The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld: A Memoir by Justin Hocking, and: Season on the Line: An Epic Love Letter to the American Theater by Shawn Pfautsch (review)

Creative appropriations and adaptations of Melville's works can function as a kind of pluralistic, democratic, culturally contested space. Besides keeping the ninenteenth-century author in global circulation, they open up Melville to fresh interpretations. As Samuel Otter suggests in his essay "Leviathanic Revelations," "these representations of Melville's texts … help us to see the book anew."

Two recent creative prose engagements with Moby-Dick are Justin Hocking's The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld: A Memoir and Shawn Pfautsch's Season on the Line: An Epic Love Letter to the American Theater, both of which can prompt us to reconsider facets of Melville's epic novel. Distinct in form and theme, these two works represent the two basic modes of adaptive engagement that Siobhan O'Flynn outlines in Adaptation and American Studies: "telling" and "showing." Hocking's retrospective and introspective narration takes the reader on a psychological journey that brings Ishmael and Ahab closer to our contemporary world. By contrast, in Pfautsch's play, an American theatre director (Pfautsch employs the British spelling throughout) develops an Ahabian obsession with an eccentric staging of Moby-Dick; the dramatic mode foregrounds the performative quality of Melville's work. Pfautsch's play premiered at the House Theatre of Chicago in September 2014 (I discuss only the printed version).

Like other contemporary authors who engage with Melville—from Sena Jeter Naslund to Tony Kushner, Frank Stella to Matt Kish—Hocking and Pfautsch have contracted what Hocking, drawing on Merton M. Sealts's afterword to Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael, calls the "White Death," or "an all-consuming obsession with the novel Moby-Dick and the life of Herman Melville" (14). This affliction is a psychological symptom of Melville's continuing power to command obsessive attention.

An intimate, mesmerizing memoir, The Great Floodgates of the Wonder-world centers on an eloquent white male college graduate, who, not long after his thirtieth birthday, moves from Colorado to New York City. Fueled by uncontrollable "peripatetic obsessions," he heads east even though his girlfriend Karissa cannot accompany him (17). This premise may create an impression of male selfishness and irresponsibility, calling to mind Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel. Such an impression would not be unwarranted. Hocking—or, rather, the first-person fictionalized narrator of his bio-narrative—seems perpetually on the run, disappearing into the urban jungle and, once his skateboarding obsession has morphed into a surfing obsession, escaping as often as possible to Rockaway Beach. In an early chapter titled "Moving," he links his obsessive personality with his love of movement by noting the etymological root of the word obsession: "ob (opposite) and sedere (to sit)" (7). He confesses, "I can't sit still" (7). He skates and surfs and swims to exhaustion, "trying to numb out the pain and guilt over Karissa" (42).

While physical activity gives him a limited feeling of control, he is substantially less happy on the L-train that takes him under the polluted East River to his cubicle at a publishing company in Manhattan. He hates this subterranean ride with an Ahabian rage: "Suddenly my heart is a pipe bomb inside the suitcase of my chest, threatening to blow apart not just my body but also this entire train car and all the two hundred strangers who are about to witness me completely blow apart" (17). With time, this torturous commute becomes an allegory for his journey through the dark tunnel of his own psyche, wonderfully worked out in a four-page dialogue between himself and the L-train.

Throughout The Great Floodgates, which alternates between an erudite, literary style and straightforward descriptions of beach life, Hocking quotes from Melville's novel, paraphrases it, and comments on it. He draws a good deal on...