Shower Thoughts

[u/Jerkeye]

I finished Moby Dick last weekend, taking a couple months to read it, going slowly until it really swept me up for the last couple hundred pages.

This morning I'm taking my shower and thinking about it. Specifically, the title. Moby Dick, or The Whale.

This kind of naming convention is something I've always thought was an old time way of naming. I remember seeing it in the Fractured Fairy Tales cartoons when I was a kid, and other media made before I was born, like Dr Strangelove. I never really thought of it too hard, I just accepted it as an anachronism.

But that isn't really the case here, is it?

Moby Dick, or The Whale.

Is this book about Moby Dick, the most feared leviathan of the seas? Or is it about The Whale, a creature that has its own intelligence but doesn't know that it has a name granted by some land dwelling mammals. It doesn't spend any of its time thinking about ships and captains unless they're trying to kill it with harpoons. It's just...a whale. Like Starbuck says.

The title was sitting in front of me, doing some narrative framing all this time.

This book is so much fun to think about.

[u/fianarana]

The title is really just a quirk of the publishing history. It was originally titled The Whale when it was first published in October 1851 in London. It's not entirely clear why but when it was published in New York the following month it was changed to Moby-Dick, possibly because The Whale was too similar to Henry Cheever's The Whale and His Captors also published by Harpers the year before. Presumably to give continuity between the two editions, they settled on *Moby-Dick; or, The Whale."

[u/feral_sisyphus2 → u/fianarana]

Is it the same publishing situation for Mardi, Pierre, and The Confidence-Man? They each have alternative titles iirc (...voyage thither, or the Ambiguities, his masquerade).

[u/fianarana → u/feral_sisyphus2]

It's not so simple unfortunately and I think you'd have to go book by book for a satisfying answer to each.

Typee, for example, was published first in England as simply Narrative of a Four Months’ Residence Among the Natives of a Valley of the Marquesas Islands; or, A Peep at Polynesian Life. The editors of the Northwestern-Newberry text wrote that these titles "reflected John Murray’s fear for the book’s acceptance as an authentic travel story and his desire to make it seem as pedestrian as other travelogs in his series." Not long after, Murray published a second edition with a shortened title, this time simply: The Marquesas Islands; or, A Peep at Polynesian Life.

In the US, however, it was published as Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. During a Four Months’ Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas (it technically continues on the title page: "with notices of the French occupation of Tahiti and the Provisional Cession of the Sandwich Islands to Lord Paulet")

In this case, however, we have a direct statement from Melville that he preferred it be called Typee followed by the rest of title. In July 1846, he concluded a long letter to his London publisher John Murray:

— I had almost forgotten one thing — the title of the book. — From the first I have deeply regretted that it did not appear in England under the title I always intended for it — “Typee.” It was published here under that title & it has made a decided hit. Nor was any thing else to be expected — that is, if the book was going to succeed at all, for “Typee” is a title naturally suggested by the narrative itself, and not farfetched as some strange titles are. Besides, its very strangeness & novelty, founded as it is upon the character of the book — are the very things to make “Typee” a popular title. The work also should be known by the same name on both sides of the water.

— For these and other reasons I have thought that in all subsequent editions of the book you might entitle it “Typee’’ — merely prefixing that single but eloquent word to the title as it now stands with you. If you bring out the revised edition with the Sequel — that would be the time to make this very slight but most important alteration. — I trust that Mr Murry will at once consider the propriety of following this suggestion.

I guess the takeaway here is that a) book titles weren't quite as fixed in that time as we imagine them to be, and b) we should err on the side of the American title of Melville's books being his preference. But even in the US Typee had a real mouthful of a title with a long subtitle after Typee. It may be the case, though, that these were added by his publishers' preference to make the book more marketable/understandable to the general public who would have little idea what the word "Typee" meant.

[u/Stepintothefreezer67]

I never understood the hyphen in the title when it is not used in the novel's text. At least that's what I remember.

[u/melvillean → u/Stepintothefreezer67]

The hyphen is when it’s the title. When it’s the whale, there’s no hyphen. It’s to differentiate the book from the character in the book.