EXTRACTS: Ahab's Leg Dilemma Pt. 3

; or, odds and ends on an odd limb

I’ll be back the week after next with a new investigation, but for now here are some final odds and ends from my research into Ahab’s leg that I had to cut for space or for going too far down strange rabbit holes.

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The mystery of Ahab’s leg took on an interesting second life of its own down at the bottom of the ocean when Italian literary critic and semiotician Umberto Eco made philosophical use of it in a book on language and cognition titled Kant and the Platypus. Eco uses the ambiguity about which leg is missing to demonstrate a categorical difference in fiction between unspecified characteristics/properties which have narrative importance and those which the reader may supply with their own imagination.

It has been said that narrative worlds are always little worlds, because they do not constitute a maximal and complete state of things. In this sense, narrative worlds are parasitical, because, if the alternative properties are not specified, we take for granted the properties that hold good in the real world. In Moby-Dick, it is not expressly stated that all the sailors about the Pequod have two legs, but the reader ought to take it as implicit, given that sailors are human beings. On the other hand, the account takes care to inform us that Ahab had only one leg, but, as far as I remember, it does not say which, leaving us free to use our imagination, because such a specification has no bearing on the story.

Once we have accepted the commitment to read a story, we are not only authorized but also invited—if we so wish—to make inferences both on the basis of events narrated and on those presupposed.

The example is in service of a larger point that Eco is making about language, semiotics, and the ‘contract’ between writer and reader, but suffice it to say that Ahab’s leg represents an essential example of this situation in that the fact that one of Ahab’s legs is missing is not just specified but structurally essential to the story, but which leg is missing is of no importance (to readers, anyway; Ahab might have had a favorite).

Several academic papers in the field of software engineering have since built on Eco’s notion of “Ahab’s Leg Dilemma,” in reference to a particular kind of challenge faced by software developers when translating a client’s ideas into concrete visual or narrative examples. In short, when developers create a mock-up or prototype adhering to the vision and requirements dictated by stakeholders, they inevitably need to make decisions about other unspecified design and functional elements. However, this situation inevitably creates needless communication and efficiency problems when clients become distracted by these meaningless details.

The Ahab’s leg dilemma is a semiotics phenomenon that consists of the need to add details to a story when changing the target media or the communication style, in order to keep the story engaging. […]

In our experience, the phenomenon was particularly relevant during the requirement validation phase, because the analyst adopted narration as a way to communicate and validate semi-formal requirements with stakeholders. Narrative scenarios were derived from requirements, and the analyst was forced to add details during the translations, in order to instantiate generic requirements into a concrete spatial-temporal context. Although narrative scenarios are an expressive way to represent and communicate requirements to non-technical people (in our case nurses and doctors), we observed that stakeholders sometimes focused their attention on those non-central aspects of the story (Ahab’s Legs) that are just due to the translation. This caused waste of valuable time during the session, since comments raised on Ahab’s Legs did not impact any part of the actual requirements. In other words an Ahab’s Leg potentially represents a source of distraction for a stakeholder, who is supposed to provide feedback to the requirements.

While this is an intriguing (if narrow) technical application of the idea, Eco’s use of Ahab’s leg has arguably become markedly more relevant in the last decade. What are the seemingly endless “culture war” complaints about casting non-white actors in adaptations of books where skin color was never specified but Ahab’s Leg Dilemma? Translating the largely imaginative world of books to visual mediums presents myriad challenges and opportunities, and Ahab’s leg may be the archetypal example.

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Speaking of translation, I encountered in my research an curious meta-example of Eco’s idea on an early-2000s website made by the members of a German book club who were working through Moby-Dick using a 1977 translation. One member of the group works out his own argument for the left leg/right leg question based on Ahab seemingly being right handed, which I’ll quote here both in their original German and the rough translation:

ORIGINAL: In Kapitel 36… schreibt Melville: „Er [Ahab] nahm die Kleidkeule, und den Hammer in der erhobenen Rechten, das Goldstück in der Linken, daß alle es sehen konnten, trat er auf den Großmast zu und rief aus: »Wer von euch einen Wal sieht….

TRANSLATION: In Chapter 36… Melville writes: “He [Ahab] took the mallet, and with the hammer in his right hand raised, the gold piece in his left, for all to see, he went up to the mainmast and exclaimed : "Whoever of you sees a whale…”

The post goes on to posit that if Ahab is right handed, he would also presumably also throw with his right arm and braced himself with his left knee, citing the passage about the clumsy cleat. Again, here’s both the excerpt from the German translation of Moby-Dick that’s provided in the post, and a rough English translation.

GERMAN: Oft hat er im Boot gestanden, das gesunde Knie fest in der halbkreisförmigen Ausbuchtung der Klampe, und mit dem Stechbeitel des Zimmermanns hier ein wenig ausgehöhlt, dort einen Span abgeflacht.

TRANSLATION: He often stood in the boat, his good knee firmly in the semicircular bulge of the cleat, and used the carpenter's chisel to hollow it out a little here and flatten a chip there

In sum, if Ahab is right-handed, he throws with his right hand. And if he throws with his right hand, he would brace himself with his healthy left knee. Therefore it’s his right leg which is missing.

This would appear to be solid, if not conclusive, evidence… if the entire argument weren’t based on a highly-imaginative translation. In fact, the 1977 German translation from which the writer is quoting invented all of the key characteristics in those clues — Ahab’s “left hand,” “right hand,” and “good knee.” None of those words appear in the original English text, which neither specify the hand Ahab uses to nail the doubloon to the mast, nor that Ahab braced himself with his “good” knee — just his “solitary” knee.

Although I don’t speak German, I don’t believe there’s any linguistic reason that the translator would need to specify his left or right hand or swap “solitary” knee for “good knee,” but somehow even in this text-to-text adaptation we find an example of Eco’s problem of translation.

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I briefly waded into the waters of statistics, curious whether Ahab’s left- or right-handedness could tell us anything about his foot preference and whether it might be useful information when thinking about him ‘shaking’ Captain Boomer’s hand or kicking Stubb in a dream.

According to a recent study of over 1.5 million people, about 86.8 percent of individuals were right-handed, and 10.9 percent were left-handed. Just 2.1 percent were ambidextrous. So the odds were clearly in favor of Ahab being right-handed, especially in a profession where it seems there wouldn’t be much accommodation for left-handers, much less someone missing a leg.

What I wanted to know, though, was how that correlated to their dominant leg? Another recent study looked at the association of handedness and “footedness,” which was determined by foot preference with regard to “kicking a ball to hit a target, picking up a pebble with the toes, stepping on a beetle or a cigarette stump, and stepping up onto a chair.” The study found that overall 61 percent of individuals preferred their right foot, regardless of hand-preference, and just 8.2 percent preferred their left foot. The remaining 30.2 percent were “mixed footed,” have no preference for either.

From these totals, we can work out that 67 percent of right-handers were also right-footed, about 29.5 percent were mixed-footed, and just 3.5% were left-footed. What could this tell us about Ahab’s leg? Not that much. But assuming I’m onto something with my theory from last week, there’s one small clue that might point to Ahab being right-handed that has to do with the position of the doubloon on the mainmast.

The mainmast is at the outer edge of the quarter-deck, as we’re told that Ahab paces the deck “taking regular turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast.” Now, in the scene in The Quarter-Deck where he nails the doubloon to the mast, imagine Ahab walking from the bulwarks on the side of the ship toward the mast in the center. As I argued last week, the coin must be on one of the sides of the mast if both Ahab and the crew can easily see it from their typical standpoints on the ship.

If the doubloon is on the starboard (right) side of the mast, it might indicate that Ahab is right-handed, steadying the coin with his left hand and hammering the nail with his right hand — and vice versa for the port (left) side. Otherwise, he would have to awkwardly lean or step off the quarter-deck to hammer it straight on, which is not only impractical but not described in the book.

As we know, Ahab puts his foot on Fedallah in Chapter 119: The Candles while standing under the doubloon, but there’s no particular reason up to this point to think that the doubloon is on the port or starboard side of the mast. But imagining Ahab with his right leg on Fedallah, his ability to then turn and face the masts likely indicates that they must be on the starboard side.

Then turning—the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm, he stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.

In other words, in a position with your right leg raised, it’s far more natural to turn to your left than to the right. This would place the doubloon on the starboard side of the mast, and therefore suggest that Ahab is right-handed.

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I was fascinated by the bizarre connection between Francis V. Lloyd’s attempt to figure out Ahab’s leg and Jane Alpert, the young radical who became helped her boyfriend carry out eight bombings throughout New York City in 1969. Here’s a slightly longer version of that story:

As I mentioned, Lloyd opens his article by mentioning that it never dawned on him that the question of which leg was missing was unresolved until reading a New York Times profile of Jane Alpert. What really caught my eye is that Alpert’s life took an extreme turn while at Columbia when she met Samuel Grossman, who, in a strange coincidence, had already by that time legally changed his name to Samuel Melville in honor of Herman Melville.

As one friend later recalled, to Samuel, the white whale represented an unconquerable evil which had to be fought at all costs.

He said, "I got the name Melville because I took it. My real name is not Melville, but I was so impressed by what he was saying in Moby Dick that I took that name."

"So," I said, "what about Moby Dick? It's just a whale story." I remember seeing a movie where Ahab was not Gregory Peck--that's maybe some of your generation--but John Barrymore played the first Ahab in the first motion picture Moby Dick. And I said, "It's just a whale story."

"No, it's not, Bill. The white whale is evil, that swims on unconquering and unconquerable. Everybody dies on the Pequod. The Pequod is smashed to smithereens by the whale. Ahab is lashed by the harpoon lanyard to the whale's back and is drowned, the men in the long boat are destroyed, but one man goes back to sea. You can remember his name: it was Ishmael." And that's how the book essentially ends, Ishmael goes back to sea.

I do wonder if this friend misremembered some of the details of their conversation as this is a pretty unusual read of the book. But more importantly, it’s not a good sign if someone’s main takeaway is admiration for Ahab’s doomed mission. Perhaps it’s unsurprising then that participation in peaceful anti-war movements in the late 1960s eventually led him and Jane Alpert, with whom he had become romantically involved, to work with militant organizations like the Weather Underground.

Melville eventually pleaded guilty to the bombings and was sentenced to 13-18 years in prison, but like a true Ahab kept fighting until the bitter end, helping foment the 1971 Attica prison riots during which he was shot and killed by state police. Alpert, on the other hand, received 27 months in prison and later apologized for and distanced herself from the bombings in her memoir. More of an Ishmael-type, really.

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Lastly, I wanted to include some correspondence with artist Matt Kish, the artist behind Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page, published in 2011. An enormous undertaking as obsessive as Ahab’s quest, Kish made over 550 illustrations based on each page of the Signet Classics paperback edition in a wide variety of mediums (ballpoint pen, marker, paint, crayon, etc.) set on pages torn from old books.

Notably, Kish’s work is also highly abstract, having more in common with the Melville-inspired work of Jackson Pollock, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Frank Stella than with traditional illustrators of the book. And to be clear, Moby-Dick in Pictures only reproduces short excerpts of the text from each page, not the entire book. There are, however, discernible characters and scenes throughout, putting it in an interesting space somewhere between illustration and the art world.

It goes without saying that Kish’s Ahab is non-traditional to say the least, and most curiously for our purposes here is drawn each time in such a way that it’s not entirely clear whether he’s facing forward or to the side. This cleverly makes it impossible to say whether the peg leg is his left or right in a kind of Ahabian rabbit-duck illusion.

Image courtesy of Matt Kish

I initially emailed him to ask whether this was an intentional choice, absolving himself of having to lop off a leg as if he were the white whale himself. I was surprised not by Matt’s thoughtfulness in his approach to his drawings but that despite the abstraction there actually was a definitive answer to the left/right question. His response in full:

Before I began my illustration project, I was aware from my prior readings of the novel that Melville never specified which of Ahab's legs had been taken by the White Whale. I wasn't especially troubled or concerned by this since, when I began my illustrations, I had no idea they would ever be published, let alone be seen by anyone other than close friends. Even more importantly though, it's essential to note that I never set out to create the definitive visual version of the novel. Such a thing is impossible, and if it were, I would certainly not be the artist to attempt it. My illustrations were entirely concerned with the way I as a reader had envisioned the novel in my mind. They are far more about my personal relationship with the text than anything else.

So, I did spend a great deal of time thinking about how to depict Ahab, but the choice of which leg was missing was not a big part of that. To me, Ahab, as well as most of the crew and whalers, seemed more a kind of hard structure or machine than flesh and blood human. That image developed from my near-inability to comprehend the hardship and deprivation of being at sea for 2 or 3 years, working back-breaking labor, and engaging in combat with terrifying aquatic monsters. I wanted my Ahab to look like a kind of grim, machine-like sentinel, scarred but not broken, one eye singly focused on his goal of revenge. My symbolism was never really very complex. I enjoyed the challenge of using this blueprint and stretching it, distorting it, using different media and representational styles to show the surprising range of emotions Ahab expresses...from pride to rage to longing to crushing grief and regret.

Back to the leg though. In my depictions of Ahab, his left leg is the one replaced by the peg. There is absolutely no reason for this beyond the fact that, when I first drew his full figure, it just felt right. I was quite satisfied with how he looked, and that stayed with me.

There you have it: his left just felt right. I was interested to hear the thoughts of other illustrators in how they decided, but none have gotten back to me just yet. So thanks to Matt not only for his kind response but for his timeliness!