{"id":3157,"date":"2019-10-18T16:04:06","date_gmt":"2019-10-18T20:04:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/?p=3157"},"modified":"2019-10-18T16:04:34","modified_gmt":"2019-10-18T20:04:34","slug":"capturing-the-leviathan-alex-katzs-moby-dick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/2019\/10\/18\/capturing-the-leviathan-alex-katzs-moby-dick\/","title":{"rendered":"Capturing the Leviathan: Alex Katz’s Moby Dick<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1948, when Alex Katz rendered in pen and ink the characters and scenes of Moby-Dick<\/em>; or, The Whale<\/em>, Herman Melville was widely considered one of the most important writers in American literature. His work was the focus of numerous scholarly studies, and Moby-Dick<\/em> was a classic, often cited as a (even the<\/em>) Great American Novel. But this consensus about Melville\u2019s literary significance was in fact a recent phenomenon, the product of a revival of interest in his work during the 1920s. Melville\u2019s reputation had declined dramatically during his lifetime. His first two novels, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life<\/em> (1846) and Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas <\/em>(1847), were popular successes, earning Melville a reputation as a colorful storyteller who would  entertain readers while satisfying their curiosity about the exotic scenes and peoples he had encountered in the South Pacific as a sailor. But as Melville continued to write, he consistently failed to meet readers\u2019 expectations; instead, he revealed himself to be a highly unorthodox artist, impatient with convention. For the rest of his career, he formulated dark allegories, offering metaphysical speculations and sharp social commentaries\u2014and expanding the boundaries of nineteenth-century literary form and content.<\/p>\n

Moby-Dick<\/em> (1851) was met with a mixed reception among critics in Britain and the United States when it was first published. Today it is understood not just as an epic tale of human versus nature\u2014although the plot does concern Captain Ahab\u2019s obsessive efforts to hunt down and kill the white whale which destroyed his leg, \u201cdismasted\u201d him\u2014but also as an experimental text, heterogeneous in form. Interlaced with chapters tracing Ahab\u2019s monomaniacal quest for the whale are long sections in which Melville provides the elements of an encyclopedic study of whales and the whaling industry. He draws on his own experiences on whaling ships and incorporates a range of scientific, historical, and literary sources into these chapters (a strategy anticipated in the novel\u2019s preface, an extensive collection of statements about whales from the Bible, newspapers, ship logs, popular songs, and other texts). Moby-Dick<\/em> moves across genres, shifting from prose narrative to drama (several chapters feature stage directions); scenes of fast-paced action are interspersed with poetic reveries and philosophical musings. The tone is unstable, alternating between playful and grim, the parodic and the tragic. The narrator, Ishmael, is unreliable; despite his efforts to report what happens on board the whale ship the Pequod<\/em>, he finds much of what he witnesses to be mysterious. Like the white whale itself, the world around him remains undecipherable, inscrutable, ultimately unknowable.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Figure 1. Alex Katz, Untitled<\/em>, 1948\u201349. Pen and ink on paper, 8 x 5 1\/8 in. (20.3 x 13 cm). Gift of the artist, 1995.489.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Figure 2. Alex Katz, Untitled<\/em>, 1948\u201349. Pen and ink on paper, 8 x 5 1\/4 in. (20.3 x 13.3 cm). Gift of the artist, 1995.490.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At the beginning of Moby-Dick<\/em>, Ishmael confesses that he longs for the sea \u201cwhenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul.\u201d Landlocked men, trapped within the deadening rhythms of work, look to the sea to escape \u201cweek days pent up in lath and plaster\u2014tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.\u201d Readers gradually learn that for Ishmael, joining a whaling ship as a \u201csimple sailor\u201d promises more than just adventure and glimpses of \u201cthings remote.\u201d The ship\u2019s crew is also a community that presents an alternative to conventional society, offering possibilities for contact with a \u201cbarbaric, heathenish, and motley set\u201d of men of different races and nations\u2014\u201crenegades, and castaways, and cannibals.\u201d In Fig. 1, Katz portrays Ishmael\u2019s arrival in the coastal town of New Bedford, where he will await passage to Nantucket in hopes of joining a whaling crew there. The weather is cold and dismal; carpet-bag under his arm, he searches for cheap lodgings. Here Ishmael is presented as a solitary figure, but in the novel Melville soon places him in close relation to another man. Spending the night at the Spouter-Inn, Ishmael reluctantly shares a bed with Queequeg, a heavily tattooed South Sea Islander rumored to be a cannibal. Ishmael\u2019s fear of Queequeg quickly yields to intense affection, as the two men become \u201ca cosy, loving pair.\u201d Indeed, much of Melville\u2019s work is concerned with bonds between men, a theme that Katz depicts in a scene of camaraderie in Fig. 2<\/strong>. Melville describes \u201ca wild set of mariners\u201d who, after a three-year voyage, arrive in New Bedford and make \u201ca straight wake\u201d for the bar at the Spouter-Inn: \u201cEnveloped in their shaggy watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador.\u201d Melville writes that the \u201cliquor soon mounted into their heads\u201d and \u201cthey began capering about most obstreperously.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Figure 3. Alex Katz, Untitled, 1948\u201349. Pen and ink on paper, 8 x 5 1\/4 in. (20.3 x 13.3 cm). Gift of the artist, 1995.491.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fig. 3<\/strong> envisions an incident during Ishmael and Queequeg\u2019s trip to Nantucket. A young man who has just mocked Queequeg\u2019s unusual appearance falls overboard. The harpooner, shown here observing the young man\u2019s fall, leaps into the water and saves him from drowning. This moment foreshadows one of Moby-Dick<\/em>\u2019s most famous scenes, when a young black boy, Pip, jumps out of a boat during a whale chase and, temporarily abandoned, goes mad while contemplating the \u201cheartless immensity\u201d of the sea.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Figure 4. Alex Katz, Untitled, 1948\u201349. Pen and ink on paper, 8 x 5 1\/4 in. (20.3 x 13.3 cm). Gift of the artist, 1995.501.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fig. 4<\/strong> pictures Captain Bildad and Captain Peleg, the principal owners and agents of the Pequod<\/em>, who engage Ishmael and Queequeg for a whaling voyage. Peleg is dressed in a coat of \u201cblue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style.\u201d Captain Bildad\u2019s appearance is \u201cthe exact embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his long, gaunt body, he carried no spare flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft, economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his broad-brimmed hat.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Figure 5. Alex Katz, Untitled, 1948\u201349. Pen and ink on paper, 8 x 5 1\/4 in. (20.3 x 13.3 cm). Gift of the artist, 1995.499.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Katz\u2019s next sketches focus on episodes from the novel after the Pequod<\/em> has set sail. The dinner scene in Fig. 5<\/strong> shows the Pequod<\/em>\u2019s three harpooners eating by themselves at the captain\u2019s table after Captain Ahab has finished his meal. The harpooners make up a society among themselves, in part because they are perceived to be racially and culturally different from the other crew members. Queequeg is joined here by Tashtego, a Native American from Martha\u2019s Vineyard whose \u201ctawny brawn\u201d impresses Ishmael, and Daggoo, an African whose golden hoop earrings are \u201cso large that the sailors called them ring bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to them.\u201d The steward, Dough-Boy, with his \u201cpale loaf-of-bread face,\u201d is \u201ca very nervous, shuddering sort of little fellow\u201d whose terror of the moody Captain Ahab and of the fierce harpooners has turned his life into \u201cone continual lip-quiver.\u201d Ishmael wryly comments, \u201cHard fares the white waiter who waits upon cannibals.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Figure 6. Alex Katz, Untitled, 1948\u201349. Pen and ink on paper, 8 x 5 1\/4 in. (20.3 x 13.3 cm). Gift of the artist, 1995.487.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fig. 6<\/strong> depicts the \u201cstricken, blasted\u201d Captain Ahab. Ahab\u2019s face is seamed: \u201cdown one side of his tawny scorched face and neck\u201d is \u201ca slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish.\u201d One sailor declares that Ahab had been scarred \u201cin an elemental strife at sea,\u201d while another speculates that this is \u201ca birth-mark\u201d that runs \u201cfrom crown to sole.\u201d Ahab\u2019s leg was \u201cdevoured, chewed up, crunched\u201d by Moby Dick, and he now walks with the aid of an ivory leg \u201cfashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale\u2019s jaw.\u201d Here Katz illustrates a crucial early scene in the novel: Ahab grips a gold doubloon from Ecuador, which he promises as a reward to the first sailor who \u201craises\u201d (sees) Moby Dick. He goes on to nail the \u201cbroad bright coin\u201d to the Pequod<\/em>\u2019s mast, exclaiming, \u201cThis is what you have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out.\u201d The sailors come to regard the doubloon as \u201cset apart and sanctified,\u201d for it is \u201cthe white whale\u2019s talisman.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Figure 7. Alex Katz, Untitled, 1948\u201349. Pen and ink on paper, 8 x 5 1\/4 in. (20.3 x 13.3 cm). Gift of the artist, 1995.483.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Figure 8. Alex Katz, Untitled, 1948\u201349. Pen and ink on paper, 8 x 5 1\/4 in. (20.3 x 13.3 cm). Gift of the artist, 1995.488.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Figure 9. Alex Katz, Untitled, 1948\u201349. Pen and ink on paper, 8 x 5 1\/4 in. (20.3 x 13.3 cm). Gift of the artist, 1995.500.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Figure 10. Alex Katz, Untitled, 1948\u201349. Pen and ink on paper, 4 3\/4 x 5 1\/4 in. (12.1 x 13.3 cm). Gift of the artist, 1995.482.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Figure 11. Alex Katz, Untitled, 1948\u201349. Pen and ink on paper, 8 x 5 1\/4 in. (20.3 x 13.3 cm). Gift of the artist, 1995.479.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fig. 7<\/strong> refers to chapter 48, \u201cThe First Lowering,\u201d when the Pequod<\/em> first sends boats out in pursuit of a group of sperm whales. The boats are caught in a squall and, as night descends, Ishmael\u2019s boat is separated from the others. Starbuck, the first mate, lights a lantern and hands it to Queequeg, who sits \u201cholding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness.\u201d In Fig. 8<\/strong>, we witness Ahab hailing a ship, using his trumpet to pose the question he invariably asks all passing vessels: \u201cHast seen the White Whale?\u201d In Fig. 9<\/strong> we see the Pequod<\/em> and a whale yoked together, as sailors remove the first strip of blubber from the mammal\u2019s carcass: \u201cNow as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an orange, so it is stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it.\u201d Fig. 10<\/strong> perhaps registers the predatory creatures who swarmed near that slaughtered whale and who \u201cviciously snapped\u201d at one another, twisting \u201clike flexible bows, bent round\u201d to bite at their own tails. Fig. 11<\/strong> depicts the \u201cticklish\u201d moment just after a whale has been harpooned. To force the whale to the point of exhaustion, the harpooners\u2019 boats must hold on tenaciously: \u201cthree ropes went straight down into the blue\u2014the gunwhales of the bows were almost even with the water, while the three sterns tilted high in the air. [\u2026] As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Figure 12. Alex Katz, Untitled, 1948\u201349. Pen and ink on paper, 7 3\/8 x 5 1\/4 in. (18.7 x 13.3 cm). Gift of the artist, 1995.486.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fig. 12<\/strong> is Katz\u2019s illustration of Melville\u2019s humorous theory that the legend of St. George and the dragon was actually about a whale: \u201cthe animal ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal,\u201d and \u201cit will not appear altogether incompatible with the sacred legend . . . to hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself.\u201d This fanciful sketch may also allude to Melville\u2019s comparison of each boat\u2019s mate or headsman to \u201ca Gothic Knight of old,\u201d whose harpooner supplies him with \u201ca fresh lance\u201d when one is needed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Figure 13. Alex Katz, Untitled, 1948\u201349. Pen and ink on paper, 8 x 5 1\/4 in. (20.3 x 13.3 cm). Gift of the artist, 1995.502.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fig. 13<\/strong> depicts a moment when Ishmael and Queequeg\u2019s boat is being pulled by the whale they have just harpooned and is \u201crunning away with us like light\u201d: \u201cthe whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him [. . .] we thus tore a white gash in the sea.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Figure 14. Alex Katz, Untitled, 1948\u201349. Pen and ink on paper, 2 7\/8 x 5 1\/4 in. (7.3 x 13.3 cm). Gift of the artist, 1995.484.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fig. 14<\/strong> is likely Katz\u2019s figurative rendition of the chapter when the Pequod<\/em> meets the Bouton de Rose<\/em>, a French ship whose bow is adorned with a wooden carving of its namesake rosebud. The vessel has \u201ca peculiar and not very pleasant smell\u201d because it is tethered to two rotting whales. The French sailors are unaware that the decaying whale contains valuable ambergris; after Stubb, the Pequod<\/em>\u2019s second mate, persuades the French captain to cut the whales loose, he is able to draw out handfuls of the \u201csoft, waxy [. . .] highly fragrant\u201d substance.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Figure 15. Alex Katz, Untitled, 1948\u201349. Pen and ink on paper, 3 1\/4 x 5 3\/8 in. (8.3 x 13.6 cm). Gift of the artist, 1995.485.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fig. 15<\/strong> details the bench of the ship\u2019s carpenter: \u201ca long rude ponderous table furnished with several vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood.\u201d The carpenter can expertly perform a surprising range of tasks that go beyond carpentry\u2014pulling teeth, piercing ears, concocting soothing lotions, even fashioning a new ivory leg for Ahab. Here Katz sketches a \u201cpagoda-looking cage\u201d that the resourceful artisan has constructed from \u201cclean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm whale ivory.\u201d Inside we find a \u201clost land-bird of strange plumage.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Figure 16. Alex Katz, Untitled, 1948\u201349. Pen and ink on paper, 8 x 5 1\/4 in. (20.3 x 13.3 cm). Gift of the artist, 1995.503.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Figure 17. Alex Katz, Untitled, 1948\u201349. Pen and ink on paper, 3 1\/8 x 5 1\/4 in. (7.9 x 13.3 cm). Gift of the artist, 1995.494.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Fig. 16<\/strong> we see that Ahab\u2019s project to subdue the great leviathan is proving disastrous. Moby Dick has been harpooned by several irons, and the planted lines are now tangled; he lashes out with his tail. Then the whale, \u201cdiving down into the sea, disappeared in a boiling maelstrom, in which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch.\u201d In the midst of this wreckage, as depicted in Fig. 17<\/strong>, Ahab\u2019s boat \u201cseemed drawn up towards Heaven by invisible wires,\u2014as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its bottom, and sent it, turning over and over, into the air.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Figure 18. Alex Katz, Untitled, 1948\u201349. Pen and ink on paper, 3 3\/8 x 5 1\/4 in. (8.6 x 13.3 cm). Gift of the artist, 1995.493.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Finally, in Fig. 18<\/strong> we witness Ishmael in the novel\u2019s Epilogue. After Moby Dick has \u201csmote\u201d the Pequod<\/em>, and the ship sinks amidst a whirling vortex, Ishmael alone survives. Earlier in the narrative, when Queequeg believes he is dying, he asks the carpenter to build him a coffin that resembles the canoes in which dead warriors of his people are \u201cstretched . . . out . . . floated away to the starry archipelagoes.\u201d Queequeg recovers and the coffin is converted into a life-buoy. In this final scene, Ishmael describes himself as \u201cbuoyed up by that coffin,\u201d floating \u201con a soft and dirge-like main.\u201d<\/p>\n

In writing the capacious Moby-Dick<\/em>, Melville was acutely aware that his attempts at literary representation of the whale were inevitably partial and circumscribed. His narrator admits, “Dissect [the whale] how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will.\u201d So, too, did Melville believe that visual artists had fallen short of accurately representing whales: \u201cthe great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness.\u201d If Melville\u2019s novel is an act of defiance in the face of that difficulty, a sustained struggle to represent that which must ever elude representation, he might well have been charmed to see these sketches by Alex Katz\u2014whimsical efforts to capture the strange and slippery novel that has become central to the American literary tradition.<\/p>\n

Katherine Stubbs is an associate professor of English at Colby College.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1948, when Alex Katz rendered in pen and ink the characters and scenes of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Herman Melville was widely considered one of the most important writers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10094,"featured_media":3174,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[526146],"tags":[99394],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/files\/2019\/10\/Fig17_1995.494_001_cd.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3U3TZ-OV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3157"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10094"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3157"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3183,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3157\/revisions\/3183"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}