Altered Visions
Presented by Peter Martin and David Rosenthal at the 12th International Melville Conference at New York University on June 18, 2019. iPhone photos by Peter Martin. Text by David Rosenthal.
Fedallah
The first image of the series is called Fedallah, named for the mysterious Parsee stowaway, who is here represented by two objects: a rope and a harpoon iron. Both are artifacts from Melville’s time—the harpoon iron is an early-19th-century original; the rope was salvaged from the wreck of the 19th century whaler, The Wanderer (the last whaling ship built in Peter’s hometown of Mattapoisett). The rope recalls Fedallah’s prophesy: “only hemp can kill thee,” while the iron evokes Ahab’s harpoon, forged and tempered in human blood in a ceremony over which Fedallah spiritually presides. Although the hemp line can kill as effectively as “a hangman’s noose” in Moby-Dick, it also comes to represent the thread of life, and the ties that bind (Fiedler). While contemplating the historicity of the artifacts, this image also establishes an iconography of love and death that recurs throughout the series.
Inn-Keeper’s Bed
This image faithfully depicts the early hours of the Ishmael-Queequeg romantic comedy, the moment in “The Spouter Inn” when Ishmael awakens to find "Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner." However, in Martin’s imagination, the romantic comedy becomes a ghost story. Death occupies the photograph’s focal point in the form of a whale’s skull.
The skull forebodes Queequeg’s death and the destruction of the Pequod—which Ishmael repeatedly foreshadows in these opening chapters. Furthermore, the skull evokes the “pasteboard mask” which Ahab conjures on the deck of the Pequod: “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks…If man will strike, strike through the mask!” (Ch. 36). In this photograph, although Queequeg embraces Ishmael lovingly, he raises his fist to the skull-mask as if to strike through.
The image invites the application of Ahab’s words to human beings. Our surface-level differences mask our deeper truths. The imagery compliments the quote appearing on Queequeg’s leg in this image, “you cannot hide the soul” [Ch. 10]. Ishmael makes this remark when he discerns, beneath Queequeg’s “unearthly tattooings,” traces of “a simple honest heart.” Ishmael must overlook Queequeg’s most superficial layer to appreciate his true character. Nevertheless, it is in the physiognomy of Queequeg’s eyes, brow, and “phrenologically…excellent” skull that Ishmael finds the traces of Queequeg’s soul. He remains fixated on Queequeg’s material body. We are left with the question of what remains when this body is taken from us.
Ahab’s Idee Fixe
Image #5 is called Ahab’s Idee Fixe. Setting aside the Romantic comedy, we enter the provenance of death and destruction. This photograph depicts Ahab’s monomaniacal fantasy: to “dismember” his “dismemberer.” Or perhaps it shows Ahab’s final moment, when he exclaims “while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up my spear!”
In the photograph, Martin, as Ahab, strikes a one-legged pose. Ahab’s symbolic castration is further echoed in the one-horned cow skull upon his head. Moby-Dick is represented by a whale’s skull, held by Queequeg. Here, Martin, just as Leslie Fiedler, posits a symbolic equivalence between Queequeg and the whale as Ahab’s oceanic victims; furthermore he emphasizes “the interrelationship among species” (41) to use Elizabeth Schultz’s words.
Martin’s pose and adornment demonstrate the influence of the deer dance tradition of the Yaqui Native Americans. In this dance, traditionally performed on Easter, a dancer, adorned with a deer’s head, honors deer who have been hunted to support human life. In the Yaqui Catholic tradition, this dance has become associated with Christ’s resurrection. In alluding to the deer dance, Martin pits redemption, in the realm of Queequeg and Ishmael, against the bodily destruction in the realm of Ahab.
Squeeze of the Hand
Martin next adapts chapter 94, “Squeeze of the Hand,” arguably the culmination of the novel’s erotic tension; love for fellow man provides a salve against Ahab’s hegemony; Ishmael “washes” his “hand” and “heart” of his sworn oath to hunt the white whale with Ahab. In this photograph, Martin employs a background of foam insulation to mimic spermacetti. The soft focus creates a blurring of boundaries between the hands and between hand and sperm; all has been squeezed “universally” into one.
Queequeg in his Coffin 2
Martin adapts another chapter in image 8, “Queequeg in his Coffin.” The coffin is represented by a vertical plank in the background, and the diptych illustrates the moment when, having previously resigned himself to an “endless end,” Queequeg suddenly convalesces by sheer will. Ishmael relates, “poising a harpoon, [he] pronounced himself fit for a fight” (Ch. 110, 420). In the epilogue, Queequeg’s coffin ends up outliving Queequeg; and just as this coffin-life-buoy physically saves Ishmael, so too does Queequeg provide symbolic salvation, the subject of the next image.
Ishmael
Image 10 is entitled “Ishmael.” This final photograph shows Ishmael in repose within a vortex. It recalls the line from the Grand Armada, “Amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still forever centrally disport in mute calm.” The image also resembles Moby-Dick’s epilogue, in which Ishmael enters the whirlpool that the sinking Pequod has left behind.
The vortex is an elemental archetype and a recurring symbol in Moby-Dick. According to ecocritics Cohen and Duckert, the ancient philosopher Empedocles posited that the vortex was the shape of the universe and that this shape arose as a direct result of the competing effects of the elemental forces of Love and Strife. Martin makes the coexistence of love and strife, regeneration and ruin, explicit in this image, by centering the vortex on Ishmael’s phallic region.
In the epilogue, Ishmael reaches the center of the Pequod’s whirlpool only to find it transformed into a “milky pool,” and at its center he find’s Ishmael’s life-sustaining coffin. Despite the unwavering woe Ishmael has witnessed, the memory of Queequeg sustains him.
Queequeg
In this next image, Martin continues his explorations of objects, depicting Queequeg along with the things he carries: his harpoon, his “tomahawk-pipe,” and his idol Yojo. Queequeg strikes an intimidating pose, flexing around his harpoon. Among Queequeg’s tattoos, which are said to contain “a complete theory of the heavens and the earth” and a “treatise on the art of attaining truth” (Ch. 110, 421), Martin here has included Ishmael’s line: “a man can be honest in any sort of skin,” a message of tolerance and equality. An honest man in imposing skin, Queequeg, represents a fusion of ferocity and benevolence.
The story continues in the next photograph, entitled “Ishmael and Queequeg: the inkeeper’s bed.”
The Third Night and Beyond
The fourth image, entitled “the third night and beyond,” provides a sequel to the third. Ishmael and Queequeg have now switched positions, with Queequeg at the center, and Ishmael beneath him and to the side. The new positioning parallels Ishmael’s change in orientation toward Queequeg and the subversion of social hierarchies this change implies. In the text, Ishmael’s transition is expressed precisely as a change in “position”: Ishmael goes from struggling to “unlock” Queequeg’s “bridegroom clasp” in the Spouter Inn to “cleaving” to Queequeg “like a barnacle” by their third evening together. In Martin’s rendering, both Queequeg and Ishmael don whale skull masks—the image hints at a ghostly adaptation of the “Grand Armada,” in which the sailors witness “young Leviathan amours in the deep” (346).
For this and the previous image, Peter drew inspiration from Annie Leibovitz’s iconic Rolling Stone cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, another photograph which takes love and death as its subjects. The Leibovitz photo, in which John holds Yoko in a naked embrace, was taken only a few hours before John Lennon was murdered. Martin’s anachronistic allusion further heightens his piece’s dark foreshadowing.
The Monkey-Rope
Image #6 is entitled “the monkey rope.” Here, Peter again returns to Ishmael and Queequeg. The image illustrates its eponymous chapter, in which Queequeg strips a floating whale carcass of blubber while Ishmael supports him from the deck by means of a rope secured to each of their bodies. Meanwhile Tashtego and Daggoo fend off sharks with harpoons, roiling the water with shark blood. In the novel, Ishmael describes himself erotically drawing in and slacking off the rope “to every swell of the sea.” And, as in the Spouter Inn, he again finds himself physically and spiritually “wedded’ to Queequeg, his individuality merged with Queequeg’s.
In this image, blood, represented by a red cloth, provides the only color in the entire series. The stump that stands in for the whale’s carcass recalls Ahab’s words, “it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now” (Ch. 36). Tethered upon the dead stumps of Ahab’s universe, Ishmael and Queequeg are poised to defend their love against collective foes.
Queequeg in his Coffin 1
Martin adapts another chapter in image 8, “Queequeg in his Coffin.” The coffin is represented by a vertical plank in the background, and the diptych illustrates the moment when, having previously resigned himself to an “endless end,” Queequeg suddenly convalesces by sheer will. Ishmael relates, “poising a harpoon, [he] pronounced himself fit for a fight” (Ch. 110, 420). In the epilogue, Queequeg’s coffin ends up outliving Queequeg; and just as this coffin-life-buoy physically saves Ishmael, so too does Queequeg provide symbolic salvation, the subject of the next image.
Ishmael’s Salvation
In image 9, Ishmael’s salvation, Queequeg, in profile, and Ishmael, facing forward, appear as if “squeezed” or “melted” into one, standing in direct alignment with Queequeg’s coffin in the background. Ishmael, with gaze upturned, lifts off his skull-mask. The presence of the coffin in this image evokes how Ishmael is rescued from bodily harm in the epilogue; however, as in “Squeeze of the Hand,” here his salvation is depicted as a transcendence of bodily boundaries.