A Whale Is a Palimpsest: Dismembering and Remembering in Moby-Dick and Fighting the Whales

Abstract

In Chapter 104, “The Fossil Whale,” Melville’s Ishmael pronounces leviathan a “text” (“But when leviathan is the text, the case is altered”), later daring his comrades and his audience to “Read it if you can.” In Moby-Dick (1851) and the lesser-known Fighting the Whales (1863) by Scottish novelist R.M. Ballantyne, whalemen read the whale’s flesh like a text to imaginatively “remember” (put back together) its life story while industriously dismembering its body. They read the text of the whale’s body as a palimpsest with multiple layers of physical semiotic inscription: harpoons embedded in the whale from previous skirmishes with whalemen in addition to scars and distinguishing marks all help craft this life story (which also materially contributed to early scientific knowledge about whales). The whale is endowed with this “memory” and funereally commemorated after the cutting-in and trying-out. This act of “remembering” is then set against the constant danger of the whaleman’s life—the dismembered body is sometimes his own—and the familiar nineteenth-century trope of burial at sea in which the lack of a fixed grave marker necessitates alternate forms of commemoration for the slain whale hunter.