New feature! Homemade audio (8:08), performed immediately upon finishing the list below.
UPDATE 5/06 – Links to reading intentionally broken. Ugh.
particoloured, a.
1. Partly of one colour and partly of another or others; variegated; esp. (of a dog or other animal) having a coat of with two or more colours in distinct patches.
slippering, vbl. n.
Beating with a slipper.
horse-collar
The COLLAR of a horse.
I mean, I assumed – but it wasn’t an item I was able immediately to picture.
pikestaff, n.
1. A staff or walking stick, esp. a walking stick with a metal point at the lower end, similar to an alpenstock. Also fig. Now rare except in set phrases (see sense 2).
2. In proverbial phrases, as the type of something plain, straight, or obvious, as stiff as a pikestaff, clear as a pikestaff, to call a pikestaff a pikestaff, etc.
toilet, n.
5. a. The action or process of dressing, or, more recently, of washing and grooming.
“Toilette” is just an alternate spelling, though OED tells me that it usually takes the frenchified pronunciation when spelled this way. Melville uses both spellings in the course of this chapter.
beaver, n.
3. a. A hat made of beaver’s fur, or some imitation of it; formerly worn by both sexes, but chiefly by men.
Just checking. Basically, this just means a nice hat.
trowsers
alt. spelling of trousers, of course.
go-off, colloq.
1. The action or time of going off; a starting, commencement.
stave, v.
Has no meaning in the OED that can account for the current usage in the phrase “staving about.” If you search for “staving about” you’ll find this sentence and only this sentence. On context it’s clear enough, and seems to fit the sound of the word. But as far as I can tell it doesn’t mean anything particular.
centre-table
A table intended for the centre of a room, formerly often used for the display of books, albums, etc.
stock, n.
IV. The more massive portion of an instrument or weapon; usually, the body or handle, to which the working part is attached.
29. The handle (of a whip, fishing-rod, etc.).
Rogers’s best cutlery
Here’s what I can figure out. Joseph Rogers, of Sheffield, was a major cutlery works and the manufacturer of many pocketknives imported and sold in the US. This reference, as well as another one in Melville’s White Jacket seem to confirm that “Rogers’s Best” was a related brand-name or advertising phrase. What he means here is not entirely clear to me, however. Perhaps – I’m making this up – perhaps “Rogers’s Best Cutlery” knives were known or advertised to be sharp enough to shave with … or perhaps “Rogers’s Best Cutlery” is simply being used as a jokingly genteel term for the harpoon. I don’t know – the complete solution to this one seems to be eluding my Google skills. Write in if you figure it out!
pilot jacket, n.
= PEA-JACKET n.
A short, double-breasted, woollen overcoat, formerly commonly worn by sailors.
So help me out here: Is “stiff as a pikestaff” in this context intended to be, er, homoerotic? I’ve always hoped so.
I feel like I’ve encountered the “dude, they sleep together” take on Moby-Dick somewhere out there; and it’s true that the embrace is twice described as matrimonial. But, based on my developing sense of the text from my reading of Chapters 1-3, it seems more likely to me that Melville’s point with the bed and the embrace is just part of the grand theme of identifying and bonding with savages (and with the inner savage). I take it that the ghostly hand in the anecdote is, like the whale and everything else, something in Ishmael’s head and/or an emanation of the cosmic mystery of the universe. And he’s saying this is what was going on when Queequeg embraced him – he’s wedded somehow to the pagan truth of the world/himself. Or something. Anyway, the “marriage bed” scene plays very nicely into all that (whatever that is) without any apparent use for the sexual imagery that could easily follow but which notably does not. In that connection, what could it mean? We don’t just marry the pagan within but we have sex with him?
Melville’s also saying that Christian propriety about whether two men sleep together is a superficial custom with no essential moral significance, and it seems to me that the reflexive, adolescent assumption that something sexual is going on would be classed as part of that deluded Christian timidity. You could claim that he’s additionally claiming that Christian disapproval of homosexual behavior is similarly “inessential,” but that, historically speaking, has been much stronger medicine to take. He’s taking such efforts to point out why our assumptions about savages are wrong; regardless of whether he’d agree with it in the first place, it’s hard for me to imagine that he’d just bury the sex thing and expect it to come across. So you’re left with the theory that he believes in it but doesn’t think he can afford to be direct about it, so he puts in a “secret” penis image in the form of the phrase “stiff as a pikestaff,” which, with foreknowledge of Freud, he has cleverly designed to lie in waiting, imperceptible, until the 20th century can reveal it to the world.
It’d take a very strong argument to convince me that the desire to see a stock phrase as a coded sexual reference is sensitive literary instinct and not just prurience.
I’d definitely want to hear it if you had one, though. Based on your “I’ve always hoped so,” I take it you don’t?
Well, check out entry #64 on this list, compiled a few years ago by a gay and lesbian publishers association, with the assistance of some quite distinguished gay writers as judges:
http://www.literarycritic.com/gaylesbian1.htm
Actually, the entire list is sort of a hoot — the books seem to be ranked according to the formula [strength of homosexual themes] x [greatness]. I’ll give you #11 and #60 and even #13, but #31? #43? #67? Anyway, it’s funny.
I actually had never realized that “stiff as a pikestaff” was a stock phrase and not a literal description of Queequeg’s tumescence. Your project has paid for itself in spades.