Pulp(y) Fiction: A Dylan Dog Adaptation of Moby-Dick

Since 1932, when the first Italian translation of Moby-Dick appeared from the pen of Italian novelist Cesare Pavese, Herman Melville’s classic has been a significant part of Italian literary culture.¹ The flow of critical essays on Moby-Dick has been steady, and the novel has also left a mark on a small but significant group of Italian literary texts ranging from Pavese’s own poetry to Beppe Fenoglio’s Il partigiano Johnny—his modernist epic novel on the Italian resistance—and Stefano d’Arrigo’s monumental Horcynus Orca, the 1100-page novel described by George Steiner as “no doubt, the European answer to Moby-Dick” (Steiner 33). Ishmael’s mighty book has also penetrated other areas of Italian culture. The composer and music critic Armando Gentilucci has contributed his 1988 opera; the rock band Il Banco del Mutuo Soccorso dedicated its 1983 song “Grande Moby Dick” to the White Whale; and, more recently, Vinicio Capossela’s album, Marinai, Profeti e Balene (Mariners, Prophets, and Whales), features songs specifically devoted to Melville’s chapters, “The Sermon,” “The Whiteness of the Whale,” and “The Candles.”² Moby-Dick has inspired major Italian comics artists like Gino d’Antonio and Dino Battaglia, and it has been staged repeatedly by professional and amateur companies.³ Furthermore, it has attracted the interest of the accomplished visual artist Franco Fortunato.⁴ Finally, in November 2008, Italian writer and journalist Barbara Spinelli read from Moby-Dick on Italian national radio.⁵ Italians attuned to high and lowbrow art are likely to be familiar with the story of Ahab’s hunt for the White Whale. Indeed, dozens of businesses—from pet shops to ferry lines, from fish restaurants to spas—bear the name “Moby Dick” even though they do not sell baby whales for your fish tank, do not organize whale cruises, feature no whale steaks on their menus, or have any whales swimming in their thermal pools.

White whales are not an endangered species in the ocean of high and popular Italian culture. Rather than trying to classify Italy’s numerous adaptations with no better hope of succeeding than Ishmael’s cetological project, my object is one particularly stimulating, recent “revisitation” (to use Linda Hutcheon’s term) of Melville’s text: the 2001 Sulla rotta di Moby Dick (On the route of Moby Dick). The graphic novel, written by Tito Faraci and drawn by Bruno Brindisi, appeared in the Dylan Dog comics horror series, featuring the eponymous “investigator of nightmares,” originally created by writer and cartoonist Tiziano Sclavi (Fig. 1).⁶ The enormously popular Italian series has appeared in translation in Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, Poland, and Turkey. In the United States, it has been published by Dark Horse Comics. Sclavi’s Dylan Dog is mostly read by young people, but it has also won the approval of sophisticated readers like Umberto Eco, who has confessed that “I can read the Bible, Homer, or Dylan Dog for several days without being bored” (Ostini 15).

My methodological approach to questions of adaptation is based on Linda Hutcheon’s work. I fully endorse her efforts, in A Theory of Adaptation and elsewhere, to counter “the constant critical denigration of the general phenomenon of adaptation” (Hutcheon xi), as if all rewritings of an original text were by default “minor and subsidiary and certainly never as good as the ‘original’” (xii). Of course, in order to assess the extent to which an adaptation is capable of granting the pleasure of “repetition with variation” (4), comparisons with the source text—as long as they are not “Oedipally envious” (7)—are both welcome and necessary. While an adaptation in theory and practice can be enjoyable as an autonomous work, to study adaptations necessarily means to consider them as “deliberate, announced, and extended revisitations of prior works” (xiv). The Dylan Dog story is not only a reinvention but a “remediation” (13) of Melville’s text, transposing it from one sign system (the novel) to another (the graphic novel). Moreover, while most Italian adaptations of Moby-Dick stand in a largely synecdochal relation to...