Special Issue: On Artists and Adaptation Introduction

“There’s another rendering now;” says Stubb, as he observes Queequeg approaching the doubloon that Ahab has nailed to the mast, “but still one text.” An object so material as a doubloon—definitive and finite—nevertheless yields itself up to infinite interpretations, and such subjective renderings derived from a single fixed “text” become something like the networking of a culture, and one that yields up more doubloons. Thus, Moby-Dick is a rendering that has inspired other writers and artists to re-write Moby-Dick into further renderings in a process we, perhaps inadequately, call adaptation.

Scholars and critics have been shy of adaptation. It is at best some sort of critical stepchild that is presumed to have little claim to the authenticity of art. It is not “original”; it is stolen; it is derivative. But if you rise above the fantasy that art and writing have value only as the product of solitary genius and instead take the view that art, culture, and human identity are elements of a constantly evolving process, then you might also see Moby-Dick as existing in a continuum of fluid texts: it is a rendering of a myriad sources that has in turn become the originating source of a myriad other modern renderings. And the full evolutionary range of these adaptive texts, yet to be completed if ever, is in itself a rendering, representative of a basic human phenomenon: the need to grasp a thing and make it our own by transforming it into something that more closely resembles ourselves. This need to adapt is something to ponder, and to get at its meaning—if only to scratch its surface—is the hidden agenda of Leviathan’s special issue on Artists and Adaptation.

Apart from its focus on the forms of adaptation, our October 2013 number is special in several ways. The essays collected here began as a call for papers for the Melville Society’s Eighth International Conference—Melville and Rome—organized by Giorgio Mariani, Gordon Poole, and myself, that was eventually held in Rome in June 2011. The conference was our largest abroad, drawing participants from close to twenty nations, addressing topics related to democracy, empire, belief, and art. (For keynotes, reports, and photos, see our March 2012 special Extracts section in Leviathan 14.1.)

When we asked participants to submit fully revised and expanded essays based on their presentations, the response was so broad and delicious that the conference organizers conspired to deliver two collections of essays. One would be a volume of essays, titled Facing Melville, Facing Italy: Democracy, Cosmopolitanism, Translation, which will appear in Spring 2014 as the inaugural volume of the new monograph series, Sapienza Studies in American Literature and Culture, headed by Mariani and published by the University of Rome Press.

The second is the collection you now hold in your hands, featuring essays by artists Claire Illouz and Tony de los Reyes about their Melville-inspired work and by scholars on the artists Melville collected in the form of prints (Robert K. Wallace) and on contemporary Italian artist Franco Fortunato (Elizabeth Schultz). Also featured are essays on Melville’s artistic milieu, aesthetics, and pedagogy: Erika Schneider on the “starving artists” of Rome, Wendy Stallard Flory on beauty and delight in Billy Budd, and Martina Pfeiler on teaching Melville in a global context. Concluding our special issue is a trio of essays by Italian scholars on both Italian and American adaptations of Melville works, in the Dylan Dog graphic novel series (Giorgio Mariani), in the science fiction of Samuel Delany’s Nova (Salvatore Proietti), and in musical stagings of The Confidence-Man (Paolo Simonetti).

As rich and international as these essays are, our special issue is also special because we have taken the opportunity to include more than our usual number of images to illustrate the essays, including some in color. Bringing color into an academic journal is not done often or without significant editorial discourse (and penny-pinching). Leviathan began in its first year with color inserts, but the practice was dropped with Wiley as our publisher. However, Johns Hopkins University Press has...