There were no courses in Melville and the Arts when I did my graduate work in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 1966 to 1972. I did take a seminar on Melville, in which the professor passed around a hat, and we each drew out the title of the work we would each be responsible for teaching in our sequence of weekly meetings: I drew Israel Potter. The one class session we spent on Moby-Dick revived the admiration I had felt for the book in college, but I was informed that Moby-Dick would not be acceptable as a dissertation topic. There was nothing new to be said about Moby-Dick in 1968, I was told, but a neglected text, like Israel Potter, might actually be a good, safe topic. That advice steered me in the direction of Henry James and George Eliot for a while, but I eventually got permission to write my dissertation outside of the department as a project in cultural history under Jacques Barzun. It was a biography of the Russian pianists and teachers Josef and Rosina Lhevinne.¹

My initiation into the field of Melville and the Arts was painful but productive. During the first course in the nineteenth-century novel I taught at Northern Kentucky University in the early 1970s, a student asked, after the first assignment in Moby-Dick, why Ishmael spends three whole paragraphs describing the painting in the Spouter-Inn in chapter three when he is not even sure what it means or depicts. The question was not entirely hostile, but it was unsettling. The first thing I could think to say was that the fictional painting reminded me of some of the powerfully indistinct seascapes that J. M. W. Turner had painted in London during the decade before Melville wrote his novel. I had seen The Whale Ship (1845) at the New York Metropolitan Museum during graduate school and had seen reproductions of Snow Storm—Steam-boat in a book on Turner, so the next time I taught the course I brought in slides of those works as a supplement to our reading. I also projected some slides of lee-shore paintings by Turner to help students visualize the hazards of Melville’s “Lee Shore” in chapter twenty-three. These visual aids not only helped me as a teacher. That student’s question made me wonder what Melville might actually have known about Turner’s paintings while writing Moby-Dick, resulting eventually in the book I published on Melville and Turner in 1992. That question also led to my discovery of more than four hundred prints from Melville’s personal collection of art. More than thirty are engravings after paintings by Turner, including Snow Storm—Steam-Boat, Whalers—the Erebus, and Fishermen upon a Lee-Shore in Squally Weather.²

The first course I taught in Melville and the Arts in 1992 also resulted from a question asked by a student. Barb McCrosky had taken the upper-division course I taught in music and literature, and she asked if I could teach a comparable course in painting and literature. I told her I had never thought about doing so, but that I would teach such a course if she took it and would help me develop it. The first version of that course was called “Twelve Romantic Artists,” and it featured four authors, four composers, and four painters, Melville and Turner being two of the twelve. By 1992, I had decided that the subject of Melville and the Arts could provide enough material for an entire course. The Melville I assigned included Typee, Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, and selected poetry; the other arts ranged from music to painting to film. This was quite an exploratory course, since there were no textbooks available for what I was hoping to do, and that was part of the pleasure. I still remember two of the presentations from the end of that semester. Hillary Bendele asked if a culinary project could be considered “art”: she took us into one room in which she cracked open a coconut to begin a South Seas feast before leading us to a second in which she served up rock-hard sea biscuits, such as whalers consumed on board, blessedly without the maggots. Jay Langguth’s project was a veritable anthology of Melville-inspired music none of us had ever heard, from a very obscure Bob Dylan song to Steve Lacey’s jazz setting of Melville’s poem “Art.” Students in that class gave me my first sense that the subject of Melville and the Arts might be much broader, and more entertaining, than I had myself imagined.

The horizons opened in a new way the next time I taught the course in 1994. The syllabus was pretty much the same, but the student presentations at the end brought a major change to all future courses. Fred North, a non-traditional student who was a union leader at a Ford transmission plant, was an art major. He asked if he could paint an artwork, rather than write a research paper, as his final project. Fred was a challenging student, but the kind you trusted. He painted two artworks as his final project: a seascape sunset quite in the style of Turner and a stormy, lee-shore seascape that was part of his motorcycle jacket series—in which Ishmael sails into the teeth of a storm inside the outline of Fred’s signature jacket. These two paintings, and their accompanying artist statements, so impressed Fred’s classmates, as well as myself, that I have offered the creative option in all my subsequent upper-division literature classes, including those in Emily Dickinson and Henry James, as well as those in Melville and Frederick Douglass.

Several factors led to even more dramatic changes in my Melville and the Arts class in the Spring Semester 1996. The first is that Elizabeth Schultz published Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art in 1995. In that book, Schultz discovered, reproduced, and interpreted a constellation of artistic responses to Moby-Dick whose scope had been previously unknown—and even unimagined. I attended the exhibition at the University of Kansas that accompanied the publication of the book in the fall of 1995 and realized that the book would be essential for my next semester’s class. I also realized that if I timed things just right, I could arrange a field trip for my students to see the exhibition Unpainted to the Last on the last weekend at its third and last venue, the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. We began that course during the Spring 1996 Semester by studying Moby-Dick in January and Unpainted to the Last in February. We got to the exhibition in Evanston just in time for each student to write and present a paper on one of the Moby-Dick artworks during the week before Spring Break. I had a full syllabus planned for the seven weeks after Spring Break, but the students convinced me to put it aside so each student could create his or her own work of Moby-Dick art to display in an impromptu group exhibition at the end of the semester. This exhibition turned out so well that the entire class, none of whom were seniors, returned for Further Studies in Melville and the Arts during the Spring 1997 Semester. In April, our entire class traveled to Rockford, Illinois, for a joint exhibition of Moby-Dick art with students at Rockford College, one month after half of the class had gone to Provo, Utah, to make presentations at the conference of the National Association for Humanities Education.³

Several things became clear after that 1997 course. One is that future versions of the course needed to be called Moby-Dick and the Arts, because Moby-Dick and the artistic responses to it, including those of my own students, were more than enough to fill a whole semester. Another is that studying Moby-Dick followed by Unpainted to the Last was the perfect way to begin a semester, but that flexibility was needed in whatever would follow. One reason for flexibility is that a number of students would find artists in the Schultz book about whom they wished to do more research later in the semester. Another reason is that we needed to leave room for a variety of new artworks, in a variety of media, that were now being created after the publication of Schultz’s book. Some of these were created on our own campus, when Robert Del Tredici, who had been a keynote speaker at our joint exhibition in Illinois, began making large, gestural Moby-Dick silkscreen prints when here as a visiting lecturer, entirely transforming the small pen-and-inks reproduced in Schultz’s book. Other new works were being created in New York, where Frank Stella was completing the monumental Moby-Dick series he had begun in 1985, and in Rhode Island, where Mark Milloff was beginning a new series of mural-sized pastel paintings in the wake of the ones Schultz had reproduced in her book. In Positano, Italy, Vali Myers was now drawing Stella Maris (1998), an update of the stunning 1974 Moby Dick reproduced by Schultz. In Volos, Greece, Thanasis Christodoulou, the first person to have translated Moby-Dick into Greek, was now beginning an extraordinary array of Moby-Dick drawings that would engage him for more than a decade.

Teaching some of this new art “after Schultz” became easier when Del Tredici’s new silkscreens were reproduced along with his early pen & inks in Floodgates of the Wonderworld in 2000, and Stella’s complete Moby-Dick series was reproduced and cataloged in my Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick a few months later. The new century was also bringing a new surge of performance art related to Melville’s novel. Ellen Driscoll’s Ahab’s Wife, Laurie Anderson’s Songs and Stories of Moby-Dick, and Carlo Adinolfi’s one-man Moby-Dick in the late 1990s were followed in 2000 by Guy Ben-Ner’s two-person Moby-Dick film and Rinde Eckert’s two-person chamber opera, And God Created Great Whales. That burst of creativity in both visual art and performance art at the turn of the century has not abated since. Some of the more notable achievements among visual artists are the Moby-Dick paintings that George Klauba has created in Chicago; the Moby-Dick paintings and drawings that Aileen Callahan has created in Massachusetts; the Whiteness book in ink and embossing that Claire Illouz has created in France; the variety of prints, paintings, and sculptures that Tony de los Reyes has created in California; and the book Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page that Matt Kish completed in Ohio in 2011. Especially notable among performance pieces created since the turn of the century are Moby-Dick: Here and Now, an inner-city drama incorporating high school students premiered by the Mixed Magic Theater in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 2007 and subsequently performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC; and Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s Moby-Dick, a grand opera premiered by the Dallas Opera in 2010 and performed in Australia and Canada as well as in San Diego and San Francisco before being broadcast by PBS in its Great Performances series in November 2013.⁴

One major surprise in teaching Melville and the Arts over the last twenty years has been the number of students who have taken the creative option for their final projects once that option was made available. Only one of the twelve students in my 1996 class was an art major, yet they all chose to create artworks for the impromptu exhibition they mounted at the end of the semester. In every Moby class since then, a large majority of students have chosen the creative option, only a small minority of those being art majors. Many students have said, when making their final presentations, “I haven’t done anything creative since the fifth grade.” Students who choose the creative option usually have a strong inner need for doing so, and the result is, more often than not, memorable—for their classmates and myself as well as for the creator of the artwork. The phrase “creative students” in the title of this essay is an inclusive term for all students who have created artworks in my courses, whether or not they would have defined themselves as “creative” when the course began. I have nothing against research papers; they are the kind of writing I most often do myself. But I do feel a special thrill when I see students taking the creative plunge in the preliminary proposals they submit at mid-semester, and I am never disappointed by the final result. All fifteen undergraduates in my spring 2013 Moby-Dick and the Arts course chose a creative project, and so did eleven of the twelve who took my first graduate course in the subject during the 2013 fall semester. Here, I will present a few highlights from those final presentations over the last two decades.

One of the outstanding projects in the spring 1996 class was English major Abby Schlachter’s inscribed body cast Queequeg in her Coffin I. In addition to making a plaster and gauze cast of her own body, Abby inscribed onto it appropriate writings from the novel itself, from other books she loved, and from her own journal. When the entire class decided to create new work for the Landlocked Gam in Rockford, Illinois, a year later, Abby created a sequel, Queequeg in her Coffin II. In 2001, Elizabeth Schultz selected the latter work to be exhibited at the International Conference at Hofstra University celebrating the 150th anniversary of Moby-Dick. Schlachter, along with Thanasis Christdodoulou, Aileen Callahan, and Robert Del Tredici, was one of the artists who spoke at the Artists’ Forum and had their remarks published in a subsequent issue of Leviathan, the journal of Melville studies. In her remarks, entitled “A Snug-Fitting Coffin Lid: One Student’s Artistic Response to Moby-Dick,” Schlachter explained that as “a young female college student” she responded so strongly to Queequeg because she found his “humanity incredibly endearing.” As she prepared her remarks for the artists’ forum, she realized that Queequeg II had unconsciously expressed a “transformation” in herself as a person. The new work “took on a more confident stance, with her arms more at ease over her chest rather than wrapped around her middle as her senior had been. The writing covering her was bolder and clearer, as the viewpoints it related were stronger. My voyage from Sophomore to Junior had brought me a step closer to becoming the adult I meant to be, and my two coffin lids reflected this progress” (fig. 1).⁵

After the publication of the Schultz book in 1995, all of my classes in Moby-Dick and the Arts have begun with the same two books: Moby-Dick followed by Unpainted to the Last. During the spring 2004 course, I tried something different in the Moby-Dick segment. Instead of giving an essay exam or requiring a paper, I asked students to keep a log in response to each block of reading for the novel. We read the book sequentially, about twenty chapters at a time, and I had a sense that this requirement would help each student find his or her way into the book in a way that would also give me something substantial to grade as their first major assignment for the course. One of my students that semester was a printmaker from the art department, Kathleen Piercefield. She asked me if it would be okay if she drew a map of the voyage as part of her log, as doing so would help her follow the story. That improvisatory drawing became a full-scale map by the end of the semester; by 2007, it had evolved into the Map of the Voyage of the Pequod in the Longman Critical Edition of Moby-Dick. In 2007, another work that Piercefield created in that class, an etching and aquatint entitled The Women of New Bedford, became the cover art for Women and Melville, the first collection of essays ever published on that subject (fig. 2). In 2006, a multimedia print that Piercefield had exhibited as part of her senior BFA show, Queequeg in his Own Person, was reproduced in Blackwell’s Companion to Herman Melville. In 2009, seventeen Moby-Dick artworks by Piercefield were exhibited with thirty-nine by George Klauba and twelve by Robert McCauley at the Rockford Art Museum in Rockford, Illinios.⁶

Students in my spring semester 2009 course created an impressive variety of artworks for their final projects, including three quilts, a collage, a documentary film, and my first-ever Moby-Dick tea set. Danielle Wallace, who created the tea set, was a double major in English and art, with a minor in honors. She had planned to do a painting that would depict the final day of the chase, but came to feel that what she had in mind could not effectively be depicted in two dimensions. She, therefore, created a Moby-Dick tea set in glazed ceramics, featuring a large white tea pot surrounded by a dozen cups whose incised lines represented specific characters or scenes in the story. Also included were ceramic containers for sugar and cream. Although each cup and the lines incised on it have a specific relation to characters or scenes in the novel, Danielle saw the most important relation to the novel in the degree to which all of the smaller objects required fluid from the large white container in order to achieve their purpose (fig. 3).

Although the first half of my course has been set for some time, with Moby-Dick followed by Unpainted to the Last, the syllabus for the second half of the course has become increasingly difficult to set because there is now so much to choose from. There simply is not enough time for all the visual artists after Schultz, or all of the new performance art I would like to show, or even all of the outstanding artworks my own students have produced since the 1994 class with Fred North. It helps that books such as Del Tredici’s Floodgates of the Wonderworld, Del los Reyes’ Chasing Moby-Dick, and Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick have become available; I have assigned each of these from time to time in my courses during the last decade. Since 2011, I have also assigned Matt Kish’s Moby-Dick in Pictures every chance I get. I first did so during the 2013 spring semester, near the end of which Kish paid a visit to our classroom before making two public presentations. In addition to giving a lecture on the process by which he had created one new Moby-Dick image every day for 552 consecutive days, Kish created an entirely new Moby-Dick image before a live audience on our campus, inspired by the passage in the “Try-Works” chapter, in which the whale “supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body” (fig 4.).

I also required the Kish book for my graduate class during the fall semester 2013. Because Kish has created so many images rich in culture and art historical images while while also responding to the text of Melville’s book with depth and finesse, I have found that a classroom of students can find an exceptional variety of ways to journey through his book on the way to writing a paper or making a classroom presentation. In these two classes alone, students have given memorable presentations by following the depiction of a single character, such as Queequeg or Ahab, throughout the book, by following Kish’s engagement with Melville’s epistemology or humor throughout the book, by analyzing Kish’s use of “negative space” in depicting pictorial drama, and by comparing Kish’s visual interpretations of Moby-Dick with those in the classic comic by Bill Sienkiewicz or with the literary interpretations of C. L. R. James.

The final projects created by students in my spring 2013 undergraduate course were impressively varied. They included a mixed-media shadow box, a fabric relief sculpture, a mixed-media sculpture, a mixed-media collage, a mixed-media sketch with text, a photo collage with text, a video news broadcast, the model for a Moby art exhibition, two paintings in acrylic on canvas, a quartet of finger puppets, a quartet of digital poster designs, and one painted metallic relief. The painted metallic relief, entitled Shear, by political science major Danielle Kleymeyer, is reversible. The Moby side glows in glorious white as the breaching white whale casts aside the broken Pequod; the Ahab side is painted in darker, rougher colors, with a lightning bolt for a scar, as the powers of nature overwhelm the ship. Danielle was a graduating political science major who generously donated her art work to “the collection,” so it is now permanently mounted in the Honors House, in which the course was taught. We have installed Kleymeyer’s Shear high above the drawing by Matt Kish that my students chose for the Honors House collection, the original drawing for page seventy-five of his book (one of two dozen original Kishes that our university acquired at the time of his visit). Immediately to the left of the Kish in the Honors House is Boggy, Soggy, the screenprint that Del Tredici created in 2001 as his response to the Spouter-Inn painting in chapter three of the novel (fig. 5).

My fall 2013 graduate class in Moby-Dick and the Arts also produced quite a harvest of artworks inspired by the novel. Along with one excellent research paper; a science-fiction story inspired by the “Castaway” chapter; and a fictional dinner attended by Melville, Dickens, and Mark Twain in 1868, we had five original poems accompanied by reproductions of five images by Kish; three original poems accompanied by the student’s own drawings in ink and chalk; a fictional photo collage of a legal inquest into the loss of the Pequod; a podcast narrating the last days of the chase; a collage of nine mythological sea creatures inspired by the novel; an acrylic painting of “The Battering Ram,” with attributes ascribed to the whale inscribed within; an acrylic painting of Ishmael and Queequeg as women in love; three linocut prints making cetacean variations on Old Master paintings; and two glazed ceramic depictions of the “The Chase—Third Day.” The glazed ceramics are by Victoria Mitchell, a retired high school English teacher. One is a diptych, the other a triptych, on pre-fired ceramic tile; each has a sinking whale ship in the rounded shape of the doubloon above the rectangular tiles (fig. 6).

A notable number of students in my fall 2013 class had collaborated with friends, children, parents, or partners in creating their final projects. One student found it “very heart-warming to hear how many folks had family and friends contribute to their finished projects. As a class, we introduced Moby-Dick and the Arts to another population that may have never read the book.”

Afterword

In the spring of 2013, I was given the chance to experience Dr. Wallace’s Moby-Dick and the Arts course through the honors department at Northern Kentucky University. As required by the university, I had taken a course or two in English. I had read the required books, sat through the lectures, and written the research papers. And as an Art History major, I had sat through countless lectures and read countless reference books describing how art has influenced the world in countless ways. But not once, in all of these lectures and all of these books, had I learned about how literature and art have influenced each other.

Dr. Wallace’s methods of teaching by emphasizing the relationship between art and literature breathe new life into these two traditionally separate topics, allowing his students to experience them in a whole new light. Today, his undergraduate course in Moby-Dick and the Arts includes Schultz’s Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art, Del Tredici’s Floodgates of the Wonderworld, Kish’s Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page, as well as Wallace’s own Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick: Words and Shapes as companions to the novel. The course begins with the reading of Moby-Dick itself—at which time each student begins a journal (or “Moby Log”). In this log, students record their personal reactions to the course material; at the end of the novel, the logs are collected for grading and feedback. Next, the class studies Schultz’s text, on which each student is to present a comparative essay regarding one or more of the artworks they have selected from the text and how that artwork relates to Moby-Dick. After that, post-Schultz artworks are studied; groups of students present on either Del Tredici’s, Kish’s, or Wallace’s texts; and finally, each student is allowed to choose whether to write a research paper or to develop a creative project for presentation at the end of the semester.

One moment in particular from this course sticks out in my mind: when Kish came to our class to discuss his work on Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page. What has stuck with me the most was when he asserted that he is “not an artist.” In fact, he stressed this repeatedly. I was completely taken aback. Kish’s drawings are some of the most widely known Moby-Dick-inspired artworks today. And his book has not just been sold, but featured, in the art sections of various booksellers. Yet, the man does not even consider himself an artist!

It seemed preposterous to me at the time. But I think this idea relates quite closely to what Dr. Wallace is getting at when he stresses that “the phrase ‘creative students’ . . . is an inclusive term for all students who have created art works . . . whether or not they would define themselves as ‘creative.’” Just as Kish does not consider himself an artist, neither do many of the students who create artworks for Dr. Wallace’s class. But is an artist not someone who creates works of art?

This concept has stayed with me since then and has added fuel to my own work as an aspiring art historian. Towards the end of my semester in Dr. Wallace’s class, he approached me and asked if I would be interested in collaborating with him to create two exhibitions of artwork by students in his classes, one from Moby-Dick and the Arts, the other from Emily Dickinson and the Arts. I immediately said yes—and so began my BFA Senior Show and Honors Capstone Project. A main focus of these two projects is to express to the public that the term “artist” should not be applied only to those with art degrees, or to individuals who have been creating art their entire lives. On the contrary, an artist is anyone who creates a piece of art. And we hope that through these concurrent exhibitions we will be able to bring more attention to this new way of teaching and thus possibly inspire others to begin creating.

By studying artwork in conjunction with Melville’s novel, much can be gained about the many messages and subtle nuances of Melville’s prose and how it still relates to readers’ lives today. The depth of his work has inspired artists throughout the past and continues to do so even now. While “there was nothing new to be said about Moby-Dick in 1968,” there seems to be an awful lot to be said about it today.

Notes