Afterword: Melville, the Sorcerer

Abstract This Afterword captures a few of the key thematics that traverse the volume, and meditates upon the emergent directions that they embark upon in carrying Herman Melville’s work forward. Yet the Afterword also points to a certain pattern across these essays. This pattern refers to something undecidable in Melville’s writing, namely that what is seen is revealed as concealing something different from itself; what is said is unsaid often in the very process of being said; what is praised is simultaneously critiqued or even negated; unthought emerges in thought; what is appears as what merely seems; what is fixed becomes elusive; what is stable vacillates, one becomes another. As such, the Afterword explores how the essays collected in this book multifariously tell the story of Melville’s “powers of the false” (as developed in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and in reference to the fiction of the French twentieth-century writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet), as a way of understanding Melville’s persistent ontological blurring of characters and persons with what is impersonal, inanimate, radically other, or disquieting.