A short corollary to December’s ramble on Apollo: Melville’s “The Ravaged Villa.”
It’s easy to mourn what could have been when Melville took his post-Moby-Dick hiatus from fiction, just as easy as it is to lose sight of what we got when he shifted to poetry. His trajectory from Mardi to Pierre to Confidence-Man is one of the great mystical turns in art.
“What I’m writing is not in an avant-garde mode, and certainly not in an experimental mode, and certainly not in an ‘alternative’ mode. It comes out of a rival tradition, and it’s much older and much bigger than the tradition of realist fiction, which only started in the 18th Century. Whereas this rival tradition you can trace all the way back to the epics, Ovid, Rabelais, and even at the beginning of the realist tradition, to Laurence Sterne, and Diderot, and so on. This is a tradition that’s beginning, I think, to break loose again.“
Ronald Sukenick
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