As Alison mentioned before, this is the section where Ishmael the narrator starts to fade from view. This is also the section where the chapters themselves start to get a little... strange. Up to this point, the book has proceeded in a more or less plot-driven, narrative way. But in the chapters that we read this week, we start to drift in to different sorts of storytelling.
In "The Lee Shore" we get Ishmael stepping away from his story to talk to us as readers ("Some chapters back...") and to give us a preview of the fate of Bulkington and the ship. That very beautiful, emotional chapter is followed by "The Advocate," in which Ishmael abandons the plot altogether and does a 180 in terms of tone in order to give us a legal-style defense of the glory of whaling. Then of course there's "Cetology," a break from the story to give us a lesson on how to classify whales. The book starts to feel a bit jumbled.
What's going on with that?
I'm wondering if this has to do with some of the ideas that start to emerge in "Cetology," about order and chaos ("The classification of the constituents of chaos...") and about incompleteness ("I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty"). Do you think that the sort of disordered, unfinished feel of the book is a product of the way disorder and incompleteness is presented as inevitable--and not only inevitable, but preferable ("For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity")?
That's an interesting question Caitlin. I've not yet read "Cetology" but I did think "The Advocate" quite odd. "The Advocate" is followed by "Postscript" which is "Wait, I forgot to mention..." and one wonders why this is a separate chapter at all. Moreover, why is he defending whaling to a reader who hasn't attacked it?
ReplyDeleteOn the question of the disordered, unfinished feel of the book, I would go along with disordered, but unfinished? It seems to me that it is quite concluded by the end.
I don't mean unfinished in the sense that the story is unfinished, but unfinished in the sense that it feels not totally polished and put together, in the way that finished books usually are.
DeleteGreat point about order and chaos Caitlin! This might be the right time to come back to etymology and extracts, since I know you're still wondering what the deal with them is, Dad. I didn't come up with this idea myself but it makes sense to me. I think we'll see that one of the major conflicts in the novel is between a world that is governed by an absolute truth (possibly God, possibly Evil) vs a world characterized by vast, meaningless chaos. So we can see etymology and extracts setting up that binary: etymology is the concrete black and white picture of the whale (or of humanity's understanding of the whale) and extracts is the infinite, chaotic jumble.
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