The Fifth Desk · Canonical Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Herman Melville · a novel · the Etymology, the Extracts, 135 chapters and an Epilogue · 212,836 words · first published in London and New York, 1851 · in Melville’s English, read in the Project Gutenberg e-text #2489
Mode
Encyclopaedic novel as prose tragedy; sea narrative, natural history, sermon and stage drama under one narrator
Mythos
The oracle fulfilled to the letter; a captain named for a wicked king, a prophet on the wharf, the swallowing deep, and one escaped alone to tell
Phase
One voyage, from a Christmas sailing out of Nantucket to three days of chase on the Line, and a day and a night afloat on a coffin
Presentation
Fiction; an etymology, eighty extracts, 135 chapters from 45 to 7,953 words, and an Epilogue; ten chapters set wholly as drama
Register
From inn farce, whaling law and anatomy to the sermon, the soliloquy and stage tragedy; a narrator’s “I” that fades to silence and returns
Scale
One ship, thirty men, one whale, every sea
Governing Proposition
A man with nothing to keep him on shore signs onto a whaler whose captain has sworn the crew to hunt the white whale that took his leg. The book tries every way of knowing the whale, admits that none will serve, and gives the hunt three days. The wager of the novel is that one will can make thirty men into one, through forms, wages and an oath, and that the line which binds each man to his fellow is the same line that kills.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book does not begin with its narrator. It begins with a dead usher’s etymology of the word for whale, and then with eighty extracts, gathered by a “Sub-Sub-Librarian” from “any book whatsoever, sacred or profane”, the last of them a whale song: “A giant in might, where might is right, / And King of the boundless sea.” Only then: “Call me Ishmael.” The man who speaks goes to sea in place of suicide, “This is my substitute for pistol and ball”, and asks why every crowd drifts to the water’s edge. He answers with Narcissus, drowned reaching for the image in the fountain: “It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”
The book is built to that key. Its 135 chapters run from forty-five words to nearly eight thousand. The captain is kept out of sight for more than a fifth of the book; the first kill falls at the half, the chase at ninety-four per cent. Thirty-seven chapters, a quarter of the whole, advance nothing in the voyage. They classify and measure, and after the hundred-and-fifth they stop dead. The book’s exact middle word falls in a chapter on rope, “The Line”, in a sentence that weighs Manilla against hemp: “is much more handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp.” Counted from “Call me Ishmael”, it falls in the first kill. Either way the centre is the line and the first death it serves.
The voice that begins it does not last. In the twenty-two chapters ashore and setting sail, the narrator’s “I”, “me” and “my” run at thirty-one to every thousand words of narration. Through the middle they run at six to ten; among the omens of the last weeks, under one; in the three days of the chase, none. Ahab’s name rises as the voice falls. The turn is stated just after the oath: “I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest”. The man who asked to be called Ishmael is named nineteen times in the whole book, and by the end he has been absorbed into the crew he joined.
Movement II
Ashore the book is comedy. At the Spouter-Inn Ishmael is made to share a bed with a harpooneer who turns out to be a tattooed cannibal, and he wakes with Queequeg’s arm “thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner.” His verdict on the night: “I turned in, and never slept better in my life.” Then the whalemen’s chapel, and Father Mapple climbing to a pulpit shaped like a ship’s bow to preach Jonah. The sermon ends in a run of blessings: “Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth”; delight is to him “who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven.” Every later boast of the voyage is measured against that sentence.
Back at the inn, Queequeg invites him to worship a small idol, and the Presbyterian reasons his way to it. “But what is worship?” It is to do the will of God, and the will of God is “to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me”. Queequeg is his fellow man, and he would wish Queequeg to join him in his own worship; “Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator.” They share a pipe and a bed and lie talking, “in our hearts’ honeymoon”. The Golden Rule, worked out to the letter, makes a Christian bow to a piece of wood, and the book counts it a gain.
On the packet to Nantucket a bumpkin mocks Queequeg, is knocked overboard by a swinging boom, and is pulled out by the man he mocked. Queequeg asks only for fresh water, lights his pipe, and seems to be saying to himself: “It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians.” The phrase is a law, and the book keeps it. It returns at sea as the monkey-rope that ties Ishmael to Queequeg on the whale’s back, “a joint stock company of two”, and as the line in the boat, which binds every man to every other and, at need, to death.
Movement III
The captain appears at last on a grey morning out of Nantucket: “Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.” He looks “like a man cut away from the stake”, and stands on a leg of whale’s bone. On the quarter-deck he nails a gold doubloon to the mast for the man who first raises the white whale, and tells the mate what the whale is: “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.” “If man will strike, strike through the mask!” He admits the doubt in the same breath, “Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond”, and wills past it: “be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.” Then the sermon’s question, turned round: “Who’s over me?”
The oath is a sacrament inverted. The harpoons are turned socket upward and filled with grog, “Commend the murderous chalices!”, and the crew drink death to Moby Dick. The book then turns into a play. Ahab alone at the cabin window: “my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve.” He would “be the prophet and the fulfiller one.” Starbuck alone at the mainmast sees his office plainly, “to obey, rebelling”. The sailors sing and quarrel in the forecastle under stage directions. When the narrator returns, he states the captain’s case in a sentence set inside Ahab’s own heart: “all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.”
How one man holds thirty is set out as plainly as the anatomy of a whale. He works through the forms of the sea, so that “that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship.” He keeps the ordinary hunt going, because men who scorn cash now will want it later, and “this same cash would soon cashier Ahab.” Between the two stands the chapter on whiteness, which opens on one sentence of 467 words and ends on a question: is it that whiteness is “a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?” The hunt has an object. Its motive is a blank, and the crew have sworn to it.
Movement IV
At the centre of the book stands a lecture on rope. The whale-line is two thirds of an inch thick and runs among the oarsmen, so that each man sits inside its turns. The chapter closes on its premise: “All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, everpresent perils of life.” The next chapter makes the first kill of the voyage, and its climax is a sentence of four words: “His heart had burst!” The lecture is a prophecy. Later the line takes “several turns around his chest and neck” of the boy Pip, and in the last chapter it takes the captain.
Around that centre the book tries every means of knowing the whale and records each failure. It classes whales as books, folios and octavos, and measures the head, the tail and the skeleton. At the tail it gives up: “Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep. I know him not, and never will.” It takes the words God speaks to Moses for the whale, “Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen”, and concludes: “I say again he has no face.” Only “in the heart of quickest perils” can the whale be “truly and livingly found out.” Two chapters later the measuring stops for good, and the chase begins to gather.
What is learned is learned at a price. Pip, the black boy of the ship, jumps from Stubb’s boat and is warned: “a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama.” He jumps again and is left on the open sea, “in the middle of such a heartless immensity”. The ship picks him up by chance, and he comes back mad. “He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense”. Seven men read the doubloon nailed to the mast, Ahab finding in its towers and volcano that “all are Ahab”, and Pip conjugates the whole scene: “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.”
Movement V
In the last weeks the book stops explaining and starts to fulfil. The Parsee Fedallah tells Ahab that before he dies he must see two hearses on the sea, the second of wood “grown in America”, and adds: “Hemp only can kill thee.” Ahab hears the gallows and laughs. Starbuck takes a loaded musket to the cabin door, hears Ahab cry out in his sleep against the whale, and turns away: “he placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place.” The Rachel comes looking for a lost boat with the captain’s son in it, and Captain Gardiner begs, “Do to me as you would have me do to you in the like case.” Ahab answers, “Captain Gardiner, I will not do it.”
On a clear day before the end, Ahab leans over the side and the hardness gives way: “Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.” Starbuck speaks of Nantucket, and for a moment the course might change. Ahab asks what drives him, “Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?”, and keeps on. On the second day of the chase the book states what Ahab has made: “They were one man, not thirty.” They are welded as the hull is, of “oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp”. On the third day Starbuck says it once more: “Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!”
The whale smashes the ship’s bow, and Ahab sees the second hearse: “its wood could only be American!” The line runs foul, and “Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck”. The ship goes down in concentric circles, and “the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” Then an epigraph from Job, “AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE”, and the one voice the chase had silenced: “Because one did survive the wreck.” At the centre of the closing vortex, Ishmael sees Queequeg’s coffin, made a life-buoy, shoot up beside him, and floats on it a day and a night, until the Rachel, still searching for her missing children, “only found another orphan.” His “I” returns at its first rate, thirty-one to the thousand.
Act III · The Twelve
A quarter of the body advances no event, yet most of it is put to work. The ordinary hunt is licensed inside the plot: Ahab “must still in a good degree continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod’s voyage” (ch. 46). The lecture on the line (ch. 60) kills Ahab, the whale’s divided vision (ch. 74) decides the second day’s tactics, and the drugged whales of ch. 87 come back. What holds the axis at 8.5 is a removable fringe of about 9,000 words (chs. 25, 56, 62, 63, 83, 101 and the Sleet burlesque of ch. 35), Bulkington raised and buried, the leg back-filled out of place, and a book that twice admits it repeats itself.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: how one will captures many, and what the many are paid in. Forms let a captain’s “sultanism” become “incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship” (ch. 33); wages keep the crusade staffed, for “this same cash would soon cashier Ahab” (ch. 46); the subordinate learns “to obey, rebelling” (ch. 38); then “They were one man, not thirty” (ch. 134). Around it stands an economy made visible: “not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it” (ch. 45). Held below the top where mood stands in for meaning, in parts of the whiteness chapter, and by the narrator’s own period typing of race.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Height at the ceiling, in every register: the sermon’s “Delight is to him” (ch. 9); Ahab “like a man cut away from the stake” (ch. 28); the “murderous chalices” (ch. 36); “a colorless, all-color of atheism” (ch. 42); the nursing calves gazing “as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight” (ch. 87); Pip, who “saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom” (ch. 93); the tear richer than “all the Pacific” (ch. 132); the shroud of the sea at the close. Frequency holds it short of the summit. The plan deflates on purpose, and the cetological runs (chs. 53, 56, 62–63, 77, 83, 88–90, 101, 103) neither rise nor try to.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The names are argued as fates inside the fiction; of Ahab’s namesake, “When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood?” (ch. 16). The prophecy plot has the oracle’s form, fulfilled to the letter: two hearses, the second of American wood, and “Hemp only can kill thee” (ch. 117), answered by the line at Ahab’s neck. Ahab would seize the oracle and “be the prophet and the fulfiller one” (ch. 37). Jonah frames the voyage, Job’s messenger heads the Epilogue, and the Rachel, “weeping for her children, because they were not” (ch. 128), finds “another orphan”. Fedallah, myth with no particular person under him, holds it a step from the top.
Score: 9.7 / 10
The inheritance is plain: the sea narrative, with Cooper’s Pilot among the Extracts; the whaling literature the book argues with, Scoresby, Beale, Bennett and Chace; the learned anatomy of Burton, Browne and Rabelais. The turn: eighty extracts before a word of story, whales classed as folios and octavos, a five-chapter play inside a first-person novel, a narrator who fades to silence and returns only to say he lived. The text names its stake: readers “might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable” (ch. 45). The cost was paid in hostile reviews, a London edition cut and without the Epilogue, small sales, and a standing never recovered in Melville’s lifetime. Each device has a precedent; the swerve is in the combination and the scale.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Change the form and the book stops knowing three things. First, the loss of a self in a crew: the narrator’s “I” runs at 31.0 per thousand words of narration in chs. 1–22, six to ten through the middle, 0.7 among the omens and none in the chase, while Ahab’s name rises from 0.9 to 7.6 per thousand; the Epilogue returns at 31.0. Second, the failure of knowledge: the cetology, the heads and the skeleton each concede the whale, “I know him not, and never will” (ch. 86), so the form argues that only the chase will do. Third, reading: one coin, seven readers (ch. 99). Held a step down by seams the form does not govern, such as the disclosure ch. 106 confesses is out of place.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: some seventy years of near-silence, then the revival at the centenary, Raymond Weaver’s biography (1921), D. H. Lawrence (1923), Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941), Olson’s Call Me Ishmael (1947), C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953), Toni Morrison on whiteness (1989), and a century of theological, political, psychoanalytic and ecological readings without exhaustion. The yield is in the book. Starbuck’s “Moby Dick seeks thee not” (ch. 135) stands against the narration’s “Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice”. Ahab’s “be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal” follows “Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond” (ch. 36). Held a step down: one century of re-examination, not several, and chs. 62, 63, 97 and 101 exhaust on a first reading.
Score: 9.6 / 10
The book reorganised what a novel may hold, putting encyclopaedia, sermon, sworn deposition, stage tragedy and natural history under one consciousness that is allowed to vanish; it states the claim, that the sperm whale “lives not complete in any literature” (ch. 32). Delayed influence is credited and discounted, and the delay is long: for some seventy years the book was barely read, and it redirected nothing. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: after the revival, central to the American canon as Matthiessen built it; a root of Olson’s poetics; claimed by novelists of the encyclopaedic line, among them Pynchon and McCarthy in Blood Meridian; Huston’s film (1956), Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick series and Jake Heggie’s opera (2010); and “Ahab” as a word for a leader’s obsession.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Survival is demonstrated: 175 years, read continuously since the 1920s, translated, taught and adapted worldwide. The book has outlived the industry it records, and that industry is its surface: the oil economy, the processing of chs. 94–98, the whaling law of chs. 89–90, Maury’s circular of 1851 (ch. 44). Some of it is now error: “we account the whale immortal in his species” (ch. 105). The narrator’s racial typing dates the voice, though the same voice mocks those who stare at Ishmael and Queequeg, “as though a white man were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro” (ch. 13). Held a step down by an eclipse nearly total and more surface to annotate. What lasts needs no gloss: the Symphony, the chase, the Castaway.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Judged on Melville’s English. The range is very wide: farce, “I turned in, and never slept better in my life” (ch. 3); the sermon; the 467-word sentence that opens the whiteness chapter, turning on “yet for all these accumulated associations” (ch. 42); technical prose made premise, “All men live enveloped in whale-lines” (ch. 60); action exact enough to stage, “he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck” (ch. 135). Held at 9.3 by construction and care, in slips that are Melville’s own: Pip is a “Poor Alabama boy!” (ch. 27) and a native of Tolland County in Connecticut (ch. 93); Kokovoko becomes Rokovoko; a stepmother becomes a mother within a sentence (ch. 4); New Zealand Jack becomes Tom (ch. 45).
Score: 9.3 / 10
The range is as wide as any on this desk, and one law, the bond, holds most of it. Queequeg’s “mutual, joint-stock world” (ch. 13) returns as the monkey-rope’s “joint stock company of two” (ch. 72) and the whale-lines that envelop all men (ch. 60); the word-centre falls in “The Line”, and the turn of line that nearly kills Pip (ch. 93) kills Ahab. Ishmael turns idolator by the Golden Rule (ch. 10); Ahab refuses it to the captain who begs, “Do to me as you would have me do to you in the like case” (ch. 128). The strain is real: a first-person witness reports what no survivor saw, Ahab’s sleep and Starbuck at the door,, with no licence given.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Many orders, held through one body, the whale’s, and one hull: consciousness, “thy thoughts have created a creature in thee” (ch. 44); friendship as marriage (ch. 10); labour, in the line, the try-works and the squeeze of the hand; wages and capital, law and property, the state and usurpation (chs. 16, 33, 46, 89–90); empire and race; five faiths; natural history and the cosmos, “the invisible spheres were formed in fright” (ch. 42). They are integrated, not listed: the old whale’s oil lights “the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all” (ch. 81). Held below the top by the family and women. Ahab’s “girl-wife”, Starbuck’s Mary and the nursery under the boats stay at a distance; inside the hull the book is male and maritime.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.4 / 10 — Final Average
Canonical Placement: Tier V — Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep at 9.7, then The Swerve, The Living Form, The Bottomless Well and The Encompassed at 9.6. A prophecy plot built into the story and fulfilled to the letter, a departure paid for with a novelist’s career, a form in which the narrator is swallowed by the crew and returns, a century of return since the revival, and every order from wages to the stars held in one hull.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.5, held by a removable fringe of about 9,000 words, some four per cent, by threads raised and dropped and matter back-filled, and by the open question whether the whole of the exposition is compelled; most of it is put to work. Next above it, Pressure on Tradition, The Imperishable, The Made and The Inner Law at 9.3: a reach delayed some seventy years, an eclipse and an industrial surface, small slips of construction, and a witness who reports what no survivor saw.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.6, The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.7, The Swerve at 9.6, The Unconcealment at 9.5, Pressure on Tradition at 9.3 and The Imperishable at 9.3 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis falls below 8.5, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.6. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading of the whole of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale in Melville’s English, Project Gutenberg e-text #2489, which does not name its source edition — the Etymology, the Extracts, 135 chapters and the Epilogue, 212,836 words. Neither the American edition (Harper) nor the British (The Whale, Bentley) can be identified from the file. The e-text places the Etymology and the Extracts after the Epilogue; they are read here as the front matter they are, and the placement is charged to nothing. The dedication is not in the file, and nothing on this page rests on it. The whole was measured by script, and every passage on which an entry rests was read in full. Faults of transcription, chiefly dropped quotation marks and a few garbled lines, belong to the e-text and are not charged to the work; no quotation on this page passes through one. Quotations are from this text and cited by chapter.