Epilogue: Encountering Melville

Summary

To Paraphrase Ishmael: What Melville was to his critics from 1920 to 2010 has been seen. What, at times, he is to me, and what he promises to be to new readers in the new century remains to be hinted at.

Each semester that I teach Moby-Dick, I have a ritual to which I am drawn before the first day on which we discuss it in class. Setting aside my teaching copies of the book, I turn to myself and pick up a copy of the Riverside edition from 1956, with an introduction by the redoubtable Melvillean and Americanist Alfred Kazin. I flip through the pages, attending particularly to the notes in the margin. The copy in question is both the first copy of Moby-Dick that I ever read, and the reading copy of Moby-Dick that my mother, Esther, who died in 1988, had used as a student at Eastern Mennonite College in the late 1960s. As I look through the copious notes that she wrote in the margins, I try to imagine what her experience of Melville must have been like, as the first person to receive a GED or attend college in her family, or as a member of an often misunderstood religious minority (Old-Order Mennonite) within an often misunderstood religious minority (Mennonites more generally), and thus doubly an “Ishmael” in relation to her wider society. The notes are detailed, thorough, and neatly written, but I am certainly aware that they represent an engagement with Melville that is mediated through Kazin’s introduction (also annotated) and the critical sources that informed her professor’s lectures as much as through her individual response to the text. I am also aware, and have become increasingly aware in the course of writing this study, that her Melville in the late 1960s is not my Melville in the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, when I teach Moby-Dick, in some sense the young Esther is my imagined audience.

I bring my mother’s Riverside edition up, not (entirely) out of sentimentality, but because I believe it highlights something often overlooked in our accounts of how criticism develops: the initial, informal, serendipitous acquaintances with an author that shape our critical visions. As productive of scholarly interpretation as Melville’s work has been, Melville’s image is not solely in the hands of literary and cultural critics.