Llamadme Ismael

In 1947, with the publication of his first book, Charles Olson not only revolutionized the canonical approach to Herman Melville's masterpiece, but also multiplied the possibilities of the essay as a literary genre for the 20th century. According to Olson, Moby Dick would only have taken its final form when its author, after an enlightened rereading of the tragedies of William Shakespeare -especially Macbeth and King Lear-, reorganized the narrative according to a structure close to that of the acts of the Elizabethan drama, it breathed life into the Faustian Captain Ahab and endowed the white whale with its immeasurable symbolic density. As in the panorama of the nineteenth-century novel Moby Dick, it was a radically modern project in which, together with the narrative itself, the treatise on aesthetics, the theatrical dialogue or the encyclopedic text coexisted naturally, Llamadme Ismael is also in its composition a scholarly and personal essay discourse, a free homage to Melvillian heterodoxy.