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In his novel Moby-Dick, Melville employed an encyclopaedic vision of the world to transform a yarn about whaling into a text of profound symbolism, operating at levels of political, socio-economic and philosophical profundity. To attest to this, some modern editions of the tale devote almost as many pages to annotation as to the chapters themselves. What, this curious old surfer wonders, would Melville have made of the World Wide Web?
And the white whale? It may have lost some of its original radiance following attacks by monomaniacs and enthusiastic academics, but the leviathan refuses to be beat. Indeed, the expanse of literary imagination in which whales are to be found is as vast as the oceans in which they swim. Based on the EXTRACTS which preface Melville's Moby-Dick, a list of sightings appears here, and it is in the continuous process of being linked to electronic texts in the virtual libraries, and to other World Wide Web sites, as and when they come online. If you wish to add to this list, keep an eye out for whales in your reading and simply note down a representative quotation (with the page number and/or Document URL please) and mail it.
James Fenimore Cooper, The Pathfinder:
Where are your combing seas, your blue water, your rollers, your breakers, your whales, or your waterspouts, and your endless motion, in this bit of a forest, child?
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass:
I see the regions of snow and ice,
I see the sharp-eyed Samoiede and the Finn,
I see the seal-seeker in his boat poising his lance,
I see the Siberian on his slight-built sledge drawn by dogs,
I see the porpoise-hunters, I see the whale-crews of the south Pacific
and the north Atlantic,
I see the cliffs, glaciers, torrents, valleys of Switzerland - I
mark the long winters and the isolation.
James Joyce, Finegans Wake:
1132 A.D. Men like to ants or emmets wondern upon a groot hwide Whallfisk which lay in a Runnel. Blubby wares upat Ublanium.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World:
"Well, that was grand!" he said to himself when it was all over. "Really grand!" He mopped his face. When they had put in the feely effects at the studio, it would be a wonderful film. Almost as good, thought Darwin Bonaparte, as the Sperm Whale's Love-Life - and that, by Ford, was saying a good deal!
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Innocent Erendira
The grandmother, naked and huge in the marble tub, looked like a handsome white whale.
George Orwell, Inside the Whale:
To say 'I accept' in an age like our own is to say you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders.
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
And that region which ... with its wild race of fishermen for whom no more than for their whales had there been any Middle Ages ...
Laurens van der Post, The Hunter and the Whale:
After all, to them whaling was a straightforward business and every whale caught made a financial difference because of the liberal system of bonuses paid for each catch by the owners.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
'Hallelujah . . .'
' . . . It'll put you, glory, glory, Oh my Lawd, in the WHALE'S BELLY.'
'Preach it, dear brother . . . '
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest:
The shorts under his work pants are coal black satin covered with big white whales with red eyes. He grins when he sees I'm looking at the shorts "From a co-ed at Oregon State, Chief, a literary major." He snaps the elastic with his thumb. "She gave them to me because she said I was a symbol."
William Shakespeare, Love's Labours Lost (V:ii):
This is the flower that smiles on every one,
To show his teeth as white as whale's bone;
J.G.Frazer, The Golden Bough:
Similarly among the Aleuts of Alaska the hunter who had struck a whale with a charmed spear would not throw again, but returned at once to his home and separated himself from his people in a hut specially constructed for the purpose, where he stayed for three days without food or drink and without touching or looking upon a woman.
James Joyce, Ulysses
They halted, looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay on the water like the snout of a sleeping whale. Stephen freed his arm quietly.Ibid:
Galleys of the Lochlanns ran here to beach, in quest of prey, their bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf. Danevikings, torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the collar of gold. A school of turlehide whales stranded in hot noon, spouting, hobbling in the shallows. Then from the starving cagework city a horde of jerkined dwarfs, my people, with flayers' knives, running, scaling, hacking in green blubbery whalemeat. Famine, plague and slaughters. Their blood is in me, their lusts my waves. I moved among them on the frozen Liffey, that I, a changeling, among the spluttering resin fires. I spoke to no-one: none to me.
Erskine Chandlers, The Riddle of the Sands
... outside the line of buoys patches of the surface heaved and worked; in one or two places streaks and circles of white were forming; in the midst of one such circle a sleek mauve hump had risen, like the back of a sleeping whale. I saw that an old spell was enthralling Davies as his eye travelled away to the blank horizon.
Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America:
The mansion was on a promontory, high over the Pacific. Money could see farther in the 1920s, and one could look out and see whales and the Hawaiian Islands and the Kuomintang in China.
Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast:
This being the spring season, San Pedro, as well as all the ports upon the coast, was filled with whales, that had come in to make their annual visit upon soundings. For the first few days that we were here and at Santa Barbara, we watched them with great interest - calling out "there she blows!" every time we saw the spout of one breaking the surface of the water; but they soon became so common that we took little notice of them. They often "broke" very near us; and one thick, foggy night, during a dead calm, while I was standing anchor-watch, one of them rose so near, that he struck our cable, and made all surge again. He did not seem to like the encounter much himself, for he sheered off, and spouted at a good distance.
African American Spiritual: "Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel?"
He delivered Daniel from de lion's den,
Jonah from de belly of de whale.
And de Hebrew children from de fiery furnace,
An' why not everyman?
Bob Dylan's 115th Dream:
"Boys, forget the whale
We're going over yonder
Cut the engines
Change the sail
Haul on the bowline"
We sang that melody
Like all tough sailors do
When they're far away at sea.
Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters:
On 25th August 1891, James Bartley, a thirty-five-year-old sailor on the Star of the East, was swallowed by a sperm whale off the Falkland Islands.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night:
... she might have been looking into Hollywood. The bizarre débris of some recent picture, a decayed street scene in India, a great cardboard whale, a monstrous tree bearing cherries large as basket-balls, bloomed there by exotic dispensation, autochtonous as the pale amaranth, mimosa, cork oak, or dwarfed pine.
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus:
Quitting the common fleet of herring-busses and whalers, where indeed his leeward, laggard condition was painful enough, he desperately steers off, on a course of his own, by sextant and compass of his own. Unhappy Teufelsdsröckh!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment:
As soon as we finish this, we are going to start a translation of a treatise on whales, then something from the second part of Rousseau's Confessions ...
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov:
And there's no need of much teaching or explanation, he will understand it all simply. Do you suppose that the peasants don't understand? Try reading them the touching story of the fair Esther and the haughty Vashti; or the miraculous story of Jonah in the whale. Don't forget either the parables of Our Lord, choose especially from the Gospel of St. Luke (that is what I did), and then from the Acts of the Apostles the conversion of St. Paul (that you mustn't leave out on any account), and from the Lives of the Saints, for instance, the life of Alexey, the man of God and, greatest of all, the happy martyr and the seer of God, Mary of Egypt - and you will penetrate their hearts with these simple tales. Give one hour a week to it in spite of your poverty, only one little hour. And you will see for yourselves that our people is gracious and grateful, and will repay you a hundred foId.
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle:
If we suppose the case of the discovery of a skeleton of a Greenland whale in a fossil state, not a single cetaceous animal being known to exist, what naturalist would have ventured conjecture on the possibility of a carcass so gigantic being supported on the minute crustacea and mollusca living in the frozen seas of the extreme North?
---
One day, off the East coast of Tierra del Fuego, we saw a grand sight in several spermaceti whales jumping upright quite out of the water, with the exception of their tail fins. As they fell down sideways, they splashed the water high up, and the sound reverberated like a distant broadside.
Charles Darwin The Origin of the Species:
In answer, it may be asked, why should not the early progenitors of the whales with baleen have possessed a mouth constructed something like the lamellated beak of a duck? Ducks, like whales, subsist by sifting the mud and water; and the family has sometimes been called Criblatores, or sifters.
Sylvia Plath, Battle-Scene from the Comic Operatic Fantasy "The Seafarer":
A lantern-frail
Gondola of paper
Ferries the fishpond Sindbad
Who poises his pastel spear
Toward three pinky-purple
Monsters which uprear
Off the ocean-floor
With fanged and dreadful head.
Beware, beware
The whale, the shark, the squid.
Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho!:
The bishop looked again; settled that it must be a white whale, or shark, or other monster of the deep; crossed himself, prayed for a safe voyage, and snored once more.
Saint Augustine Confessions, Book XIII, xx, 26
... et inter haec facta sunt magnalia mirabilia tamquam coeti grandes ...trans. Albert C Outler:
For by the ministry of thy holy ones, thy mysteries have made their way amid the buffeting billows of the world to instruct the nations in thy name, in thy Baptism. And among these things many great and marvelous works have been wrought which are analogous to the huge whales ...
The Venerable Bede, A History of the English Church and People:
trans. Leo Sherley-Price
Britain is rich in grain and timber; it has good pastures for cattle and draught animals, and vines are cultivated in various localities. There are many land and sea birds of various species, and it is well known for its plentiful springs and rivers abounding in fish. Salmon and eels are especially plentiful, while seals, dolphins and sometimes whales are caught. There are many varieties of shell-fish ...
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African:
... we saw many very high and curious mountains of ice, and also a great number of very large whales which used to come close to our ship and blow the water up to a very great height in the air.
Rudyard Kipling, (Title) Just So Stories:
How The Whale Got His Throat
John Osborne, Very Like a Whale #58:
T.V.Interviewer: I see. And - then - what about the present?
Jock: Oh - Very like. Like a Whale.
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
I hit the brakes and eased the Whale down into the grassy moat between the two freeway lanes.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket:
About eighteen months after the period of the Aeriel's disaster, the firm of Lloyd and Vredenburgh (a house connected in some manner with the Messieurs Enderby, I believe, of Liverpool) were engaged in repairing and fitting out the brig Grampus for a whaling voyage.
Matthew Arnold, The Foresaken Merman:
Where the great whales come sailing by
Sail and sail, with unshut eye
Richard Buckminster Fuller, Goldilocks and the Three Bears:
For the miracle answer the kings, nobles, and merchants of Mesopotamia turned to the navigator-astronomer-priests of Babylon. To convince everyone in the new western world that accounts of any earlier religions or people elsewhere on earth were false, the priests said that the beginnings of humans in the Universe had occurred nearby to Babylon in a garden called Eden. Their story from then on is well known. What seems pure nonsense in the Garden of Eden story of the creation of a woman from a man's rib is explained as follows. Vessels of the sea are always female because they contain their crews in their interior wombs. The female "Eve" was the high-seas, world-around-sailable vessel; her great strength developed when navigators discovered the backbone-mounted rib cage employed by Nature in the design of whales, porpoises, seals and other sea creatures. So man built his high-seas vessel, "Eve," with strong wooden ribs rising sidewise from her keel, planked "her" in, then leather-thong-fastened the planks' edges together, tied them tightly into the ribs, and pitched her seams. Thus "Eve" the ship, built from Adam's rib cage design, was temptingly "led on" by Naga the serpent, god of the sea, around the world, with Adam aboard. Thus Naga showed Adam, by means of Eve, that the earth is as round as the apple.
Martin Amis, London Fields:
My God, thought Guy: he looks like a whale. A killer whale? No. Some beningly wheezing old basker. A blue whale. A sperm whale. Yes and with the incredible pallor.
Mervyn Peake, Mister Pye:
His hope recoiled and collapsed, for the sea-breeze had at last decided to puff steadily into the embayment and the stench of a small dead whale monopolised the scene.
MacDiarmid, Hugh, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle:
And this deid thing, whale-white obscenity,
This horror that I writhe in - is my soul!
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer:
As soon as they arrive in those latitudes where they expect to meet with whales, a man is sent up to the mast-head; if he sees one, he immediately cries out AWAITE PAWANA, here is a whale; they all remain still and silent until he repeats PAWANA, a whale, when in less than six minutes the two boats are launched, filled with every implement necessary for the attack.
Aristotle, History of Animals (trans. D.W.Thompson):
Again, some animals are viviparous, others oviparous, others vermiparous or 'grub-bearing'. Some are viviparous, such as man, the horse, the seal, and all other animals that are hair-coated, and, of marine animals, the cetaceans, as the dolphin, and the so-called Selachia. (Of these latter animals, some have a tubular air-passage and no gills, as the dolphin and the whale: the dolphin with the air-passage going through its back, the whale with the air-passage in its forehead; others have uncovered gills, as the Selachia, the sharks and rays.
Ogden Nash, Pretty Halcyon Days:
How pleasant to gaze at the sailors
As their sailboats they manfully sail
With the vigor of vikings and whalers
In the days of the viking and whale.
Nathaniel Ames, Nautical Reminiscences:
I recollect when a boy very frequently hearing old people interrupt a tough story with "Darby, did you ever see a whale?" thereby intimating that the existence of that animal, now so common and well known, was considered too absurd an idea to be entitled to a place in a serious treatise upon zoology.
Boswell's Life of Johnson:
If you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales.
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels:
But the large rivers are full of vessels, and abound with excellent fish, for they seldom get any from the sea because the sea fish are of the same size with those in Europe, and consequently not worth catching; whereby it is manifest, that nature, in the production of plants and animals of so extraordinary a bulk, is wholly confined to this continent, of which I leave the reasons to be determined by philosophers. However, now and then they take a whale that happens to be dashed against the rocks, which the common people feed on heartily. These whales I have known so large that a man could hardly carry one upon his shoulders; and sometimes for curiosity they are brought in hampers to Lorbrulgrud: I saw one of them in a dish at the King's table, which passed for a rarity, but I did not observe he was fond of it; for I think the bigness disgusted him, although I have seen one somewhat larger in Greenland.
John Donne, The Progress of the Soul:
He hunts not fish, but as an officer,
Stays in his court, as his own net, and there
All suitors of all sorts themselves enthral;
So on his back lies this whale wantoning,
And in his gulf-like throat, sucks every thing
That passeth near. Fish chaseth fish, and all,
Flyer and follower, in this whirlpool fall;
O might not states of more equality
Consist? and is it of necessity
That thousand guiltless smalls, to make one great, must die?
Matthew XII #40:
For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
Benedicite, Book of Common Prayer:
O ye Whales, and all that move in the Waters, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him forever.
The Qur'an #37:
Verily Jonas too is among the envoys;
When he ran away to the loaded ship;
He cast lots, but was one of those who drew blank.
So the whale swallowed him, he being to blame.
And had it not been that he was one of those who give glory,
He would have remained in its belly until the day of their being raised up.
Ether 2, The Book of Mormon:
For behold, ye shall be as a "whale in the midst of the sea; for the mountain waves shall dash upon you."
James Joyce, A Portrait of The Artist as A Young Man:
The pandybat made a sound too but not like that. The fellows said it was made of whalebone and leather with lead inside: and he wondered what the pain was like.
Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Pudd'nhead Wilson:
Dey knows how to work a nigger to death, en dey knows how to whale 'em, too -- whale 'em till dey backs is welted like a washbooard.
Robert Coover, Pricksongs & Descants:
Saved! he thinks, but, no, his dad grabs him right back out of the tub and whales the dickens out of him ...
Gloria Naylor, Bailey's Café:
But his toe only kept making contact with the whalebone in front of my corset.
Nathaniel West, A Cool Million:
The proprietor of the house had hired Asa Goldstein to decorate this suite and it was a perfect colonial interior. Antimacassars, ships in bottles, carved whalebone, hooked rugs - all were there.
Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, 1743 - 1790:
Dr. Franklin thought that the votes should be so proportioned in all cases. He took notice that the Delaware counties had bound up their Delegates to disagree to this article. He thought it a very extraordinary language to be held by any state, that they would not confederate with us unless we would let them dispose of our money. Certainly if we vote equally we ought to pay equally; but the smaller states will hardly purchase the privilege at this price. That had he lived in a state where the representation, originally equal, had become unequal by time & accident he might have submitted rather than disturb government; but that we should be very wrong to set out in this practice when it is in our power to establish what is right. That at the time of the Union between England and Scotland the latter had made the objection which the smaller states now do. But experience had proved that no unfairness had ever been shown them. That their advocates had prognosticated that it would again happen as in times of old, that the whale would swallow Jonas, but he thought the prediction reversed in event and that Jonas had swallowed the whale, for the Scotch had in fact got possession of the government and gave laws to the English. He reprobated the original agreement of Congress to vote by colonies and therefore was for their voting in all cases according to the number of taxables.
Herman Melville, White-Jacket:
... a rare snuff-box, fabricated from a sperm whale's tooth, with a curious silver hinge, and cunningly wrought in the shape of a whale.
Herman Melville, Redburn:
The broad quarter-deck, too, where these gentry promenaded, is now often choked up by the enormous head of the sperm-whale, and the vast masses of unctuous blubber; and every where reaks with oil during the prosecution of the fishery.
Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Roughing It:
"Oil? What do you take me for? I'm not a whaler."
John Dos Passos, U.S.A. (The 42nd Parallel):
When the wind set from the silver factories across the river the air of the gray fourfamily frame house where Fainy McCreary was born was choking all day with the smell of whaleoil soap. Other days it smelt of cabbage and babies and McCreary's washboilers.
Thomas Jefferson, Public Papers:
Whale oil enters, as a raw material, into several branches of manufacture, as of wool, leather, soap: it is used also in painting, architecture and navigation. But its great consumption is in lighting houses and cities.
Virgil, The Aeneid (trans. Dryden) #V:
The tempests fly before their father's face,
Trains of inferior gods his triumph grace,
And monster whales before their master play,
And choirs of Tritons crowd the wat'ry way.
Benjamin Franklin, Boston and London:
Charlestown likewise suffer'd very much; and we hear a great number of Whaleboats have been carry'd from the shore towards Cape Codd, where the Tide was never known to come before.
Jules Verne, Vingt Mille Lieues Sous Les Mers:
... je dévorais d'un oeil avide le cotonneux sillage qui blanchissait la mer jusqu'à perte de vue! Et que de fois j'ai partagé l'émotion de l'état-major, de l'équipage, lorsque quelque capricieuse baleine élevait son dos noirâtre au-dessus des flots. Le pont de la frégate se peuplait en un instant. Les capots vommissaient un torrent de matelots et d'officiers. Chacun, la poitrine haletante, l'oeil trouble, observait la marche du cétacé.Translate into English, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea:
I devoured with an avid eye the cotton wake which whitened the sea until lost from view! And how often have I shared the emotion of the top brass, of the crew, when some capricious whale raised its dark back above the waves! The deck of the vessel was crowded in a moment. The cabins poured forth a torrent of sailors and officers. Each one with heaving breath, with troubled eye, watching the course of the cetacean.
Frederick Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra:
Just now have I seen them bent down - to creep to the cross. Around light and liberty did they once flutter like gnats and young poets. A little older, a little colder: and already are they mystifiers, and mumblers and mollycoddlers. Did perhaps their hearts despond, because lonesomeness had swallowed me like a whale? Did their ear perhaps hearken yearningly - long for me in vain, and for my trumpet-notes and herald-calls?
Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues:
... and God knows we are sensitive to the suffering that has sometimes broken loose to come billowing forth from your appendages like the pungent vapors of whales - often it appears that in this life of experience and accommodation we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. But Sissy ... hold on!
Jack London, The Sea Wolf:
'O the blazing tropic night, when the wake's a welt of light
That holds the hot sky tame,
And the steady forefoot snores through the planet-
powdered floors
Where the scared whale flukes in flame.
Her plates are scarred by the sun, dear lass,
And her ropes are taut with the dew,
For we're booming down on the old trail, our own trail,
the out trail,
We're sagging south on the Long Trail -;
the trail that is
always new.'
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables:
Phoebe accordingly supplied, and, as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a slight super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a whale! The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of Ninevah, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of fate which so varied a caravan had preceded him.
Thomas Pynchon, V.:
Dream tonight of peacock tails,
Diamond fields and spouter whales.
Ills are many, blessing few,
But dreams tonight will shelter you.
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno:
One took off a sailor's fingers. Another struck the whale-boat's bow, cutting off the rope there, and remaining stuck in the gunwale, like a woodman's axe.
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake:
Lave a whale a while in a whillbarrow (isn't it the truth I'm tallin ye?) to have fins and flippers that shimmy and shake. Tim Timmycan timped hir, tampting Tam. Fleppety! Flippety! Fleapow!
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote De La Mancha (I.XXXI):
El daño estuvo, dijo Don Quijote, en irme yo de alli, que no me habia de ir hasta dejarte pagado; porque bien debia yo de saber por luengas experiencias que no hay villano que quarde palabra que diere, si él ve que no le está bien guardalla; pero ya te acuerdas, Andrés, que yo juré que si no te pagaba que habia de ir á buscarle, y que le habia de hallar aunque se escondiese en el vientre de la ballena.
Asi es la verdad, dijo Andrés; pero no aprovechó nada.Translate into English, Don Quixote De La Mancha (I.31):
"The mischief," said Don Quixote, "was in my going off, for I should not have done so until I had seen thee paid; I should have known, from long experience, that no villain will keep his word if he finds it suits him to break it. But thou mayest remember, Andres, that I swore if he paid thee not I would track him down even though he were hidden in a whale's belly."
"That is true," said Andres, "but it signified nothing."
Saul Bellow, Herzog:
Shura was your true disciple of Thomas Hobbes. Universal concerns were idiocy. Ask nothing better than to prosper in the belly of Leviathan and set a hedonistic example to the community.
J.B.Priestley, Outcries and Asides (That Small Fish):
Sometimes I find myself thinking, rather wistfully, about Lao Tzu's famous dictum: 'Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.' All around me I see something very different, let us say - a number of angry dwarfs trying to grill a whale.
William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (The Discovery of the Indies):
There are also whales. I saw no beasts on land save parrots and lizards.
John Keats, Endymion (III; 205-9):
The gulfing whale was like a dot in the spell.
Yet look upon it, and 'twould size and swell
To its huge self, and the minutest fish
Would pass the very hardest gazer's wish,
And show his little eye's anatomy.
William Blake, America: A Prophecy:
I see a serpent in Canada who courts me to his love,
In Mexico an Eagle, and a Lion in Peru;
I see a Whale in the South-sea, drinking my soul away.
Jean-Arthur Rimbaud, Le Bateau ivre:
J'ai vu fermenter les marais énormes, nasses
Où pourrit dans les joncs tout un Léviathan!
Des écroulements d'eaux au milieu des bonaces,
Et les lointains vers les gouffres cataractant!
I have seen the enormous marshes fermenting, traps
Where in the rushes a whole leviathan rots!
The tumbling of waters between the lulls,
And the far reaches towards the plummeting abysses!
John Gordon Davis, Leviathan:
The Mexican said diffidently, "Whale meat is also an important part of the Japanese national diet, Mister Magnus."
Paul Theroux, My Secret History:
She looked at me as if at a moron, with a kind of hopeless pity.
I said, "You think whale's going to be grey blubbery stuff with square edges and about six inches of white fat. But remember the line in Moby Dick where Stubb says something about the 'red meat'? That's not Melville's usual hyperbole, that's a literal fact. The whale steak is red like a sirloin, and very sinewy. There's a strange contradiction between the look of it and the taste" - Jesus Christ, it was so hard talking to someone who didn't reply - "it looks like beef but it has a fishy taste."
***
Her room was so small she was able to stretch out her hand and stop me. "Andy, I missed my period," she said. "It's two weeks late. I keep praying, but - oh God, I don't know what to do -"
That was my second whale steak.
Rudyard Kipling, Kim:
Four days later a seat was booked for Kim and his small trunk at the rear of a Kalga tonga. His companion was the whale-like Babu, who, with a fringed shawl wrapped round his head, and his fat openwork-stockinged left leg tucked under him, shivered and grunted in the morning chill.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary:
Leviathan, n. An enormous aquatic animal mentioned by Job. Some suppose it to have been the whale, but that distinguished ichthyologer, Dr. Jordan of Stanford University, maintains with considerable heat that it was a species of gigantic Tadpole, (Thaddeus Polandensis) or Polliwig-Maria Pseudo-hirsuta. For an exhaustive description and history of the Tadpole consult the famous monograph of Jane Porter, Thaddeus of Warsaw.
Various Sources, Proverbs:
There is no eel so small but it hopes to become a whale. (Germanic)
To throw out a tub to the whale (to create a diversion). (Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs)
Throw out a herring to catch a whale (or a sprat to catch a mackerel). (Ibid)
Günter Grass, Die Blechtrommel:
Endlich war Ruhe im Holzlabyrinth, das etwa die Größe jenes Walfisches hatte, in welchem Jonas saß und tranig wurde. Nein nein, Oskar war kein Prophet, Hunger verspürte er! Es war da kein Herr, der sagte: "Mache dich auf und gehe in die große Stadt Ninive und predige wider sie!" Mir brauchte auch kein Herr einen Rizinusbaum wachsen lassen, den hinterher, auf des Herren Geheiß, ein Wurm zu tilgen hatte. Ich jammerte weder um jenen biblischen Rizinus noch um Ninive, selbst wenn es Danzig hieß. Meine Trommel, die nicht biblisch war, steckte ich unter den Pullover, hatte genug mit mir zu tun, fand, ohne mich zu stoßen oder an Nägeln zu reißen, aus den Eingeweiden einer Tribüne für Kundgebungen aller Art, die nur zufällig die Proportionen des prophetenschlingenden Walfisches hatte.Translate into English, The Tin Drum:
At least it was quiet in my wooden labyrinth, which was about the size of the whale's belly where Jonah sat staining his prophet's robes with blubber. But Oskar was no prophet, he was beginning to feel hungry. There was no Lord to say: "Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it." For me the Lord saw no need to make a gourd grow and send a worm to destroy it. I lamented neither for a biblical gourd nor for Nineveh, even if its name was Gdansk. I tucked my very unbilical drum under my pullover and concentrated on my troubles. Carefully avoiding overhanging beams and protruding nails, I emerged by my own resources from the bowels of a rostrum intended for meetings and rallies of all sorts and which happened only by the merest accident to have the proportions of a prophet-swallowing whale.
Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit:
... for it was their custom, Mr Jonas said, whenever such a thing was practicable, to kill two birds with one stone, and never to throw away sprats, but as bait for whales.
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove:
Milly drew the feet of water, and odd though it might seem that a lonely girl, who was not robust and who hated sound and show, should stir like a leviathan, her companion floated off with the sense of rocking violently at her side.
Herman Melville, Mardi and A Voyage Thither:
In desperation, he was bent upon bobbing for the Right whale on the Nor'-West Coast and in the Bay of Kamschatka.
Stanley Kunitz, Ambergris:
This body, tapped of every drop of breath,
In vast corruption of its swollen pride,
Is perfected to be the whale of death;
Yet, I believe, the hand that plumbs its side
Will gather dissolution's sweet increase,
Exquisite fern of death - in nature, ambergris.
Thor Heyerdahl, Expedition of the The Kon-Tiki:
The large shiny black forehead of the first whale was no more than two yards from us when it sank beneath the surface of the water, then we saw the huge blue-black bulk glide quietly under the raft right beneath our feet. It lay there for some time, dark and motionless, and we held our breath as we looked down on the gigantic curved back of a mammal a good deal longer than the raft.
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse:
Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures ...
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason #2:
In the former part of 'The Age of Reason' I have spoken of Jonah, and of the story of him and the whale. - A fit story for ridicule, if it was written to be believed; or of laughter, if it was intended to try what credulity could swallow; for, if it could swallow Jonah and the whale it could swallow anything.
Alexander Barclay, The Eclogues:
As many Todes as breede in Irelande,
And as many Gripes as breede in Englande,
As many Cuckowes as sing in January,
And Nightingales as sing in February,
And as many Whales as swimmeth in the fen,
So many be there in Cities of good men.
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle:
Call me Jonah. [Opening line]
#94:
It was in the sunrise that the cetacean majesty of the highest mountain on the island, of Mount McCabe, made itself known to me. It was a fearful hump, a blue whale, with one queer stone plug on its back for a peak. In scale with a whale, the plug might have been the stump of a snapped harpoon, and it seemed so unrelated to the rest of the mountain that I asked Frank if it had been built by men.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy:
Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet. And since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this poor innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms with not being a whale any more.
...
"At the top of the crater they met Zaphod.
'Look,' he said, pointing into the crater.
In the center lay the exploed carcass of a lonely sperm whale that hadn't lived long enough to be dissappointed with its lot. The silence was only disturbed by the slight involuntary spasms of Trillian's throat.
'I suppose there's no point in trying to bury it?' murmured Arthur, and then wished he hadn't."
Clarence Major (ed), Black Slang, A Dictionary of Afro-American Talk
Whale: to throw dice or to be very active in some other gambling activity; to do anything very effectively.
Sinclair Lewis, Main Street:
"Well, I don't know as I'd say he was such a whale of a scholar. I've always had a suspicion he did a good deal of four-flushing about that.
...
Made taller and younger by his interest she poured out, "Oh my yes. It was a wonderful trip. So many points of interest through Massachusetts - historical. There's Lexington where we turned back the redcoats, and Longfellow's home at Cambridge, and Cape Cod - just everything - fishermen and whale-ships and sand-dunes and everything."
Charles Olson, Some Good News:
... - or Smith,
who came to Monhegan
to catch whales,
found cod, instead.
Robert Lowell, The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket:
This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale
Who spewed Nantucket bones on the thrashed swell
And stirred the troubled waters to whirlpools
To send the Pequod packing off to hell
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (The Locked Room):
"Of course you do," I said, all bluster and good humour. "The name's Melville. Herman Melville. Perhaps you've read some of my books."
He didn't know whether to treat me as a jovial drunk or a dangerous psychopath, and the confusion showed on his face. It was a splendid confusion, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
"Well, he said at last, forcing out a little smile, "I might have read one or two."
"The one about the whale, no doubt."
"Yes. The one about the whale."
Philip Roth, The Great American Novel:
"Moby Dick is a book about blubber, with a madman thrown in for excitement. Five hundred pages of blubber, one hundred pages of madman, and about twenty pages of how good niggers are with the harpoon."
D.H.Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature:
There you have them: a maniac captain and his three mates, three splendid seamen, admirable whalemen, first-class men at their job.
America!
Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael:
A few facts: by 1833, 70,000 persons and $70,000,000 were tied up in whaling and such associated crafts as shipbuilding, sail-lofts, smiths to make toggle irons, the thieving outfitters, their agents and the whores of ports like New Bedford; by 1844 (peak years roughly 1840-60) the figure is up to $120,000,000, whaling competes successfully in attracting capital to itself with such opening industries as textiles and shoes , and the export of whale products - one-fourth of the catch - is third to meat products and lumber.
C.L.R.James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways:
... candidates for the Universal Republic are bound together by the fact that they work together on a whaling-ship. They are a world federation of modern industrial workers. They owe allegiance to no nationality. There are Americans among them, but it is the officers who are American. Among the crew nobody is anything. They owe no allegiance to anybody or anything except the work they have to do and the relations with one another on which that work depends. And we may add that they are not to be confused with any labour movement or what is today known as the international solidarity of labour.
Harold W. Ross, quoted in James Thurber's The Years with Ross:
Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?
Editor's note: The whale is Moby Dick and the book Moby-Dick (with hyphen).
Thanks for contributions, or help with translation, to:
Gayle Julien, Anchor Point, Alaska; Rauno Lauhakangas,
Helsinki, Finland; Sandrine Nosbe, Amiens, France; Ronald
Webb, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Kate Griffiths, West Didsbury,
U.K., Jean-Francois Hangouet, Saint-Mande, France; Philip
Kuypers, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Ian Royle, Bangkok.
Andrew L. Graham, Keele University
Please contact the webmaster with any queries : page last updated March 14, 2006