Cetology (the naming of things)

Well, as you all know, I remain woefully behind on the reading schedule. (Alison, do you think you might adjust the deadlines somewhat? I know I'm not the only one who is behind, although I may be the worst.) But I wanted to weigh in on Cetology (Chapter 32). This is probably the chapter that causes many first-time readers of Moby Dick to quietly set the book aside for something more ... conventional. Entertaining?

I wonder if this chapter, and the philosophical and/or informative chapters, should be viewed as an interlude between the acts. The cetology chapter precedes Ishmael's voyage--marks the end of his innocence, perhaps?--and leads us into the next part of the book.

I think that one of the overriding themes of the Cetology chapter is Melville's attempt to address our innate need to put things, people, animals, into categories: The Folio Whales, the Octavo Whales, the Duodecimo Whales. He's categorizing these animals based on their size--not a very scientifically-based way of categorizing things. Not to mention the fact that he discounts the then well-known fact that whales are mammals, and calls them fish. What's the point? I wonder if he's making a commentary about the contemporary desire to categorize human beings into different races--after he's established his bond with Queequeg. Does it really matter that his skin is dark? Or that he has strange religious practices, etc? Well, clearly not. Or, it matters, but it does not put him into a different category of humanity.

Not to denigrate the impulse to name/categorize. It's an important tool to understanding the natural world.  If I had been born two centuries earlier I like to think that I would have been one of those lady naturalists who devoted her life to mushrooms or rabbits (oh, that would be Beatrix Potter, who was awesome in that way, wasn't she). Although, given my ancestry, my interests would have had more to do with putting food on the table. Oh, well. 

But the impulse the name/categorize things got me to thinking about one of my very favorite books of nonfiction, one that I think you should all read, and not just if you're from Kansas: PrairyErth,by William Least Heat-Moon. Here, he writes about a hawk called the Northern Harrier, Circus Cyaneus. If you don't believe that WLH-M owes a huge debt to Melville, then you are ... wrong. Just read:

Then very goddamn well, I say at last, maybe I can write around the goddamn problem: I advise myself to try again and again and this time speak only in names, in pictures--that 's the primitive method. ... I am going  only to name and limn hawkness as I have encountered it in the tall pairie, where its form and habitats suite themselves so perfectly to the windy and open hills as to make it a familiar of the place.

 Least Heat-Moon goes on to give alternative names for the bird, based upon the observers interpretation of the bird: Marsh Hawk, Bog Trotter, Frog Hawk, Rabbit Hawk (as well as some of his more fanciful names: "Zigzaggerur.").


So, what do you think? Is Cetology a chapter at about the dangers of categorizing people/whales?  An attempt of getting us to to think about the matter at hand? A simple interlude?