Clark Davis 
After the Whale [PDF ebook] 
Melville in the Wake of Moby-Dick

Examines Herman Melville’s short fiction and poetry in the context of popular 1850s fiction The study focuses on Melville s vision of the purpose and function of language from Moby-Dick through Billy Budd with a special emphasis on how language in function and form follows and depends on the function and form of the body, how Melville s attitude toward words echoes his attitude toward fish. Davis begins by locating and describing the fundamental dialectic formulated in Moby-Dick in the characters of Ahab and Ishmael. This dialectic produces two visions of bodily reality and two corresponding visions of language: Ahab s, in which language is both weapon and substitute body, and Ishmael s, in which language is an extension of the body a medium of explanation, conversation, and play. These two forms of language provide a key to understanding the difficult relationships and formal changes in Melville s writings after Moby-Dick. By following each work s attitude toward the dialectic, we can see the contours of the later career more clearly and so begin a movement away from weakly contextualized readings of individual novels and short stories to a more complete consideration of Melville s career. Since the rediscovery of Herman Melville in the early decades of this century, criticism has been limited to the prose in general and to a few major works in particular. Those who have given significant attention to the short fiction and poetry have done so frequently out of context, that is, in multi-author works devoted exclusively to these genres. The result has been a criticism with large gaps, most especially for works from Melville s later career. The relative lack of interest in the poetry has left us with little understanding of how Melville s later voices developed, of how the novels evolved into tales, the tales into poetry, and the poetry back into prose. In short, the development of Melville s art during the final three decades of his life remains a subject of which we have been afforded only glimpses, rarely a continuous attention. After the Whale provides a new, more comprehensive understanding of Melville s growth as a writer.*