	216	(1)
The Chart	217	(5)
The Affidavit	222	(8)
Surmises	230	(3)
The Mat-Maker	233	(3)
The First Lowering	236	(10)
The Hyena	246	(3)
Ahab's Boat and Crew Fedallah	249	(3)
The Spirit-Spout	252	(4)
The Albatross	256	(2)
The Gam	258	(4)
The Town Ho's Story	262	(19)
Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales	281	(5)
Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales	286	(4)
Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth, &c	290	(3)
Brit	293	(3)
Squid	296	(3)
The Line	299	(4)
Stubb kills a Whale	303	(5)
The Dart	308	(2)
The Crotch	310	(2)
Stubb's Supper	312	(7)
The Whale as a Dish	319	(3)
The Shark Massacre	322	(2)
Cutting In	324	(2)
The Blanket	326	(3)
The Funeral	329	(2)
The Sphynx	331	(3)
The Jeroboam's Story	334	(6)
The Monkey-rope	340	(4)
Stubb and Flask kill a Right Whale	344	(5)
The Sperm Whale's Head	349	(4)
The Right Whale's Head	353	(3)
The Battering-Ram	356	(3)
The Great Heidelburgh Tun	359	(2)
Cistern and Buckets	361	(4)
The Prairie	365	(3)
The Nut	368	(3)
The Pequod meets the Virgin	371	(11)
The Honor and Glory of Whaling	382	(3)
Jonah Historically Regarded	385	(2)
Pitchpoling	387	(2)
The Fountain	389	(5)
The Tail	394	(5)
The Grand Armada	399	(12)
Schools and Schoolmasters	411	(3)
Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish	414	(4)
Heads or Tails	418	(3)
The Pequod meets the Rose-bud	421	(7)
Ambergris	428	(3)
The Castaway	431	(4)
A Squeeze of the Hand	435	(4)
The Cassock	439	(2)
The Try-Works	441	(5)
The Lamp	446	(1)
Stowing Down and Clearing Up	447	(3)
The Doubloon	450	(6)
Leg and Arm · The Pequod meets the Samuel Enderby	456	(7)
The Decanter	463	(5)
A Bower in the Arsacides	468	(4)
Measurement of the Whale's Skeleton	472	(3)
The Fossil Whale	475	(4)
Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish?	479	(4)
Ahab's Leg	483	(3)
The Carpenter	486	(3)
Ahab and the Carpenter	489	(4)
Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin	493	(3)
Queequeg in his Coffin	496	(6)
The Pacific	502	(2)
The Blacksmith	504	(3)
The Forge	507	(4)
The Gilder	511	(2)
The Pequod meets the Bachelor	513	(3)
The Dying Whale	516	(2)
The Whale Watch	518	(2)
The Quadrant	520	(3)
The Candles	523	(7)
Towards the End of the First Night Watch	530	(1)
Midnight-The Forecastle Bulwarks	531	(2)
Midnight Aloft-Thunder and Lightning	533	(1)
The Musket	534	(3)
The Needle	537	(3)
The Log and Line	540	(3)
The Life-Buoy	543	(4)
The Deck	547	(2)
The Pequod meets the Rachel	549	(4)
The Cabin	553	(2)
The Hat	555	(4)
The Pequod meets the Delight	559	(2)
The Symphony	561	(4)
The Chase --- First Day	565	(9)
The Chase --- Second Day	574	(8)
The Chase --- Third Day	582	(11)
Epilogue	593

Excerpts

Call me Ishmael. This resonant opening of Moby-Dick, the greatest novel in American literature, announces the narrator, Herman Melville, as he with a measure of slyness thought of himself. In the Scriptures Ishmael, a wild man sired by the overwhelming patriarch Abraham, was nevertheless the bastard son of a serving girl Hagar. The author himself was the offspring of two distinguished American families, the Melvilles of Boston and the Gansevoorts of Albany.

Melville's father cast something of a blight on the family escutcheon by his tendency to bankruptcy which passed down to his son. Dollars damn me, the son was to say over and over. When he sat down in the green landscape of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to compose Moby-Dick he was in debt, the father of one son, and another to be born a few days after the publication of the novel in England.

Melville had published five novels previous to Moby-Dick; the first two did well, and then with the capriciousness of the public the subsequent novels failed to please. He was a known literary figure with a fading reputation. How he came upon the courage to undertake the challenging creation of the epical battle between a sea creature, a white whale called Moby Dick, and an old captain from Nantucket by the name of Ahab is one of literature's triumphant mysteries. Add to that, as one reads, that he was only thirty-two years old.

Ten years before, in 1841, he had signed up as a common seaman on the whaling vessel Acushnet bound for the South Seas. Young Ishmael was drawn by the lure of the sea and by the wonder of the whale itself, the Leviathan, the monarch of the deep, "one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air." Until the discovery of petroleum oil in 1859 and Thomas Edison's invention of the incandescent lamp in 1879, whaling was a major commercial occupation in New England. Fortunes were made, grand houses were built, often with a "widow's walk" on the roof that testified to the great dangers of the enterprise. For the crew, service on a whaler was a drastic life of unremitting labor; foul, crowded quarters; bad food in scanty servings; contractual terms for years at miserable wages; brutalized companions picked up from all the ports of the world; tyrannical captains practicing a "sultanism" which Melville abhorred. A ship afloat is after all a prison. Melville was on three whalers in his four years at sea and from each, as we read in Typee and Omoo, the struggle is to escape, as he did when the boats anchored near exotic islands. He wrote about the misery of the whaling life, but not about whaling itself until he came to Moby-Dick. His imaginary whaler, the Pequod, death bound as it is, would be called, for an ordinary seaman, an agreeable berth. Ahab has no interest left beyond his internal struggle with one whale.

Still, there is whaling, the presumption of it. When a whale is sighted small boats are detached from the main vessel and the men engage in a deadly battle to try to match, with flying harpoons, the whale's immense strength and desperation. If the great thing is captured, the deck of the main ship becomes an abattoir of blood and guts. The thick blubber is to be stripped, the huge head to be drained of its oils for soothing ambergris, for candles; the bones of the carcass make their way into corsets and umbrellas and scrimshaw trinkets. Moby-Dick is a history of cetology, an encylopedic telling of the qualities of the fin-back, the right whale, the hyena whale, the sperm whale, the killer whale, classified by size in mock academic form as folio, octavo, and so on.

Information about a vanished world is one thing, but, above all else, this astonishing book is a human tragedy of almost supernatural suspensiveness, written in a rushing flow of imaginative language, poetical intensity, metaphor and adjective of consuming beauty. It begins on the cobbled streets of New Bedford, where Ishmael is to spend a few days before boarding the Pequod in Nantucket. The opening pages have a boyish charm as he is brought to share a bed with a fellow sailor, the harpooner Queequeg, an outrageously tattoed "primitive" who will be his companion throughout the narrative. Great ships under sail gave the old ports a rich heritage of myth, gossip, exaggeration, and rhetorical flights. Ishmael, on a Sunday, visits a whaleman's chapel to hear the incomparable sermon by Father Mapple on Jonah and the whale, a majestic interlude, one of many in this torrential outburst of fictional genius.

As Ishmael and Queequeg proceed to Nantucket, the shadows of the plot begin to fall upon the pages. The recruits are interviewed by two retired sailors who will struggle to express the complicated nature of Captain Ahab. We learn that he has lost a leg, chewed off by a whale, and thus the fated voyage of the Pequod begins. Ahab has lost his leg to a white whale Moby Dick and is consumed with a passion for retribution. He will hunt the singular whale as a private destiny in the manner of ancient kings in a legendary world. However, Ahab is real and in command. The chief mate, Starbuck, understands the folly of the quest, the danger of it, and, as a thoughtful man longing to return to his wife and children, he will speak again and again the language of reason. "Vengeance on a dumb beast that simply smote thee from the blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."

The necessity of Starbuck's human distance from the implacable imperative of Ahab's quest illustrates the brilliant formation of this harrowing tale. But it is Ahab's story, his destiny, and, if on the one hand, he is a shabby, sea-worn sailor long mesmerized by mercurial oceans, he too has a wife at home and a child of his old age. We learn, as the story proceeds, that on a time ashore after his terrible wounding, he had fallen and by way of his whalebone leg been unmanned. He has suffered an incapacity not to be peacefully borne by one who in forty years had spent only three on land. Ahab knows the wild unsuitability of his nature, his remove from the common life.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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Excerpted from Moby-Dick, or The Whale by Herman Melville
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.