Customer Reviews

Call Me Ishmael

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In brief, "Call Me Ishmael" is the most interesting piece of literary criticism I've ever read. Foreshadowing his future leanings as a poet, Olson writes "Ishmael" more like a prose poem than stodgy dissertation. Yet, however unique the form, it seems strangely predetermined. For it is only through a poetic nature that it could distill such huge, multilayered concepts into an accessible and short (119 pg.) essay. This reissue--it was first published in 1947--takes the reader through Shakespearean influence on "Moby Dick," Melville's struggle with faith, and the importance of place--to name only three examples. The future rector of the short-lived, yet highly influential, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, creates an energy out of words bested only by "The Whale" itself. As Olson stated to his colleague, Merton Sealts, Jr., who wrote the new afterword to the essay: "I see that The White Death has descended upon You too." And it will upon you as well. After reading this incisive, lyrical, and engaging piece, you will want to return to "Moby Dick" before you've closed its pages.

It should come as no surprise that the world's greatest novel would inspire the world's greatest essay of literary criticism. Sadly, Olson's ideas did not appeal to members of the elite Melville Society, and to this day they still consider him a "crank." A real pity, because Olson will be remembered long after they are forgotten.

Charles Olson selected a snappy title for his book, but his elliptical writing style and the few interesting nuggets of knowledge that he offers up preclude a more enthusiastic recommendation. Another critic of Melville writes that, in Call Me Ishmael, Olson "rather enigmatically" relates Moby-Dick to the Osiris myth of ancient Egypt (one of the nuggets). Those who find this book more "lyrical" than elliptical and enigmatic, should read the section on Moby-Dick in Studies in Classic American Literature (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence). It, too, avoids the style of "stodgy dissertation," but is better written and predates Olson's work by 2 decades. Olson offers evidence from Melville's letters and writings that he initially wrote a more pedestrian whaling book for the mass market, then, inspired by Hawthorne and Shakespeare, transformed it over the course of a year into the poetic epic that we read today. Jean-Paul Sartre suspected this multi-stage development as he reviewed the French translation of Moby-Dick, and this supporting information is important to those interested in the author as well as the work. I found Olson's explanation of the Bulkington character most interesting, as his brief, but pointed, introduction and immediate fade to nothingness in Moby-Dick is itself enigmatic. After reading Call Me Ishmael you may want to move on to the compendium of criticism, Twentieth Century Interpretations of Moby-Dick: A Collection of Critical Essays (A Spectrum Book) (M.T.Gilmore, ed.). Gilmore includes the chapter "Captain Ahab and His Fool" from Call Me Ishmael (another nugget relating Ahab and Pip to Lear) but offers as well a wide range of other criticism, touching romantic symbolism, 19th century American technological sociology, biblical metaphor, and more.

Or, if you have read and re-read the current bestseller Ahab's Wife, and you are looking for another classic treatment of the Moby Dick story not featured on Oprah Winfrey's daily chat show, you might pick up Olson's famous theoretical exposition of Melville. In 1947, Charles Olson hadn't written much poetry and he was just coming off a failed political career as a minor functionary in Roosevelt's New Deal, but somehow he got his act together with CALL ME ISHMAEL. Nowadays, everyone is in on the Melville revival but in the immediate postwar years Melville had only really been in the canon for twenty years or so, so Olson was working out something new and undone in American literature. His book didn't sell particularly well, it's challenging and high-toned, but it has remained in print continuously for almost 60 years. Let's see if AHAB'S WIFE can say the same!