Quote 25
For this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory. (45.7)
Ishmael (and Melville) is highly concerned with making the underlying structure of Moby-Dick seem reasonable and even probable. He’s obsessed with creating a veneer of realism. In this passage, he claims it’s because he doesn’t want the novel interpreted symbolically.
We’re sorry to disappoint him, but some of the symbols are just too obvious. Still, it’s important to remember that part of what Moby-Dick tries to do is play down its own literariness. Of course, the other thing it tries to do is play up its literariness. But at least that creates an interesting contradiction.
Quote 26
Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face, in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read if it you can. (79.6)
This is supposed to sound as though Ishmael is daring you to interpret the whale as a symbol, daring you to try as hard as you possibly can to "read" the whale’s meaning. It’s also Melville daring you to make sense of this crazy novel. We know you’re up to the challenge!
Quote 27
The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing – at least, what untattooed parts might remain – I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale. (102.13)
Ishmael’s close association between composing a work of literature and the body reminds us that Moby-Dick continually interprets the body as a blank page on which events write themselves. Think of Queequeg’s tattoos, or Ahab’s whalebone leg, or Starbuck’s condensed leanness. Our bodies tell our stories, so why not tell our stories on our bodies? That’s how Ishmael thinks, anyway.