The Whale as a Novel
Though a majority of Herman Melville’s readers have found the Cetology chapter of his novel Moby Dick to be unnecessarily long and tedious, I thoroughly enjoyed both his comical take on scientific writing and ingenious method of classification: “As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors” (114). Melville chooses to classify these immense creatures for the feature they are most distinguished by: their size. Melville, however, decides to scale this system of classification in terms of various sizes of books including folio (large), octavo (medium), and duodecimo (small). Though this may have irritated cetologists of nineteenth-century America, Melville is unapologetically steadfast in his descriptive and detailed technique.
By organizing various species of whales into categories of books, Melville is implying that a whale is much more than an animal. Like a piece of written work, a whale is something to be read, to be interpreted, and to be experienced. He plays upon the “unshored, harborless immensities” of both cetology and literature, connecting the two in a way that is captivating, compelling, and unique (115). Though little is known about the science of the whale, their presence in American culture is grand: “Nevertheless, though of real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty” (115). As conveyed in the extracts section of the novel, the whale has existed as a concept, an idea, and a character throughout vital pieces of historical literature. For Melville, this appears to be the only logical and honorable mode of classification.
Before I started reading Melville, one of my friends warned me of Melville’s tendency to go off topic in his novels. He explained to me that Melville enters sidebars that don’t necessarily have a straightforward objective towards the story, but if you as the reader try to obtain something out of the chapters and sidebars he writes, then his entire novel becomes a much better experience. And that is what I thought about when I hit the Cetology chapter, and it that idea to try and obtain some new information from Melville’s ramblings, it enhances the actual story by such a great amount. I was able to appreciate it in many of the ways you mentioned above.