The Function of the Cetological Chapters in Moby-Dick

Abstract

,NE OF THE MAJOR FACTORS in retarding the reputation of MelkJville's Moby-Dick was the unpopularity of the chapters that methodically describe the appearance and activity of the whale and tlie various processes involved in whaling. Both the reading public and the literary critics' found it difficult to accept what appeared to them an incongruous blend of formal exposition and traditional narration, a partial novel that could also serve as a handbook or treatise on whaling, a chaotic melange of adventure, metaphysics, and amateur scientific investigation. Today, however, with the increasing tendency to examine Melville's fiction as sui generis and rather outside the main stream of the English, or, for that matter, the American novel, it no longer orthodox even to consider Melville as an artless genius. Newton Arvin and Yvor Winters, who have strongly defended Melville's technical skill, account for the looseness and digressiveness of Moby-Dick by associating it with the form of the epic poem. Arvin states that There no doubt that [the form] in part the result of a conscious and artful process.2 Winters even more affirmative: Moby-Dick is beyond a cavil one of the most carefully and successfully constructed of all