Call Me Ishmael (1947) is a book in name only. It is print rendered aural and haptic, a metaphor for manuscript and collage. That is why its sound and shape are so startling. As Charles Olson says of Billy Budd: "It all finally has to do with the throat, SPEECH." And therefore, with the breath….

Call Me Ishmael, a consummate instance of aurality and hapticity in modern literature, is a redramatization of language. For although it is (often brilliant) scholarship and criticism, it is also something much more ambitious, an extrapolation of Moby-Dick as a species of Projective Verse. (p. 189)

Henry James may have possessed Hawthorne but Olson was possessed by Melville as, in fact, Melville was possessed by Shakespeare. Yet Shakespeare's possession of Melville was not absolute because Melville saw (or claimed to see) the incompleteness of his master: "And if I magnify Shakespeare, it is not so...