The Body of Space in Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael

Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael (1947) redirected Melville scholarship, American Studies, and American poetry. Known for historicizing the whaling industry as the American frontier, by exploring Melville’s experience and poetics of “Space,” criticism has largely read Olson’s seminal concept of space negatively, as an empty, receptive and feminized field which Olson’s mythology, geography, and discourse expands over, projects and inscribes; however, the material, corporeal, insurgent form of space found lacking in this context is precisely the topos underlining Call Me Ishmael. By introducing the body of space in Call Me Ishmael, through the book’s re-narrativization of space, corresponding typographical or haptographical spacing, and concurrent poetry, this article discloses an aesthetics of fleshly space surfacing within and against the symbolic economy of Call Me Ishmael.