Some of the book’s madness undoubtedly stems from its conceit as a dodgy draft of a true story. Moby-Dick is told in the first person. Some (maybe most) first-person books are just told from within the narrator’s perspective without being conceptualized as books. Moby-Dick is different. It’s presented as Ishmael’s written account of his days on the Pequod, the whaling ship that sets out in pursuit of the infamous white whale. This book, the product of his education at sea, might prove the only good and profitable thing he’s ever done.
And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
Not only is Moby-Dick self-consciously Ishmael’s book, it’s a draft of a book—at least, to the extent that Ishmael is aware how much is left necessarily unfinished in it. Near the end of his catalog of whales, he adds a little apologia:
Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!
At least one modern fan of Moby-Dick acknowledges this aspect of the text as part of its beauty and magic: “But ‘Moby-Dick’ is not a novel. It’s barely a book at all,” wrote Philip Hoare in The New Yorker. “It’s more an act of transference, of ideas and evocations hung around the vast and unknowable shape of the whale, an extended musing on the strange meeting of human history and natural history.” These “ideas and evocations” that are “hung around” the whale are held in suspension by the book’s four-thousand-odd semicolons, sturdy little nails holding narrative thread spread out wide enough to comprehend not just a whale but everything the whale comes to mean to the men hunting it.
Plotwise, the book isn’t really all that. “The plot is meagre beyond comparison, as the whole of the incident might very conveniently have been comprised in half of one of these three interminable volumes,” complained a reviewer for the London Britannia; many modern readers have felt the same way.* The truly great moments in the book come when Ishmael goes off on what could be considered a tangent. There are entire chapters devoted to whale fat, or to the color white, or to questions about whether the whale has shrunk since God first created it. At the paragraph level, too, Ishmael is prone to wandering off.
It’s true that Melville isn’t afraid of a long sentence, but I’ve seen longer sentences. (Ask me about my Faulkner phase.) No, it’s not really that Melville uses the semicolon to stretch out the distance between a capital letter and a period; instead, the semicolons are in the service of carrying you slowly, gently, pleasurably away from whatever it was you thought you were reading about—the process of beheading a whale, or how to assess winds, or cannibalism.
I say “pleasurably,” but of course some people don’t find these digressions pleasurable at all, and would have agreed with Melville’s contemporary critics, not our present-day appraisal of the book, which counts it among the best of American novels. After it was rediscovered by literary critics in the 1920s, Melville’s flop was transformed into a classic. Readers now pick it up based on its literary repute or because it’s a requirement for a class, and after a few pages many of those readers would gladly hurl it into the depths. Even when the action picks up, Ishmael’s narration isn’t exactly economical. He often uses semicolons to string several events into sequence.
When instantly, the entire ship careens over on her side; every bolt in her starts like the nail-heads of an old house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her frightened mast-heads to the sky. More and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping heave of the windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows; till at last, a swift, startling snap is heard; with a great swash the ship rolled upward and backward from the whale, and the triumphant tackle rises into sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular end of the first strip of blubber.
Even his jokes require extended setups that sometimes take the text wandering off from the matter at hand (and the matter at hand is, as always, more likely than not to be tangential to the “main events” of the book already):
In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish. The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump, whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings), they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess, in flavor somewhat resembling calf’s head, which is quite a dish among some epicures; and everyone knows that some young bucks among the epicures, by continually dining upon calves’ brains, by and by get to have a little brains of their own, so as to be able to tell a calf’s head from their own heads; which, indeed, requires uncommon discrimination. And that is the reason why a young buck with an intelligent-looking calf’s head before him, is somehow one of the saddest sights you can see. The head looks a sort of reproachfully at him, with an ‘Et tu, Brute!’ expression.
But wait—we were supposed to be talking about eating whales. . . .
“Its oceanic reach and perverse digression provide endless sources of inspiration and interpretation,” writes Philip Hoare. “In chapters such as the famously sublime ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’—almost hallucinatory in its associative suspension of normality and subtle obscenity—Melville takes up his theme, then takes it apart, teasing it out to impossibly filigreed tendrils, until you wonder how you, or he, got there in the first place.” Eventually Melville’s disquisition on the idea of whiteness winds its way back to the matter of hunting Moby-Dick, but only after sideswiping practically every subject in the arts and sciences:
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino Whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
The semicolon was the perfect punctuation mark for capturing the “mystical and well nigh ineffable” “horror” occasioned by the w
hiteness of the whale, which Ishmael “almost despair[ed] of putting in a comprehensible form.”
Some readers thought Ishmael’s despair was well-justified. Suggestive and beautiful though Melville’s disquisition on the whale’s whiteness may be to many readers (myself included), it confounded and repelled others, especially those who picked up a copy of Moby-Dick after devouring one of Melville’s previous novels. He didn’t start out his literary career with the penumbral writing style that fogged the plot of Moby-Dick. His first novel, Typee, was a bestselling account of two sailors’ adventures in Polynesia. Many critics longed to return to those islands. “Mr. Melville grows wilder and more untamable with every adventure,” a review in the New York Evangelist observed. “In Typee and Omoo, he began with a semblance of life and reality, though it was often but the faintest kind of semblance. As he advanced, he threw off the pretense of probability, and wandered into the mist and vagueness of poetry and fantasy, and now in this last venture, has reached the very limbo of eccentricity.”* Typee, with its “semblance of reality,” had less use for the semicolon (although to be sure, Melville still exercised it plenty). The novel clocked in at around 107,000 words and 845 semicolons, a rate of approximately one semicolon for every 127 words. Moby-Dick, on the other hand, was about double the length at around 210,000 words, but had 4000 semicolons. That’s one for every 52 words. The semicolons are Moby-Dick’s joints, allowing the novel the freedom of movement it needed to tour such a large and disparate collection of themes.
Bones of the right whale, from Recent Memoirs on the Cetacea (1866)
D. H. Lawrence, who helped dredge Melville back up from obscurity in the 1920s, wrote of Moby-Dick that “there is something really overwhelming in these whale-hunts, almost superhuman or inhuman, bigger than life, more terrific than human activity.” In its narrative structure and ambition as well as its themes, Moby-Dick was ahead of its time, in uncharted waters. Just as sailors needed instruments to wander out past sight of shore, Moby-Dick required writing technologies that could allow it to venture out beyond the genre constraints of its time, and one of those technological marvels—as slender and significant as a compass needle—was the semicolon.
TRUST ME, I’M A WRITER
Looking at me over the rim of a teacup on a rainy London afternoon, my British friend Suzanne chooses her words carefully. “We don’t really think of him as a popular writer,” she says diplomatically, in response to my announcement that I’m working on a section on Henry James’s semicolons. We Americans don’t think of him as a popular writer either, I assure her.
If reviews for Moby-Dick ranged from lukewarm to cool, reviews for Henry James’s later work were often ice cold. His books produced “acute periodic exasperation” in their readers. His sentences were “cumbrous and difficult, struggling through a press of hints and ideas.” A review of his 1904 book, The Golden Bowl, appeared under the heading “A Novel for the Select Few.” The reviewer wagered that “a more difficult book to read surely was never written. It is the minutest study in the psychological analysis of certain highly complex, over-refined, over-sensitised present-day persons.” For casual readers, the book was “unreadable,” and anyone with any kind of a life beyond sprawling on a chaise longue had better not even try: “Life is too short to master its intricacies of style and treatment.” Or, as another, more circumspect reviewer tactfully put it, the book was to be recommended only for “the seasoned reader of Henry James.”*
Melville, at least, was allowed to fade quietly back into an ordinary life after Moby-Dick bombed. Henry James had no such luck, in part because of his famous older brother, William. William James, psychologist and philosopher, was beloved by the public. He thrived in front of a crowd; Henry, on the other hand, declined to give interviews and eventually holed up in quiet Sussex, England. Like so many younger brothers, Henry was destined to be compared to his older sibling whether he liked it or not. The long shadow William’s accomplishments cast didn’t offer much in the way of flattering lighting for Henry:
Someone has said that “Henry James is a novelist who writes like a psychologist and William James a psychologist who writes like a novelist.” The epigram pays the greater compliment to the psychologist for it is much more difficult for a man of science to write charmingly of his speciality than for a literary man to acquire mannerism and become obscure. Certain it is that William James is the most popular of philosophers and Henry James not impossibly the least popular of novelists.
In his sixties, facing down a lifetime of mixed reviews, Henry went back through his early novels and stories and created revised versions of them. These heavily altered stories were published by Scribner between 1907 and 1909 and are known as the “New York Editions.” James’s revisions shone harsh introspective light into previously shadowy corners of his characters’ minds, exploding sentence after sentence with laborious psychological detail. The revisions are perplexing; suddenly, there is little space for the reader’s imagination or inference. Every thought is so painstakingly spelled out, every object so slavishly described, that the atmosphere of the book becomes suffocating. Nothing is left unsaid.
Sentences puffed out in this way become difficult even to comprehend. Watch how the directness of a sentence in James’s 1877 edition of his novel Roderick Hudson becomes tortured and effortful. The original version was no short sentence, but it was well-managed:
She was a woman for the light, not for the shade; and her natural line was not picturesque reserve and mysterious melancholy, but frank, joyous, brilliant action, with just so much meditation as was necessary, and not a grain more.
Revised, its punctuation barely holds it together: phrases come rushing like water through the barriers of colons and commas and semicolons.
She was a creature for the sun and the air, for no sort of hereditary shade or equivocal gloom; and her natural line was neither imposed reserve nor mysterious melancholy, but positive life, the life of the great world—his great world—not the grand monde as there understood if he wasn’t mistaken, which seemed squeezable into a couple of rooms of that inconvenient and ill-warmed house: all with nothing worse to brood about, when necessary, than the mystery perhaps of the happiness that would so queerly have come to her.
“You can never revise too often!” I used to tell students, before I had read much James.
One of the starkest differences generated by James’s revisions can be glimpsed in a climactic scene near the end of Portrait of a Lady. Isabel Archer, the protagonist, has been tricked into marrying Gilbert Osmond, who schemes with his ex-lover Madam Merle to poach the extraordinary fortune Isabel has inherited. After discovering Osmond’s deception, Isabel finds herself alone with an admirer she had once rejected, Caspar Goodwood. In the original 1881 edition of the novel, James’s account of what passes between Isabel and Goodwood is oblique, restrained, and allows the simile of “lightning” maximum impact. “He glared at her a moment through the dusk, and the next instant she felt his arms about her and his lips on her own lips. His kiss was like a flash of lightning; when it was dark again she was free.” Why on earth did James need to tinker with this perfect set of sentences? But tinker he did.
His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed; and it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession. So had she heard of those wrecked and under water following a train of images before they sink. But when darkness returned she was free.
It’s not that the revision makes for an awful passage. It’s just that compared to the original, it feels so heavy-handed. Looking at the grammar of the original version of the sentence, I picture Gale Sondergaard in the noir cinema classic The Letter, hovering behind a beaded curtain in a glittering dress. The semicolon is that tantalizing veil shimmering between the two halves of the senten
ce, showing us just enough to let us dream.
In the revised version of the passage, on the other hand, the semicolon makes me think of Sisyphus. That semicolon is a shoulder pressed against the heaviness of the back half of the sentence, trying desperately to huff its weight forwards so that . . . well, I’m not sure, exactly. But wherever James is going with the sentence, that semicolon is straining just to keep the whole thing from collapsing on itself. More significant even than the shift in style is the loss of a potently poetic irony. In the revised version, we lose the beautifully ominous paradox of the proximity of the flash of lightning, the spark of passion that traps Isabel, to the freedom that comes when that bright light is extinguished. The attraction that Isabel feels to Goodwood is a different type of constraint than her marriage to Osmond, but it is, nonetheless, a loss of freedom in which she does not act but is acted upon; when the light vanishes and she is “free,” she runs.
In the passages he went back and painstakingly altered, James’s modifications feel anxious, as though he were nervous we readers just couldn’t be trusted with the freedom of the first version. What might we imagine, what might we feel? Better not to leave it up to us, he seems to have decided. Not only did he bloat sentences throughout the book with a map of Isabel’s every thought, he changed the ending of the novel, removing any ambiguity as to whether Isabel might reject Osmond and choose Goodwood instead, or even reject them both and strike out on her own. In the revised version, he made it as clear as he could that Isabel returned to Osmond. There is no other choice for us to consider. And so he closed the gaps, sweeping away the vague.
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