“For Ever Slides Away”: Melville and Critical Theory

Abstract One term runs through almost all of critical theory’s various accounts of Melville’s work: character. The one exception is Maurice Blanchot: rather than focusing on characters, Blanchot viewed the narrative of Moby-Dick as itself a character. The sense of inexorable movement that for Blanchot defines Melville’s work can be felt both at the level of the text and that of the individual sentence, which “leads the one who lets himself be taken by it without his knowing where he is going and where he is losing himself.” Blanchot’s notion that the reader is as lost as are Melville’s characters is developed further in his neglected essay “The Song of the Sirens.” It sets up a counterintuitive opposition between what Blanchot refers to as the novel, represented by the Odyssey, and the narrative, represented by Moby-Dick. Blanchot’s opposition tells us something profoundly important both about Melville’s work and literature itself.