Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

207inscrutability). We learn from this chapter that any “systematization” (139) leads to failure.Interpreting the whale becomes as difficult as hunting it down. In this chapter, Ishmael indicatesthat “utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal” this confusion expresses theimpossibility of pursuing “our research in the unfathomable waters.” Such impossibility evokesthe “impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea” (137). The veil makeshermeneutics impossible and promotes a theory of indeterminacy. The White Whale functions as“an ‘image’ of the fictive transcendence of language in the sublime, that is, of languageunderstood as pictographically inscribed” (Irwin 291). The marks inscribed on the whale’s faceresemble the image of the hieroglyphics:These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls ofpyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connexion. Bymy retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I wasmuch struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famoushieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks,too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. (Moby-Dick 298-9)We witness Melville’s desire to naturalize the Oriental shadow in the Americanlandscapereally, the desire to domesticate the shadowthat lurks at the very back of Melville’snarrative. However, the shadow broadens culturally and temporally in this passage. The whale isa transcendent illegibility that defies the reader’s intention to comprehend it. It therefore “cannotbe read, because it refers to nothing other than itself” (Dimock 113). Ishmael illustrates theimpossibility of representing the whale. The long list of illustrations do not do the Whale justice.The text is also full of letters, signs, and hieroglyphs that need to be defined. These various signsform a symbolic system, a system in which the letter appears as a mere trace, or a symptom of an