Two Questions about Moby-Dick

I have two questions about Herman Melville's Moby-Dick that seem, at first, to be unrelated. The first is: Why does Melville begin the narrative of the novel in Manhattan? The second is: Why does the novel's narrator Ishmael insist in his chapter on "Cetology" that the whale should be considered a fish, going against the classification recommended by almost all 19th-century zoologists? In fact, these two questions turn out to be alternative ways of approaching one of the novel's central concerns: how to deal with difference.

Because our forum's point of departure is Graham Burnett's Trying Leviathan, let's take the second question first. Melville scholars have shown that Melville made extensive use of the article on whales from The Penny Cyclopedia (published between 1833 and 1843) when composing the famous "Cetology" chapter of Moby-Dick. There he would have found this definition: "WHALES—Cetacea—an order of aquatic mammals with fin-like anterior extremities, the posterior extremities being absent, or rather, having their place supplied by a large horizontal caudal fin or tail, without an external ear, without hair on their external integument, and the cervical bones so compressed as to leave the animal without any outward appearance of a neck." The article then goes on immediately to address the question of the classification of the whale: "The cetacious mammals, whose abode is either in the sea or the great rivers resemble the Fishes so closely in external appearance, that it is hardly to be wondered at that not only the vulgar, but even some of the earlier zoologists looked upon them as belonging to that class." So why does Melville choose to have his narrator, Ishmael, align himself with "the vulgar" and insist that we should call the whale a "fish"? Because it isn't only the "vulgar"—broadly construed to mean "the common people"—who persist in calling the whale a fish, but also those who are most intimately acquainted with the habits of the leviathan: the whalemen. The Cyclopedia continues: "This notion is kept alive to the present day in the announcements of the comparative success of those ships which are employed in the Whale Fishery; for not only is it conveyed by that general term for the capture of whales, but by statements that one ship has arrived with three fish, another with four fish, a third with one fish, &c."

The Cyclopedia thus sets science against both popular opinion and the opinions of those who practice whaling. For Ishmael, practice trumps theory. He objects in the "Cetology" chapter to the procedure followed by many naturalists of making "endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences," which leads "some departments of natural history [to] become so repellingly intricate." He faults what he calls "book naturalists" for promulgating many errors about the sperm whale. After making a joke about the fact that fish continue to swim in the same ocean with the whale in defiance of Linnaeus's edict that they should be "separated," Ishmael submits Linnaeus's rationale for considering the whales as separate from the fish to a higher court of appeal: two of his whaling buddies, Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin.

From Henry Theodore Cheever, The Whale and His Captors; Or, The Whaleman's Adventures (New York, 1850).

Both of these men pronounce Linnaeus's reasons "insufficient," with "Charley profanely hint[ing] they were humbug." As is often the case in Moby-Dick, Ishmael seeks to forge consensus. He begins—unlike the naturalists—not with difference, but with sameness. He subscribes to the traditional view that the whale is a fish, but then asks how the whale differs from other fish. For the internal differences, Ishmael is happy to use Linnaeus as an authority, citing the whale's "lungs and warm blood; whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded." To help those of us who want to be able to classify a whale without cutting him open, Ishmael provides this definition: "a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail."

What has Ishmael done here? He...