I Look, You Look, He Looks

Chapter 99 of Moby-Dick is the one everyone knows is coming. Ahab nailed the doubloon to the mast in Chapter 36 — the gold coin, prize for whoever first sights the White Whale — and now, eighty chapters later, Melville finally lets the other men look at it.

What happens is not what you'd expect from a prize competition. Nobody argues about who gets it. Nobody checks whether the White Whale has been sighted. Instead, one by one, eight characters step up to the coin and read it. Eight men, same coin, eight entirely different readings. And Stubb narrates the whole sequence from the try-works, watching, cataloguing, slightly baffled — so we're watching a watcher watch a series of watchers. The chapter is a telescope trained on the act of interpretation.

Ahab is first, and he gives away the game immediately.

The coin is from Ecuador: REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR: QUITO. Three mountain peaks stamped on its face — one with a flame, one with a tower, one with a crowing cock. Ahab looks at them and says: "The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab."

And then, having reduced the imagery to his own reflection, he delivers the sentence that is the chapter's center: "this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician's glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self."

He knows.

That's the thing. Ahab knows exactly what he's doing. He names the interpretive trap — the coin as mirror, the reader as the thing being read — and then he steps directly into it. He reads the coin and sees only Ahab. The knowledge of the trap is complete and the trap closes anyway. There is a certain precision to this: knowing that you're doing a thing does not mean you can stop doing it. Awareness of the mirror doesn't give you access to anything that lies beyond the mirror. Ahab is as lucid as anyone on the ship. He's also the most completely enclosed.

Starbuck comes next, and he reads differently — Christian, mournful, shot through with real grief. He sees the peaks as Trinity, the valley between them as the vale of Death, the moving sun as God's presence that cannot be held. "This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me."

And then: "I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely."

This sentence has haunted me since I read it.

He doesn't say the coin is wrong. He doesn't say he doesn't believe it. He says he will quit it lest it shake him. Lest something real happen to him. And the word falsely is doing extraordinary work — it doesn't mean "incorrectly," because the truth he's hearing is real. It means something closer to: if I let this truth finish what it's started, I will be moved to act on it. And the action it would move me toward is confronting Ahab. And I cannot do that. So I cannot let the truth complete itself.

Starbuck's retreat is not cowardice in the ordinary sense. It's a man who knows exactly where his limits are and enforces them before those limits are tested. He cannot go where the coin is pointing. So he doesn't look at the coin long enough for it to point there clearly. He leaves before the truth has spoken its last word, because he has already calculated what the last word will be and what it will cost him.

There's something almost honest about this. He doesn't deceive himself about what the coin says. He deceives himself about his reason for walking away.

Then Stubb, narrating all of this, takes his own turn. He reads the zodiac as the life of man — Aries to Pisces, birth to sleep, each sign a new assault and a new recovery — and he makes it cheerful. "There's a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty. Jollily he, aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and so, alow here, does jolly Stubb."

Stubb is not stupid. He's doing something deliberate. He takes the cosmic machinery — the full weight of mortality, the zodiacal calendar of human suffering — and decides to find it funny. The alternative, for Stubb, is not heroism; it's Ahab. Jolly Stubb is a kind of wisdom. He reads the coin into something he can live in.

Flask looks at the coin and sees sixteen dollars. Nine hundred sixty cigars. He walks away satisfied.

The instinct is to call Flask shallow. But Flask is immune in a way that Ahab is not. The coin cannot read Flask because Flask refuses to enter the register where symbols mean things. He doesn't have a mirror for the coin to reflect; he has a ledger. You can't use a coin as a Rorschach on a man who sees coins as coins. There's a kind of sovereignty in this, even if it forecloses everything else. Flask will never be shaken by a symbol. He also will never be moved by one.

The Manxman sees omens and doom — the roaring lion, the witch of Copenhagen, the ship's destruction foretold. Queequeg compares the coin to his tattooed thigh, can't find the match, concludes it's an old button off a king's trousers. His epistemology is embodied, personal, and complete; the coin arrives at a system that simply doesn't have room for it. Fedallah makes a sign to the sign and bows. He recognizes the fire. Nothing more needs saying.

Eight men. Eight complete cosmologies. Same coin.

And then Pip.

"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."

Three times. Pip says it three times. And then he adds: "And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats."

This is Murray's Grammar. The conjugation of the verb to look, in all its persons and numbers. Nothing more.

Stubb, watching, is baffled and unsettled: "he's too crazy-witty for my sanity." And Pip, alone with the doubloon, adds one more thing: "Here's the ship's navel, this doubloon here, and they are all on fire to unscrew it. But, unscrew your navel, and what's the consequence?"

Pip is the one who was dropped overboard. Who sank to the ocean floor and saw the miser-merman hoarding the drowned sailors' hearts. Who came back empty of himself and prophetically full of something else. He's the one who has actually been to the place the coin is trying to describe — to the absolute, to the bottom — and returned unable to operate in the world anymore but also unable to be fooled by any of its symbols.

So when he comes to the doubloon, he doesn't interpret it. He steps outside the act of interpretation and conjugates the universal verb. Present tense. All persons. All numbers. I look, you look, he looks. The thing that is universally true about the coin is not what it shows — it's that everyone looks at it and sees themselves. Pip doesn't say what he sees. He says that everyone looks. He reports only the structure.

The madman is the only one who gets out of the mirror.

And then the navel question: they are all on fire to unscrew it. But you can't unscrew the navel without destroying the body it holds together. The center of the ship — the coin Ahab nailed there — cannot be extracted. It can be read, misread, interpreted, projected upon. But the moment you remove it from where it is, you have something else. A piece of gold. Sixteen dollars. Nine hundred sixty cigars.

There's a move Melville is making that I want to name.

Every reader of this chapter is also in this chapter. You read it, and somewhere in the sequence — Ahab, Starbuck, Stubb, Flask, the Manxman, Queequeg, Fedallah, Pip — you find the character whose reading most persuades you. And that preference reveals you. Melville knew this. He structured the chapter so that it performs its own argument on its audience. The coin is not just the doubloon on the mast; it's the chapter you're holding. And the chapter is watching you decide which interpretation is right.

Which means: which one did you find most persuasive?

If you nodded along with Ahab's named trap, and found his self-knowledge impressive before noticing that he walked right into it anyway — that says something.

If Starbuck's grief felt most real to you, and you found his retreat understandable, even wise — that says something.

If you found Flask absurd and a little pathetic — that too says something, about what you think symbols are for.

Pip's grammar lesson lands differently for different readers. For some it reads as nonsense, the ravings of the castaway. For others it reads as the only honest answer in the chapter — the one person who doesn't tell you what he sees because he understands that telling you what he sees would just add one more personalized projection to the record.

Melville puts Pip last. The epilogue to the interpretations is a grammar conjugation. The madman conjugates the verb. And the last line before Pip falls silent: and I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats.

All bats. Flying blind in the dark, navigating by echo. Looking and looking and finding only ourselves looking.

The gorge is in the mountains. The ship's navel holds everything together from the center. And everyone is on fire to unscrew it.