"So far as what there may be of a narrative": Abridgment and Moby-Dick

“So far as what there may be of a narrative”: Abridgment and Moby-Dick WILLIAM M. HANSEN Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library Duke University M oby-Dick has existed in revised forms since its first publication. The fact is perhaps unsurprising, given Ishmael’s proclamation that his study of whales is “but the draught of a draught”1 and Pierre’s scorn for the “gnat-like torments” of meticulous revision.2 In 1851, Melville’s English publisher, Richard Bentley, expurgated the text to remove or render inoffensive certain vulgarisms, Americanisms, and blasphemies, among other things, and Melville himself may have made other changes from the earlier American edition (NN MD 681-82). Many early reviews and more modern reevaluations have suggested that Moby-Dick might benefit from a more focused approach to its storied diversity of narrative forms. The novel’s reintroduction to a large readership in the 1920s—by which time the work had entered the public domain—and its almost simultaneous canonization occasioned cries for interpretations of why it had been neglected, why it should be read, and how it might be read. This fervor also coincided with the appearance of various abridgments of the novel. Abridgments are a way to mediate and interpret the text for contemporary readers, responding to their perceived wants and needs. What forms have the mediations and interpretations of abridgers taken? What can we understand of abridgers’ motives toward Moby-Dick and toward their intended audiences? An analysis of over thirty abridged editions of the novel provides a textual foundation for responding to some of the aesthetic, educational, and social aspects of these questions. After exploring the nature of abridgment, I want to consider what meaning we can derive from how abridgments are achieved and presented to their implied or stated audiences. C  2010 The Authors Journal compilation C  2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or the Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988), 145; hereafter cited as NN MD. 2 Herman Melville, Pierre, or, the Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1971), 664. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 21 W I L L I A M M . H A N S E N What Is an Abridgment? T he meaning of “abridgment” can be surprisingly slippery. The applicable definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is the third: “A compendium of a larger work, with the details abridged, and less important things omitted, but retaining the sense and substance; an epitome, or abstract.” The tendency to conflate abridgment with similar types of textual manipulation—condensation, epitome, abstract, and digest—is telling. People often take it for granted that these terms (as opposed to “adaptation” or “retelling”) are interchangeable with abridgment, using each to refer to any text shortened for a particular, non-creative purpose. All of these genres gather further gradations of meaning within their literary milieu, but “abridgment” accumulates its own colloquial usages and context-specific definitions. To that thorough parser of textual changes, Gérard Genette, an abridgment is a “purely quantitative” process, contrary to the term’s more common definition, which allows a wide variety of textual changes (paraphrase, summary) so long as “sense and substance” are retained.3 In her analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anthology, Leah Price bases the difference between abridgment and adaptation largely on their effects on their targeted narrative.4 And in her study of adaptations, Linda Hutcheon defines “forms like condensations and bowdlerizations or censorings” as those “in which changes are obvious, deliberate, and in some way restrictive.”5 On the other hand, Noel Perrin lumps together “the abridger, the digest editor, and the extract maker” and defines them vis-á-vis the bowdlerizer as those “whose first principle is that any piece of writing is better shorter.”6 In the context of a study of “the...