Moby Dick

In Chapter 32, “Cetology,” Ishmael both questions and confirms the human need to classify, bending the rules of science and making up his own classification system. Interestingly, Ishmael’s uses words for different sizes of books to organize his classification:

“First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend thema ll, both small and large. I. The FOLIO WHALE, II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III, the DUODECIMO WHALE” (Melville 129).

Books used to be made by printing a certain number of pages on a sheet of paper, and then folding the paper. Books made by printing two pages on each side of a sheet of paper are called Folios. Octavos are made by printing eight pages of text on one sheet of paper, and folding eight times, and the duodecimo format has twelve pages per sheet (Ishmael left out quarto, four pages of text per sheet.) When the size of the paper used is constant, folios come out the largest, and then octavo, and then duodecimo, and similarly, Ishmael uses Folio for the larger whales, Octavo for medium ones, and duodecimo for smaller ones. I thought it was an interesting way of putting art and science together.

Ishmael’s classification is not scientific at all, and in fact he critisizes Linnaeas’ for “fain have banish[ing] the whales from the waters” (128). Linnaeas’ findings about how whales differ from fish are summarized as “lungs and warm blood; whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded” (128). This description of the whale is favorable; “cold blooded” is not usually taken as a compliment. However, Ishmael still considers whales to be fish, because they live in the water.

This chapter might be another way that Ishmael suggests that whales aren’t so different from us (and that we are not so different from whales).

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Signet Classic, 1998.

Information about book sizes from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_size

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