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Ceci Nâ•Žest Pas Une Baleine: Surrealist Images in Moby-Dick

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Ceci Nâ•Žest Pas Une Baleine: Surrealist Images in Moby-Dick Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2003 Ceci N'Est Pas une Baleine: Surrealist Images in Moby-Dick Albert Glover Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES CECI N’EST PAS UNE BALEINE: SURREALIST IMAGES IN MOBY-DICK By ALBERT GLOVER A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2003 The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Albert Glover defended on April 23, 2003. _________________________ David Kirby Professor Directing Treatise __________________________ Roberto Fernandez Outside Committee Member __________________________ Joseph McElrath Committee Member __________________________ Dennis Moore Committee Member The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures………………………………………………………………………… iv Abstract………………………………………………….............................................. vi 1. MELVILLE, MOBY-DICK,, AND THE VISUAL ARTS……………………….. 1 2. MELVILLE AS PROLEPTIC SURREALIST…………………………………… 36 3. IMAGES FROM THE SEA………………………………………………………. 65 4. FROZEN HEAVENS: MELVILLE’S RELIGIOUS IMAGES…………………. 93 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………… 113 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH…………………………………………………………. 118 iii LIST OF FIGURES 1.1 Moby Dick, Steuben Glass…………………………………………………….27 1.2 The Chronicle Review………………………………………………………....28 1.3 George Washington……………………………………………………………29 1.4 General Peter Gansevoort………….…………………………………………..29 1.5 The Duke of Leinster …………………………………………………………..29 1.6 Peche du Cachalot ….………………………………………………………….30 1.7 Fisherman Upon a Lee Shore .….……………………………………………...31 1.8 Pasiphae ……………….………………………………………………………32 1.9 Blue (Moby Dick) …….……………………………………………………….33 1.10 Moby Dick………..………….……………………………………………...34 1.11 The Grand Armada............................................................................................35 2.1 The Use of Words ……………………………………………………….....…55 2.2 The Castle in the Pyrenees …………………………………………………....56 2.3 The Pleasure Principle ………………………………………………………..57 2.4 The Great War ………………………………………………………………..58 2.5 The Idea ………………………………………………………………………59 2.6 The Landscape of Baucis ……………………………………………………..60 2.7 The Persistence of Memory …………………………………………………..61 2.8 Perspective: The Balcony by Manet ……….………………………………...62 iv 2.9 Perspective: Madame Recamier by David ………………………………....……64 3.1 Hegel’s Vacation ………………………………………………………....……...81 3.2 The Tempter ……………………………………………………………….....…..82 3.3 The Red Model ………………………………………………………….....….....83 3.4 The Explanation…….…………………………………………………….....…...84 3.5 Memory of a Voyage……………………………………………………....….....85 3.6 A Journey Remembered…………………………………………………....…... 86 3.7 The Temptation of St. Anthony ………………………………………….......... 87 3.8 Dali at Age Six ……………………………………………………………...….. 88 3.9 Golconda …………………………………………………………………...…...89 3.10 The Month of the Grape Harvest …………..…………………………….....…90 3.11 The Beautiful Truths ……………………….……………………………...…..91 3.12 Infinite Gratitude… ………………………..……………………………......92 4.1 Congregation of ants……………….………………………………………….104 4.2 Old Fleece Preaching to the Sharks………………………………………..….105 4.3 The False Mirror…………………………………………………………..…..106 4.4 Insanity Series#1…………………………………………………………...….107 4.5 Insanity Series #2………………………………………………………..…….108 4.7 Insanity Series #4………………….………..………………………………...109 4.8 Insanity Series #5………………………….……………………………….….110 4.9 Insanity Series #6……………………………………………………………...111 4.10 Bimini Ishmael…………………………………………………………….….112 v ABSTRACT This dissertation analyzes the relationship between the surrealist painters of the twentieth century and the verbal images of Herman Melville in his masterpiece Moby-Dick. The work examines Melville’s lifelong affinity for the visual arts, his strange visual images, and the relationship he has to the surrealists of the subsequent century. vi CHAPTER ONE MELVILLE, MOBY-DICK, AND THE VISUAL ARTS Professor David Kirby has argued that the subject of Moby-Dick is “immensity” (74), and immensity is an excellent word to describe not only the subject of Melville’s masterpiece, but also the vast array of scholarly works that the novel has produced since the genesis of the Melville Revival in the twentieth century. The scope and depth of the scholarship has both enriched and inspired Melville’s readers, but of the many topics broached by these researchers, the investigations into Melville and the visual arts are the most important for this dissertation. Moby-Dick has become a springboard for serious American artists in the twentieth century as Elizabeth Schultz has chronicled in her monumental volume Unpainted to the Last: “Moby-Dick” and Twentieth-Century American Art. Furthermore, the parade of artwork has not diminished since the publication of her book in 1995. Robert Del Tredici’s 2001 publication Floodgates of the Wonderworld: A “Moby-Dick” Pictorial provides an extensive visual interpretation of the novel. The 2003 Steuben Glass Catalogue proffers an 11 ¼ inch long crystal carving by Donald Pollard and Sidney Waugh entitled “Moby-Dick” for a mere $30.000 (figure 1.1), and the front cover of The Chronicle Review, January 17, 2003 presents a large cartoon-like figure of Moby Dick and Captain Ahab to accompany an article by Elaine Showalter “What Teaching Literature Should Really Mean” (figure 1.2). While Moby- Dick has for a long time inspired both serious and less serious pieces of visual art, Melville scholars have been a bit slow to probe the affinities between the writer and these plastic arts. Scholarship in the last ten 1 years, however, has produced numerous studies on Melville and these sister arts. The topics of their inquiries have ranged from traditional realistic interpretations to abstract expressionism, but no one has of yet interpreted Moby-Dick from a surrealist perspective. David Reynolds in his celebrated book Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville points specifically to the surrealist tendencies in mid nineteenth-century American literature: What modern scholars have identified as a distinguishing feature of surrealism—the juxtaposition of disparate realities—is commonplace in both the language and the illustrations of subversive American humor. The French surrealists took an interest in one antebellum writer, Edgar Allan Poe, and in the artist Thomas Quidor, whose grotesque paintings based on stories by Irving have a distorted, nightmarish quality. What they didn’t recognize was that Poe and Quidor were at the tip of a huge iceberg of a presurrealistic American style whose bizarre manifestations appeared in the popular frontier humor Poe and Quidor are known to have enjoyed. (453) But scholarship has not yet followed Reynolds’s lead: this dissertation will. It will demonstrate the close affinity between Melville’s word- pictures in Moby-Dick and the works of the surrealists. In spite of Ishmael’s declaration in Chapter 82 that “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method” (MD 361), this chapter will try to follow an orderly scheme. The analysis will begin with an investigation of Melville’s family history and Herman’s early exposure to family portraits. Next, it will look at Melville’s readings, his frequent visits to museums and galleries, his personal art collection, and his lecture on Roman statues. Collectively, these show the lifelong fascination Melville had with varied forms of 2 artistic expression. The next section will examine the ways that Melville develops Moby-Dick using the visual arts, and the last part of the chapter will focus on selected examples of modern art that the novel has inspired. Each section demonstrates the close affinity between Melville and the visual arts, which opens the door to the possibility of reading Moby-Dick with a visual eye. To begin with, Melville was born into a family which hallowed its aristocratic heritage. Both of Herman’s grandfathers were prominent citizens and celebrated Revolutionary War heroes. Herman’s paternal grandfather, Thomas Melvill, was a prosperous Boston merchant and a close friend of Samuel Adams and other noted revolutionaries. In December, 1773, Thomas engaged in a life defining event when he joined with other young men from New England in what became known as the Boston Tea Party (Parker 2). Herman’s mother, Maria Gansevoort Melville, also had a distinguished ancestry, and the prominence of her ancestry was constantly imprinted on the minds of the Melville children. Parker testifies to this fact when he says that Maria instilled in the minds of her descendants “that she was a cousin of the grandest living New Yorker of them all, Stephen Van Rensselaer, the Eighth (or “Last”) Patroon…” (3). In addition, Herman’s maternal grandfather, Peter Gansevoort, left his heirs a heroic legacy. He rose to the rank of General and was widely hailed as the “Hero of Fort Stanwix” for his deft defense of this key position in the war against the British. He was credited with saving the city of Albany, which greatly aided the effort to win the war that Thomas Melvill had helped to start (Parker 5). The Gansevoorts and Melvilles were quite proud of their exalted family traditions and sought to enrich the lives of their children with the celebrated stories of the family ancestors.
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