Moby-Dick: “That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate”

“Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will.” (ch.86) 

It often puzzles me that lots of readers don’t seem to notice that there are two quests in Moby-Dick: a physical quest (Ahab’s pursuit of Moby Dick) and a metaphysical quest (Ishmael’s search for meaning). Ahab is not the only obsessive: he’s obsessed with a whale; Ishmael is obsessed with the whale. 

For what is the whale? Leviathan? A sea monster? A personification of all that maddens and torments? A dumb brute? A dish? A poor animal murdered to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men? Some inscrutable, unknowable thing? 

“‘All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.’” (ch.36) 

Even Ahab does not know—the whale is beyond his reach. 

Thus Ishmael seeks to know the whale, to learn everything he can—from head to tail, from blubber to skeleton—so as to grasp the meaning of Moby Dick, of the chase, of his own survival. Ahab is mad, but is Ishmael not, too, a madman? 

“Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals—morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old man’s ire—by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be—what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life,—all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go.” (ch.41) 

What’s the White Whale to them, indeed? But Ishmael too was part of the chase. Ishmael too went down with the Pequod—and yet he survives. What’s the meaning of that fatal chase? And his own madness? And what does it mean that he alone lives? 

But Ishmael isn’t free; his soul continues to be possessed by the madness of the old man. 

“Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. […] These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable.” (ch.68) 

It was only when I got to the chapter “The Doubloon” that I realised that Ishmael’s obsession with meaning—with signs and wonders—came from Ahab. 

“‘What then should there be in this doubloon of the Equator that is so killing wonderful? By Golconda! let me read it once. Halloa! here’s signs and wonders truly! That, now, is what old Bowditch in his Epitome calls the zodiac, and what my almanac below calls ditto. I’ll get the almanac and as I have heard devils can be raised with Daboll’s arithmetic, I’ll try my hand at raising a meaning out of these queer curvicues here with the Massachusetts calendar.’” (ch.99)

Ahab seeks meaning in a doubloon; Ishmael sees hieroglyphics on the skin of a whale. 

“‘There’s another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men in one kind of world, you see. Dodge again! here comes Queequeg—all tattooing—looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself. What says the Cannibal? As I live he’s comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone; thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels, I suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon’s Astronomy in the back country…’” (ibid.) 

Ahab sees signs and wonders on the surface of a doubloon, and on the skin of Queequeg. That remark on Queequeg might only be a passing thought for Ahab, but Ishmael later repeats it: 

“Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last.” (ch.110) 

What are these mysteries in the tattoos of Queequeg, and on the skin of the whale? Do they contain answers? But Ishmael can never know, and the entire book is his quest for meaning, his attempt to strike through the mask.