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"In the beginning was the word ..." whale "... the letter H ..." (1).

Article Excerpt
Call me Ishmael." Despite a popular impression that these three words open Moby-Dick, Melville's great sea story actually first presents itself as an extended dictionary entry. Consider: following such obligatory preliminaries as title page, dedication (to Hawthorne), and table of contents, the reader comes abruptly upon an "Etymology" section "Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School" who is "ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars." Next looms a quotation from Richard Hackluyt concerning the orthography of "whale," followed by etymologies for "whale" from the dictionaries of Noah Webster and Charles Richardson succeed by a list of the word for whale in thirteen different languages. Some dozen pages of "Extracts"--"(Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian)" -- then illustrate instances of "whale" in their contexts, arranged more or less chronologically. All of this constitutes a rough, extended approximation of an entry for "whale" in the New English Dictionary, the first volume of which would not appear until thirty-three years after the publication of Moby-Dick. Moreover, the first English edition of Melville's work was tiffed The Whale; among its several meanings "dick" is a slang word for dictionary; and at least from Ishmael's perspective, the book is an extended epistemological pursuit of "whale," both the word and its referent. (2)

Why is it that Melville opens his book of such seemingly prohibitive length with such forbiddingly detailed lexicographical matter, likely ignored by most first-time readers? If we suppose a Melville lurking behind the persona of Ishmael as narrator of the entire book, these gleanings from dusty "old lexicons and grammars" by a "Late Consumptive Usher" (xv, my emphasis), and "random allusions to whales" grubbed out from "long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth" (xvii) by the "Sub-Sub," suggest Melville's appropriations from the resources of the editor of The Literary World: as Geoffrey Stone remarked, Melville's third novel, Mardi, started out to be a continuation of the South Sea's voyage of Tommo/Omoo, then turned into "a voyage through Evert Duyckinck's library." (3)

Leaving aside the autobiographical implications in these opening pages, consider those linguistic and etymological factors. The quotation from Hakluyt under "Etymology" calls attention to "the letter H [in `whale'], which alone maketh up the signification of the word ... " (xv). Then follows a list of "whale" in various languages, the first in Hebrew, the second in Greek. The editors of the NN Moby-Dick contend that Melville made a mistake in transcribing these words, and therefore correct his "errors" to accord with his source. (4) But other explanations about Melville's so-called errors have recently been proliferating in the pages of the Melville Society Extracts. In both the Hebrew and the Greek words for whale, Melville's mistake was the addition or substitution of an equivalent H. Dorothee Metlitzki writes about how "visibly important" is the letter H in Melville's "conscious or unconscious" misreading of Hebrew and Greek words for the whale. She sees the "open secret" of Melville's imported H as a "hieroglyphic" reduction of YAHWEH, the "ineffable name of God." (5) Neal Schleifer, noting Melville's "skills as lexicographer and linguist," sees Melville's transcription of the Hebraic word for whale not as an error, as the editors of the NN text contend, but as a deliberate and learned pun which gives to the Hebraic "whale" the meaning of "grace." So too does he see the substitution in the Greek as rendering the whale name "Christos." By such word-play in association with the power displayed by the whale, Melville "establishes a dichotomy between grace and retribution" that denotes the major polarity of the forces in Moby-Dick as well as "the spiritual forces manifest in the world." (6) Batsheva Dreisinger sees Melville's version of the Hebraic word as signifying "behold," or "wonder," rather than "polarized" symbols of "positive or negative connotation" advanced by Schleifer. She argues that any attempt to find particular meaning in Melville's whale should be resisted, citing Ishmael's attempt to draw out Leviathan with a hook: "Behold, the hope of him is in [sic] vain." But her misquotation -- several times -- suggests that such attempts are fruitless, "in vain," rather than presumptuous, or "vain," as...