Life After Ahab

On Rodrigo Fresán’s 'Melvill'

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Jun 13, 2025

Arkhip Kuindzhi, *Rainbow*, c. 1905, Oil on canvas

In his 1997 essay “The Wonderful White Whale of Kansas,” Paul Metcalf posed a nagging question about the respective afterlives of a pair of American classics. “If there have been so many sequels to [The Wonderful Wizard of] Oz,” he wondered, “why not Moby-Dick?” Luckily, Metcalf is here to correct the record. He proceeds to dream up a few sequels of his own, concocting different futures for the Pequod’s crew and their offspring, some of whom, in his fantasy, actually survived the wreck. In Metcalf’s imaginings, these lucky escapees decamped to the setting of Melville’s first novel, the Marquesas Islands, where they interbred with the natives “and eventually scattered into the world.” Among their heirs: Ahab’s great-grandson, a dentist in Peoria, Stubb’s great-grandson, a corporate lawyer, and a descendent of Queequeg who is the “first female mixed-race mayor of a major American city.”

Metcalf’s cheeky challenge was taken up in exhaustive fashion some eighteen years later by the French writer Pierre Senges whose novel Ahab (Sequels) imagines several afterlives for the Pequod’s captain, including a central throughline in which, surviving Moby Dick’s attack, Ahab tries to sell his story, first as a Broadway musical and then as a Hollywood film. But even by the late 90s, there were no shortage of sequels to Melville’s novel if you knew where to look — not least a monumental effort of Metcalf’s own. In a sense, Metcalf’s whole career was a long follow-up to Moby-Dick. Like the descendants he dreams up for the Pequod survivors, Metcalf was himself a great-grandson, in this case of Melville himself. After studiously avoiding anything to do with his ancestor, following the publication of his first book he embarked on an intensive study of Melville’s life and works. The result of this prolonged engagement was his 1965 collage novel, Genoa, a hybrid work of fiction and criticism, in which a failed head of household spends the night poring over the collected works of Melville — as well as anatomy textbooks, the writings of Christopher Columbus, and other documents — in order to make sense of himself, his family, and his country. Metcalf would rarely reference his ancestor so explicitly in his subsequent work, but the influence continued to linger over the remaining three decades of his career.

Although Melville had achieved popular success with his early Polynesia-set novels, and although he continued to have his champions throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in England, by the time of his 1919 (posthumous) centennial, he was mostly just a footnote in American literary history. This changed thanks to the efforts of a new generation of scholars, many of whom congregated at Metcalf’s childhood home, where his mother, Eleanor Melville Metcalf, held an informal literary salon, and who in short order published biographies, critical studies, and helped bring out new editions of Melville’s work. Rather than a crafter of adventure stories, Melville was recast as a proto-modernist, as attention shifted from his early work to his 1851 masterpiece. The so-called Melville Revival ignited a newfound wave of interest in the author’s life and works that has never abated and which soon moved the author to the center of the American canon, solidifying Moby-Dick as the one inescapable American novel. The critical studies proliferated, and it wasn’t long until Melville’s influence was felt in other art forms, with Moby-Dick providing the direct source material for films as early as 1926, and later, for radio broadcasts, operas, comic books, television series, and rock albums. Novelists, too, quickly fell under the influence, with authors like William Faulkner and Norman Mailer drawing direct inspiration from Melville’s leviathan.

Taking things a step further, though, in 1941, French writer Jean Giono would inaugurate a new genre. After working on the first French translation of Moby-Dick, he was tasked with writing an introduction to the book. His efforts soon got away from him and he ended up producing a standalone volume, a brief novel that imagines a highly fictionalized and largely ahistorical Melville traveling to London to deliver the manuscript of his 1850 novel White-Jacket to his English publisher. Taking Melville’s dictum — “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method” — as a working principle, Giono offered up a strange tale that partakes of the lyrical, the fanciful, and the absurdly comic, as the author charts Melville’s physical journeys to the English countryside in the company of a fictional young woman Adelina White and his mental journeys as he struggles with the inner compulsion to write a “true” novel, which is to say Moby-Dick.

Originally published as Pour Saluer Melville, and many decades later appearing in English as Melville: A Novel, Giono’s slim fantasia was the first significant effort at directly using the life and writing of Moby-Dick’s author as source material for a novel, and it would be a while before anyone picked up the example again. But following the appearance of Genoa in 1965, novelists, particularly American novelists, started looking to Melville as the central figure in their country’s literary history and confronting his legacy. Perhaps surprisingly, many of these writers worked in the science fiction genre. Taking their cue from Samuel R. Delany’s 1968 novel Nova, which was merely inspired by Moby-Dick, writers such as Philip José Farmer, Bruce Sterling, and John Kessel would tackle that book more directly, offering respectively a sequel to, a retelling of, and a metafictional fantasy about Melville’s masterpiece in works that appeared between 1971 and 1982. Their example would continue into the present day, with authors ranging from Ray Bradbury to China Miéville to Bernd Perplies all publishing sci-fi takes on Moby-Dick this century.

Beyond the sci-fi world, Melville’s work has served as the basis for countless more ambitious undertakings, its scope and range inspiring encyclopedic novels like Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 opus Gravity’s Rainbow and violent American epics like Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 volume Blood Meridian. More explicitly, Italian writer Stefano D’Arrigo’s 1,200-page novel, Horcynus Orca (unfortunately, not translated in English) appeared in 1975 after twenty years of labor on the author’s part and drew heavily on Moby-Dick, using the story of a soldier’s homecoming, in the words of one critic, to “ask . . . the eternal questions about life, death, and humanity’s place in the complicated world it happens to inhabit.”

Still, novels dealing directly with Melville’s life and legacy were more scattered offerings than regular events throughout the twentieth century. This began to change, though, at the dawn of the millennium, with two notable books in the genre appearing in 1999. While Frederick Busch’s historical novel The Night Inspector follows a Civil War vet as he returns to New York and befriends Melville, then working as a customs inspector, Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife: or, The The Star-Gazer tells the story of a figure only briefly mentioned in Moby-Dick, the Pequod captain’s young wife, here named Una. Both these books differed significantly from the Melville-themed novels of the previous century, eschewing their genre-mixing postmodernism for a more realist orientation. Writing about this shift in his 2021 essay, “The Melville Effect in Contemporary Fiction: An Approach to Post-Postmodernism in the Novel,” Joseph A. Boone writes:

The degree to which [these] novels . . . look backward to Melville in order to look forward to the future of fiction is perhaps most evident in the degree they participate in a shift from high postmodernism as a marker of novelistic excellence to a revitalized deployment of realism that several critics have taken to calling the post-postmodern turn in contemporary fiction.

For Boone, this turn away from postmodernism in these two books, as well as in a trio of more recent, and less explicitly Melvillean efforts that he discusses, is a welcome corrective to what he views as the aggressively male orientation of twentieth century riffs on the writer’s legacy. In contrast to the individualistic, ruggedly masculine Melville put forward by the Revivers and which continued to play a large role in the public imagination throughout the last century, the writers participating in what he calls the “second Melville revival” (he declines to capitalize the term) are channeling a Melville “whose prescient interrogation of issues of gender, race, and class deconstructs notions of elite Anglo-Saxon masculinity, whose global perspective trumps American exceptionalism . . . and whose polyglot mix of genres has more in common with contemporary aesthetics of pastiche, collage, and mashups than with modernist mythmaking.”

If you’re looking for this last strain, though, it is scarcely anywhere to be found in the books that Boone cites. Boone claims that “the radicality of the current Melville revival is most immediately apparent in the reenvisioning of Melville occurring in and across genres other than the novel,” but he may just not be looking at the right novels. (To be fair, a few of the more interesting Melville-themed books have appeared in the four years since Boone’s article appeared.) It is precisely their cross-generic sweep, their “pastiche, collage, and mashups,” that make this current group of books so exciting. Drawing their inspiration from Moby-Dick as well as other Melville works like Pierre, The Confidence-Man, and Clarel, well-versed in the exhaustive critical legacy of Melville studies, and conversant with the great Melville collage projects like Genoa and Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, these books extend the legacy of their inspiration. Serving as both boundary-pushing works of fiction and critical studies in their own right, genre-bending novels like Ahab (Sequels), Dan Seligson’s Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley, Howard A. Rodman’s The Great Eastern, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel’s Dayswork, and Rodrigo Fresán’s Melvill don’t so much recreate the postmodernism that Boone sees the current crop of Melville-themed books as refuting, as it does adapt it to present circumstances, digging up buried hints in Melville’s texts and recasting his life and work in ways that offer a vivifying jostle to the world of contemporary fiction.

Andrew Delbanco’s account of the incident consists of a mere two sentences, but for Rodrigo Fresán, those two sentences are everything. Describing Herman Melville’s father Allan’s last-ditch attempt to settle his debts, Delbanco, critic and historian, writes:

In December 1831, returning from a discouraging trip to New York during which he had tried to pacify his creditors, [Allan] was forced by ice in the Hudson River to disembark from the steamboat at Poughkeepsie. He continued north for the final seventy miles by open carriage through subzero temperatures over two days and nights until, at the village of Greenbush, he crossed the frozen river on foot to rejoin his family at Albany.

Allan did indeed make it home, but he was never the same afterward, developing a cough, then pneumonia, then falling into a feverish delirium as a result of his frigid exertions. His brother, Thomas, was summoned to his side in January 1832 and soon after, declared by that same brother to be a “maniac,” Allan passed away, undone by his lack of business acumen and his inability to fulfill his role as patriarch of a once-illustrious family. He was only forty-nine.

When he read this account of the frozen-river crossing in Delbanco’s Melville: His World and Work, Fresán, Argentine bibliophile and graphomane, couldn’t shake the image, tracking this singular event — “as unforgettable as it was inspiring” — across nearly a dozen biographies and critical articles, not least of which was Hershel Parker’s epic two volume biography, a central text that would pop up unexpectedly in a late moment in Fresán’s 2022 novel Melvill. (Melvill appeared in an English edition in 2024 from longtime translator Will Vanderhyden.) Fresán had long toyed with the idea of expanding Delbanco’s brief account (and Parker’s slightly longer one) into a novel — in one of his previous volumes, a writer-character fantasizes about doing just that — but it wasn’t until he finished his epic, nearly 2,000-word Part Trilogy that, feeling the need to work on something more “focused,” he reached for that seminal incident in the life of the young Herman, who was just twelve at the time of his father’s decease.

Of course, given Fresán’s sprawling, endlessly expansive mind, focused is a relative word when applied as a descriptor to Melvill. “I’m a manic referential, and I really like to play,” Fresán once told an interviewer, and even in this relatively modest volume, he lists over a hundred sources in its acknowledgments, many of which are referenced in either direct or deliberately mangled citations throughout the text. Add in a dizzying array of footnotes, time travel devices, and shifting narrative perspectives, and it’s clear that Fresán belongs far more to the encyclopedic, postmodern, and decidedly male strain of Melville-ana decried by Joseph A. Boone than either the more realist books that Boone writes about or the most recent entry in the Melville novel subgenre, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel’s Dayswork. That novel freely employs literary strategies like collage, white space, and autofictional narration, all in the service of a pandemic-bound domestic drama, while evincing a #MeToo-inspired approach toward Melville’s life and legacy. (Hershel Parker, referred to throughout the book as simply “The Biographer,” becomes here a villainous figure, bending over backward to excuse Melville’s worst behavior.) Fresán’s is a novel packed to the brim with stuff — from a full accounting of Melville’s career and life to an odd and central Venetian fantasia — which works occasionally to its detriment (those footnotes can be tough), but which ultimately creates a rich and even heartrending portrait of mortality and patrilineal inheritance. It’s all a very Melvillean creation, a monstrous, polymorphous reckoning with the life and mind of the legendary writer, written in a way that both honors that writer and proves decidedly the product of its own stubbornly singular creator.

Science fiction looms large in the Melvillean afterlife, marking several of the more interesting fictional efforts at recasting Moby-Dick and coloring the not explicitly sci-fi novels of other Melville-inspired writers. Perhaps it’s the utter strangeness of Melville’s worlds — the otherworldly yet globally microcosmic world of the Pequod, the sinister steamboat traveling the Mississippi in The Confidence-Man — that inspire practitioners of the genre; but whatever it is, Rodrigo Fresán falls well into the tradition of sci-fi inflected Melvilleans. In his 2009 book The Bottom of the Sky, a sort of meta sci-fi puzzle that he calls “not a novel of science fiction but a novel with science fiction,” and whose world occasionally bleeds into that of Melvill, he lays out a theory of the interconnectedness of past and future. The narrator, himself a sci-fi novelist, looks back on the glory days of the genre and outlines the different narratives that dominated the sci-fi world in his youth. Reflecting on the destroyed-earth subgenre, he describes future creatures roaming a decimated planet and trying to reconstruct what the old civilization looked like. For him, this inquiry represents a “new form of reverse science fiction. A science fiction that would be nothing less than the myths, the events, and finally, History. Because the History of what was . . . is also a science-fiction novel. What has happened is as fantastic as what is to come.”

Melvill, which jumps forward and backward freely in time as its author sees fit (including in one sequence, sending Herman into the present day) operates according to this principle. Fresán’s (and his Melville’s) efforts to excavate the past are indeed fantastic, taking on elements of the supernatural and mirroring the quest of future visitors in The Bottom of the Sky in their efforts at recreating a strange and haunted world. Fresán’s own effort at recreation unfolds in three parts, with each section of Melvill shifting focus to different elements of Allan and Herman’s lives while employing a different narrative strategy. The first section, which begins with Allan on the ice of the frozen Hudson and moves backward to describe Allan’s thwarted dreams and business failures, is told in the third person, which is continually interrupted by footnotes provided by Herman. For Allan, the river crossing and his Venetian adventures (which Herman later surmises may be strictly hallucinated or metaphorical) represent the two most significant moments of his life, the former a spiritual journey in which he cast himself as a heroic searcher, and the latter a moment of temptation to live a different life or escape from a life that he altogether rejected.

For Herman, the moment he keeps revisiting are the weeks after his father’s return when, chained to a bed in his madness, he regaled his twelve-year-old son with the adventures of his life and, perhaps sensing his future vocation, charged him with keeping his memory alive. He acknowledges that all this may be a little much for his young son, but, as he tells him, “Maybe you can trap one idea here and another there and, with time, after many years, out of the ruins and some lost jewel among the unearthed bones, you’ll be able to reconstruct the splendor of my defeat.” How large a ghostly presence Allan played in real-life Melville’s thoughts and writing is hard to say — certainly blasted paternity takes on a sizable role in both Redburn and Pierre — but, in his book about fathers and son, Fresán renders the influence large. In his typically playful fashion, he uses a pair of footnotes to suggest all the ways Allan would later show up in his son’s work. While one footnote posits Allan as the model for everyone from Ahab to Bartleby, another comically reveals that many of the most famous lines in Moby-Dick were shouted out by Allan in his delirium and copied down by the young Herman for later use.

The second section is taken from Allan’s journals (and Herman’s filling in of those journals based on Allan’s delirious testimony — it is hard to tell where one narrator leaves off and the other begins), and it both details Allan’s time in Venice where he fell under the influence of an intoxicating ghost-vampire (fanpiro) named Nico C. and a disquisition on the nature of ice. The former of these strands is pure fantasy, an odd turn that Fresán described as his “finally turning in a delayed and ambiguous vampiric assignment that I’ve spent decades studying for,” while the latter yields some more influence-of-the-father-on-the-son material that stands as some of the book’s finest passages. In a section clearly meant to recall Melville’s famed “The Whiteness of the Whale” chapter and to slyly suggest that Herman essentially ripped off his father’s journals, Allan waxes poetic in a passage that we might label “The Transparency of the Ice.” Reflecting on the qualities of transparency, Allan writes (in words that riff on his son’s real-life writings):

Despite all these accumulated associations with and within all that is sweet, vulnerable, and sublime, something elusive always hides in the private idea of this color that’s not a color; something that instills more panic in the soul than the horrifying red of spilled blood . . . . Could it be that the transparent casts a shadow with its vagueness across the void, the unforgiving vastness of the universe, and stabs us in the back with thoughts of nothingness, like when, provincials of Ursa Minor, we stare out at the cosmopolitan and lacteal depths of a spilled Milky Way?

Thus, in Fresán’s telling, Herman was initiated in the philosophical mysteries of the universe at a young age.

Now on to a much older one. The elegiac final section, told in the voice of an elderly Melville, finds the not-far-from-death writer wandering Manhattan on his daily strolls, leaping forward and backward in time (either in his head or in actuality, it’s not always clear.) Traveling to the twenty-first century, he’s baffled by cell phones and selfie sticks (the latter he describes as harpoons), witnesses the aftermath of 9/11, and discovers the extent of his posthumous reputation when he comes across the second volume of Hershel Parker’s biography (“Herman Melville is far and away the most original genius that America has produced.”) He’s a bit bewildered by his life and world in general (even when he’s not time travelling) and his extended inner monologues show a man at sea on land,a bit shell shocked by the way his life has gone.

This section takes us chronologically through Melville’s career as he reflects back on its highs and lows and then ends as Herman is visited by a series of ghosts from his past, from his mother to his siblings to Nathaniel Hawthorne. But all this is prelude to the long-awaited visit from Allan, whose presence here at this late date provides the book with its sentimental core. In passages of remarkable affective power, Allan provides several pages’ worth of advice to his son (essentially to the effect of don’t do as I did), and then, with Herman simultaneously becoming his twelve-year-old self and remaining his present-day self, the two traverse the ice of the frozen Hudson together, correcting history by bringing father and son together at the pivotal moment of the former’s soon-to-be-extinguished life.

Correcting history, or rewriting the past, is one of the chief privileges of fiction, even fiction that doesn’t purport to be “historical.” Melville drew deep on his own experiences, mostly those of the nautical adventures of his youth, for his novels, and shaped them to fit his needs. But, even accepting the generous interpretations offered by Fresán’s Melville, Allan remained but a fleeting presence in his son’s life and fiction. This is something that Herman finally realizes at the end of the book as he returns to the promise he had made his father all those years earlier on Allan’s deathbed. “And, now, at long last,” he writes, “blessed be this moment when I finally, as I didn’t do then, carry out (in writing and so many years later), his last wish.” This wish, to be remembered, to feel that his life, despite its outward failures, was worth something, is one that Herman can only grant Allan in his old age, having, through his own failures, come to understand his father in a way that was simply not possible before. Sometimes it takes a lifetime. And so, picking up his pen, he writes the book we’re reading — the earlier sections in retrospect now seen as having been written in one way or another by Herman — and secures his father’s legacy to the page. As for Melville’s own, already secured for a century, it has been subject to countless odd twists and turns and is likely to be subject to many more, as writers like Fresán (Chris Bachelder, Jennifer Habel, Pierre Senges, and Dan Seligson) continue to place their own weird minds up against that of their master.

Andrew Schenker is an essayist and critic who lives in Catskill, NY. He is working on a book about novels based on the life and writings of Melville. He also writes about books and baseball for his newsletter, Last Days of the LOOGY.