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For my final project, I compared the fields of creative and technical writing as they relate to Moby-Dick.

Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!

One way a creative writer might approach Melville's massive work would be to consider his inspirations. The book is dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne, a fellow writer and Romantic. Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter had recently been published when the two authors formed their brief friendship. Melville named Ahab's ship The Pequod, after the Pequod Indians featured in The Scarlet Letter. In a letter to Hawthorne, Melville reveals a secret:

"Shall I send you a fin of the Whale by way of a specimen mouthful? The tail is not yet cooked--though the hell-fire in which the whole book is broiled might not unreasonably have cooked it all ere this. This is the book's motto (the secret one),--Ergo non baptiso te in nomine--but make out the rest yourself" (542).

The motto, the only line spoken in Latin by Captain Ahab in the course of the book as he brandishes a new harpoon, translates approximately into "I baptize thee not in the name of the Father, but in the name of the devil." To a creative writer, this line would stand out as immensely important (even without the secret knowledge that this is the book's motto) because of the singularity and abnormality of Ahab's one Latin phrase.

Another massive influence on Melville was Shakespeare, who he honors in "Midnight, Forecastle," a chapter which spontaneously breaks out in play form. Elsewhere, Shakespeare is referenced (Ahab has iambic habits of speech), but nowhere so directly. There is a slow build-up to the play in preceding chapters as three characters (Ahab, Starbuck, and Stubb) give soliloquies introduced by stage directions, for example the stage directions for the chapter "Sunset": "(The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out)" (142). The gradual descent into play form is mirrored by the characters' gradual descent into a drunken state of revelry. A creative writer would find this match of content and form very pleasing.

Critical Response

From the comfort of my rolly chair in the 21st century I can say Melville was a writer well ahead of his time. It's not that the critics of the 1850s were dumb, but they were dumbstruck by Moby-Dick, which was widely rejected until the 1920s. To examine how creative writers approach the book, I looked into critical essays on the subject.

From the year of its publication, an anonymous reviewer had this to say: "This is an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition." The line in bold could serve as a definition of post-modern fiction, had the term existed yet. Americans love labels, and without a word for this kind of disconnected-yet-all-encompasing novel readers couldn't find their footing.

In his 1899 essay, "The Best Sea Story Ever Written," Archibald MacMechan attempts to revive Moby-Dick from obscurity and discusses its (and Melville's) presumed failure. MacMechan "has seen only one copy of the book exposed for sale, and met only one person (and that not an American) who had read it." He goes on to say that Melville had the option of writing a ribald adventure novel on the high seas, instantly sellable, as pleasurable as any action movie (he did this in his novel Typee, which was very successful), but "from all these advantages Melville not only cuts himself off, but seems to heap all sorts of obstacles in his self appointed path." Certainly the chapter "Cetology," and other moments of minutely detailed technical writing are among those "obstacles" as seen from a creative writer's point of view. MacMechan proposes that Melville overcomes all his self created obstacles (for example, the absence of a love interest...there aren't any female characters at all): "The book is not a record of fact; but of fact idealized, which supplies the frame for a terrible duel to the death between a mad whaling-captain and a miraculous white sperm whale. It is not a love-story but a story of undying hate."

A great fiction writer with an opinion is William Faulkner who, in his post-revival 1927 letter, "I Wish I Had Written That," explains the thrill of Ahab's mission of destruction: "the symbol of their doom: a White Whale. There's a death for a man, now; none of your patient pasturage for little grazing beasts...There's magic in the very word. A White Whale. White is a grand word, like a crash of massed trumpets; and leviathan himself has a kind of placid blundering majesty in his name. And then put them together!!!" Faulkner mixes his respect with hilarity, but the eye of the creative writer becomes clear through this quote: the visceral reactions, romantic tendencies, and manic wordplay of a creative personality. And three exclamation points!!!

My source for reviews: http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?id=11008

Cetology

Melville spends a lot of time making fun of scientific writing. The chapter "Cetology" exemplifies his attitude. Instead of dividing the whales in the scientifically accepted categories, he creates his own: folio, octavo, and duodecimo. These, according to the Norton footnotes, are "technical terms by which printers and booksellers classify the size of books and their pages, from large to small." He is "treating whales as if they were books" (118). Natural enough for Melville to do, since his whale is a book, his book a whale. Melville changes the common scientific classifications in creative protest. The scientific definition in its attempt at logical description loses the beauty of the thing, the cosmic romance. He is raging against technical writing that would "devise a pure 'observation language,' free of emotion and metaphysics which pollute ordinary language" (Carolyn Miller, "A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing" 49).

Leviathanic Histories

One way Melville smoothly ties technical writing into an otherwise fictional narrative is his introduction of a book Ishmael discovers: "an ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew must be about whalers" (342). He goes on to recreate a list of what a whaling boat should carry:

400,000 lbs. of beef

550,000 lbs. of biscuit

2,800 firkins of butter

10,800 barrels of beer

[etc]

The question to ask, other than what a "firkin" is, would be how this material fits in the larger creative whole. Ishmael answers: "Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in this present case...where the reader is flooded with whole pipes, barrels...of good gin and good cheer" (343).

For Melville, the creation of fake technical writing, like the quotes from his imaginary Dutch volume above, easily combines the two forms. However, Melville spent years on the sea and on whaling ships. His specialized knowledge in the field allows him to write technically without such light-hearted fictionalization.

In Chapter 63, "The Crotch," Melville describes with minute detail the part of the ship that gives the chapter its name:

"It is a notched stick of a peculiar form, some two feet in length, which is perpendicularly inserted into the starboard gunwale near the bow, for the purpose of furnishing a rest for the wooden extremity of the harpoon, whose other naked, barbed end slopingly projects from the prow. Thereby the weapon is instantly at hand to it s hurler, who snatches it up as readily from its rest as a backwoodsman swings his rifle from the wall. It is customary to have two harpoons reposing in the crotch, respectively called the first and second irons" (234).

This paragraph contains the specific vocabulary of the whaler: crotch, starboard gunwale, bow, prow, first and second irons. Of these unfamiliar terms, some Melville has taught his reader in previous chapters, and some--crotch and irons--the reader learns for the first time in the passage. A technical writer would recognize the multiple levels of comprehension (an expert in the field versus a layman) at work as Melville attempts to teach his reader the particulars of a whaling ship. For his novel to be successful, the reader must learn a new vocabulary. In this way, Melville blends imaginative, entertaining fiction (the backwoodsmen simile interrupts this "parchingly dry" description) with instructive technical writing.

Page numbers taken from the Norton Critical Edition.

Two Definitions

Melville's Moby-Dick combines the discourse of technical/scientific writing with prose. His metaphysical whaling novel breaks all boundaries between genres and styles. Here are two definitions from A Handbook to Literature that suit Moby-Dick in its vastness of form:

Originally a medical term, Anatomy is used to describe an exhaustive analysis of an idea. The medical definition is a dissection. All parts considered from all angles. In literature it is: "that kind of prose work organized around ideas and dealing with intellectual themes and attitudes with prodigious masses of erudition" (27). Melville's prodigious mass is the whale.

Moby-Dick is an example of Mennipean Satire, a term I just learned tonight. With its mixed structure (sometimes a play, sometimes a novel, sometimes a dictionary) and focus on ideas over concrete, traditional characters, the novel winds between the technical and creative discourses of writing. Bakhtin's theories on the carnivalesque apply, where there are no rules and anything goes. To quote Harmon: "In longer works the Menippean satirist piles up vast accmulation of fact and presents this erudition through some intellectual organizing principle" (318).

As a novel of ideas, Moby-Dick expands beyond the preconceived notions of separate discourses. Melville blends different modes of writing together in his pursuit of the Idea as represented by the white whale.