المستخلص: |
As a story of whales, Moby-Dick or The Whale includes a number of factual chapters which meticulously elaborate on the zoological properties of cetaceans by describing their physiology, behavior, and taxonomy. In these cetological chapters, Ishmael takes up the task of exploring the physical reality of the whale in the light of a number of scientific disciplines whose empirical methods he zealously puts to the test. Yet, the whale keeps resisting and defeating Ishmael’s methodical study, therefore, compelling him to abandon the scientific discourse and to indulge in the poetic. Estimating that the whale’s complex, impenetrable nature cannot be known by the measuring rod, the narrator turns to an alternative mode of knowledge, the ontological, only to rule it out as deficient, given its speculative methods. Marked by satire, Ishmael’s mock-scientific and philosophical acrobatics plainly express Melville’s doubt about the value of these disciplines as the ultimate path to knowledge. For Melville, absolute knowledge is unattainable, though one can sporadically approach it through genuine experience, namely through the poetic mode.
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