*Herman Melville's 'Moby Dick' - the 'contained' spaces. Does Herman Melville have a fascination for contained spaces? An odd and interesting thing. Melville needs to see in and ferret around these spaces and voids, and it's particularly noticeable in the final quarter of Moby Dick. When Melville moves himself to an isolated whaling-ship and the leviathans that it is hunting, something unusual happens. He peers down the ship's holds and caverns and he sticks his head into the 'cathedral spaces' within the whale's body. He investigates contained spaces. Moby Dick takes its readers right round the whale. It cants over the head of the Sperm Whale 'with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand' and ascends to the summit by a ladder to 'have a peep down the mouth' and holding on to a tooth there, imagines some descent in to the cavern with the help of a lantern. He peers about in whale spaces labelled with his favoured words - 'quoins', 'junks', 'cases', and 'tuns'. He imagines a whale birth from out 'the maternal reticule'.
When he moves his attention from the whale to the ship, he advises that 'to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates.' The 'try-works' appear and if you were to remove the hatchway you would gaze down upon the great 'try-pots' 'two in number, and each of several barrels' capacity'. And finally, extra space is needed for Sperm-oil - 'it was humorously added, that the cook had clapped a head on his largest boiler, and filled it; that the steward had plugged his spare coffee-pot and filled it; that the harpooners had headed the sockets of their irons and filled them . . .'
Everywhere everywhere contained spaces.
*Herman Melville's 'Moby Dick' - finny talk. As well as the mysterious inclination above, do others enjoy as I do, Moby Dick's whaling words and finny talk. Ishmael has a fancy to take himself off and explore the 'watery part of the world'. The try-pots are the 'fishiest of all fishy places', sailors return from 'a plum-pudding voyage', whales out there in the oceans are 'the leviathanic brotherhood', and those who know all about these matters are 'whale-wise people'. There's some sort of regret when the last page has been turned on Melville's Moby Dick and on its seamen and their 'eely legs'.
*Herman Melville | Moby Dick | necessary footnote. (You know there was an earlier Melville whale-story don't you? Moby Brian. Brian is a sleepy friendly sort of whale who helps little children get back on the pedalo when they fall off - you get the gist. Unpublished of course. Prob'ly best.)
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