"}\n\nEverything Tumblr has told you about Moby-Dick is absolute bullshit, and everything that Tumblr has told you about Moby-Dick is 100% true. It\u2019s a travelogue fantasy. It\u2019s proto-science fiction. It\u2019s cosmic horror. It\u2019s shockingly original and it\u2019s shamelessly plagiaristic. It\u2019s a misotheistic Christian parable in which the whale is the mask of a cruel, uncaring God and Ahab is Satan himself, not as trickster or as tempter, but as doomed hero. It\u2019s the most gripping thing you\u2019ll ever read. It\u2019s boring as shit. But above all else \u2013 and I cannot emphasise this enough \u2013 it is filled with Facts About Whales.
Some of which are even true.
I\u2019d argue that the wrong Whale Facts are much more interesting than the correct ones. Every time you run into an incorrect Whale Fact, you\u2019re left with several options:
- It\u2019s something which was believed to be true at the time of the work\u2019s authorship, and later proved not to be.
\u00a0- It\u2019s something which was understood to be a popular misconception at the time of the work\u2019s authorship, and Melville\u2019s research failed him.
\u00a0- It\u2019s something which was legitimately an unsettled question at the time of the work\u2019s authorship, and Melville just happened to come down on the wrong side of the debate. (This is most likely to be the case when the Whale Fact in question relates to taxonomy; e.g., the whole \u201cwhat is a fish?\u201d business.)
\u00a0- It\u2019s something which has no known precedent outside of the work itself, seriously, where the fuck did Melville get that?
Each of these options has a potentially fascinating story behind it. Basically, when Melville gets a Whale Fact right, that tells you a thing about whales \u2013 but when Melville gets a Whale Fact wrong, that tells you something about the context of the work\u2019s authorship. And frankly? I\u2019ve got better sources available to me if I just want to know things about whales!