SPEAKER_00 0:01

It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grubworm of a poor devil of a subsub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales you could, anyways, find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. Therefore, you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic in these extracts, for veritable gospel Cetology. Far from it, as touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining as affording a glancing bird's eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan by many nations and generations, including our own.

SPEAKER_03 1:28

Ciao ragazzo, come va?

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Tut a posto, tutto a posto. Grazie, sono pienissimo di pasta, ho mangiato tantissime cose molto molto buone. Molto bene. Yes, I've been I've been at a conference today, uh, talking about toad, so I'm I'm having a big day of discussion about uh creatures of the water, very neat.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Well, of course you are.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Who would want to do anything else?

SPEAKER_00 1:57

And where else would you do that? But beautiful Sardinia, a place I associate with toads, like inseparably.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

They are always mentioned in the same breath.

SPEAKER_03 2:08

Yeah. Uh when I was studying at the University of Bologna, um, I had a Sardinian uh roommate, and he he kind of had a toad-like aspect to him. So I think that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Well, what George Orwell called the the face of a toad, and they look like um a strict Catholic towards the end of Lent.

SPEAKER_03 2:27

Feels right. Feels right. So you're gonna be doing some whale watching. Have you already done some whale watching or no?

SPEAKER_01 2:33

I uh I'm gonna get out on the high seas uh at some point next week. That's exciting. No whale spotting yet. No, I did get in the ocean yesterday, which was wonderful. I hadn't felt the sea on my skin for a long, long time. Uh so yes, I spent uh a long, long time just immersing myself in the depths, thinking wonderful deep thoughts, of course, about well, about toads and also about Moby Dick.

SPEAKER_00 2:59

No, is this the Mediterranean?

SPEAKER_01 3:01

It is, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

Okay. I expect that's a little bit of a different vibe than the coast off Nantucket, maybe even just temperature-wise. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

I think ever so slightly warmer here. Yeah. That's good. So uh toads. Briefly, what what's the deal with toads? Um I was talking about Giovanni Boccaccio and his Decameron, which I'm sure you and the listeners all know, is uh roughly speaking a collection of a hundred short stories connected by a framing tale. And in one of the stories, there is uh a toad, which is actually a catalyst for the tragedy that unfolds in this particular story. Two young people get poisoned by this toad uh and uh and and they lose their lives. Uh and so, yes, I've been talking about how the toad is a metaphor for the developing genres of the Decameron.

SPEAKER_03 3:52

Oh, interesting. Well, uh, moving on from uh Boccaccio to uh Melville. Um Meg, would you tell us a bit about what we're we're talking about today with these uh etymology and extract section?

SPEAKER_00 4:05

Oh my gosh, what a beautiful day it is to talk about front matter. Something that it does not have enough podcast episodes just about them, which is sad. She's the debutante. She leads us, she's the foyer of the novel. And we want to look at all the all the wreaths in there, all the catch-all dishes, the beautiful rugs. It's the first impression. And without that, uh, you know, maybe you don't think about it afterwards. But if it was weird, uh you would say, this is a weird front hall. And then you would realize what kind of genre you were in. Is this a horror movie? Is this a rom-com? So etymology and extracts um uh are a couple pages worth of pre-information. So this is before we get to our beautiful um so-called opening line of uh chapter one. Uh the etymology has a couple really short quotes about where the word whale in English seems to derive from. So we've got some like Danish, um Dutch, German. Uh, she won't pretend to pronounce these words, but we've all got it in front of us. You can look with your beautiful eyes. And then he's got a list of the word whale in various languages: Hebrew, Latin, Swedish, English, French, Fiji, spelled with ease. Uh, so it's it's uh, and that's about it. Is that what an etymology is when you open a dictionary? We can talk about that. Um and then there's extracts, which um you think maybe could only last a page or so, but it kind of goes on and on. Oh, boy. Believe it or not, there are 80 quotes about whales, uh, and sometimes intriguingly not um from various sources, starting with the Bible, and we kind of go forward in time to more or less seem to catch up to kind of Melville's time. And some of them are from novels, some of them are from plays, some of them are nonfiction like newspaper quotes he could have gotten from like a story that happened in somebody's real life. Again, the really only string that seems to connect them is whales, except for again, uh, when they don't seem to connect with whales. And that's uh the etymology and extracts. But one of the most intriguing things about these two chapters is those are not even the beginnings of those chapters. First, we get in brackets the information supplied to us from the author that these um these quotes have been compiled for us by like a grad student, basically. They're called a sub-sub librarian. And we get a couple sentences or um even two paragraphs in front of the extract saying like how difficult this work is, how kind of thankless uh, and uh we can get into what's going on uh with that, but uh we're both given what seems like a lot of information, but are more questions are posed than they're answered. And then you turn the last page and then it's call me Ishmael. So etymology extracts. What can we learn? Why do this? Why are they here?

SPEAKER_03 7:35

Um, and also uh importantly, um, and uh uh in my edition, at least this is uh before all that, is we have a dedication. Um so indeed. It's very brief, but uh Moby Dick is dedicated uh in token of my admiration for his genius. This book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne, um, who uh I absolutely believe we'll have uh much occasion to discuss in future episodes. And probably in the near term, we'll do a uh like a bonus episode specifically on uh Melville and Hawthorne. I know uh Johnny, you're very eager to do uh sort of the Melville and sort of series for our audience.

SPEAKER_01 8:13

Absolutely. I mean, we've got 80 different Melville and front of us in the in the extracts. I can't wait to get started.

SPEAKER_00 8:21

Yes, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 8:22

Hawthorne even turns up in the extracts, which is fantastic. It's he's he's he's an he's one of the names among among all the others.

SPEAKER_00 8:28

That is for sure. That is for sure. I think at the top of every episode, we should reveal a new part that comes before chapter one.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

Yes, spin-off podcast, which is just called Front Matter.

SPEAKER_00 8:38

Yep. It just gets shorter and shorter and shorter, but never zero.

SPEAKER_01 8:43

No, never, never always honest the the shortest of podcasts.

SPEAKER_03 8:48

Love it. Okay, so let's get into etymology then. So uh this one is uh supposed to be supplied by a late consumptive usher to a grammar school. Uh and we do get one of these brackets here. Um so so what do you all think of this etymology section and this uh this supposed supplier of this information?

SPEAKER_01 9:05

I mean the poor usher and the poor subsub librarian, they get such a bad treatment in the in these in these two sections. And I can't quite put my finger on why I think that is. There is no need for the just the two character assassinations that happen in the first two pages of the book.

SPEAKER_03 9:25

Yeah. I think that is interesting. Um try and think about this. So okay, in in so we've got the usher and we've got the sub-sub librarian, both of these people being um knowledgeable people uh who are supplying this sort of information. And yeah, they do get this sort of uh they get horrible treatment by Melville. Um I am curious if there's like a little bit of uh resentment from Melville on his like never having gone to like uh like university. If maybe there's uh some sort of uh kind of like an anti-intellectualism going here, or like some kind of uh you know, uh rubbing his nose at these people who have like these very lowly positions. Um yeah, what do you think, Beg?

SPEAKER_00 10:08

I think it's um I think you could even go the opposite, which is to say um that kind of by casting this in this sort of um romantical, these like dusty robes, you imagine their feet must be very cold in the they're in a castle in my mind, which doesn't make any sense, but just go with it. Um uh these um thankless tasks that we then still read the stuff that they gathered. It's not that this um all of this work was for naught because we're reading it. Um I think you could almost think about that he's kind of in a uh, I don't want to overuse the word satirical as we start to get into this uh this author's work, but um kind of like um cartoonish um elevation of like the work of like academic uh I don't know uh labor here. But I think the for me, one of the most interesting things, um, if if you you you don't mind looking at the start of the extracts instead, is when he's like, look, uh this list is is long and and like he did his best, but still I don't want you to think that this is like the truth of like Cetology, which on the one hand you could think about, well, well, then why did you put this here? But having that um sort of um already contradictory phrase and then the eight pages of quotes can only create like an irony in why he's saying this isn't cetology. It also reminds me of um, is it at the beginning or the end of um Huck Finn, where he's like, I think it's a uh the prologue or something by the author, Mark Twain, where he's like, if you try to find one bit of like reality in this book, I'm gonna shoot you, which is like, but I'm gonna read the book. So it's it's I think it's it's both, I think it's supposed to be funny, uh, but also get you already in mind of who is compiling this information. You're reading this thing that somebody did, which makes it feel more like a living document than if we just started um with the quotes without sort of this weird uh quasi-fictionalized, but we're about to read real quotes. Yeah, it's uh generic wise, it's it's super bizarre.

SPEAKER_03 12:22

You jump ahead a bit um to uh this is uh beyond the scope of this episode, but like kind of uh getting into what you're saying there. So the the island that Queequeg's from, I think it's Kokovo, but yeah, he he he puts in there, um, it's not down on any map anywhere. Real places never are.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

Yeah. Well, and likewise that that we get a an a sort of sense of how that's that kind of narrative strategy is going to work, even in the extracts, where we get uh an extract from quote, something, close quotes, unpublished. He's just inventing sources at this point, and that will happen several times over the course of the text. He will just invent something and just assume that we're going to go along with it.

SPEAKER_00 13:05

The real world is not enough. He has to make the adverbs judgmatically salted. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 13:16

Okay, so uh getting into this etymology. Um, so we we've got this description of uh the consumptive usher, and then we've got uh something from somebody who I'm going to try to pronounce this uh hackluit. I don't know, that's probably not right. Do y'all have a better pronunciation than that?

SPEAKER_00 13:33

I've been doing a hacklute in my mind, which kind of sounds like you're you're um well, I won't make fun of the uh facetiously of the the uh where this name comes from. But yeah, it's in uh it's a guy who was his first name is Richard. Um, he was like a travel writer before we would necessarily call them travel writers. So this uh quote from his work is long, is well, obviously it's it's longer. Um but uh this yeah, this quote is so beautiful. He says we have to um put keep the letter H in the word whale or we're leaving out uh you deliver that which is not true, which I think is so fun and ties into some of the things we were talking about um at the last episode about whether the ocean knows that we're talking about it so much. Um the whale is gonna be a whale, whether or not humans put an H in that word otherwise. But when we talk amongst ourselves, we feel like we have to make it sound a certain way or we're discussing something else. So we're getting into sort of like signifier-signified territory.

SPEAKER_01 14:36

Absolutely. Absolutely. And it something that we were talking about a lot when we were talking about loomings is the kind of ways in which the text is setting up the reading experience. How are we supposed to be reading this text? And here we open with an attempt to define the whale in some way. And readers confronting the text for the first time with us should know that's not going to stop. We uh will attempt to define the whale from all different angles from in from within and from without, physically, spiritually, philosophically, theologically in some cases. So this is really it's an initiation of the kind of science in the literal sense, right? The knowledge of the whale.

SPEAKER_03 15:29

Yeah, no, um, for me when I get there, uh I I put my uh linguist hat on. So, like one of the things that uh especially in this period of like United States history and like the the dial uh dialectal variation going on at the time, um some parts of the United States are going to be preserving the older pronunciation of the word whale, which is with a H in it, right? So um now most people uh would say this with a silent H, but originally you have whale, um, and in the same way you have uh which or uh what, uh, which are are still preserved in some uh dialects, especially in like the American South. Um but I think you also get here like uh as this you have this uh switch to what would have been like originally like a less preferred or like a less uh prestigious um dialect variation on the word uh whale or the pronunciation of words, um you're starting to lose that H in the pronunciation and uh in different dialects in the United States. And so people are saying whale, like we it is the the standard pronunciation now. And so yeah, no, I think it's interesting. Uh is the whale a whale if you don't call it a whale.

SPEAKER_01 16:39

Do we need to be taking a sense on this podcast? Do we need to be saying whale?

SPEAKER_00 16:43

A whale?

SPEAKER_01 16:44

Do we need to be a united front on this?

SPEAKER_00 16:47

That sounds pretty much like uh how would Dylan Thomas say it? That's gotta be the correct way. Wikipedia says that this man um is perhaps there. Well, they give me three pronunciations for his last name. Um that seems like he was an Anglican Protestant, so it doesn't need to hit that hard. It the name appears to be Welsh. It might be like Hacklett. Okay. In any case, yeah, he seems to this zooming out. Why does Melville include this quote? And it seems to already, as you guys have said, and as we said a million times um in episode one, we're talking about ambiguities. And the way that we're talking about it right now is through how we've how have we pronounced this word and what interesting ways this have seemed to have gotten off the rails, but we brought it back and now we put the H back in, et cetera. So, I mean, I think the um, you know, if you stand up um in sort of the movie version of this and he's surrounded, you know, on the floor by like pages of um pages of his dictionaries that he's ripped out. The idea is just to say that we've been talking about whales for a long time. For so long that the the Hebrews had a word for it and uh the ancient Egyptians called them something. It's the idea that they've been, they've been spoken about for a long time, so long that language has evolved around it. And then it's sort of, then it just kind of ends. Take that, you know, take what you will from that list, and then that's what we're trying to do. But uh uh yeah, I think the thrust of it is um this is an ancient creature, it has been in our minds for a long time. The shape of it seems to suggest that you should pronounce the H.

SPEAKER_03 18:24

Yeah, yeah. Um, so I can do one better than Melville. I've got my uh dictionary of Indo-European roots here. Um, so if you go back even further, uh it's squalo is the root for whale, which you kind of you can see that sort of here. Um, but also uh squalice, which I only really remember from uh Jaws uh uh when the the marine biologist character is uh quoting uh like the Latin name for the the the great white whale uh the great white shark, excuse me. Um I'm pretty sure squalus is uh a Latin for for uh shark as well. I guess the the root goes back both for sharks and you're right.

SPEAKER_00 19:03

I can hear it in that actor's voice now that you say that.

SPEAKER_01 19:06

The Italian word for shark is squalo, even now. This is just directly inherited from Latin.

SPEAKER_00 19:12

It's all coming back together.

SPEAKER_03 19:13

One of the things we absolutely have to do at some point as a bonus episode is we have to do an episode on Jaws. I I think that it has to be a must.

SPEAKER_01 19:22

That feels like uh the act of a turncoat to start doing episodes about sharks. That feels extremely disrespectful to the whale.

SPEAKER_03 19:30

Well, well, I I get you, but there, you know, I think I think you can justify it pretty well. There are a lot of references to Moby Dick in Jaws. Um, so it'd be interesting to unpack from that because there are lots of sharks in Moby Dick.

SPEAKER_01 19:42

That's also true.

SPEAKER_03 19:43

There you go. Oh, one other thing I did want to uh so this isn't in the extracts, and it is related to the etymology, uh, which is um the we we do get in Beowulf, which is this uh I don't I don't know if it's the oldest, but it's like a super, super old English um epic basically. Um in the beginning of it, uh there's a section here. So I'll I'll it's been a long time since I've had to uh pronounce old English um you know for anything, but I'm gonna go for it. He das hofre gabad weak under woknum weertmundum agwada um sitindra offer chronrada. And that chronrada uh means whale road. And so uh that chron there apparently there's some ambiguity whether chron, uh that word in old English means whale, as like we think of a whale, or specifically orcas, uh that's been debated. But most people uh go with chron for whale uh as the translation and uh chronrada is like this uh very uh I think beautiful and poetic way of referring to the sea. So the chronrada is the whale road. And so in Beowulf, they refer to the sea as the whale road.

SPEAKER_00 21:06

That's one of our famous kennings, is it not? I would love to be on the floor in the debate about whether it means whale generally or whether it means orca. I'm seeing tears being shed, I'm seeing blood being shed.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

We should weigh in as a as a podcast team. We should be we should be heavily investing in this in this discourse.

SPEAKER_00 21:25

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:26

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:26

I'll do some reading and get back to it.

SPEAKER_03 21:28

Apparently, uh uh JRR Tolkien was like a big advocate that no, it does not mean whale, it means orca.

SPEAKER_00 21:35

Well, whatever JRR says it must be true. That was a man who loved front and end sections. So it was a guy who was like, We're gonna have a glossary, and he wasn't fooling around with that shit.

SPEAKER_01 21:49

Well, and he liked a digression as well and a sprawling Prussian sentence.

SPEAKER_03 21:54

Yeah, famously, uh I think he only wrote his uh the intervening sections of his. Books so that he could like publish what he had in his front section. Is that right? Yeah, no, so he invented the languages for his uh books um before like and he was like, Oh, okay, I gotta do something with this now that I've like created elvish.

SPEAKER_01 22:14

He needs a vocal for Quenyon. Oh, I see.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

What a dweeb.

SPEAKER_03 22:21

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. All right. Let's move on to extracts.

SPEAKER_01 22:28

Um, Johnny, what do you think extracts? Let's let's hear from you on this. I think they're absolutely fascinating. I mean, something uh that Meg started to touch on earlier is uh it's just extraordinary to me the number of different ways uh the different kinds of extracts seem to be priming us to read the rest of Moby Dick very differently. But what are these higgledy-piggledy whale statements actually setting Moby Dick up to be? I mean, we get so many different kinds of text that engages with theological text, with the Bible, with natural history, with novels, with the epic, with theatre with invented sources, something unpublished. And so I'm really interested in how these 80 incredibly diverse statements united by the common thread of the of the whale are how how except when they aren't. Except when they're not. How is all this shaping our expectations for what's to come? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:31

Yes, yeah, for sure. Um, I think I think the extracts are so juicy, like a like a beautiful orange, just ready for you to just sort of peel and get in there. I think there are a lot of what different ways you can approach it. Um, if you kind of just start at the beginning and read through and go, whales, there they are. And then you can kind of just get into the book and it's fine. But if you um take your know your little tweezers, you can really get in there and find some sort of like uh sub-extract uh families to kind of start to even get into the thematic work that's gonna be in the novel for the rest of um for the rest of the work.

SPEAKER_03 24:14

Um yeah, but please tell us more.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

Yeah, for sure. So uh you have to imagine all of this is coming from me in kind of like a Charlie Day mode in front of the thing with the red tape, and it's like, has Meg seen sunlight? Get her some lemon juice. Um, so all of this is is basically coming from a really beautiful paper that um that I read um when I was doing my own extract research. This author, um, his name is Frank Shuffleton. I think he's a Melville scholar of note. He wrote a really lovely, very readable paper um in the early 80s called Going Through the Long Vaticans, which is him basically saying, What's up with the extracts? What's going on here? And he basically has split them into three sections, which, if that is interesting to you, can be very interesting. So one through 30, from what I can glean uh from his writing, the first 30 of them. He's positing basically um our early human-whalationships largely through what he calls visions of commercial utility. So these are quotes where he's saying, like, this whale will be worth um two boatloads of of oil, or we can get um 30, got a good quote, um, number 30, extract number 30, which is also the number of how many um men are in the in the Pequad's crew. It says 30 uh ducats for the first discoverer of the of the whale. So here we're setting up that there is a relationship between humans and whales. It's largely based in like fear and what can we get um money out of it, because that's how we've been interacting with um the world. Or at least that's what we've written down that he has found that he's interested in, Melvin, or whoever it is we think uh wrote this section. And the second one are sort of the next 20 quotes or so, 31 through 52 is what he says. And he says that these quote expand the possible relationships between Leviathan and man. Here we get some scientific measures of them, and I think some really beautiful quotes about how people are using like the stripped whale jaws to be portals, really beautiful. And then um, lastly, it becomes um Frank puts this in quote scare quotes, but American. Okay. Uh we start to get into sort of like gothic scenes of like shipwrecks. These are when we get our really interesting mutiny quotes, which are my favorite ones. I would love to talk about the Essex. You guys just tell me when you're ready for that one. Um, but these are when um almost the whale comes back to being a metaphor as it was in the first few extracts, but now it's like um human consciousness. Basically, Shuffleton's thesis is that the extracts are telling us about how humans react, uh interact with the world, but the metaphor throughout is whales.

SPEAKER_02 27:18

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

And that's what Moby Dick is. That's the entire novel we're about to get into. So if that kind of map is interesting to you, you can really get into like what this quote is doing with this quote. But also you can zoom out just a little bit more and kind of see the shade of it change throughout all of the 80 quotes and see how the whale metaphor becomes frightening, becomes comforting, becomes like exoticized, becomes like this thing we can control, I think we can measure. Um, and then lastly, just sort of a way with us to talk to to talk about God.

SPEAKER_03 27:52

Yeah, no, um, so uh to to take that very last point and like uh extend on it. One of the things that I find like a tension in these extracts is like what is God's relationship to one, the sea, and then two to whales, and whales as like a uh being emblematic of the sea. Um and I so there's a couple of extracts here. So the very first extract is and God created great whales, uh, which is in Genesis. And I think I got here in the notes which uh one that is Genesis uh chapter one, verse 21, and God created great whales, which is interesting because um in Genesis the the first, like specifically named creature that's created is the great whales, which I didn't realize until I was doing the the research for this, but I thought that that was uh interesting and profound in relation to like this choice of topic. Um and specifically, so like getting to this idea of like the tension there, um, Melville loves to conflate whales with Leviathan. Like, basically, if there's like you know, for me as the reader, if I get some ambiguity, is this like person this extract actually talking about a whale, or it's sometimes it seems more like some kind of sea dragon or something. For Melville, no, it's all it's all whales. Um, and specifically, if we get to uh the the quote from Isaiah, in that day the Lord with his sword and great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan, the piercing serpent, even Leviathan, that crooked serpent, and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea. Um, and to me, there's a tension there. So, did God create the whales, or is God going to punish the whales, or what's the relationship there? And one of the things that me being a huge uh religious studies nerd like really latches on to is the specific ancient Near East context of the Old Testament, right? So in Genesis, we get like uh God creating all these different things um in terms of the relationship with the sea. But for most of the ancient Near East, which had a profound uh influence on like the development of Judaism, the the world is created by the main god being in conflict with the sea. Um and like basically like the sea is like this already existing primordial chaotic thing that the like whoever the main god is structures, right? Like uh so if you go to uh the Enuma Elish, which is uh this important epic uh in uh Mesop uh Mesopotamian literature, uh Marduk uh slays uh Tiamat, um, and uh Tiamat being like this embodiment of the sea, and like cuts up her body like the whales get cut up and structures the world out of it, so separates the waters above from the waters below. And in Genesis, you get this too, right? So um in it's interesting in Genesis 1, 1, so like chapter 1, verse 1, um a lot of times in English it gets translated in the beginning, uh God created the the heavens and the earth. Um, but a more linguistically accurate rendering in English would be like when in the beginning, as God was creating the heavens and the earth, the spirit of God uh was hovering over the waters. And so it seems like the waters are already there as this thing that's separate from God, that's already existent, the beginning of creation. And it's through changing and structuring these waters, these chaotic waters and ordering them, that uh God creates the world. Um, and I think there is this tension that we'll get throughout Moby Dick with like, what is the sea? What is the relationship to the sea? Is the sea good? Is this the sea like part of God's orderly creation, or is this something that is uh sort of alien to God or like uh separate from God or like separate from ourselves?

SPEAKER_00 31:27

Those are Ahab questions.

SPEAKER_01 31:28

They're extremely Ahab-coded questions, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:36

Yeah, the first five, I think, which are explicitly saying um about the the Lord, where it's from Psalms. If it says thou, I figure like it's about God, um, are setting up um those like um the uh the mankind questions, right? Like there are quotes in the extracts that are about the world, and then there are quotes from like when I was on a boat. So we're constantly like zooming in and zooming out and zooming in and zooming out. And the accumulation of those over 80 quotes is, I think the the project is the same as the as the um as the etymology, which is to say um, like this uh includes everybody. I think even if you haven't gone whaling. So if we um take a step back and like look at the etymology and then the extracts in our in our hands and say, why have we included these before the book starts? Kind of like what you were saying, um, is the idea that like um the book we're about to read is like encoded in our myths as storytellers and story readers. And we've been doing it this whole time. So you're part of like this big community of like people who are about to be obsessed with whales. So it's kind of like do you buy in to this history, which I am supplying to you through quotes?

SPEAKER_03 33:01

Yeah. Now, um, I do want to make sure, uh, Johnny, that you, as our resident uh Shakespearean actor and director and uh knower, uh, what do you think of this very like a whale? Um, I I recently, so I I do not consider myself to be a Shakespeare expert, uh, but I I I've been for uh not forcing myself because it's very fun to read Shakespeare. I've been uh for the show, like making myself brush up on my Shakespeare, and including this section. So I'm curious what you have to say.

SPEAKER_01 33:28

Well, there are two Shakespearean extracts. We have this one from Hamlet, though it's not actually Hamlet who speaks the words, very like a whale, it comes from Polonius. Uh and it's a wonderful scene during uh the period of Hamlet's so-called antic disposition. He's he's faming uh madness, and they the uh courtier Polonius sort of goes to attempt to speak to him, and as part of this antic disposition, he starts sort of looking up at the clouds and saying that uh that he sees different animals in the clouds. One looks like a it look it looks like a camel, it looks like a weasel, uh, it looks like a whale, and it just absolutely exasperates Polonius, who who can do nothing but agree with him. Tis backed like a weasel. Uh and then and then finally, the kind of closing gambling on it is oh, very very very like a whale. Um and it's it's a it's a wonderful scene, um, and and and often a really, really funny moment. Here, I think it's doing a huge amount of the kind of philosophical work that is accelerating uh at this early stage in Moby Dick. It begs the question, what does it mean to be like a whale?

SPEAKER_02 34:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:43

In what way can we say that a cloud is like a whale, but also in in in in general, when we're saying that something is very like a whale, what are we talking about? Are we to uh are we are we looking at it in the same terms as, for example, the extract from Stowe's Annals, the whale's liver was two cartloads. Are we are we talking about being like a whale in terms of its physical shape, size, mass, or something like that? Or is it something a little bit more philosophical than that? I think uh Melville here as elsewhere sort of contrives to have it both ways. He kind of has his cake and he and eats it, doesn't he? It's it's kind of both. That's that's what uh Moby did get extremely kind of um and like we're gonna spend so many chapters.

SPEAKER_03 35:28

Like, what does a whale even look like? What do you mean this looks like a whale? Like uh uh um especially like just how many uh uh different people he will disparage for their portrayals of whales, either in uh description or in uh art, like throughout this book. What does it mean to look very like a whale?

SPEAKER_01 35:45

The the the other one uh is it slightly confusing because it's attributed to King Henry, but what's meant by that is it's a line from uh the first part of King Henry IV by Shakespeare. But again, this is not King Henry in Henry the Fourth part one that says this. This comes from Hotspur. The sovereign's thing on uh on earth is Parmacetti for an inward bruise. It's the only reference, I believe, in Shakespeare to the use of whale oil. We get reference to whale bone elsewhere as the being used as a material, that's in Love's Labour's Lost. Um there are several whale quotations actually in Shakespeare that that and and also to Leviathan, which Melville leaves out here. I'm really, really interested in these two choices. Why include Henry IV, part one, and Hamlet, but none of the others. There are a couple of references in Pericles, for example. Well, why not bring why why not bring those in? If it's if if these are sort of attempting to be some kind of exhaustive list, why not? Because Melville knew his Shakespeare extremely well. He would have known he would have spotted other references in other plays. Why exclude them?

SPEAKER_03 36:48

Yeah, no, I think that's a very interesting question. And uh one of the things I did want to ask both of you is like what are some uh notable absences from this list that you noticed? Um, was there anything, Meg, that you noticed that uh seemed like a notable thing that you were surprised wasn't present?

SPEAKER_00 37:04

Well, I was I was reading these extracts, I was consulting my uh whale-only library, which I can't even show you because it's so huge. Picture the thing from Beauty and the Beast. And as he was quoting, I was crossing them out, and I did notice some some some vacancies. No, I have no idea. Um, I'm sure he did. Um, but again, I mean, um, if you want to think about how uh uh the concept of of the whale, what he's trying to do is to give us an impression of it, but it's must be mediated through quotes he has found, except again when he's making them up. So he uh you can see you can almost see his like crazy eyes behind the screen, trying to put as much as he can on the page and then being like 80, that's enough, right? Maybe he's like 81 feels like if I do 81, I might as well do 100. If I do 100, I might as well do 200. And maybe 80 is kind of a an arbitrary number. I mean, he was like a human being. He was like, How many quotes can I put the beginning that they're actually gonna read? So I don't I don't notice any anything missing. Um, but uh again, I mean, these are basically all the whale quotes I know because now I have read this this the part of this book. So um maybe you'll say something and I'll be like, oh, of course. You know, he doesn't mention the scene in Pinocchio. That's a pretty good whale.

SPEAKER_03 38:25

Sure. Um, one of the things that was surprising to me was like the specific choice from Job. Right. So our number two extract, we've got Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him. One would think the deep to be hoary. Um H-O-A-R-Y, which is was not a word I was super familiar with, but apparently it means like white sort of thing. Which you get a you get a whore frost, right? Which is a kind of uh yeah. Um, which I perhaps that's why he chooses this particular part, but like uh this particular chapter of Job is so full of such interesting like uh discussion on whales, or like Leviathan specifically. Um, some of which like seem like they'd be more relevant to me. I'm going to uh quote a a little bit of this because I think it's uh very interesting. So I'm at uh uh I'm reading the King James Version of the Bible, which you know, putting my religious scholar hat back on, not necessarily the best translation from a like linguistically accurate perspective, but I do think like this is going to be like what's gonna be uh like in Melville's head, and it's the most relevant for like uh English literature. So Job chapter uh 41. So canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook, or his tongue with a cord, which thou letest down? Canst thou put a hook into his nose, or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Will he make any supplications unto thee? Will he speak soft words unto thee? Will he make a covenant with thee? Wilt thou take him for a servant forever? Uh shall the companions make a banquet of him? Shall they part him among the merchants? Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons, or his head with fish spears? Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more. Behold, the hope of him is in vain. Shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him? None is so fierce that dare stir him up. Who then is able to stand before me? Which I think is actually super crucial to like the plot of Moby Dick, right? So basically, what God is saying here is like, look, I I can hold up Leviathan like uh, you know, by a hook because I'm God, right? You know, can can anybody fight the whale? Can anybody throw their barbed irons into the whale? No, nobody can, no, no, no, there's nobody who can face a whale. Nobody can face Leviathan. So how how dare you think that you can say anything uh negative towards me uh who can do these things to the whale? And as we'll get into it, right? You know, uh it this this section is about like the sort of the pride or hubris of human beings, and specifically in relation to their thinking that they can like go after the whale, which is like specifically what we're gonna get with with Ahab, right?

SPEAKER_01 40:59

Absolutely, who is characterized as that grand, ungodly, godlike man. So he's being so deliberately couched in those terms, and of course, and we've got we've got all sorts of other references within the extracts to Tales of Hubris. I mean, I'm thinking about Paradise Lost as well, of course, which is really it's a paradigmatic tale of hubris, right? Of course, it's about the fall of Lucifer.

SPEAKER_03 41:22

Yeah, now um, Meg, I think you wanted to say something about the Essex.

SPEAKER_00 41:27

Oh, boys. You know, I was thinking about it. And if the three of us were stranded in a whale boat, do you think one of us would just die and then we could eat that person, or would we have to draw lots?

SPEAKER_01 41:39

No, I think I'll just perish. That's fine. I'll make that easy for us.

SPEAKER_00 41:43

We'll just eat Johnny, it's fine. So, excerpt number 58, which is in the romantic cycle, the last one, where we're starting to get more, way more contemporary. These are like times where people who would have been reading the novel would have been alive and would probably um perhaps have remembered these stories of these real people. So, this is a couple down from the Hawthorne that you mentioned. So, excerpt number 58. Um, my God, Mr. Chase, what is the matter? I answered, we have been stove by a whale. It says this is a narrative of the shipwreck of the whale ship Essex of Nantucket, which was attacked and fatally finally destroyed by a large sperm whale, Pacific Coast. Um, and this is uh a book by Owen Chase, who wrote his sort of memoir of what had happened after the fact. So Essex was a whale ship that left Nantucket in like 1820 and was doing its thing. And this crazy thing happened, which is that a bull sperm whale or sperm whale bull. Uh bull fixed that in post. Okay, yes, perfect. Sounds good. Attacked the ship, not the little whale boats, or it might have actually also done the little whale boats, but it it it wrecked the ship. It attacked the whale ship Essex and it sank. And um, everybody in the crew, you know, 20 dudes or whatever, had to scramble into the the whale boats, which maybe calling it a whale boat makes it sound like some sort of like specialized equipment. It's like a rowboat. Nothing fancy about it, not a lifeboat. It's like a little canoe. Um, and they were like in the Pacific, and uh they couldn't go to Hawaii because of like storms, and they couldn't go back to the Galapa coast for some reason. Um, but they were kind of close to Tahiti, but they decided not to go because um, as Melville writes elsewhere, they dreaded cannibals was because the uh the sort of like uh the gossip through the Nantucket grapevine was that the the South Pacific Islanders practiced cannibalism and also homosexuality. And they were like, No, we're from Massachusetts. Um the spirit of these people is is alive today, I think, but these kind of drifted around. Found an island, drifted around some more. And a lot of the guys who ended up in the whale boats trying desperately to find like European sailors ended up having to eat each other because they were floating on the open ocean. And um to an interesting degree, um, it's called um maritime survival cannibalism was kind of understood to be something that might have to happen. Um, and if you did it um if someone died naturally, or if you if no one was dying, you had to eat. It was understood that if you did it totally by chance, everyone was given the totally equal opportunity of like picking lots or like straws. If that was done completely randomly, you wouldn't be like prosecuted if you ever got um, you know, taken in by European society again. And um, that's what happened with these guys. Owen Chase um wrote his memoir about it uh for a long time. I was re-listening to um the last podcast on the left, did a two-parter about it. I don't know if that's a show either of you would be into, but I think it's a lot of fun. Um, but they were talking about it. Um uh, and to quote um Marcus Parks, the the uh the really interesting about thing about this story is that by trying to um avoid cannibalism, as he says ironically, they guaranteed it. So this quote um and the one from the Globe Mutiny later is both they were whalers, and the we know the narrative that's coming down the horn is about whalers. So is something like that gonna happen to us? So he's getting us excited about the plot, which is fine. But he's also saying the way that we interact with these creatures is incredibly dangerous, and who knows which what's gonna happen to you once you're out on a ship in the ocean with a bunch of crazy dudes, you might have to eat each other. It's a I think it's a wild, insane um billowing open of the stakes of the story we're about to read.

SPEAKER_03 46:01

Yeah, no, absolutely. Um that yeah, Johnny, do you have anything you want to say about that? I do want to hear uh your thoughts on the the Milton present and uh the extracts. Certainly.

SPEAKER_01 46:12

Well, I mean, the the thing that I wanted to just add about the Chase quotation is that something, an element of that story that is so important to Melville, and particularly in his characterization of Ahab, not not, and of course Moby Dick himself, is that the overwhelming theory was that this whale was uh sank the ship out of malice, that it was actually swimming away and then it turned around, and then for no real reason, not not in order to preserve itself, seemingly, out of pure uh sort of vengefulness, it it it destroyed and and and sank the boat. Now, it seems whales, according to sources that I've read, don't have a sense of vengeance. I don't know any animals that do. Um, but of course that's absolutely Do the whales care.

SPEAKER_00 47:02

We're about to get into it.

SPEAKER_01 47:03

Oh, we're about to spend a hundred chapters.

unknown 47:07

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 47:08

Um, but of course, that that that's that absolutely underpins what Ahab calls Moby Dick's inscrutable malice.

SPEAKER_02 47:15

Right?

SPEAKER_01 47:15

The the the the the text doesn't really function if that element isn't there. And so that's a really crucial way in which the the plot of Moby Dick is absolutely directly indebted to not just to the stuff, not just to the the the narrative of the the sinking of the Essex, but also crucially how that story is relayed and the the interpretations that are actually put on the whale's actions in that text. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:39

Yeah, I think it's um it's well, it's been pretty well documented that this the the the sinking of Essex more or less directly inspired some part of the act of the book that we're reading. Um I will say that um a guy who wrote a book about the Essex sinking, uh, which is called In the Heart of the Sea, uh, which is a good book, is um they made it into a movie uh which has neither the best nor the worst CGI you've ever seen. It's got some some big, you know, uh beautiful uh actors in it you you would all recognize. Uh Owen Chase is played by Chris Hemsworth, one of the really young guys is played by um pre-Spider-Man, I guess, Tom Hollander. Herman Melville is Ben, is it Wishaw? Uh check my pronunciation on that. We're totally failing pronunciation this, but I think.

SPEAKER_01 48:29

Well, I think you what one in the spirit of the the new rule of the podcast, surely it should be Wishaw.

SPEAKER_00 48:35

Wishaw, yes, you're right. Oh, that's so much more Keatsyan, yes. But in the um, in the scene where the the whale attacks the ship, the whale is named Moby Dick in that in the in the in that media. It's um pretty the narrative they set up is that he um is defending the the giant pod, is specifically a mother whale and her calf. And I will say um it's a pretty good scene, and you guys should honestly, if you've got eight minutes, check it out. Um, the YouTube comments beneath it are resoundingly pro-whal. They're like, he's defending his family. And like, well, yes, of course. There's like, you know what, he was doing his job as a father, and I'm like, I am loving this whale apologia. But they also um uh um include the author's hypothesis, which is that the whale was drawn to the hammering when they were trying to fix one of the whale boats and putting like a metal plate on it. And then that's what maybe the whale, this giant white sperm whale heard what he could have interpreted to be another big male whale in the area. He was like, These are my girls. He was like attacking the ship for that reason. But as we're about to see, some people are calling that interpretation like um, whales can't feel revenge. That's not true. And but the idea of like, well, why did this this whale did kill these people? And it was like kind of shocking to like the Nantucket society that came back. So that we're already thinking about those things is really cool.

SPEAKER_03 50:06

That's fascinating. I gotta put a pin in it. Um, make a mental note. One, I we gotta add that to the the growing list of uh pequad pod movie reviews that uh we'll definitely need to do. Yeah, uh two, we gotta find ourselves a uh a veritable cetologist uh to have as a guest on the show. Absolutely. Uh okay, so um Johnny Milton. Go. What do you got for us? John Milton.

SPEAKER_01 50:34

Yes, indeed. Well, I mean, we've already said that of course Paradise Lost is a uh really uh a kind of uh a paradigmatic account of the punishment of hubris, it's about uh Satan's expulsion from uh from from heaven, uh, and of course the establishment of hell. Uh he is going to be uh Satan, this is a really, really important figure again in Ahab's characterization, specifically in terms of his rhetoric, to say nothing of the fact that uh, of course, uh Ahab's own hubris will be dealt with in um well in in in ways that new readers will discover before not too long. Um so on the intertextual level, uh I think it's very, very important for those reasons. I think it's also very, very interesting that Melville is deliberately bringing in an epic here, which is uh a word that gets used of um of Moby Dick in terms of what its form actually is. Are we looking at a novel? Are we looking at a prose epic? People are divided. I'm still not quite ready to call it a novel, I don't think. I think it must be something slightly different. Um and I think throwing the epic into the mix here uh sets that particular cog whirring as well, in terms of how we're supposed to be engaging with the rest of the text. It's interesting that Milton gives us um some factual inaccuracies about whales, and Melville is nevertheless happy to include them. Uh at his and at his gills draws in and at his trunks bouts out a sea. Well, we will have all sorts to to read and to say about what a whale is and what a whale isn't over the course of text. It apparently a fish and maybe a dog. A fish with lungs, yeah, and possibly also a dog. Um, so I think in terms of what is that the kind of cumulative picture that we're getting of the whale uh is problematized really interestingly by by this that the by the inclusion of that particular quotation.

SPEAKER_03 52:35

Yeah, no, that's interesting. Uh one of the things that recurs in these extracts is the idea that the whale like causes the sea to boil, um, and and also this vision of like the the whale's open maw or like its mouth as like this thing that sucks everything in. Um I I I went on a uh a Wikipedia tangent the other day, and you can see the the results on our Instagram, um, which is uh I got really into this uh the the hell mouth uh as like a artistic uh motif um which is related to Leviathan. So like apparently um in depiction, so like uh in the artistic tradition, the hell mouth is related to like the concept of Leviathan, and the hellmouth is this like big maw that drags you down to hell, um, and uh to you know thinking about paradise loss, thinking about the devil, and thinking about like this boiling uh uh supposed nature to the whale. Like I I can't help but like think of like that open maw as like the gates of hell um that like draws the the prideful down.

SPEAKER_01 53:37

Yeah, absolutely. I mean it does inevitably make me think of the inscription over the gate of hell in inferno, the first part of Dante's divine comedy, La chat ogni speranza voikrate, abandon all hope ye who enter here.

SPEAKER_03 53:54

Finally, I think uh like what what I view as a very important part of the extracts is like basically establishing like the pedigree and like the the the like the literary pedigree of whales as a topic. And like uh Melville saying, you know, I'm gonna write this giant book about whales. You might think that's crazy, but look at all these people who before me, including God, including Moses, including Milton, including Shakespeare, they all talked about whales, and so it I am totally justified in spending like the next uh several hundred pages uh on the concept of the whale.

SPEAKER_00 54:28

He's saying who his brothers are, really.

SPEAKER_03 54:31

Yeah, yeah. Well, to close us out for this episode, is there any particular extract that anybody wants to read for our audience?

SPEAKER_01 54:39

Yes, cool. I'll I'll I'll can I can I read a bit of the uh the can I read the farewell to the sub sub? Yeah, do it. So fare thee well, poor devil of a sub sub, whose commentator I am. Thou belongs to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm, and for whom even pale sherry would be too rosy strong, but with whom one sometimes loves to sit and feel poor devilish too, and grow convivial upon tears, and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness, give it up, sub subs. For by how much the more pains ye to please the world, by so much the more shall ye forever go thankless.

SPEAKER_03 55:23

Love it. Okay, well, thank you all very much, audience, uh, for for listening to this episode zero, uh, Etymology Extracts. This has been a joy, um, and we'll see all of you uh next time for episode two, The Carpet Bag.

SPEAKER_01 55:41

You've been listening to the Pequad Pod with Tristan Babel Marquise, Meg Francher, and Johnny Wiles. You can support the show by visiting patreon.com forward slash pequadpod, throw us a tabloon or two for some bonus content, and to help to keep the show going full sale. Thank you for listening, and until next time, call us the Pequad Podcast.