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.