On Color

by David Kastan

  Little is gained by the refusal to consider white a color—or black or gray. We could—should—say that these are achromatic colors, which have lightness though not saturation or hue, but in most contexts the technical distinction isn’t of much use. For almost all purposes, it makes sense to consider them colors. So, for the purpose of this book, white is a color—and not just one that we see but one onto which we load symbolic meaning. We do that with all colors, but with none more intensely than white. White is the color of unspotted purity and of complete absolution, of blank pages and clean starts. But that is the second of its lies.

  White is also the color of ghosts. Of skulls and bleached bones. Of maggots. White literally “appalls” (etymologically the word means to make pale). Instead of promising a future or forgiving a past, this white terrifies or disgusts. It “stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation,” as Herman Melville says in Moby-Dick.1

  This might be the third of its lies, although it is really just another version of the one before. Each is the lie that white means anything at all. Colors don’t mean. The painter Ellsworth Kelly alleged that “color has its own meaning.”2 Maybe that’s true. But color doesn’t tell us what that meaning is. We tell the color; and whatever we say it means, we make it mean, and we make it mean without much help from our visual system.

  Melville knew that, too. He doesn’t tell the lie. He just reports it, though hardly straightforwardly. Moby-Dick is a “strange” and “ungainly” book, as Melville himself admitted in a letter in 1850 to Richard Henry Dana, particularly so if it is taken to be about Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal quest for the great white whale. It is more than 500 pages long in whatever edition you read it (or more likely don’t read it—but do). It would be a wonderful adventure story if it were 150 pages, but there are all those tedious digressions about whales and whaling that keep the story at bay. In a novel of 135 chapters, Ahab doesn’t appear until chapter 28 and we don’t see Moby Dick until chapter 133. A third of the book has passed before someone cries, “There she blows!”

  The novel is one of those “large loose baggy monsters,” as Henry James termed various long and unwieldy nineteenth-century novels.3 In so many ways it’s excessive. And yet, it’s not the adventure story but the excess that makes it a great novel. But a great novel about what if not about a whale hunt? Maybe about excess. Particularly about the excess of meaning that attaches to white.

  Chapter 42 is called “The Whiteness of the Whale.” It’s tempting just to include it here in its entirety. Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, admits that it “was the whiteness of the whale that appalled” him, and the paragraph that follows is a single extraordinary (excessive?) sentence, with clause piling upon clause, each joined by a semicolon, tracing the positive associations of white across time and cultures as a sign of beauty, innocence, majesty, joy, fidelity, and holiness. Four hundred and thirty words of a 470-word sentence breathlessly compile evidence of how white is associated “with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime”—until the inevitable “yet” comes, indeed comes twice: “yet for all these accumulated associations … there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood” (160). The “innermost idea of this hue” is what Ishmael’s story must explain, or “else,” he says, “all these chapters might be naught” (159).

  Not to understand this enigmatic whiteness is, then, not to understand Ishmael, not to understand Ahab, not to understand the multihued, multicultural crew of the Pequod, not to understand the white whale—not, that is, to understand the novel at all. But what we are invited to understand is that whiteness is an enigma. “The whiteness of the whale” is “a dumb blankness, full of meaning” (165). But the fullness of meaning is a function of that unresisting blankness, an emptiness that allows (encourages?) us to imagine meaning in it. We invest it with meaning, but the meanings are all our own. The “innermost idea of this hue” is that it doesn’t have an innermost idea.

  White becomes our symbol of symbols precisely because of this vacancy. It reminds us that symbolic meanings are never natural or inevitable. Take, for example, green, a nearly universal symbol of fertility and rebirth for obvious reasons. But it is also a symbol for jealousy and envy. In China it is a symbol of infidelity; in the United Kingdom it’s the color of “awareness ribbons” for childhood depression, kidney cancer, workplace safety, and open records for adoptees. You can make similar lists of unpredictable and even contradictory symbolic associations for every color. Color symbolism is unsystematic and multivalent. In the case of white, what Ishmael calls its “indefiniteness” just makes the arbitrariness of its associations more obvious than with other colors.

  For Ahab, the whiteness of the whale is the symbol of its malevolence, a mark of “that tangible malignity which has been there from the beginning” (156). But if the white whale swims “before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies,” it is Ahab’s monomania that incarnates it so. On to “the whale’s white hump,” he has “piled … the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down” (156). That’s a lot of piling, and sometimes a white whale is just a white whale (Figure 39).

  And sometimes a white lamb is just a white lamb. But we pile symbolic meanings on it, too, though obviously different ones than those Melville’s white whale carries. White is the color of the mystic lamb, the symbol for Christ’s sacrifice for the salvation of humankind. “Behold the Lamb of God,” says the apostle John, “which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29, KJV). But in Francisco de Zurbarán’s remarkable painting of the Agnus Dei, the meticulous rendering of the animal’s body uncomfortably reminds us that this particular lamb has not chosen its sacrificial role (Figure 40).

  Zurbarán, in fact, painted six versions of the painting. In one (now in San Diego) there is a halo over the lamb’s head and the inscription TAMQUAM AGNUS (as a lamb), making this symbolism unmistakable: this is Jesus, who was “led as a sheep to the slaughter; and like a lamb dumb before his shearer, so opened he not his mouth” (Acts 8:32, KJV). In the version now in the Prado in Madrid, there is only the lamb, but even in the ones with some explicit indication of its intended meaning, the lamb itself is so carefully observed and meticulously rendered that it cannot be fully absorbed into the simile. As a symbol, Zurbarán’s Agnus Dei seeks to unite the world of the spirit and the world of the flesh, but the astonishing proficiency of the painting itself pries the two realms apart. It just cannot be forgotten that this is not Christ the Savior but a living lamb that won’t be saved. Zurbarán is simply too good a painter.

  FIGURE 39: “Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?” Dead whale on the beach in Brittany, 1904

  FIGURE 40: Francisco de Zurbarán, Agnus Dei, 1635–40, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

  Symbols are objects or images that stand for something else. But it is the something else that really matters. The symbol should give way effortlessly to the thing that is symbolized. The symbol matters only because what is symbolized matters more. But Zurburán’s lamb resists. It won’t give up its hold on us, not because the artist makes us sympathize with the lamb he has painted but because he has painted that lamb so perfectly. Symbols can’t survive that painterly perfection.

  With Melville it works the opposite way. Melville’s artistry at first seems to insist that the whale is a symbol. “Of course he is a symbol,” wrote D. H. Lawrence. “Of what? I doubt if even Melville knew exactly.”4 But whatever Moby Dick may be thought to symbolize, Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, is a reluctant participant in the creation of the symbolism. Ishmael focuses our attention on the whale itself. In seventeen chapters of seeming interruptions of the narrative, the whale is methodically described, anatomized, and classified. Ishmael conscientiously provides us with “the plain facts, historical and otherwise” about the mammal. He keeps its physical being before us. He insists on the materia
lity of the whale, preventing it from being easily understood “as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory” (172). That would never do.

  But the more Ishmael insists on those plain facts, the more this weakens the grip they have on us. They are all too easy to skip over. We get impatient for the story that is put on hold. And in any case, they don’t take us very far toward understanding the creature that gives the novel its title. The whale, defined “by his obvious externals,” as Ishmael says, is “a spouting fish with a horizontal tail. There you have him” (117). But do we? First of all the central fact is wrong: the whale is not a fish; it’s a mammal. We know that; Ishmael does, too. He, however, willfully rejects Linnaeus and instead “calls upon holy Jonah to back” him (117). But second, wherever the whale fits in the taxonomy of living creatures, its “obvious externals” hardly let us “have him” (117). Even Ishmael comes to realize that “dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep. I know him not and never will” (296).

  Skin deep, the novel seems to insist, is never enough. Melville famously said: “I love all men who dive.”5 But maybe skin deep is as far as we can go. Surfaces may be just “pasteboard masks,” as Ahab says (140). But what are the realities that we think we will find below? Beneath the skin, as Ishmael’s cetology makes clear, is nothing metaphysical, just more messy matter: blubber, bones, and blood. Ahab is usually certain that he knows better, but even he at times worries that “there’s naught beyond” (140). And Melville seems pretty sure that we are just making it all up.

  In his response to a letter from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia, Melville gently refused her “highly flattering” but allegorical reading of the book. “You, with your spiritualizing nature, see more things than other people, and by the same process, refine all you see so that they are not the same things that other people see,” he wrote back to her, “but things which while you think you but humbly discover them, you do in fact create them for yourself.”6

  There are no fixed meanings for the enigmatic and elusive whale or for its whiteness, except for the ones we provide. “It is all in all what mood you are in,” says Ishmael: “if in the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels” (295). Perhaps that’s easier to say about a whale than about a lamb, since the symbolic connections in the whale’s case are not so deeply inscribed in the culture. Zurbarán’s Prado painting anticipates and even welcomes what will be “piled” on his lamb, and it is only his breathtaking artistry that keeps so much of our focus on the tethered animal.

  A whale is different. Not that it is entirely free of theological associations: there’s Job’s whale and there’s Jonah’s. But the whale in Melville’s novel is burdened with meanings that are unconnected to its actual being. Ishmael keeps that being before our eyes, allowing the meanings to be seen as the product mainly of Ahab’s own fanatical meaning-making. Melville himself seems so much less convinced, and the whale of course doesn’t care. It’s indifferent. The malevolence is all Ahab’s own. The whiteness of the whale, while not exactly an inkblot to be read, is a provocative blankness to be inscribed.

  In various languages, the word for “white” is related to the English word “blank”: Spanish blanco and French blanc, most obviously. Even in English, the word “blank” retained a similar color sense well into the eighteenth century. It meant not just “empty” or “vacant,” as today, but also was a color word meaning pale or white. Chalk was “blank.” Birds were often described as “blank,” particularly young falcons; and even Milton’s pale moon is “blank” in Paradise Lost (10.656). Melville’s whale is “blank” in both of its English senses. White and empty. A blank canvas upon which we can paint anything we wish. Not an allegory, which always comes prepainted.

  And yet white itself, we know, is not blank. It is not an innocent color, although it is normally the color of innocence. Not that it is actually capable of “imparting some special virtue of its own” (159), but the color has absorbed the meanings imposed upon it. “Though your sins be as scarlet,” promises Isaiah, “they shall be as white as snow” (Isa. 1:18, KJV), though modern city dwellers know how short-lived that particular whiteness is. One could hope that innocence would be more durable. But the fantasy is nonetheless pervasive. White is innocent, good, and pure.

  Or so they say. No doubt the particular meanings attaching to white and black, light and dark, can be traced all the way back to the lizard brain: to the ancient terrors of the night and the uncertainties about whether the sun would rise again. But the sun easily gets transformed into the Son, radiant in his white robes: “shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no fuller on earth can white them” (Mark 9:3, KJV).

  And that leaves black to bear the burden of its putative opposition: dark, stained, impure, sinful.

  It is obvious where this dualism leads, especially if we only see “skin deep.” If Moby-Dick is the great American novel, perhaps it is because Melville understands all this so clearly. “Melville knew,” said Lawrence: “He knew his race was doomed. His white soul, doomed. His great white epoch doomed.”7

  But maybe what Melville knew was that he needed to refuse the dualism of white and black that underwrites the corrosive racism in (not “of”) the novel. Ishmael matter-of-factly reports that white’s “pre-eminence” in the world of colors “applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe” (159). But that “mastership” is hardly “ideal,” and in any case cannot be justified on chromatic grounds. Colors should just be optical facts. But by 1851, when Moby-Dick was published, a decade before the American Civil War, Melville certainly knew that it was much too late for that.

  A century later, Optic White would be the name of the signature color of the fictional Liberty Paint Company in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). It is a color described as “the purest white that can be found,” but a color that is made by the addition of ten drops of black paint to the white paint, serving Ellison as a symbol of the fantasy of white racial purity and privilege. “If It’s Optic White, It’s the Right White” is the company slogan, echoing a familiar sardonic bit of Afro-American social commentary: “If you’re white, you’re right.”8

  Fifty years later still, Optic White would become, presumably with no irony, the name of a tooth-whitening product made by Colgate. That seems unobjectionable enough, even if it would be nice to think that marketing people read novels. But cosmetic companies do make skin-whitening products, bleaching creams that reduce the melanin in the skin, and so whitening brings us full circle, back to the very dualism Melville wanted to—but knew he couldn’t—escape. If you’re white, you’re right; if you’re black, get back.

  Even in seemingly benign contexts in which white might plausibly appear to be only an optical fact, disquieting values easily sneak in. The deeply rooted classicism of European culture had always revealed itself in its stigmatization of color: “chromophobia,” in David Batchelor’s useful word.9 Its ideals of beauty were derived “historically” from its encounters with the ruins of Rome and, even more, of Greece, as eighteenth-century Europe embraced the aesthetic standards of proportion, simplicity, balance, and grace it found in the architectural and sculptural survivals (standards that then would reappear in the austerity of a twentieth-century modernism). Refinement and rationality became their credo, refinement and rationality traced back to the Greeks, refinement and rationality—but always without color.

  Somewhere behind all this was the belief in the supremacy of classical art founded not on its successful imitation of nature but in its perfecting of it. And the perfection was located not only in its grandeur, proportion, and repose but also in its whiteness. For “the perfect images of antiquity,” as the first great scholar of classical art, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, confidently asserted in 1764, white was their perfect color: “Since white is the color that reflects the most rays of light, and thus is most easily perceived, a beautiful body will b
e all the more beautiful the whiter it is.”10

  Renaissance artists had taken this to be true, imitating what they thought to be the practice of the ancients. On their example and, later, on Winckelmann’s prestige, the idea that classical sculpture was necessarily white because it expressed what Walter Pater would call “the colourless, unclassified purity of life” was established as a fact.11

  This was the source of the neoclassicism of the eighteenth century, as in the beautiful white marble statues of Antonio Canova. But the fact may be less indisputable than has been assumed. The classicism that gave rise to it might merely be a kind of class-ism. In 1810, Goethe, who greatly admired but never met Winckelmann, claimed that it is only “men in a state of nature, uncivilized nations, children,” who “have a great fondness for colours in their utmost brightness.”12 Civilized adults should not so easily be distracted from essential truths by such seductive gratifications. Only if it’s white is it right.

  The reality, however, was that classical statuary was not inevitably white. Now we know that, and it is possible that Winckelmann knew it, too. Scholars have confirmed that these statues often were colored but that their original paint and gilt has been lost to time. In Euripides’ play about Helen of Troy, Helen complains that she has suffered because of the jealousy of Hera but understands also that her own beauty is partly to blame. She tells the Chorus that she wishes she could erase it, “the way you would remove the color from a statue.”13 The gleaming marble that seems so essential to classical and neoclassical sculpture, and that has given form to our idea of the beautiful, is seemingly just one more of white’s proliferating lies.