Grammar and Etymology in Moby-Dick

MARK BAUERLEIN Grammar and Etymology in Moby-Dick To philosophize is to inquire into the extraordinary. But because . . . this questioning recoils upon itself, not only what is asked after is extraordinary but also the asking itself. —Heidegger The words "call me ishmael" are not the fitst words of MobyDick . Before introducing his narrator and starting the nattative proper (a questionable category in this novel), Melville opens with the science of first words: "Etymology." The novel begins with an outline of the history of the word "whale," its derivation, definition, spelling, and, in the succeeding "Extracts" section, a chronicle of its usage from Genesis to Darwin, from the mythic to the mundane. Melville sets the term in the context of a dictionary entry, regarding the name fitst and foremost philologically, much as would the "late consumptive ushet" and the "sub-sub-librarian" whose portraits precede, respectively, the etymology of and allusions to the word "whale." The latter chronology does not, Melville notes, propose to set forth a "veritable gospel cetology," a series of authotitative statements intended to render the essential or symbolic nature of whales, but rather it offets an "entertaining" glimpse into "what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan." That is, the list of quotations has less to do with the whale itself than with the way the whale has been variously and plurivocally represented. Similatly, the etymological citations confine themselves strictly to the term, not the AW^OTUi Quarterly Volume 46 Number 3, Fall 1990 Copyright © 1 990 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 1610 Marie Bauerlein real thing: the Hackluyt reference emphasizes the importance of the "lettet H" in the word: the Webster note specifies the word's original denotation—"rolling"; and the Richardson quotation traces the word's close relation to Dutch and Getman.1 In other words, instead of framing the prospect of the story to follow and foregrounding the novel's concerns, these prefatory sections unveil a philological background, a lexical history, a retrospective index of meaning and usage from which the ensuing whaling natrative will draw (and which it will parody, critique, and outright attack). In one sense, these time-bound and seemingly inessential definitions, etymologies, classifications, and citation lists, concerned more with language and categories than with nature, are but the first of many verbal representations of the whale which more or less fail to comprehend it adequately and accurately within a cultural undetstanding. Along with the "Etymology " and "Extracts," the novel contains a "Sermon," an 'Affadavit," an incomplete "Cetology," a eulogy to "The Honor and Glory ofWhaling ," and, in reference to the White Whale, tumots, legends, and stoties, as well as reports from passing ships about their own direct encountets with Moby-Dick. As Châties Feidelson, Paul Brodtkorb, Robert Zoellnet, and many others have rightly concluded, these testimonies ate sometimes parodie, sometimes pathetic human constructions designed to implement the production of "meaning" and the cornmodification of "nature." Whether contrasted with Ishmael's "visionary activity" (a transcendental "seeing" valorized by Emerson and questioned by Melville) or parallelled with the technology of whaling (best illustrated by Stubb's various "consumptions" of whales), Melville's opening indicates language's origin in the desire for ground and certainty and its inability to satisfy entirely and permanently that desire. That is, while inevitably accompanying the epistemological ot corporeal assimilation of nature (as in Ishmael's "final theory" of the Spouter Inn's painting's referent, the cook's "sermon" ovet Stubb's supper, or Ahab's final defiant speech—all Melvillian "Fort!-Da!" announcements structuring a self-perpetuating game of mastery or death), but never equalling the mystical moment in "The Masthead" ot in "The Gildet," language remains a seemingly necessary but ultimately ineffective strategy of resolution, a transitory appeasement giving way to "manhood's pondering repose of If" (Ch. 114). Ever lapsing back into the conditional "If" (the condition of hope and frustration), these lin- Grammar and Etymology in Moby-Dick19 guistic pursuits of natural force proceed from Ishmael's endless need to alleviate his ontological insecurity by humanizing the inhuman, "colorless " "Albino whale" (Ch. 42), to resolve "the problem of the universe revolving in [him]" (Ch. 35) by drawing...