A Whaler’s Dictionary
Dan Beachy-Quick
Milkweed Editions, 2008

In A Whaler’s Dictionary, Dan Beachy-Quick undertakes an intensely personal delving into the meanings which, for him, constitute the underweave of Moby-Dick. Made up of alphabetically arranged terms drawn both from the text of Moby-Dick and Beachy-Quick’s ideas about it, this dictionary is a gathering of those meanings generated by Beachy-Quick in his self-exhaustive hunt. In these one- to three-page entries, he guides us through not only his interpretation of the novel at hand, but also through extended, idiosyncratic, brilliant, and sometimes inscrutable readings of Buber, Levinas, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Beachy-Quick himself.

That Beachy-Quick is capable of powerful and original perception should be news to no reader of contemporary poetry; his poems are often so startlingly quick and sharp that they lacerate whatever perception-apparatus the reader brought to them, leaving a far larger and more open universe when they are done. Here he applies that quick intelligence to those terms he sees as meaning-gathering nodes for the text of Moby-Dick, terms such as “Pequod,” “I/Thou,” Profit/Prophet,” “Friendship,” and “Coffin.” In his treatment of these terms, he often strikes to the essence of what he sees as important, carrying the reader along to arrive at, and participate in, this insight with him.

For example: In “Scroll,” a one-page entry, he tells us how the crew of the Pequod, having slain their first whale, set about butchering it. “The whalers ‘cut in’ to the first slain whale on a Sabbath day,” he begins, and then summarizes the way that a hook at the end of a rope was inserted into the hole cut and the rope, wound through the ship’s masts for leverage against the bulk of the whale, was pulled on by the crew, resulting in lengths of blubber being pulled off the whale in spiral strips, like an orange being peeled. He continues:

The image resonates beyond the biological description Ishmael, in his scientific mode, gives. The whale seems enscrolled. The scroll is its own skin. Its skin, we learn, is everywhere marked with lines . . . and, below those marks, etched with hieroglyphs and other mystic signs. The whalers prepare the blubber for processing into profit by unwinding the scroll on which the whale’s own text is etched. The whale will be processed into oil that, lit, casts light onto pages. The first five books of the Bible . . . are a scroll. Before the blubber is put into the try-pots it is sliced as “thin as Bible-leaves.” The source of one kind of light is a strange sort of literary analysis that burns the page before reading it.

This passage, pregnant with meaning even excerpted and on its own, becomes more resonant in its natural environment, in context with the other entries. Many of the leaps here touch on passages throughout A Whaler’s Dictionary, and the ideas which span and bind them. Some of these include: the valences of meaning the whale’s skin takes on; the essential paradox of light being made out of the darkness of the whale’s head, the Ocean’s depth, and murderous profit; and the “body” of literary analysis being a physicalized metaphor in the body of the whales, the men who hunt them, and the methods each uses during this pursuit. By organizing his book as he has, short essays on simple terms, Beachy-Quick is able to approach his concerns from multiple and varying angles. The effect is to trace, navigate, pinpoint something untraceable, unnavigable, unpinnable. Like a sailor navigating by the stars, the multiple inferences of triangulation allow him to see (whether it is within himself, Moby-Dick, or the world we share) more than the horizon his eyes are bound to. Such a structure allows him to travel through his associative thoughts swiftly.

Notice how, in the excerpted passage, almost every sentence dramatically changes the meaning of the image treated, jumping within the established terms Moby-Dick has developed and which Beachy-Quick has, as any good reader must do, arranged to his own taste. He ties a visual analogy Ishmael makes (the whale unpeeling like an orange) to two Ishmael made earlier in the text: that the skin of a whale is paper thin and looks, up close, to be written on as paper is; and that the blubber, having been peeled off the whale’s carcass, is sliced thin as (in the whalers’ expression) “Bible leaves.” Add the reference to profit and what seems to be Beachy-Quick’s favorite topic, the various paradoxes reading entails, and you have a passage of remarkable density and reflexivity moving cleanly, like a stone skipping lightly across water’s surface. In this, it is much like the best of his poetry, only it also delights by eliciting what all good criticism does, a great desire to converse with the author further on the subject being discussed.

Some entries are less successful. Beachy-Quick has a habit of repeating himself, both within specific entries and across them. He tends to do so on points which really need support, textual basis, and development, and the lack of these critical necessities, replaced with a repetitive assertiveness of his conclusion as fact, only makes the tic that much more frustrating. Many of these passages would work wonderfully as poems. In a poem, associative images ligamented by repetition can build to a stark power, and the irony of having an implied or explicit dramatic persona speaking allows us to contextualize what is being said—a personality either behind the curtains of the text or on the proscenium declaiming, but a personality we viscerally relate to. In criticism, authority is gained in a different way. It must be earned not only through avenues of originality and brilliance of imagination, but also the demonstration of a trustworthy reason built on a steady support of the claims the critic makes. I am left wondering if certain entries wouldn’t have met form better as a poem, or a passage in a poem. A Whaler’s Dictionary is too clearly in the realm of prosaic criticism, for all its associative flights, for me to be satisfied on this point by considering it a 326-page prose poem.

It’s a small matter, though, placed in context of the lovely conversation Beachy-Quick engages in here with so many of the authors he obviously loves, Melville chief among them. Overhearing this conversation was mostly entrancing, sometimes frustrating, always intensely interesting, illuminating, and diverting. Any who rate Moby-Dick among their loved books should have A Whaler’s Dictionary on their shelves.