Mere Illustrations: Maurice Sendak and Melville

JOHN TAGGART Mere Illustrations: Maurice Sendak and Melville Hershel Parker's Kraken Edition of Herman Melville's Pierre: Or, the Ambiguities. Illustrated by Maurice Sendak. HarperCollins, 1995. For to me it seems more the excellently illustrated re-statement of a problem , than the solution of the problem itself. But as such mere illustrations ate almost universally taken for solutions (and perhaps they are the only possible human solutions), thetefote it may help to the tempotary quiet of some inquiring mind; and so not be wholly without use. Melville, Pierre The most significant recent study of visual art in relation to literary texts is J. Hillis Miller's Iiiustration (Harvard 1992). Among several perceptions to be found in this study, perhaps the most fundamental concerns doubleness. After noting that a picture and a text in juxtaposition will always have different meanings, will always conflict irreconcilably, Miller goes on to claim that each separate picture or text is dialogical within itself and, therefore, double in meaning. "The warfare between media is doubled by an internal warfare intrinsic to each medium in itself" (95). This leads to an even larger claim: "the difficult, perhaps impossible, task of reading works in eithet medium consists, in part, of identifying in each case this othet by way of tracks it has left within the work" (96). What can be more attracting than that which has been designated as difficult, pethaps impossible? Accordingly, I shall attempt this task with specific application to Maurice Sendak's pictures as reproduced in Hershel Parker's Kraken edition of Melville's Pierre: Or The Ambiguities Arizona Quarterly Volume 56, Number 2, Summer 2000 Copyright © 2000 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1610 112John Taggart (HarperCollins, 1995). My reading will concentrate on one pictute in particular, the embrace of two nude figures, which appears both on the dust cover and within the text (Book XlI) of this edition. Let us begin with what is seen first and, considering its tendency to become worn and thus eventually discarded, perhaps never seen again: the dust cover picture. The two most prominent elements of the cover design are the picture itself and the first half of the text's title. Their prominence is one of scale. Easily the two largest elements of the design , their shared prominence suggests that the moment illustrated by the picture is the single key moment of the book, that the picture is the single, essential key to the book as a whole. This suggestion is amplified by the appearance of the names of Melville (top) and Sendak (bottom), along with that of Hershel Parker (in between), in the same, much smaller typeface. Author, editor, and illustrator are thus made equivalent , co-producers of this key to the key of the book. Many readers, however, will very probably never know about the existence of this key picture. Published only in a relatively expensive hardbound format, the Kraken edition has obviously been marketed for institutional libraries. Who else would be interested in what is, after all, a consciously partial version of the author's complete and final manuscript ? Only institutional libraries already possessing the 1971 version of Pierre—i.e., the Northwestern-Newberry edition in the Writings of Herman Melville series, an edition which has been designated "an approved text" by the Center for Editions of American Authors and the Modem Language Association of America—could be expected to purchase this edition.1 It is customary for such libraries to remove dust covers before cataloging and placing books on their shelves. What institutional readers will first see is not Sendak's dust cover picture but a gold-stamped design on a maroon "hard cover." This design shows a single-masted ship, a cross on its flag, afloat on an orientalized serpentine sea. Under the design is THE KRAKEN EDITION in the same all caps typeface as appears under the dust cover picture. An elaborated verticalization of this serpentine sea is placed on the spine ofthe book under author, title, and publisher. The provenance of this design and its relevance to the text are unclear. Sendak, who has copyrighted the pictures, may have done it; or it may be the work of...