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Cetology now: a sketch for the twenty-first century.

Article Excerpt
In his "Cetology" chapter in Moby-Dick, Melville, through the narrative voice of Ishmael, seeks to take the measure of whales of all sizes and dispositions. Tacking away from the ready book-learning categories of Cuvier and Linnaeus and the emergent conventions of biology, Ishmael names the whale a fish, not a mammal. In line with popular belief in the mid-nineteenth century, he submits that the whale is "a spouting fish with a horizontal tail" (NN MD 137). The classification that follows, dividing whales into types, swerves still further from the ordered grids of natural science, even as it rests upon the encyclopedic impulse that organizes many anatomical typologies of Melville's day (1): "It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera that I would now fain put before you. Yet it is no easy task. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed" (134). Melville proceeds, then, to a classification of whales neither by family, structure, nor behavior, but rather by books: "According to magnitude I divide the whale into three primary BOOKS." These are "I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE. As the type of the FOLIO I present the Sperm Whale; of the OCTAVO, the Grampus; of the DUODECIMO, the Porpoise" (137). The three divisions thus class whales according their proportion, measuring them by analogy to sheets of paper folded in two, eight, and twelve. Melville satirizes the very idea that whales can be contained in books, can be put to paper. His Ishmael takes the most material, tangible feature of books--their size--and wraps the life of these uncontainable fish in...

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