Gus Blaisdell Collected

Frank Stella’s The Whiteness of the Whale

∙ 143 ∙ frank Stella’s The Whiteness of the Whale ■ The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surge of the surf, and its repose brings out the raging of the sea. —heidegger Frank Stella’s The Whiteness of the Whale, 1987, is named after one of the most famous chapters (XLII) in Moby Dick. Of this chapter Yvor Winters wrote that it is“equally one of the most astonishing pieces of rhetoric and one of the most appalling specimens of metaphysical argument in all literature.” Melville himself, in a letter to Evert A. Duycknick (Saturday 3 March 1849), declared that he loved“all men who dive.Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; and if he don’t attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can’t fashion the plummet that will. I’m not talking of Mr. Emerson now—but the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving and coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began.” D. H. Lawrence said generally of Melville what I find applies uncannily to Stella: “It is the material elements that he really has to do with. His drama is with them. He was a futurist before futurism found paint. The sheer naked slidings of the elements . And the human soul experiencing it all.” I will treat glancingly of all this material, directly and briefly. Of Stella and Melville one can only ask, Is there any relation between the godfather and his namesake? The famous chapter itself seems to me lost among the grosser slidings of its elements. Ishmael/Melville never closes with his essential subject: “It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.”The rest of the chapter is a foundering attempt to explain himself and convince us of the higher horror of whiteness.True, as Winters says, the rhetoric generated Artspace Magazine, vol. 13, no. 3, (July/August 1989), with Frank Stella’s The Whiteness of the Whale. frank stella’s ∙ 145 for the essay is good. But the undiscovered, only partly suggested subject renders much of the rhetoric bombast, hence often beautiful and sometimes irrelevant. The general hunch of the chapter is touched when Ishmael remarks that“there lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue.”That elusive something is albinism. He first trenches on this subject with a phrase descriptive of the White Steed of the Prairies when he speaks of the steed’s “warm nostrils reddening through his cool milkiness.” Two paragraphs later, in three sentences, he rhetorically raises the question of the albino man, dropping the subject entirely until the penultimate sentence where he merely asserts,“And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol.” Why would an essaying of albinism ground the rhetoric and disperse its desperations? Briefly, an albino is deprived of the colors typical of its kind. Relative to its kind the albino is unnatural and natural. An albino is unpigmented, pallorous and drained of color.This suggests death and supernatural interventions and accidents, perhaps especially horrifying ones since they take place in that supposedly most accidental of categories, color. If anything is accidental about (most) things it is their color. Order all white things. Even among white things the albino is displaced, a natural outcast, castaway because of accidents. Call it Ishmaelean. Melville remarks albinism as a phenomenon “more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion.” What does albinism abort? Color; while remaining colored. That would give Melville ground for his speculations on the contradictions seemingly internal to white: that it is simultaneously blank and full, empty and filled, concrete and abstract, present and absent; and all these visibly manifest when we think of whiteness or look at it contemplatively. Melville, lacking his essay on albinism, ends his chapter formulaically, resorting to the hackneyed conceits of whores that are charnel houses under their cosmetics and the world as a whited sepulcher, a figure Matthew rendered at 23:27 in three sentences while Melville has taken pages, paragraphs , and a chapter to end in roughly the same place, only appropriated, not original. While working up these conceits Melville turns to physics, the idea that under all hues, nature too is but a harlot and were we to apply the vanishing cream of unmediated light we should see the world lie before us a...