Melvillean Provocation and the Critical Art of Devotion

Abstract

If an American writer has provoked a greater range of experimentation in criticism than Herman Melville, the difference could hardly be by much. These experiments constitute a loose tradition at least 60 years old, one which begins with Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael (1947) and extends to such works as C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953), Paul Metcalf’s Genoa (1965), Susan Howe’s “Melville’s Marginalia” (1993), Frank Lentricchia’s Lucchesi and the Whale (2001), and K. L. Evans’s Whale! (2003). Although these texts are as dissimilar as experiments should be, they have a few features in common. First is generic hybridity; they draw on the conventions of novels, poems, plays, memoirs, confessions, politics, polemic, psychological case studies, and literary criticism. Such hybridity is unsurprising, if we assume the gravitational pull on these authors of Melville, who tried different genres across discrete works as well as inside them, and whose most famous novel was once classified as a work of cetology.