A Wondrous Work in One Volume

There is a difference between carrying something and transmitting it.

A departed prophet and seer inscribed on Queequeg's body "a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth." Every surface of him — shoulders, chest, arms, the face with its geometric lines — was text. The prophet put everything he knew into the marks. He encoded his entire cosmology into a living medium.

But the medium was wrong for transmission.

Queequeg could not read it. "His own live heart beat against them" — he carried the complete theory, pressed against it with every heartbeat — "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." Not because he refused to share. Not because the knowledge was lost. Because the form of it made transmission impossible. Queequeg was the text. He was the only copy. When he died, the complete theory would die — not destroyed, not withheld, just unmediatable. The medium and the message had become the same thing.

Melville understood what this meant. He had Ahab see it too.

One morning Ahab turned away from looking at Queequeg and said: "Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!"

Ahab has spent the whole voyage demanding the universe answer him. He has nailed a doubloon to the mast as reward for whoever spots the whale. He has driven a crew to the edge of mutiny in pursuit of a single answer. He has looked at the severed whale's head and demanded it speak — "not one syllable is thine!" the head has said back with its silence. The universe keeps presenting him with the fact of meaning — everything seems arranged, pointed, weighted with intention — and then withholding the actual meaning.

And now here is Queequeg. A man walking around with the complete theory written on his skin, unable to read a word of it.

The tantalization isn't the whale this time. It's not the white absence that won't be grasped. It's a man. A friend. Someone Ishmael slept next to in Nantucket and called his bosom companion. Queequeg is the universe doing it again: presenting the complete answer in a form that cannot be used.

But then Queequeg nearly dies, rallies on account of having remembered a small duty ashore he'd left undone, and does something remarkable with the coffin that was built for him.

He decides to use it as a sea-chest. And in his spare hours, he carves the lid "with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings" — striving, Melville says, "in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body."

He transcribes himself onto wood.

Not perfectly. In his rude way. He can't read the original text any better than anyone else — he's working from feel, from the shapes he can sense on his own skin, from whatever partial access he has to the marks he's always lived inside. The coffin lid is a copy of an unreadable text made by the text itself, which cannot read itself.

And then, after the Pequod goes down — after Ahab is caught in his own line and pulled under, after the ship itself is dragged into the vortex — the coffin-life-buoy shoots up from the center of the wreck and floats to the surface.

Ishmael grabs it.

"Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main."

He is kept alive by the imperfect copy of an unreadable text. He cannot read the carved lid any better than he could have read Queequeg's body. The cosmological theory is still closed to him, still hieroglyphic, still waiting for an interpreter who will never come. But it holds him up. He floats home on it.

The wisdom doesn't transmit as content. It transmits as form.

This is the distinction the chapter offers — quietly, almost parenthetically, in the middle of a story about Queequeg's near-death and recovery. The prophet's knowledge can't be passed on as knowledge. It can't be extracted from the medium and handed over. But the form of it — the shape the knowledge takes when it has been poured into a living person and then copied onto wood — that form can hold a man up in the ocean.

It's not nothing. It's not what you'd want. Ishmael survives but does not understand. He carries the coffin ashore and the coffin gives him no answers. The Rachel picks him up — "only found another orphan," Melville says at the end — and the orphan is alive on account of the prophet's unreadable wisdom, but no wiser.

There's something almost kind in this. The universe, which has been tantalizing Ahab for 135 chapters, does eventually come through for Ishmael. Just not in the form Ahab wanted. Not as revelation. As flotation.

What the prophet should have done, if he wanted his knowledge to survive him, was write it down in something other than skin. That's the obvious conclusion. The tragedy of Queequeg is a tragedy of medium choice: all that wisdom, no transmission vector.

But Melville is too honest for the obvious conclusion. He doesn't present the tattoos as a failure. He presents them as a tantalization — which is different. A failure is an attempt that didn't reach its goal. A tantalization is a success that refuses to complete itself. The prophet succeeded in encoding his complete theory. The code just won't resolve.

And when Queequeg copies it onto the coffin — imperfectly, in his rude way — something of the original does survive. Not the content. The form. The shape that knowledge takes when it has been lived inside for decades, when it has been pressed against a beating heart, when it has shaped the person who carried it even as the person could not read it. That form holds a survivor up.

Ishmael can't tell you what the theory of the heavens and the earth was. He could describe the coffin if you asked him — the grotesque figures, the drawings, the carved patterns he lay on for a day and a night. He couldn't tell you what any of it meant.

But he is alive. The orphan is found. And the book exists.

That's what survives: not the wisdom itself, but Ishmael, shaped by having been near it. The one person who can bear witness to all of it — to Ahab's hunger, to Queequeg's patience, to the whale's indifference, to the way the universe presents the complete theory in an unreadable form and then lets the medium moulder — is the orphan who floated home on the copy.

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.