Doodler in Chief
; or, on untimely celebrations and the politics of Moby-Dick
This past week, the world celebrated the 205th birthday of Herman Melville, born on August 1, 1819. The year 2024 also marks the 173rd anniversary of the publication of Moby-Dick; the 133rd anniversary of the year Melville died, and the 105th anniversary of the beginning of the so-called Melville Revival.
In other words, when a book and author are this old, significant milestone anniversaries are few and far between. But silly as they are, there are few figures in history whose legacies have changed due to the celebration of an arbitrary anniversary: it was the 100th anniversary of his birth that prompted Raymond Weaver’s August 1919 article about Melville in The Nation which launched the complete reassessment and canonization of his work.
That said, you won’t find me protesting even an off-year celebration of Melville. Such was the case 12 years ago, when Google decided to pay tribute with a “Google Doodle,” the temporary logo on the search engine’s homepage. On October 18, 2012, visitors were greeted with this image celebrating Ahab and the white whale, coinciding with the 161st anniversary of the day Moby-Dick (though technically, The Whale) was first published in London:
Whatever the reasoning for the anniversary, it’s a design that I could easily see being adapted for a book cover. The artist, Mike Dutton, spent nearly five years on the Google Doodle team and created created around 200 of the designs. Writing about the Moby-Dick doodle, Dutton shared an interesting perspective on what inspired him for this particular drawing and the freedom allowed in designing for well-known books:
When designing a cover for a classic in the book publishing world, there is usually room for some artistic experimentation and subtlety. This is for a couple of reasons. One, the readers are already familiar with the imagery in the book, which gives the artist an opportunity to reinterpret or "refresh" the imagery in a contemporary way. Two, the title itself will usually attract the reader's attention – in many cases, the reader is looking specifically for this title. This relieves some of the burden or obligation for the illustration to portray a key moment of suspense or high drama from the story in order to attract more potential buyers.
Dutton also let readers into his artistic process, sharing several early designs for the doodle that didn’t quite work. A common thread was the idea to “tie the white space of the homepage into the whiteness of Moby Dick (the whale), so that he wouldn't be immediately visible at first glance.” In the draft below, that element of surprise comes through not only in the white space but also in Moby Dick’s eye hidden in the first O. Dutton felt, however, that the image “seemed a little gritty and frightening, and possibly not authentic” to the moment when Ahab finally encounters the whale.
In another attempt, debris from the wrecked Pequod spells out the logo with the whale faintly lurking in the background. This idea was nixed after realizing that it might not be a great look to portray Google as a “shipwreck.”
The post (again, available here and worth a read) includes a few other sketches and ideas, but doesn’t mention specifically why Google chose to celebrate the book on its 161st anniversary. The response to the doodle, picked up by several news aggregators, offers a few hints.
Yahoo, for example, noted that Moby-Dick had “been in vogue lately,” pointing to the recent release of the Moby-Dick Big Read audiobook project, for which celebrities and other notable figures each read a chapter. A Moby-Dick marathon was also scheduled for the following month, featuring readers including Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, and Sarah Vowell. The year was “not particularly significant” per the New York Times writeup, “but this weekend was picked to honor the date the book was first published in the United States, Nov. 14, 1851.” And so, too, was the location, honoring “Melville’s relationship to the city.”
The article continued: “Who else is reading Moby Dick these days? None other than Barack Obama.”
Reader in Chief
The mention of Obama reading Moby-Dick of course caught my eye. My first thought was that maybe it had been listed on his annual summer reading list, which he’s shared every year since 2009. But he actually skipped the summers of 2012 and 2013. It turned out that the “news” was that he had listed Moby-Dick on his Facebook profile as one of his favorites, along with the Bible, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Marilynne Robinson,’s Gilead, Emerson’s Self-Reliance, and Shakespeare’s tragedies.
However, I’m still not sure why his reading preferences were considered to be ‘in the news’ in late 2012 — nearly at the finish line of his reelection campaign. His list of favorite books, Moby-Dick included, had actually been posted on his Facebook profile as early as February 2008, back when he was still a candidate in his first presidential campaign — and when articles discussing his picks still had to explain to readers what Facebook even was.
But something about the book really was in the air around this time. Just a year later the Los Angeles Library Foundation threw a Moby-Dick reading party as a fundraiser, inviting a strange hodgepodge of guests to Santa Monica’s Annenberg Beach House including Dhani Harrison (son of George), Colin Hanks (son of Tom), author Mark Z. Danielewski (son of, um… Tad?), artist Shepard Fairey, and John Densmore, the drummer for The Doors. Oh, to be a barnacle on the wall at that party. Naturally, also present was Richard Melville Hall a.k.a. Moby, who claims to be — but absolutely is not — Herman Melville’s distant relative. (More on that another time)
Whatever reason Obama included the book on his list, the selection followed him throughout his presidency. Not only was his choice of Moby-Dick was used against him as a symbol of his academic pretension and snobbery, there was no end to the belabored Ahabian analogies concerning working-class voters, the economy, and his healthcare plan to name just a few.
Washington Post, April 29, 2008: “The relationship between Barack Obama and the white working class is beginning to resemble that between Ahab and the white whale. In state after state (Ohio, Pennsylvania and now Indiana), Obama sets out to reel in his working-class quarry, and, in state after state, it eludes him. As Obama is still the likely nominee, many Democrats fear that come November, working-class whites will pull Obama and their party down to defeat.”
Frisco Enterprise, December 31, 2009: “Sub-prime housing bubbles, TARP, bailouts, stimulus and taxpayers becoming part-owners of General Motors has tripled the national debt. Captain Ahab Obama harpooned the economy and now we're floating in a sea of debris we can't pay for.”
The Independent, February 25, 2010: “Having invested so much in healthcare reform, he cannot walk away now. Yet after a while persistence starts looking like a political obsession to match Captain Ahab's hunt for the great white whale. Moby Dick, of course, hauled Ahab to his death, and healthcare could easily drag Obama to disaster.”
Moby-Dick might also have had some influence on his policy decisions as well. Just a few months into his presidency, Melville’s ghost must have guided Obama’s pen when he spared a $9 million program “to promote the history of whaling” in his 2010 education budget proposal despite other major cuts. The funds supported “culturally based educational activities, internships, apprenticeship programs, and exchanges” not only in Massachusetts but also for Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Indian tribes in Mississippi.
As a candidate in 2008, Obama promised “leadership in enforcing international wildlife protection agreements, including strengthening the international moratorium on commercial whaling.” And though he flexed some diplomatic muscle when he called Japan’s continued commercial whaling sector “unacceptable," and pushed hard for diplomatic sanctions against countries flouting the International Whaling Commission’s global moratorium on the practice, he was ultimately unable to convince them to stop.
First Mate
While political talking heads were making lame (and usually ill-fitting) analogies between Obama and Ahab, Melville scholar Wyn Kelly also picked up on the newly-elected president’s fondness for Moby-Dick, approaching the question with far more nuance and appreciation for the book’s characters and themes. Kelly pondered in a blog post what might have most drawn Obama to the book, and who among the crew would be his most fitting counterpart.
Song of Solomon, the story of an African-American man searching for his identity, seems a likely inspiration for Obama's account of a (somewhat) similar quest, Dreams from My Father. But Moby-Dick? One would hardly associate Obama with Captain Ahab, a man of furious passion bent on revenge. Nor does he much resemble Ishmael. As verbally inclined as Melville's narrator, Obama nevertheless has assumed political leadership, whereas Ishmael prefers the role of observer.
Perhaps he is an island prince, like Queequeg? Yes, he comes from a distant Pacific island, but Obama has taken his place within American society as Queequeg never does. Does he, like Bulkington, have a soul that can "keep the open independence of her sea"? It may be too soon to tell.
One possible answer appears in Obama's book, Dreams from My Father. In contemplating an early failure when working as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama describes himself as like "the first mate on a sinking ship" (166). Call me Starbuck?
Ishmael portrays Starbuck as a "long, earnest man." He admires his valor: "Looking into his eyes you seemed to see there the yet-lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life." Ishmael pays tribute to his "august dignity," which he associates with a "just Spirit of Equality, which has spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind!"
Kelly, writing shortly before Obama’s inauguration, also connects the post to the still strangely-prophetic mock headlines which situate Ishmael’s voyage in time:
"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States."
"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL."
"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."
But what Kelly couldn’t have anticipated — as no one could — was to come at the end of his second term and is arguably what most connects Obama to the first mate. Like Starbuck, he watched the ill-fated 2016 election unfold with his hands largely tied, praying for salvation but duty-bound not to intervene. (“Oh, his unappeasable brow drives on towards one, whose duty tells him he cannot depart. My God, stand by me now!”)
The Moby-Dick analogies didn’t stop after Trump was elected in November 2016 (sample headlines included: “The white whale Donald Trump aims to destroy”; “White whale and wide wall: American obsessives Ahab and Donald Trump”; “Trump has become the Democrats' great white whale”), though no one would expect him to have actually read the book himself. Like water and meditation, Moby-Dick and American politics are wedded forever; the template of an obsessive, self-sacrificing, occasionally inscrutable quest is just too tempting to pass up, no matter how long it’s been since an suitable anniversary.