The Prairie

Chapter 79 turns the whale’s head into an occasion for testing how much observation can reveal. Rather than advancing an immediate sequence of actions, it stages an interpretive encounter: Ishmael proposes to apply physiognomy and phrenology to the whale, then confronts the inadequacy of those methods. His opening declaration, “I try all things; I achieve what I can,” combines intellectual ambition with acknowledged limitation. At this point, the chapter makes the whale both an object of close attention and a challenge to explanation. The movement from attempted classification to the final invitation, “Read it if you can,” transfers that challenge to the reader without supplying a definitive meaning.

The prose repeatedly changes scale and register, moving between learned reference, comic incongruity, and visionary description. Comparing the proposed investigation to examining Gibraltar or manipulating the Pantheon makes the whale’s size expose the absurdity of ordinary analytical procedures. The discussion of noses then punctures solemnity: “A nose to the whale would have been impertinent.” Yet this comedy prepares for the concentrated assertion, “This aspect is sublime.” Architectural and landscape comparisons expand into the celestial image of “one broad firmament of a forehead.” Meanwhile, questions about whether the whale has written or spoken parody human standards of achievement. Ishmael’s voice thus performs both the urge to interpret and the resistance that unsettles interpretation.

The chapter’s central paradox is that the whale’s lack of readable features becomes evidence of overwhelming significance. From the front, “not one distinct feature is revealed,” yet Ishmael feels divine power more strongly because of that absence. The forehead is “pleated with riddles”: its visible surface invites reading while withholding an answer. Likewise, “pyramidical silence” becomes a declaration of genius, although silence cannot verify that claim. The closing dismissal of physiognomy as “a passing fable” therefore complicates the grandeur Ishmael has just constructed. His descriptions remain powerful imaginative responses, not secure discoveries of an inner essence. By extending unreadability to “every man’s and every being’s face,” he makes the whale an especially imposing instance of a general limit on human knowledge.