The Archives of Achab: the exhaustive and the elusive in the digital rewritings of Moby Dick

Résumé 0

Matt Kish’s Moby Dick in Pictures (2011) and Fred Benenson’s Emoji Dick (2010) follow the path of an incalculable number of reworks based on Herman Melville’s classic. The first one introduces a pictorial rewriting of Melville’s novel, where each and every page of the book is being replaced by a corresponding illustration, whereas the second one offers a semi-automated participatory translation of the original text, relying exclusively on the use of emojis. Our goal in this article will be to identify how those works both echo and comment on issues from the initial text, while remaining deeply anchored in a digital aesthetic and practice. Focusing on the matters of the exhaustiveness and the unseizability striking the bodies of both the whale and the text itself, we will see how both Kish and Benenson involve Melvillean themes, while formulating, through the specificities of their respective convocation, a reflection on the task of intertextual rework in a digital context.