• The Melville Effect in Contemporary Fiction An Approach to Post-Postmodernism in the Novel
• Joseph A. Boone (bio)

Ever since the rediscovery of Herman Melville in the 1920s, his hybrid aesthetics and convention-defying themes have been potent sources of inspiration for artists working in multiple genres—the visual arts, opera, orchestral music, drama, poetry.¹ During this time period novelists, too, have occasionally been inspired by Melville—and most often by Moby-Dick—in fashioning their fictions. Several twentieth-century novels bearing traces of Melville evince an all-encompassing modernist ambitiousness and masculine bravado evocative of the work of the early twentieth-century scholars who rehabilitated him—for example, Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948) Paul Metcalf's Genoa: A Telling of Wonders (1965), Stefano D'Arrigo's Horcynus Orca (Killer whale) (1975), and László Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance (1982). Another wave of novels touting their Melvillean allegiances has surfaced in science fiction; these appropriate Melville's quest format and metaphysical elements for futuristic ends and include Samuel Delany's Nova (1968), Jose Philip Farmer's Wind Whales of Ishmael (1971), and John Kessel's Another Orphan (1982).² Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), which borrows from Moby-Dick, might be said to fold both modernist and fabulous strains into its postmodernism.³ The masculine sublime, in all its awe and terror, dominates these fictional responses to Melville.

While novelistic encounters with Melville were intermittent in the twentieth century and the resonances generally allusive and occasional, over the last two and a half decades a veritable flood of novels have appeared for which Melville's Moby-Dick is the explicit springboard for Leviathanic visions of everything from apartheid in South [End Page 243] Africa to college baseball in the American Midwest to the cutthroat industry of molecular biology diagnostics ("moby-Dx") in the Silicon Valley. This outpouring, I suggest, is part of a larger contemporary phenomenon: an explosion of art inspired by Melville that, since the mid-1990s, has coalesced into a veritable second Melville "revival," one spearheaded not by scholars as in the 1920s, but rather by artists working in any number of media whose aesthetic sensibilities are especially receptive to hybrid forms that resist generic classification. In the past two decades more than two hundred works have appeared that proudly declare their Melvillean affinities.⁴ When viewed as emanations of a shared interest whose effects overlap and expand in multiple directions, this constellation of artistic expressions proves to be quantitatively and qualitatively different from earlier twentieth-century works inspired by Melville; these contemporary artists are not simply paying tribute to a past master or agonistically wrestling with Bloomian anxieties of influence. Rather, they are all participants in a collective zeitgeist whose refractions of Melville illuminate the status of the arts in a twenty-first-century epoch of multiplying media, and their shared investment in deconstructing what I've just called the "masculine sublime" is palpable.

The same is true of the novels that participate in this upsurge of interest in Melville, a phenomenon measurable in terms of volume (well over twenty such novels have appeared since 1995), in terms of shared aesthetic and social concerns, and in terms of the cultural energies they tap into as well as help activate.⁵ The degree to which these efforts form a distinctive phenomenon becomes clear on reviewing the contexts surrounding the "first" Melville revival. As Paul Lauter argues in "Melville Climbs the Canon," the 1920–30s promotion of the almost forgotten author as an "American genius" was the consequence of post–World War I scholars in the United States looking for a way to link modernism, high cultural values, and national tradition in order to legitimize the study of American literature in the eyes of the larger world. The "Melville" they created in light of these desires was, as Lauter puts it, "distinctively masculine, Anglo-Saxon … [and] a lone and powerful artistic beacon against the dangers presented by the masses"—including genteel, effeminizing, popular literature.⁶ In contrast, the contemporary Melville effect occurring in and across multiple genres and media has generated an almost entirely different understanding of the nineteenth-century...

• 当代小说中的梅尔维尔效应小说中的后后现代主义方法
• 约瑟夫·A·布恩（传记）

自从 1920 年代重新发现 Herman Melville 以来，他的混合美学和打破常规的主题一直是视觉艺术、歌剧、管弦乐、戏剧、诗歌等多种流派艺术家的强大灵感来源。¹在此期间，小说家们也偶尔会受到梅尔维尔的启发——最常见的是白鲸——创作他们的小说。几部带有梅尔维尔痕迹的 20 世纪小说展现了一种包罗万象的现代主义野心和阳刚的虚张声势，唤起了 20 世纪早期为他平反的学者的作品——例如，诺曼·梅勒的《赤裸者与死者》（1948 年）保罗·梅特卡夫的《热那亚》 : A Telling of Wonders (1965), Stefano D'Arrigo'sHorcynus Orca（虎鲸）（1975 年）和 László Krasznahorkai 的《抵抗的忧郁》（1982 年）。另一波吹捧梅尔维尔效忠的小说出现在科幻小说中。这些适合梅尔维尔的探索形式和未来主义目的的形而上学元素，包括塞缪尔·德拉尼（Samuel Delany）的新星（1968）、何塞·菲利普·法默（Jose Philip Farmer）的以实玛利的风鲸（1971）和约翰凯塞尔的另一个孤儿（1982）。²托马斯·品钦的《万有引力之虹》（1973 年）借用了《白鲸记》，可以说将现代主义和神话般的风格融合到其后现代主义中。³男性的崇高，以其所有的敬畏和恐惧，主导着这些对梅尔维尔的虚构反应。

虽然在 20 世纪与梅尔维尔的小说相遇是断断续续的，而且这种共鸣通常是暗示性的和偶尔的，但在过去的两年半里，出现了真正的小说洪流，梅尔维尔的白鲸是利维坦式的一切愿景的明确跳板。南方的种族隔离[完第 243 页]从非洲到美国中西部的大学棒球到硅谷的分子生物学诊断（“moby-Dx”）的残酷产业。我认为，这种倾泻而出是更大的当代现象的一部分：受梅尔维尔启发的艺术爆炸式增长，自 1990 年代中期以来，已经合并为真正的第二次梅尔维尔“复兴”，而不是像 1920 年代那样由学者带头，而是由在任何数量的媒体中工作的艺术家创作的，他们的审美敏感性特别容易接受抵制一般分类的混合形式。在过去的二十年里，出现了两百多件作品，它们自豪地宣布了他们与梅尔维尔的关系。⁴当被视为共同利益的散发，其影响在多个方向上重叠和扩展时，这种艺术表现形式被证明在数量和质量上都不同于 20 世纪早期受梅尔维尔启发的作品。这些当代艺术家不仅仅是向过去的大师致敬，也不是在与布卢姆式的影响焦虑作斗争。相反，他们都是集体时代精神的参与者，他们对梅尔维尔的折射阐明了艺术在 21 世纪多元化媒体时代的地位，他们在解构我刚才所说的“男性崇高”方面的共同投资是触手可及。

参与这场对梅尔维尔的兴趣高涨的小说也是如此，从数量上可以衡量的现象（自 1995 年以来已经出现了 20 多部这样的小说），就共同的审美和社会关注而言，以及就他们利用并帮助激活文化能量。⁵在回顾“第一次”梅尔维尔复兴的背景时，这些努力形成独特现象的程度变得清晰。正如保罗劳特在“梅尔维尔攀登佳能”中所说的那样，这位几乎被遗忘的作家在 1920-30 年代被提升为“美国天才”是一战后美国学者寻找一种将现代主义联系起来的方法的结果，高文化价值和民族传统，以便在更大的世界眼中使美国文学研究合法化。正如劳特所说，他们根据这些欲望创造的“梅尔维尔”是“独特的阳刚之气，盎格鲁-撒克逊……[和]对抗大众所带来的危险的孤独而强大的艺术灯塔”——包括文雅、女性化、流行文学。⁶相比之下，在多种流派和媒体中发生的当代梅尔维尔效应对 19 世纪产生了几乎完全不同的理解……