Ishmael Takes On the Whale's Face
Chapter 79 of Moby-Dick by opens with Ishmael announcing his ambitious plan to apply physiognomy and phrenology — the nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences of reading character from facial features and skull shape — to the Sperm Whale. He acknowledges the absurdity of the task, comparing it to Lavater scrutinizing the wrinkles of the Rock of Gibraltar or Gall mounting a ladder to manipulate the dome of the Pantheon. Nevertheless, citing Lavater’s study of animal faces and Gall and Spurzheim’s hints about non-human phrenology, Ishmael resolves to attempt what no physiognomist has yet dared: "I try all things; I achieve what I can."
The Anomaly of a Noseless Face
Ishmael begins his physiognomical examination by observing that the Sperm Whale is "an anomalous creature" because it has no proper nose. Since the nose is the central and most conspicuous facial feature, its absence should be a devastating deficiency. He compares a noseless face to a landscape without a spire or tower, and imagines dashing the nose from Phidias’s marble statue of Jove. Yet on the Sperm Whale, this absence becomes "an added grandeur" rather than a blemish — the whale’s proportions are so stately that a nose would be "impertinent." In a comic aside, Ishmael notes that sailing around the whale’s head, "your noble conceptions of him are never insulted by the reflection that he has a nose to be pulled."
The Sublime Brow of the Sperm Whale
Ishmael turns to the full front view of the Sperm Whale’s head and declares it sublime. He compares the mystical brow across species — from the human forehead troubled like the eastern sky at dawn, to the bull’s curled brow in repose, to the elephant’s majestic brow pushing cannon up mountain passes. He singles out Shakespeare and Melancthon as rare humans whose foreheads "rise so high, and descend so low, that the eyes themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes." But the Sperm Whale surpasses them all: gazing on that "one broad firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats, and ships, and men," one feels "the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature." In profile, the whale bears a horizontal depression that Lavater considered the mark of genius.
Genius, Silence, and the Limits of Reading
In the chapter’s philosophical climax, Ishmael asks whether the Sperm Whale truly possesses genius. The whale has never written a book or spoken a speech, yet "his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it" and in his "pyramidical silence." Ishmael imagines that ancient civilizations would have deified the whale, just as the Egyptians worshipped the tongueless crocodile of the Nile. He invokes Champollion’s deciphering of hieroglyphics only to declare that "there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face." Physiognomy, he concludes, "like every other human science, is but a passing fable." If Sir William Jones, who read thirty languages, could not read a peasant’s face, how can "unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow?" The chapter ends with a direct challenge to the reader: "I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can."