Tag Archives: language

Week 7: The boat

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One part of the reading this week I wanted to bring into our discussions was part of the description of the boat in Chapter 16. The narrator ends the description with “A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that” (p.78). I can see why this boat might be described as melancholy, with all the ruins of past trophies decorating her, yet I cannot understand the second line; that all noble things are touched with melancholy. Why is this statement made? Is the implication of this that one must be touched with melancholy to be noble, or that everything noble happens to have this melancholy? Why can something not simply be noble, without this melancholy. And what is melancholy? Simply sadness, or must there also be a level of destruction associated with creation? My mind, of course, drifts back to the letters, and Melville’s outright worship of Hawthorne. Is there a melancholy he feels in the noble Hawthorne? Or what else does Melville find makes something noble, besides melancholy? Does he figure that many greatly built crafts have some sort of ‘tragic’ backstory to be made, as this whaling ship has obviously purged many a whale to make its decor? 

I also found the amount of other cultures and countries being brought into the description of this boat interesting. For someone who has spent so much time viewing most of the world through Christian glasses, Ishmael suddenly mentions France, Egypt, Siberia, Japan, and Ethiopia. Perhaps induced by the sight of this boat, and the possibility of traveling with it, or that he sees this boat as a foreign entity. One important thing to note here is that when talking about Western countries he mentions kings and churches, and when he mentions Ethiopia, he uses the word ‘barbaric’. For how much description of the boat he gives, he seems unconstrained by one way of describing it–even calling the boat a cannibal with the teeth fashioned as decor.

Purposeful Language and What it Reveals in Melville’s “Extracts”

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There were two primary extracts that stood out to me, especially considering their purposeful language and what it reveals about Melville, his story, and the overarching historical context. Firstly, on page xliii, Melville quotes Schouten’s Sixth Circumnavigation, which describes how people “saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced to proceed with a great deal of caution for fear that they should run their ship upon them.” Here, the word “troops” really stands out to me. I researched it, and a group of whales is actually referred to as a “pod,” which was coined in the early 1800s. This timeframe suggests that “troops” was purposefully used, which implies an automatic sense of conflict towards whaling ships and a natural unity amongst whales.

Secondly, contrasting the usage of “troops” and the implication of battle from Schouten, Melville quotes Paley’s Theology on page xlv. In this, he writes that “The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of the water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage through that pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity of the blood gushing from the whale’s heart.” The focus on the heart of the whale here is interesting, especially as hearts tend to humanize animals to audiences. Here, it’s explicitly used for perspective and sizing.

Both of these quotes reveal a significant amount of context on whales and whaling. Schouten’s quote points to an intentional use of aggressive language to point to whales as inherently unified and aggressive, almost justifying the violence performed against them on the whaling ships. However, Paley’s diction is, whether intentionally or not, a humanization of the whale. Even if the focus on a whale’s heart was used for scale, it’s still putting them into a general perspective for audiences.

Extra Credit: Steve Mentz’s Visit in the DHC

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I attended the Steve Mentz talk in the Digital Humanities Center this past week. One point of conversation I found particularly interesting during this discussion was about the use of language when it comes to the internet. For instance, “surfing” the internet. “Flow” of data. I had never thought about how those words interact with technology and the idea of impermanence that comes with that language. The idea of surfing the internet makes it seem like we are just passing by, and the water (data) we touch will float away, with us leaving no trace of our existence. But, like the ocean, we are leaving a trace, something permanent rubbed into the surface that will sink to the bottom (think of the trash scattered on the ocean floor, invisible to the naked eye but long lasting evidence). Although I reckon impossible, I wonder how changing these terms might change our ideas on data and perhaps open our eyes to how insecure and public all of this data is. Perhaps if we used “walking the internet”, or “stomping through”. With these terracentric terms, we start to think about footprints (take digital footprint), and how those stick. I personally have literally no clue how these underground cables work or the cloud, but they kept getting mentioned during this talk (and the one during our class), and I’m wondering how they can even manage to support the amount of data we are constantly sending back and forth across the globe?