Luc-François Granier's Dreams of Moby-Dick

Abstract

Luc-François Granier's Dreams of Moby-Dick Gordon M. Poole The presentation of Luc-François Granier's book of paintings inspired by Moby-Dick, held in Palazzo Contarini-Polignac, Venice, in January 2019, included the exhibition of the original 72 pen-sketch cum watercolor paintings (Luc-François Granier, Moby Dick, ed. Giovanni Andrea Semerano. Rome: La Camera Verde, 2019; the book holds only the illustrations, not the text of Moby-Dick). Granier is a French painter as well as a creator of installations, videos, carvings in polystyrene and various other materials, novelist, illustrator of books for children and adults, playwright, and translator from Italian, German, and Spanish into French. He has lived and worked off and on for some years in Venice, becoming well-known in intellectual and pictorial circles; he is also a companionable presence in his favorite restaurants and coffee-bars. And he is hooked on Moby-Dick. Before ever having visited Venice, in an unedited sketch from which we shall be quoting titled "365 Rêves de Moby Dick," he tells of a reproduction in the house of his "philosopher grandmother" depicting none other than the very Palazzo Contarini-Polignac where the exhibition of his work was held. We'll come back to the "philosopher grandmother" in a bit. He recalls that it must have been 1983, in mid-winter, when he chanced upon the same reproduction hanging in the hall of another building, on the Atlantic coast of France where he was touring, and it was this coincidence that moved him to lodge there. It so happened that Moby-Dick was his sole companion in his lodgings, while the shutters were suggestively buffeted by boreal storms and icy spray. While he read in the least cold room, all bundled up, he whittled and molded some of the main characters of Melville's romance into figurines. In his words (I translate from the French), "On the mantelpiece sat a piece of jetsam, called Queequeg, pocked with holes; another one shaped like a fish was Moby, while Captain Ahab lived in a sprig of heather I had scraped clean with my fingernails and capped with a plastic bellflower" ("365 Rêves"). It is clear that Granier reacted to Melville's novel from the start in his own peculiar way, turning some of its protagonists into symbols, or perhaps totems or idols. So when he came to Rome in 2015, he was already primed for Melville, and it was there that his readings as a young man bore fruit. He had come on a visit to Giovanni Andrea Semerano, a publisher of elegant books and [End Page 123] organizer of excellent cultural events, who was bringing out Granier's novel La Pierre (The Stone). To while away the time during a lengthy publishing process, Granier took up Moby-Dick again, making illustrative paintings whenever he felt the urge. By February 2017 he had amassed 72 illustrations. In "365 Rêves" he itemizes the results: The last three days, with the final hunt, took up a full twelve drawings. The last water color shows the narrator grasping the coffin lifesaver that had been his friend's. Ishmael and the remembrance of Queequeg. The remaining 59 include two introductory ones, the first representing my recollections of Atlantic readings, the second representing Moby Dick smashing the colosseum to pieces; and they sweep me into his wake to pursue my dreamlike meanderings through the pages of the romance ("365 Rêves"). Why would Moby Dick destroy the colosseum? Perhaps the whale saw the colosseum, in Granier's mind, as representative of an imperial Roman ship of state, with the slaughter of wild animals and the combat between gladiators, sometimes to the death. Or, perhaps he saw it as an image of the United States, warring against the environment and now mired in its global power projection, symbolized in the Pequod, a worldwide war against whatever the white whale might be taken to symbolize. In a countryside estate in the town of Tuscania (in the Italian Lazio regione) in the summer before the 2019 Venice exhibition, the present writer had already seen Granier's 72 paintings when they were exhibited...