Studies in American Fiction

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...