Today (December 16) in Moby-Dick
This is my second brief note in a row about Moby-Dick. For some reason I didn’t email the last one out; it’s about Herman Melville and Newfoundland dogs and it’s here:
There are, regretfully, no dogs in this one.
If we believe what we read, this evening marks 170 years since the composition of an absolutely ridiculous but very precisely-dated sentence:
CHAPTER 85. The Fountain.
That for six thousand years—and no one knows how many millions of ages before—the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings—that all this should be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1851), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapor—this is surely a noteworthy thing.
I only say ‘this evening’ because I happen to be in England; Massachusetts, where Herman Melville wrote this, is 5 hours behind.
Or maybe it’s 171 years. Should it not be December 16, 1850? That is what the Penguin Classics edition has, and the Norton Critical. A time is given down to the precision of the quarter-minute, yet the year is in question. The Penguin Popular Classics edition has 1851, and so does the Project Gutenberg eBook edition.
December 16, 1850, Melville was definitely still writing Moby-Dick, even though back in June he had made first contact with his London publishers and claimed it was almost finished. The next year, 1851, is when it was at last published: first in England, as The Whale, on October 18, and on November 14 in America as Moby-Dick. Despite the fact it was the English edition which was not just typographically tampered with but mercilessly butchered by censors, it was in the American edition that a zero here became a one, and this opening to Chapter 85 seemed fantastically to date-stamp its own composition 32 days after its publication.
It very much seems to be Melville talking here, so far into the book. The first chapter is of course narrated by Ishmael, and contains its own date-stamp, of a sort:
... wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way—he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:
‘Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.
‘WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.
‘BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN.’
Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.
He really is the most wonderful gobshite. But there it is, with a bit more digging, in that imaginary roster of Fate, a timeframe for the start of it all: the ‘Grand Contested Election’ is William Henry Harrison’s 1840 presidential campaign — as Harold Beaver calls it, “the first ‘rip-roaring’” one in U.S. history. The stress of the campaign seems to have done him in; he’d only been president about one month when he died. The ‘BLOODY BATTLE’ is January 6, 1842, when British and East India Company forces were almost completely annihilated — whether by exposure, frostbite, starvation, or fighting — while retreating from their occupation of Kabul. (The British called this event ‘the Massacre of Elphinstone’s Army’, or even just ‘The Disaster in Afghanistan’).
The intervening year, 1841, on January 3rd, was when Herman Melville had sailed out of Fairhaven down the Acushnet river, on the maiden voyage of the whaling-ship Acushnet. Nine years and eleven months later, he has written the bulk of this enormous tale, looks at his clock, and writes what he reads into Chapter 85: 16/12/1850, 1:15:15pm. (I’m not swapping the months and days to make it look American, it's silly.)
Chapter 85 is significant to something I am writing about Moby-Dick, and I am interested in the fact that it is this one, of all 138 of them, which so forcefully foregrounds — or pretends to — and in a manner unique within the book, the reality of its composition. It’s a chapter about the whale’s spouting, the famous fountain; and it’s where a latent fixation on breathing is really allowed to let rip. Of all the occurrences of the word ‘breath’ (etc.) in all of Moby-Dick, more than a third of them are in this short chapter.
Despite that infamous opening sentence, in which Ishmael introduces himself, he is not the first character we meet in Moby-Dick. Ignoring the presence of Nathaniel Hawthorne in the dedication, our first encounter with someone is with the person, we are told, who has assembled the very first section, ‘ETYMOLOGY’. He appears in this parenthetical subtitle:
(SUPPLIED BY A LATE CONSUMPTIVE USHER TO A GRAMMAR SCHOOL)
We only meet him briefly, but the earliest two shreds of information seem to be, firstly, that he is dead; and secondly that he is dead with chewed-up lungs, due to pulmonary tuberculosis. It is a sinister and specific inversion of the idiom “living, breathing”, and the only paragraph dedicated to this man shifts from the present tense of memory (“I see him now”) to a past-tense narrative, immediately, and ends by reminding us, via this late consumptive usher’s past ponderings, as he dusted his grammars, of “his own mortality.”
Then, much later, at the start of ‘THE FOUNTAIN’, this strange eighty-fifth Chapter which ruminates at length upon much bigger lungs — and the spouting, the vapours, the very vast breath of the whale — here, parenthetically, by looking at a clock and noting down the time, the living, breathing Melville marked his presence in the text, inserted as a kind of snapshot or index. If we decide to believe the date in the earliest American edition, he did that 171 years ago, give or take a few hours.