Ur-Texts: Moby-Dick

"I have swum through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try."
-- Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Chapter 32, "Cetology"

*   *   *

A few notes on "Moby-Dick": I was hoping to title my blog posts on this book using chapter headings from the novel itself, but my desire for consistency in blogging (in all things, really) has led me to title this post not "Loomings," but "Ur-Texts: Moby-Dick."

Yes, the book's title includes the hyphen, and the full official title is "Moby-Dick; or, The Whale." Melville demonstrates his love for semicolons from the get go.

And though it has one of the most famous opening lines in all of literature (see the page above, excerpted from the beautifully illustrated University of California edition), "Moby-Dick" does not actually begin with "Call me Ishmael." Instead, it begins with a less-than-accurate etymology of the word "whale," followed by an introduction "supplied by a sub-sub-librarian" entitled "Extracts," consisting of quotes regarding whales from sources as multifarious as the Bible, "'Something' unpublished," Darwin's "Voyage of a Naturalist," and a few whaling songs. In my edition (the aforementioned University of California printing) the extracts take up six pages. Only then are we invited to call him Ishmael.

There is much more to say about this book, and about my re-reading of it as a part of my ur-texts project, but this is a blog, not an American antebellum metaphysical sea novel, so I will curtail my musings here for now.