Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. 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 mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. 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. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines.
From Chapter 36 of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. The speaker, of course, is Ahab.
Biblioklept 
“Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”
I remember this being one of my favorite lines when I first read the book. Badass.
LikeLike
[…] the allusions, the grace notes and the inside jokes, 'all visible objects, [Elkin], are but as pasteboard masks […] if man will strike, strike through the […]
LikeLike
[…] From Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. The “pasteboard images” line recalls a favorite passage of Moby-Dick. […]
LikeLike
you give meaning to the mask by providing the meaning with a reason, which explains the mask
know when you speak, you speak to someone else
the mere pasteboard mask is moulded by any reason of choice(interest/benefit)
you can make any mask you like, given you are able to come up with an explanation
giving any appropriate reason to uphold the meaning given
make what you want, when you know how to outsmart the one spoken to
give a certain meaning to a thing, a meaning that fits you to obtain that what you desire
and come up with an explenation that will be bought by anybody
in the end.. what do they know.. you just make it look like you DO know and its all fine
its the apocalypse in my book, its this age
LikeLike
The Pasteboard Masks are the duality of human kind. Humanity lives in and out of nature. This is paradoxical, impossible and unknowable but we do it anyway. To go from one to the other, to abrogate, to undo, to transcend the Pasteboard Masks, therein lies chaos, evil, insanity, eternity, the universe.
LikeLike
While it’s an interesting interpretation, and there are no 100% (in)correct interpretations, I always imagined the “pasteboard masks” to be gesturing toward a deep religious claim underpinned by one of the oldest and still-relevant philosophical concepts of Western civilization: Plato’s allegory of the cave, Kant’s idealism, and Schopenhauer’s pessimistic take on it all representing the tradition descending from Athens, leveraged to actualize the West’s other traditional source, Jerusalem, in which man, as the name “Israel” implies, “wrestles with God.” While you probably know what I’m getting at, just to briefly set it up: I think pasteboard masks is a reference to the fact that we’re forever restricted to perceiving the phenomenal world, or, in other words, experiencing reality through the secondary qualities our sensory systems assign to objects (colour being a prime example, functioning as labels assigned by our minds to represent particular wavelengths of light reflecting off said objects). What we don’t “see” are “things in themselves”–generally called “noumena” in contrast to phenomena–or the objects’ true forms before being interpolated by our senses; assuming there is anything behind the surface level (see: German Idealism). While we can’t directly perceive noumena, Ahab is insisting that their nature can be inferred by interpreting the behaviour of their corresponding phenomena; i.e., the pasteboard masks. If Starbuck is right and the whale is nothing more than an unthinking brute without malice, then the mission is absurd, but if Ahab is correct, the agency directing its behaviour can be discerned and to strike through the mask is to attack the malicious force for which the whale is a proxy. The latter man likely views this force as having agency because it provides a target for his vengeance, but he justifies it by insisting that the way the mask moulds to the principal agent’s features hints, if only momentarily, at the characteristics of whatever inscrutable entity lies beneath it; something driven by far more malevolent forces than the blind reflexes of a dumb brute.
So, with that groundwork out of the way (i.e. the notion that our perceived reality is the superficial construct that our mind overlays and distorts an inaccessible and inscrutable substrate) what is this agency motivating the whales actions that supposedly exposes it to moral culpability and, therefore, “fair play”? Well, there are a number of non-exclusive possibilities, with some obvious ones are fate, the natural world or Earth in opposition to man, and the most popular option, which could be thought to encompass the rest: God. It almost seems trite at this point, but it’s a popular interpretaton for a reason, and this passage is one of the best pieces of supporting evidence. The While Whale serves as a vector for God’s wrath and Ahab, knowing this, doesn’t take it as a pious lesson and change his ways, but instead doubles-down on his hubris in seeing it as an insult and call to arms. Taking into account 19th Century slang and numerous contextual clues, it’s strongly implied that Ahab’s “demasting” doesn’t simply refer to his leg, but his other “mast” as well: his sex organs and ability to procreate. Moby Dick is an obvious phallic symbol: its physical shape, the fact that it’s a male sperm whale, the odd juxtaposition of eroticism and violence during the process of rendering dead whales that Melville describes in excruciating detail, and the base physicality of it as a manifestation of raw, natural fecundity. At the very least, Ahab is attempting to demast God as God had demasted him, and at worst he’s essentially saying to God (knowing he likely won’t survive this voyage), “If I have to die, God, you’ll have to die too!”
LikeLike