/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11311629]

What's the point of the cetology chapters? Some are comfy but others are just plain boring. Do they serve as a metaphor? Or is it just because people in the mid 19th century generally had minimal knowledge of whales? It feels like there are more cetology chapters than plot. I'm 320 pages in.

[Anonymous No.11311642]

>>11311629
>Book about a whale
>Why does it have chapters about whales?

[Anonymous No.11311662]

>that chapter where Melville gets autistic as fuck about paintings of whales

[Anonymous No.11311675]

>>11311629
>Do they serve as a metaphor?
The whale symbolizes capitalism

[Anonymous No.11311687]

>>11311662
audible involuntarily exhale followed by bursts of breath resembling a chuckle

[Anonymous No.11311689]

>>11311642

I've seen this memed a lot but its definitely not known or proported by most as an encyclopedic novel. I was expecting a the story to go more like the beginning. Lots of description and mystical elements in regards to the sea and fun comraderie etc. I think it's normal to expect that sort of thing, especially from a fiction. Surely, people who've read "the Knight" by Wolfe weren't expecting hundreds of pages on the study of knighthood. When you read "the Monk" you're certainly not expecting a bevy of pages on the clergy. I just want to know what the point of it all is in this book, and how, with it being such a large portion of the book, did it become so popular?

[Anonymous No.11311699]

>>11311662

That one was pretty bad. The good ones were the early ones when he talks about the paths whales travel and their general way of being in the sea. Some of that was very beautiful. But I just read three chapters about the whale's fucking head and I'm just like...

[Anonymous No.11311710]

>>11311629
What significance is put into the white whales big breach during the chase, where he reveals himself close to the pursuing ship?
>>11311699
The edition I have has a couple of images in the center of the novel with the paintings he was describing in those chapters. Really great to flip to the actually painting while he is trying to describe it to a reader who usually would not have it in front of them.

[Anonymous No.11311724]

>>11311629
The writing is still terrific.

There's no 'or' the answer to both of your questions are "yes". It was something that Melville found massively interesting that he wanted to convey to a world that had ignored it - hence all the passion he pours into those chapters - but at the same time they adress the problems of man's futile attempts at applying systems of order and organization to his understanding of nature, about the limits of knowledge as such.

>>11311662
Literally the best chapters in the book.

Admittedly, they haven't aged well since it was written before we had waterproof cameras, but they display perfectly how little man knew and assumed to know at the same time. Imagine if you didn't have footage of a sperm whale. It'd be really hard to get a grasp of what the whole of it looked like, even if you were a whaler, and yet all these artists claimed to know what a whale looked like while missing the mark completely. Now we know more about sperm whales but the example was never about sperm whales specifically, so it still applies. It also gives a lot of great insights about art and the purpose of representation itself.

[Anonymous No.11311725]

>>11311710

Mine has those too but they're at the front of the book. Would've been better if it were like yours.

[Anonymous No.11311731]

>>11311724

That sounds valid. I'll take that into consideration for the other cetology chapters as well.

[Anonymous No.11311741]

>>11311689
You're stupid

[Anonymous No.11311773]

>>11311629
This was a huge part of the economy. It was replaced by oil.
Think of how mystical oil is.
Huge horrible monsters in reeking evil jungle died, and yet were so powerful and sinister that we drag up their black slimy corpses to run our whole world. To run electronic machines that control our minds, to run our economic infrastructure, and as a direct consequence, put the carbon that composed those evil woods and those monstrous creatures back into our atmosphere to bring back the conditions of that evil Carboniferous Period.

Now, knowing about a lot of science on the subject of petroleum helped me tell you that horrifying story.
It isn't going to hurt you to learn shit, you fucking baby

[Anonymous No.11312158]

Obligatory.

[Anonymous No.11312189]

>>11312158
I always wondered about the play-like scenes in Moby Dick.
Was Melville jsut having fun?

[Anonymous No.11312191]

>>11311731
Nice, but I meant to say *'among the best chapters in the book', there are many great after that.
>>11312158
So. Fucking. BASED.

[Anonymous No.11312198]

>>11311773
>reeking evil jungle
i used to complain constantly the board was dying and all the best users had absconded to heights inaccessible to the rabble but now i realize this is just a site for 16-23 year olds and ive outgrown it. Truly remarkable how dumb i must have been at 17-19 tho. You all have not even a semblance of self awareness or shame

[Anonymous No.11312214]

>>11312189
No. He was having fun but he would not have written them unless he knew that he could make something great out of it. I get that some people think that "oh now herman is just going of the rails experimenting with style" but he never does. It all makes sense and fits when conext is properly understod. Even if he did, he did it really well.

[Anonymous No.11312235]

>>11312198
I'm 34.
I'm sorry you're too brainlet to understand the scarlet thread of violence that underlies our historical human tapestry.

[Anonymous No.11312237]

It’s a book about whaling you mongrel.

[Anonymous No.11312239]

>>11312214
>all makes sense and fits when conext is properly understod.
Only time he mentioned a wider number of the crew, but otherwise it seems like nothing but him having written something fun in a zealous and creative mood and not wanting to omit it.
How was that specific chapter of any extraordinary greatness?

[Anonymous No.11312316]

>>11312239
It was the most efficient way of introducing the entire crew of a ship in an interesting manner. Extremely hard to pull off if you don't know how theatre actually works but Melville did. He balanced the low numbers of words required with the setting all of the characters were placed in, worded with his own mythical, rythmic prose.

Just the fact that plebs thinks it looks "weird" rather than "stupid" is proof enough.

[Anonymous No.11312360]

>>11312316
>Just the fact that plebs thinks it looks "weird" rather than "stupid" is proof enough.
Not what I am saying
>>11312316
>if you don't know how theatre actually works but Melville did
simlpy reading a lot of Shakespear won't make you a good playwright; and it is shown in that chapter. Melville has talent and therefor it didn#t turn out poorly and combined with his whit it was quite humerous but jsut the way you don't want people to play it down as simply quirky, you should realize, you are interpreting and given credit a lot more than what is due, and not overplay it either.

I personally would prefer a lot more to hear about Pip. He seems like an incredible character that far too rarely gets brought up in "Just bought this. What should I expect?" threads. Not jsut his own story and character development but how he then works together with literally interacting with the main characters and especially Ahab. He is even mentioned in the sinking of the Pequod, if I remember.

[Anonymous No.11312377]

>>11312235
I hope this is bait.

[Anonymous No.11312406]

>>11311629
It’s giving you all the knowledge that the best whalers has, and building up a sense of awe in you. All the time spent talking about the whale makes it a bigger deal when he finally shows up at the end. When he appears, you don’t just think of him from the modern knowledge you have of whales or just that it’s some large animal, you remember all of the things that you learned from the previous chapters.

[Anonymous No.11312423]

>>11311629
It has less to do about being informative and more to show you what Ishmael's mindset is like and how he looks at the world. Unironically the best and most important parts of the book.

[Anonymous No.11312494]

>Ishmael signs up for the voyage
>rants for 2 chapters about how whaling is the most perfect, divine profession despite never having done it before

[Anonymous No.11312516]

>>11312235
no i meant you’re an awful writer and unitelligent, have a correct opinion means nothing if you’re too weak to articulate it in a beautiful way. that’s all

im sad you’re posting here at 34 anon, you’re 11 years my senior but my prose and diction are vastly more developed
>tapestry of violence that UNDERLIES
lol

[Anonymous No.11312580]

>>11312516
Yeah OK my dude

[Anonymous No.11312718]

>>11311699
>That one was pretty bad.
The monstrous pictures of whales stands out to me as one of the best chapters. Also one which is critical to the understanding of the work as a whole

[Anonymous No.11312835]

>>11312406
>>11312423

This makes sense actually. Thinking of it that way makes it a lot more immersive because before I was sort of just figuring that he was trying to give you a more direct experience of the voyage but it just felt kind of boring in content. The writing was always beautiful though, it's like a poetic textbook.

[Anonymous No.11312872]

Also does Ishmael suck Queequeg's dick?

[Anonymous No.11313273]

My impression was that the descriptive/encyclopedic chapters were part of the psycho-spiritual development of the narrative. In the mid-19th century, the scientists and biologists of the era were trying very hard to systematize and classify their fields of inquiry via autistic precision. Ishmael is taking the state-of-the-art Linnaean taxonomy of his age and applying that against what he comes to learn about the whale via experience. And that gives rise to the grand question of the book, which is how the whale actually exists in relation to human concepts of motivation, desire, etc.

But the encyclopedic taxonomies end up being completely unequal to those questions, and I think Melville ends up coming off as rather skeptical about the limits of that kind of epistemology, describing how more primal notions of "spirit" and so on end up becoming more important to the narrator's actual experience. He is not able to use the extensive "scientistic" data about the whale to make useful predictions about its course of behavior.

[Anonymous No.11313551]

>>11311629
same reaseon Homer had the catalog of ships, among other reasons.

[Anonymous No.11313596]

>>11312189
Maybe I'm retarded but I always saw it tied with the just previous Ahab chapters which use stage directions too. I saw it as Melville showing the complete change in the tone of the book by literally changing the way it was written from the usual novel format to a play, displaying the change in tone by a literal change in style: from the adventures of Ishmael to the maniac quest of Ahab y'know? It also calls attention directly to Shakespeare, as the shift in prose style also occurs. It also shows the crew off but that's a comparatively minor aspect. I'm retarded but that's what I came up with. One of my favourite chapters desu, Moby Dick is really separated in before play and after play as that's when the whole novel really changes gear, here literally.

[Anonymous No.11313655]

>>11311629
When reading Moby Dick and asking anything about it you have to ask your questions from the perspective of the two authors: Ishmael and Melville (or you could designate a strange third if you want to argue it's all Melville simply asking you to call him Ishmael for the sake of biblical reference). Why would Melville add those chapters? Well as anons have said there's a myriad of reasons: he loves the subject and wishes to spread it, it fits thematically with the desire for knowledge and control of systems that cannot be controlled (nature), informing the reader of a subject completely which they might know little or nothing of before, building up a sense of awe and anticipation in the Whale, etc etc etc. But then you must ask, why would Ishmael add these chapters? Many of the same reasons certainly can be applied but now you are open to others. I myself believe it a sign of obsession, perhaps a spread of Ahabs monomania. Ishmael even remarks:
>It seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life.
It would seem to me at least that Ahabs obsession has taken over Ishmael as well. We know he survives the sinking of the Prequod so he could still be haunted by Ahabs obsession and his experiences aboard the ship, however far-fetched a theory that is. That's but one idea and many more are open while thinking through the eyes of Ishmael. Either way I think those chapters are some of the best and most important, in structure of the work and in how it works upon the narrative as described, but that's just me.