The New Art of Moby-Dick

George Cotkin's scintillating Dive Deeper: Journeys with Moby-Dick (2012) correlates each of the novel's 135 chapters with an object or event from popular culture. Such a format validates Cotkin's general observation about contemporary America that "we have become a largely visual culture." He goes on to ask specifically and provocatively in relation to Moby-Dick "how well and widespread the novel has been reformulated in visual terms" (104). Certainly, Melville's Sub-Sub Librarian knew from the beginning of Moby-Dick how widespread interpretations of whale lore were in the nineteenth and earlier centuries. After all, he had searched "the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales," whatever had "been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own" (xvii). And Ishmael's discourse in chapters 55, 56, and 57 provides ample evidence of his particular consciousness of whales visually represented "in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars" (269).

Something of a Sub-Sub Librarian myself, I started searching the globe for images of whales in the 1970s, beginning in Japan. This resulted in an essay published in The North American Review in 1982, titled "Eye on the Whale: A Japanese Perspective," discussing the diversity of cetacean images in Japanese culture. Back teaching in the US, I found my students began bringing me visual manifestations of Moby-Dick in cartoons, posters, knick-knacks, T-shirts, ball caps, baby-carriers, pendants, perfume bottles, sprinklers, not to mention photographs of three-legged dogs named Ahab, calico cats named Queequeg, fish shacks, bars, restaurants, and sail boats, all named Moby Dick. My book, Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art, published in 1995 after ten years of searching the long Vaticans and street stalls of the United States in particular, charts the diversity of American art created over the last century in response to Melville's novel. The first International Melville Society Conference in Volos, Greece, in 1997, introduced me to Athanasius Christodoulou, Greece's superlative translator of Melville's works in words and images (Schultz, "Seeing Moby-Dick Globally," 415–16; "Visualizing Race," 29–32) and my search for Moby-Dick images went global.

Googling "Moby Dick" and then focusing on "Moby Dick Art," "Moby Dick Gifts," "Moby Dick Decor," "Moby...