Moby-Dick and the Indefinite Sublime: On facing the white page

Recorded: Sept. 12, 2026, 4:01 p.m.

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The Yale Review | Tom McCarthy on Moby-Dick and the Sublime

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Moby-Dick and the Indefinite Sublime
On facing the white page
Tom McCarthy

Ed Ruscha, Eh?, 2024. © Ed Ruscha

This essay originated as a Santa Fe Institute Public Lecture in May 2026.

How do you write? I mean, at all: How do you enter or approach that space where literature becomes possible? Is there some kind of protocol or password that, once cracked, grants access to those secreted troves of writerly capacity—some law that, once discerned, unlocks them? I used to imagine so and, in my youth, would flail around like a lost Egyptologist hoping to stumble across it. Despite not having found it, I nonetheless fluked my way into print, whereupon people started to ask me what the secret was. I never knew how to answer—until an acquaintance, the novelist Sheila Heti, passed me an email she’d received from her friend Miranda July, recounting a recent dream. “My dream last night,” July told Heti, “was in the form of an email from you”:
you wrote me about how when you were in your early twenties you and your boyfriend and your best friend spent a summer writing letters to the author tom mccarthy. you were trying to figure out how to be writers and wanted advice from him. eventually he began writing you back. this was the advice he gave: “if you want to write more, buy more paper. if you want to write better, buy better paper. and most importantly, the first sentence of the book should be indented.” then he described how he loved to take a pencil and trace the invisible line from the first letter of the first sentence to the upper left corner of the page. i was thinking how i found that last part sexy and then right then you skyped me (something we did all the time) and said you found that part sexy.
Now when someone—interviewer, student, friend—poses the how-to question, I forward this email to them. The advice I (the July version of me) give(s) seems excellent, and right—but in a way whose logic isn’t visible. Think of the essay that follows as a drawing-to-the-surface of this logic.a day or so after agreeing to give a talk about Moby-Dick to mark that novel’s 175th anniversary, I awoke from a dream of my own, the details of which escape me, but which prompted me, at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., to jot down an outline for my lecture under the heading “The Indefinite Sublime.”
“Look,” I said on Zoom the next day to my friend Sina Najafi, editor of the wonderful Cabinet magazine. “I’ve got Moby-Dick mapped out on a single sheet of paper.
“That’s nothing,” he replied. “I’ve got it on an envelope.”
He held the latter to the camera; it was white and entirely blank. My version turned out to be bullshit, but Sina’s was bang on the money. Moby-Dick, despite being crammed with larger-than-life figures (the manic and hubristic Captain Ahab, scouring the world’s oceans for the beast that’s bitten off his leg; the gentle-giant harpooner Queequeg, who declares himself married to Ishmael, the melancholically philosophical narrator, after they share a bed at the Spouter Inn in the whaling town of New Bedford; the whaling ship Pequod’s conflicted mates Starbuck and Stubb; the multinational, multiracial crew they oversee), is nonetheless a book that’s full of blanks. There are “bitter blanks,” marble cenotaphs marking the empty graves of sailors lost at sea; sails like “blank bladders”; and blank stretches on charts. If (for Ishmael) “wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable,” the sea, too, “will permit no records.” The whales it hides are faceless and their brains “incapable of being adequately charted.” Behind, among, between, above these, his “snow-white wrinkled forehead” and whole body “streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue”—the whiteness that represents “the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors”—Moby Dick himself, from the moment he looms in our narrator’s mind “like a snow hill in the air” to the end point at which his “blank forehead” wipes the Pequod from the map, acts as a giant, roving blind spot, at once the novel’s focal and vanishing point.
Here, with our talk of the unmentionable and pale, elevated visions (which Ishmael recounts using the terms “horror” and “wonder”), we cruise straight into the book’s main hunting ground, conceptually speaking. In describing whiteness as “sublime” while simultaneously cautioning that it “strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood,” Ishmael is invoking a formal philosophical category—one that, like the whale, has a long head and an even longer tail. In Peri hypsous, or On the Sublime, a treatise of reflections on literary technique, traditionally attributed to the first-century a.d. philosopher Longinus, the notion of hypsous, or sublimity, defines the combination of ecstasy (ékstăsĭs), wonder (thōûmǎ), and astonishment (ékplēxĭs) produced in the listener by verse or prose possessed of a force that burns and sweeps away all before it “like a thunderbolt or whirlwind.” Arising at charged, critical moments (kairoi), characterized by noble diction (phrasis) and by “elevated word arrangement” (synthesis), the sublime marks a kind of limit at which rhetoric surpasses itself, rupturing the bounds of language—a paradoxical formulation that leads Longinus to tie the sublime as much to moments when speech breaks down or breaks off as to ones of eloquence.
It doesn’t take high-end sonar to pick up Longinus’s echoes in Moby-Dick: the many instances of kairoi, of whirlwinds or whirlpools, thunderbolts, and, of course, strikes and blows from tails and flukes, all coupled with intensified, excited prose that bursts out intermittently into ecstatic exclamation. Not to mention the multiple uses of the term he put into circulation (by my count, eleven). As the undercurrent of this tendency, there are repeated instances of language stuttering. This arrives at the episodic level: after being assailed by Ahab’s inevitable question—“Have ye seen the White Whale?”—the captain of the passing vessel Albatross lifts his speaking trumpet to his mouth to respond, only for the instrument to fall from his hand, “and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make himself heard without it.” We get it at the level of languages or tongues themselves: the pagan Queequeg talks with what Ishmael calls a “broken phraseology,” though to the Polynesian’s ear, the Christians among whom he lives speak “gibberish” as well. And we get it at the more universal, ontological one: for Ahab, the “linked analogies” of Nature and the Soul of Man lie “far beyond all utterance.” The sperm whale’s genius, Ishmael claims, resides in “his pyramidical silence.” To underpin the general aphasia that overtakes the novel, Melville has its characters reside among these creatures’ speechless mouths—the dried whale jawbones that adorn and even steer the Pequod—and gives Moby Dick himself a deformed one. Both the end point toward which the novel hurtles and the vehicle in which it does so take the form of this symbol, this locus, of broken articulation.
If Longinus’s voice is quietly resonating in the text of Moby-Dick, that of his eighteenth-century descendant Edmund Burke is booming; he’s quoted twice in the book’s opening “Extracts” section alone (which, as its name suggests, is made up of quotations from all kinds of other texts that mention whales). For Burke, the sublime involves not only awe and wonder but, more darkly, horror and dread; a heightened quality of mind occasioned by extremities within the natural world, it can (he claims in his 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful) be triggered as much by serpents and other poisonous animals as by mountain ranges or waterfalls. This downward, hell-bent disposition is mirrored in Ahab’s nighttime visions of internal chasms opening, “the hell in himself” into which “accursed fiends beckon him to leap down,” or his blood anointment of the harpoon he’s reserved for the white whale, his baptizing of its barbs “in nomine diaboli.” As the critic Barbara Glenn puts it, “In Moby-Dick, the effect of the sublime is terror without divine reassurance.”

Here’s the rub: lurking within this great knowledge system are holes, vortices of unknowledge.

In less religious terms, Burke the empiricist seems to have lent Melville his materialism. “Methinks,” Ishmael cautions, “that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.” The cosmos of the novel, far from being abstract, has mass, grain, and texture; nothing is more massive than the whale (“the mightiest animated mass”), and no activity is more basely material than standing knee-deep in the “leviathan gore” of whaling, “surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is true.” Yet, Ishmael insists, it’s also no less glorious than soldiery. Burke the father of conservatism bolsters the emphasis that Melville places on the capitalist nature of the Pequod’s enterprise: a floating portfolio in which all receive “lays,” or shares. And Burke the statesman, to one of whose parliamentary speeches (about whaling, no less) Melville alludes, notes the role of dread in anchoring sovereignty while also advancing its egalitarian-democratic potentiality: he seems to anticipate the strange political world of the Pequod, in which citizens and aliens, whites and nonwhites, share dividends so long as they submit to a venture steered and governed by a despot.but what melville takes most from Burke is his penchant for infinity. “Hardly anything can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity; which nothing can do whilst we are able to perceive its bounds,” Burke writes. And Moby-Dick is firmly locked into this approach route. Sailors in the masts stand “lost in the infinite series of the sea”; whale carcasses, once stripped and dumped, float into “infinite perspectives,” all beneath an “infinite blueness” of sky. The magnificent short chapter “The Lee Shore” holds that “better is it to perish in that howling infinite” of the tempest than “worm-like” to “craven crawl” to shore-hemmed terra firma—and, what’s more, that herein lies “that mortally intolerable truth: that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea,” because “in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God.”
The subject, the end point, of the analogy is clear here: thinking. Moby-Dick is a giant parable of thought and knowledge. The Pequod, Ishmael tells us, “was my Yale College and my Harvard”; Queequeg he describes as an “undergraduate.” Having already scoured the world’s lexicons for whale entries, Melville frames the creatures themselves as books and chapters, a “Bibliographical system” subdividing them by size into Folio (Sperm, Right, Humpback), Octavo (Grampus, Narwhal, Killer), and Duodecimo (Porpoises). What, though, to do with the Razor Back, who “eludes both hunters and philosophers”? “Let him go. I know little more of him, nor does anybody else.” Here’s the rub: lurking within this great knowledge system are holes, vortices of unknowledge. Indefinite as God: the phrase doesn’t simply reassert a Christian piety. It’s much more interesting than that: God denotes the indefinite—that is, truth, shoreless and unbounded. Thinking exists in a relation to what can’t be thought (not formally at least), to the hurricane that destroys thinking itself. This relation is formative and fundamental, nonnegotiable and mortally intolerable; we might, wormlike, craven, turn away from it, or we might, if we’re bold, strive to glimpse it at thinking’s limits.
Here we find ourselves smack-dab in the most fertile of all Moby-Dick’s philosophic fisheries: the Kantian one. Immanuel Kant may get name-checked only once (his last name’s lent to one of two whale heads hanging from the Pequod’s sides, the counterbalancing one being Locke), but it’s to his thought’s rhythms that the novel most profoundly moves. As the critic Robert Doran has noted, Kant’s 1790 Critique of Judgment transcendentalizes Burke’s empiricism. While the beautiful in nature, being tied to form, involves a bound or limitation, the sublime is to be found in what Kant calls Formlösigkeit (formlessness) and pertains to an object “insofar as limitlessness is represented in it,” as Paul Guyer puts it in his translation. Like the beautiful, though, it rides on indefiniteness: “einem unbestimmten…Vernunftbegriff,” an indefinite concept of Reason (which is why my middle-of-the-night notes were bullshit, their title a tautology—the sublime’s always indefinite). “Is it,” Melville asks of whiteness, “that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation when beholding the white depths of the Milky Way?” Stabs us: Kant, too, follows Longinus and Burke in tying the sublime to onslaught and assault, to “volcanoes with their all-destroying violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean set into a rage.” It’s about force but also magnitude: mathematically, we may be capable of ascribing a figure to something unfathomably huge, but “with respect to the necessary enlargement of the imagination to the point of adequacy to that which is unlimited in our faculty of reason, namely the idea of the absolute whole”—that’s quite beyond us.

Kant returns often to this notion of inadequacy vis-à-vis the whole, vis-à-vis our ability to apprehend this within “one whole of intuition.” Our idea of infinity in nature “cannot happen except through the inadequacy of even the greatest effort of our imagination in the estimation of the magnitude of an object.” Indeed, it’s the inadequacy itself, the shortfall in presentability, that enables a kind of inverse presentation or Vorstellung—a presentation of the unpresentable. And here Kant talks of law: this fall into the “abyss” of the uncontainable-in-thought “is nevertheless a law for us.”
If Kant finds in the incomprehensible abyss a law, Moby-Dick, too, encounters laws in the sea’s unfathomable depths: not just the “laws and regulations” governing the fishery but also a law founded in the void, the exceptional space, of lawlessness. It’s hard not to picture Ahab in a MAGA cap when, pointing a rifle at Starbuck, he declares that “there is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain that is lord over the Pequod.” Jacques Lacan, in an extended passage of The Ethics of Psychoanalysis that hinges on Kant’s concept of practical reason, considers Antigone’s conflict with Creon in the Sophoclean drama. In his reading, Creon, defending the “sovereign law,” embodies Kant’s concept of the good; Antigone, by contrast, enters a space at once beyond all laws and home to “a certain legality which is a consequence of the laws of the gods that are…unwritten.” By insisting, against Creon’s edict, on according her brother rites of burial even though she knows this will cost her her life, Antigone enters a “horizon” zone where “life can only be approached, can only be lived or thought about, from the place of that limit where her life is already lost, where she is already on the other side.” Lacan then turns to Kant, whose signature concept he’s unpacked at the Ethics’s outset: das Ding an sich, the real thing behind our apprehension of it—in other words, the non-thing, “characterized,” as Lacan puts it, “by its absence…there in a beyond,” the “strange feature around which the whole movement of Vorstellung turns.”
As Antigone, so Ahab:
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through…the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.…That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.
At the limit, love for a brother (per Antigone) or hatred toward the cause of a missing leg (per Ahab) merge into a single passion that propels its subject to a beyond where to reside is both essential and impossible. For Lacan, this constitutive impossibility structures the nature of desire—also of language, the order in which we experience and articulate the condition of being separated from the object (the real object) that our articulations orbit, and in which, as a condition of living, we forgo a to-be-wished-for communion with the Kantian “absolute whole” in favor of the constant exchange of stand-ins, substitutes, parts, tokens, signs. “And the sign,” Lacan reminds us, citing the theorist of language Charles Sanders Peirce, “is that which is in the place of something else for someone.”
This condition structures language, but it’s also amplified in visual art, which, Lacan claims, “always involves encircling the Thing,” the beyond-object that objects depicted in the work serve “to render both present and absent.” Lacan’s fellow post-Freudian Jean-François Lyotard, also surfing in Kant’s wake, concurs: “Art does not imitate nature, it creates a world apart, eine Zwischenwelt, as Paul Klee will say…in which the monstrous and the formless have their rights because they can be sublime.” The “impotence” (impuissance—Lyotard’s word for Kant’s Unangemessenheit, inadequacy) of the imagination striving to figure that which cannot be figured points the way, even within the Romantic period, to abstract and minimal art: “Avant-gardism is thus present in germ in the Kantian aesthetic of the sublime.” Lyotard might as well be annotating the painting that Ishmael encounters at the Spouter Inn. “A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture,” it has yet an “indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it.” At its center, hovering over three vertical lines, is a “black mass,” a “portentous something.” What does this central splodge depict? Aha: “That once found out,” Ishmael surmises, “and all the rest were plain.” He does hazard a venture that it bears “a faint resemblance to…the great leviathan,” but this doesn’t mean the picture “realistically” portrays a whale levitating above a three-master. Rather, in standing for the very thing that can’t be represented, and for that incapacity (or impotence) itself, it heralds the advent of modern art.in this respect, it seems fitting that the house in which I awoke to jot down my incoherent thoughts on Moby-Dick belonged to one of twentieth-century art’s main avatars, the American painter Ed Ruscha: I was his houseguest in Tesuque, New Mexico. He, at that moment, was in London, installing a series of paintings that, when I saw them a few weeks later, struck me as uncannily relevant to these reflections. One of them, consisting of the painted words IT’S IT, was a straight-up tautology; another showed a horizon on which floated the expression EH? I’d become friends with Ruscha when writing the catalogue essay for his 2018 exhibition at London’s National Gallery—an essay in which, to unpack the logic of his many word paintings, I had digressed through Melville’s diptych, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” In these conjoined short stories, first published in Harper’s four years after Moby-Dick, the narrator visits (in the first section) a coterie of young male lawyers enjoying a sumptuous dinner in their London chambers, then (in the second section) a desolate New England paper mill staffed by frozen, waifish young women. Here a lone male apprentice, nicknamed Cupid, guides him through the workings of the factory’s mill wheel and iron-framed pistons, cylinders, blocks, rollers, and so forth, eventually inviting him to scrawl something on a scrap of paper. The narrator jots down the apprentice’s name; the latter drops the scrap into the inflowing pulp, and nine minutes later they watch it emerge at what the former ominously calls “the end of the machine.” It has become a proto-Ruscha artwork: the word Cupid looms from a sheet of foolscap.
As unconnected to the Pacific fisheries as a Berkshires paper mill might seem, Melville’s description of Tartarus’s maids will strike any Moby-Dick reader as emphatically familiar: “At rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper.” So will that of the giant contraption they “served mutely and cringingly as the slave serves the Sultan” (the simile is copied from his description of the Pequod’s bows ducking “as a slave before the Sultan”), or the narrator’s Burkean reflection that “machinery of this ponderous, elaborate sort strikes, in some moods, strange dread into the human heart, as some living, panting Behemoth might.” In fact, so resonant are these and other aspects of the tiny stories with those of the giant novel that I suspect Melville has left us a key or legend to unlock the magnum opus.

Melville is a perfect Freudian, make no mistake.

The main hinge on which such an unlocking would turn is booming, vibrating, clanking front and center in “The Tartarus of Maids”: that dread-inducing Behemoth, the “great machine” itself, and “the metallic necessity, the unbudging fatality which governed it.” That Melville twice describes it in the story as an “iron animal” should throw into sharp relief the fact that Moby-Dick’s whales are addressed repeatedly in machinic terms: the regularity of their blowing likened to that of clocks, their displacements through the ocean to “that mighty iron leviathan of the modern railway.” It’s not just whales: the seas, too, are “sledge-hammering.” The Pequod’s sailors move around the foredeck “like machines,” and Ishmael complains that “my whole clock’s run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.” Small machines integrated into both the larger machine (made up, as we have seen, of whale parts) of the Pequod and, larger still, the one of destiny: “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.” Ishmael, weaving a mat with Queequeg, has a vision of “the Loom of Time,” he himself “a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates.” For Ahab, the threads serve more as strings: “Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?… We are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.”
In the “Extracts,” Melville cites the opening passage of Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 Leviathan: “By art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS) which is but an artificial man.” But this quotation is partial; Melville has omitted the preceding sentences arguing that, since life is already machinic (“a motion of Limbs,” the heart a spring, nerves strings, joints wheels), “all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life.” A Hobbesian vision of statehood (in which assemblies act as muscles, governors and viceroys as tendons moving public limbs, and so forth) runs through Moby-Dick. “Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs,” Ahab cautions his crew. Leviathan, though, is a treatise not just on politics but (like Moby-Dick) on knowledge too: far from being “born with us,” reason, Hobbes argues, is “attained by industry,” by joining names into chains of assertion, up and up until we attain the Rube Goldbergian systemhood that “men call SCIENCE.” In a register that anticipates Kant’s, Hobbes argues that “when a man reasons, he…is conceiving of the consequence of the names of all the parts, to the name of the whole; or from the names of the whole and one part, to the name of the other part.”
We’re back in Lacan’s realm of substitutions, stand-ins, things marking the place of other, missing things—the realm, that is, of the linguistic sign. And feeling our way back, at the same time, toward the Freudian understanding of technology as prosthesis: godlike suprabiological extension (of the power of sight, hearing, motion) that’s also a diminution of biology, in the manner of an artificial body part. Melville is a perfect Freudian, make no mistake. Ahab, commissioning a second ivory leg after the first one splinters, calls the blacksmith Prometheus, saying he’ll “order a complete man,” fifty feet high, with steel shoulder blades—all in the same breath that he bewails his crippled dependency. He understands all too well that, in hunting the white whale, he’s homing in on the ground zero of his prosthetic condition. And Melville, who understands even better that the zero beyond the zero of prosthesis is castration, delights in tilting the compass needle that way whenever he can. Look at how he has the splintering old leg smite Ahab’s groin, or a New Bedford sailor adorn a bench with a ship carving, his jackknife “working away at the space between his legs.” And look indeed at the severed whale phallus he shows us on the Pequod’s deck, which the whale “mincer” cuts armholes in and dons like a liturgical robe, turning him (censor be damned) into “a candidate for an archbishoprick.”
We, too, are now homing in on the core drama underlying both “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” and Moby-Dick. I’m going to call this the Drama of Failed Nuptials. The movement from the first to the second of the two short stories is a move from bachelors to maids, while the stories’ protagonist is a bearer and a distributor of seed: “Having embarked on a large scale in the seedsman’s business,” he visits the mill to source the paper “that comes into use with seedsmen, as envelopes.” Bachelors’ seed, though, is precisely what fails to reach these women, virgins all (save for one old ex-nurse): their bodies, far from swelling with conception, are instead ravaged by the “fine, poisonous particles” that, issuing from the old clothes they shred for pulp, lacerate their lungs. It’s not unlikely, the narrator muses, that (since here, as on the Pequod, we’re amid the flows of globalized capitalism) “among these heaps of rags there may be some old shirts, gathered from the dormitories of the Paradise of Bachelors.” As in Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, the suitors disrobe, the mill wheel grinds, and seeds are propelled toward their female targets but, missing their marks, fall short.
This drama—this exact same drama—runs through Moby-Dick. It’s sperm that the Pequod’s trading in; fat, ambergris, and baleen may also be harvested, but it’s the sticky fluid spermaceti, wrapped in what Ishmael twice calls its “envelope” of blubber inside the whales’ giant heads, that forms the vessel’s main commodity. “Don’t ye love sperm?” cries the Pequod’s third mate, Flask, as he cajoles his crew. “There goes three thousand dollars, men!—a bank!” The Pequod encounters a ship called the Bachelor en route home after such a successful voyage that not a barrel, cask, or butt remains empty: “Everything was filled with sperm, except the captain’s pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands into, in self-complacent testimony of his entire satisfaction.” Later, they cross paths with the Virgin, which, having yet made no scores, is “clean” and “well deserving [of] the name.” The language of nuptials appears again and again: from the “glistening white membrane, glossy as bridal satins,” lining sperm whales’ mouths, to sailors stepping onto “the immaculate deck…as bridegrooms new-leaped from out the daintiest Holland” sheets. The curtain rises on the drama’s final act as the sun, “even as bride to groom,” surrenders herself to the sea with “fond, throbbing trust”; in this act’s fatal third scene, Moby Dick, “shrouded in a…veil of mist,” breaches and sinks, leaving the water “creamed like new milk” around his “marble trunk”—before bursting and emptying all barrels, casks, and butts. This is no fruitful union, though, no moment of conception: the wrecking of the Pequod sees its sperm unprofitably shed across the ocean’s surface, there to float, ungatherable, past a third ship, the Rachel, named after the biblical figure who—initially infertile, then later shown weeping for her long-lost offspring—found herself twice childless.
Freud recounts, in an early paper titled “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices,” the case of a Viennese housewife who would compulsively arrange her tablecloth so as to render visible a stain on it—a neurotic reenactment, he suggests, of her wedding night, when her impotent husband, failing to stain the bridal sheet, poured red ink on it for the servants to see the next day. If, in “The Tartarus of Maids,” a boy named Cupid leads us through the rites of Hymen (failed rites: the paper sheets that the factory produces are as blank as the frustrated housewife’s or as the maids’ skin, with its “consumptive pallor”), in the novel, endless darts or arrows stab at Moby Dick’s white surface without drawing that deep-dark blood that would betoken conquest. This broad-reaching failure—to penetrate, inseminate, gestate, and deliver to the world the object of one’s labors—is rendered (of course) as fiction, in signs, in language. But it’s also, as we’ve seen, reinscribed within that rendition as a failure of language and the sign. The very word sperm, Ishmael notes, is (in the world of whaling, at least) a misnomer, “philologically…absurd,” since the fluid to which it refers isn’t (as it is in men) “quickening humor.” Philology opens the book’s very first section, which shows the pale Usher, or grammar-school teacher, who supplies the word for “whale” in thirteen languages, holding (since he is “Consumptive”) the handkerchief that he would have regularly checked for blood. There’s blood flecked all throughout “The Tartarus of Maids” as well: next to the mill, powering its wheel, Blood River regularly flows; the pulping room is “stifling with a strange, blood-like, abdominal heat.” The only thing to issue from this sanguine incubator, though—“moist and warm,” after the same number of minutes as months needed to gestate a baby—is, as we’ve also seen, a new (feeble, “half faded”) sign. Like magi, we’re being called to witness the birth of the sign itself, in all its inadequacy, to take part in an epithalamium instituting the domain not of Eros but the signifier “Cupid,” not sperm but “sperm,” not consummation but consumption.“all sorts of writings,” the narrator of “The Tartarus of Maids” muses, “would be writ on those now vacant things—sermons, lawyers’ briefs, physicians’ prescriptions,” and so on. The drama of the story, though, is that of the paper sheets’ production, their materiality, surface and substrate for all writing. Moby-Dick, too, from the moment the pale Usher pops up, frames itself with—or, indeed, as—a parable of document supply, of transformation of the natural world’s bounty into quartos, folios, lexicons, and, of course, novels. But it also prefers to zoom in and film this process in fine-grained, particulate close-up. Just as the mill’s sheets that are earmarked to be lined pass from a worker with a smooth forehead to one with a “ruled and wrinkled” one, so Ahab’s forehead is marked by “some invisible pencil” as he plots and replots routes on his map’s surface. Whales, too, embody writing, their surfaces “crossed and recrossed with numberless straight marks”; Ishmael uses the dried transparent slime scraped from their skin to make bookmarks and magnifying lenses, and notes that the term quoin, which he uses to describe the wedge-shaped anatomical sections of whales’ cleft heads, also denotes the type lock used by printers. Whaleboats are writing, their prows mounted with “a wooden pin or skewer the size of a common quill.” The whole geological world is writing, “pre-adamite traces in the stereotype plates of nature”; so is destiny, the “ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man…the stamp of sorrow in the signers.”

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Here we arrive right at the pulpy, vibrating heart of Melville’s vision. His extraordinary achievement in Moby-Dick, as elsewhere, is to process the monumental themes we’ve been discussing (reason and knowledge, mind, world, fate, the Thing) within the framework and machinery (the rollers, cylinders, and blocks) of writing. Not to write about them but (quite the reverse) to make them be, ultimately and at base, about writing, and to make writing both the subject of the agon and the stage on which it plays out. Ahab has, embedded in his artificial leg, a “little oval slate, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude”: the space of his prosthesis is the space of writing. This condition, not the mere fact of his amputation, is the source of his great anguish: “Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books.” His insight lays out, in cursive or quoin-locked script, that Kantian double bind: that all representation (Vorstellung) is predicated on its own inadequacy, its part-for-wholeness. In writing, representation finds a way to articulate this central impossibility but not (since being in the realm, ineluctable, of writing, of the sign, is, after all, the problem in the first place) to overcome it. To borrow Melville’s terminology in “The Lee Shore,” writing, at its most heightened (or deepened), at its most intense, self-aware, and ecstatic—that is, as literature—is the Inadequate’s apotheosis.
Moby-Dick is a queer book, in every sense. Just as the Pequod’s actual compass needles are turned or “transpointed,” the novel, turning away from the normal or “normative” structures and couplings of the nineteenth-century form, envisages, in tender scenes of men’s hands squeezing sperm together, or what Queequeg calls the “marriage” between him and Ishmael, new or off-the-map combinations. It’s Queequeg, the undergraduate with broken phraseology, who ends up providing the most essential act of document supply. Covered in tattoos that represent “a complete theory of the heavens and the earth,” thus transforming him into a “wondrous work in one volume” that (since the ink runs over parts invisible to him) “not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them,” Queequeg wiles away his spare hours transcribing these tattoos onto the coffin he commissioned when he fell ill but has no immediate use for now that he’s recovered. This coffin is what Ishmael will float on after surviving, “on the margin,” the Pequod’s wreck, thus allowing him to be picked up by the Rachel and, more importantly, the story of Moby-Dick to be brought to us, the readers. It is a literal narrative vehicle.
If this episode is a mise en abyme, a parable of broken articulation and unreadability embedded in a larger one, then it, too, is disrupted by a smaller one embedded within it. As the coffin is planed and joined, and the crew gathers around the supposedly dying Queequeg, the African American cabin boy, Pip (whom Ahab will later adopt), serenades the Polynesian with his nonsensical, elliptical utterances: “Form two and two! Let’s make a General of him!… Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza!…Queequeg dies game!…I say; game, game, game!” He’s been talking like this ever since falling from a whaleboat for the second time. The first time, Stubb rescues him and, reminding him that whales fetch thirty times what he would in an Alabama slave market, advises him: “Never jump from a boat, Pip, except—but all the rest was indefinite, as the soundest advice ever is.” Left to float at sea for an hour before being rescued the second time, he comes face-to-face with “the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs,” and goes mad. As Melville, reprising his earlier loom imagery, puts it in what for me is Moby-Dick’s most haunting line: “He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it.”
The line needs to be read slowly and carefully. Pip (whose name, shared with that other, Dickensian witness to one of literature’s great failed nuptials, means “seed” or “germ”) sees the foot—the amputated, or at least freestanding, metonym for God, for the Indefinite—and beholds that part where it sits at the end of the machine, its limit. He speaks it: a deceptive formulation. Pip doesn’t describe God’s foot, nor does he say the words “I’ve seen God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom.” What he says is “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.” Then: “I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I’m a crow.…Caw! caw! caw! caw!” Pip’s flailing, stumbling free association harks back to Shakespeare’s mad Poor Tom-Edgar, or any number of holy fools, but it also points forward, in its syntactic and grammatical modulations, its collaging and ejaculations, to the work of Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara, of Antonin Artaud, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce—anticipates, that is, the language of the avant-garde. How do you write? I never know what to answer. In this great book of whiteness, it’s two Black figures who unlock and open the first of these modes into the second—and, in doing so, unroll the blank sheet on which modernity will write itself.

Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theater, and radio. His books include Remainder, C, Satin Island, and The Rhyl Poster. In 2013, he received the inaugural Windham–Campbell Prize for Fiction.

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On Writing
Books
Fall 2026

Originally published:
August 31, 2026
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