Playful learning : Melville\u27s artful art in Moby-Dick

It remains one of the great ironies of American literary history that Melville\u27s Moby-Dick struggled so long for critical and popular recognition. It is a peculiar text (but, then, so are Hawthorne\u27s novels), a romance of the whale fishery that involves such explorations of language itself, of words, metaphor, symbol, allegory and the processes (and significance) of narrative construction. This article analyses its \u27peculiarities\u27 as fundamental indicators of Melville\u27s \u27playful art\u27 to argue the usefulness of a concept of \u27play\u27 to its appreciation. That Moby-Dick is allusive and multi-layered is well known. But for what apparent purpose and to what effect? Here, a claim is made that Melville simultaneously constructs and deconstructs meaning by demonstrating that things (\u27in complex subjects\u27) never come simply or singly. The later Barthes and Derrida become part of this ship\u27s crew and Moby-Dick is a postmodernist novel avant la lettre.