Melville's Moby-Dick Features Queequeg's Tattooed Body as Sacred Text
Poet involved
What happened
In Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville's harpooner Queequeg bears tattoos described as a 'mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth' — a complete cosmology inscribed on his skin by a prophet of his home island Kokovoko. When Queequeg falls mortally ill he has the same designs carved into his coffin, which then becomes Ishmael's life-saving flotation device at the novel's end. This plot device made the tattooed body literally the instrument of narrative survival, investing body modification with the highest possible symbolic weight in American literary fiction.
Literary impact
Melville's treatment of tattooing as sacred text and cosmic book had a deep and lasting impact on American poetry's metaphorics of the body. Whitman's 'Song of Myself,' written four years later, treats the human body as a kind of poem or scripture in terms that clearly respond to the Melvillean tradition. Contemporary poets including C.D. Wright and Anne Carson have explicitly invoked the tattoo-as-text metaphor in meditations on the body, mortality, and the limits of writing — a direct lineage from Queequeg's hieroglyphic skin.
Source: Wikipedia
