Today, the day of today.

And how will I manage to hold you back? How will I become this Scheherazade, who, close to you, will postpone the next day of every day that comes?

I could trust in fortune, in the casting of lots.

Here is a tale. Listen.

I beginhere. I begin, that is, where, today, the book will have opened, as if by chance, at this page.

The narrator, who took it into his head “to go on a whaling voyage,” imagines his project as “part of a grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a...

I will begin reading again, to begin with. I will then begin again, again and again, every evening to come, in order to hold you back.

But wherefrom will I begin? I could entertain you with Melville’s more overt political tales, withWhite-Jacket, for example, which, while describing the power relations on a war vessel, seems to announce the American Civil War; or else with “Billy Budd, Sailor,” this “internal narrative,” whose hero sails first on a ship namedThe Rights of Man, before he too is called to serve on a war vessel . . .

But no, I...

FROM THE BEGINNING OF “The Lightning-Rod Man,” the elements are raging. “The scattered bolts boomed overhead and crashed down among the valleys, every bolt followed by zig-zag irradiations, and swift slants of sharp rain, which audibly rang, like a charge of spear-points, on my low shingled roof” (LRM, 118).

And, in the turmoil of this storm that sounds and resounds, there are drawn tracks, arrows, lines. One, the vertical of the lightning, is the axis upon which appear together, that is to say,co-appear [comparaissent], in their face to face, both I and the storm. The horizontal of the house...

HERE IS IN FACT someone arriving, someone unknown, who seems carried off or brought on by the storm: “Hark!—someone at the door. Who is this that chooses a time of thunder for making calls?” (LRM, 118).

Faced with this untimely and tempestuous arrival, the question asked by the narrator close to the hearth strangely resembles this other one: “[Kent]—Who’s there, besides foul weather?” 6

As if, in the middle of a thunderstorm, the arriving one was hardly separable from the weather he “chooses,” from the weather itself.

The weather he chooses? In fact, the narrator’s question (“Who is...

THE ONE ARRIVING is behind the door. He knocks:

“And why don’t he, man-fashion, use the knocker, instead of making that doleful undertaker’s clatter with his fist against the hollow panel?” (LRM, 118).

Prior to being seen—already announced by the turmoil that will have preceded him, but without being, for all that, expected—the visitor is heard.

This advance of the ear (“organ of fear,” of “night” or of “twilight,” according to Nietzsche), this antecedence of hearing in relation to sight (the narrator first hears a “clatter,” a series of noises bristling with alliterations in the key ofk)...

SINCE THE HOST opened the door to him, the stranger arriving is now “planted,” standing stock-still in the middle of the room. He is erect, firm and immobile, right at the center, as if near a second hearth or counter-hearth: “His sunken pitfalls of eyes were ringed by indigo halos, and played with an innocuous sort of lightning: the gleam without the bolt. The whole man was dripping. He stood in a puddle on the bare oak floor; his strange walking-stick vertically resting at his side” (LRM, 118–19).

The stranger relays, he repeats, the thunderstorm; he reflects it or...

THE STRANGER, of whom we will later learn that he is a traveling salesman selling lightning rods, has no name. Besides, at no point will the host himself seek to know thepropername of his visitor. He does not ask him to identify himself. It is rather he, the host, who names ornicknames[surnomme] him.

“Sir,” said I, bowing politely, “have I the honor of a visit from that illustrious god, Jupiter Tonans? So stood he in the Greek statue of old, grasping the lightning-bolt. If you be he, or his viceroy, I have to thank you for...

THERE IS, I have just discovered, a proximate, contiguous relation between “The Lightning-Rod Man” andIsrael Potter. Melville published the latter in serial form, which is to say, in installments, inThe Putnam’s Monthly. The second installment, in which Melville introduced the character of Benjamin Franklin into the narrative, was published in the August 1854 issue, in the pages immediately following “The Lightning-Rod Man,” also published there for the first time.”¹⁵ Melville appears to have used the same source for both works, namely,Letters and Papers on Electricity, by Benjamin Franklin.

But Franklin also makes a brief and singular appearance...

The prophet only becomes a prophet after the fact, by a kind of returning stroke in which time stammers, carrying any stable present in a hurricane that turns and returns upon itself. History, as one says, stammers; whether it is so-called real history, as posted on the great program of the world, or fictive histories or stories, as narrated in short stories, novels, and other fictions (without mentioning the great stammering that could very well occur between the two).

To tell or to foretell, to read or to fore-read what is coming—this would be a kind ofretroprospection. And...

INISRAEL POTTER,Benjamin Franklin is described as an ageless patriarch. Living, as those biblical ones do, a great number of years, he seems to extend his life expectancy both forward and backward, according to a temporal elasticity tensely held between memory and anticipation.

Yet though he was thus lively and vigorous to behold, spite of his seventy-two years (his exact date at the time) somehow, the incredible seniority of an antediluvian seemed his. Not the years of the calendar wholly, but also the years of sapience. His white hairs and mild brow, spoke of the future as well as...

COME, FOLLOW WITH ME, to see without foresight the figures of Ahab as allegory of the reader. You will see him reading as a navigator at risk, threatened with shipwreck—this Ahab who takes after prophets and grammarian interpreters, as Quintus was suggesting.

Look. Ahab’s vessel, thePequod, is weighted with a charge, a shipment that balances it as it sails the deep seas. This weight, this ballast or load, transforms it into a reading head that, sailing across the most raging of waters, seems erect nonetheless, constantly rising toward its heading at the horizon. In chapter 110 ofMoby-Dick,...

JONAH, WHOMMoby-Dickinvokes on numerous occasions, is in many respects a figure parallel to Noah.¹ This time, by contrast to the situation during the flood (but always in the middle of a storm), it is not a human being, in fact, it is not Noah who encloses in his box the coupled specimen of each animal species. It is, on the contrary, a beast—and what a beast!—that swallows a human: “And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” (Jon. 1:17).

The monstrous beast is not, in Jonah, a sample of world...

LIKE THE LIGHTNING-ROD MAN, like the salesman of lightning rods who bursts in on the narrator of that short story, Ahab, “Old Thunder” Ahab, also handles strange metallic sticks that capture lightning, as can be seen most notably in the chapter entitled “The Candles.” There, Ishmael describes the lightning rods of Ahab’s vessel, meticulously comparing the usage of those made for land and those for sea: “Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry off the perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea some ships carry to each mast,...

IN FACT, as the end of the novel approaches, the figures of interruption are multiplied, as are the reversals, the inversions of sense. In short, the lines of navigation and destination that have borne the characters until now are beginning to lose their orientation, their magnetic pole, their arrow. They are losing the North, like the needle of thePequod’s compass, disoriented by the lightning that has struck it: “The two compasses pointed East and the Pequod was as infallibly going West . . . eyeing the transpointed compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now...

IN ITS PROPHETIC advance upon itself, the whale-text seems to attach itself to its own wake. The “great fish” seems to pull behind him a monster-text—a text within which it yet swims—anchored in him by some harpoon and its line. Thus, the laws of reading will resemble, for Ishmael, the laws of fishing.

In the chapter entitled “Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish,” Ishmael seems to propose to give “an account of the laws and regulations of the whale fishery” (but you will see that it is in fact about us readers), laws of which a certain object namedwaifis...

ANOTHER STORY OF undone and detached bond is at the origin of the madness of poor Pip, the little black man whom Ishmael describes as a kind of prosthetic self-extension of Ahab. The latter does entertain with Pip a strange bond of resemblance and twin kinship. Ahab thus says to Pip: “Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings” (125:522). Whereas Pip declares to the captain: “Ye have not a whole body, sir; doe ye but use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask...

PROPHETIC READING thus implies a kind of return mail, in the image of the “returning-stroke” spoken of in “The Lightning-Rod Man,” “when the earth, being overcharged with the fluid, flashes its surplus upward” (LRM, 122).

A bolt of lightning that, having fallen, goes back upward, a return to sender, in sum, as in the strange and uncanny postal scene inMoby-Dickentitled “The Jeroboam’s Story.” I address it to you, this scene, I entrust it to your reading; for it might well illuminate in return, by counterstroke, the retroprospective reading toward which I do not cease approaching, this reading retroprophetically...

EVERYTHING I AM TELLING YOU by intercepting and interrupting those found narratives, my entire tale, made of fragments and glosses of other tales—all this had begun I no longer know when. But I do remember it began with a question—What day is it today?—followed, in the guise of a response, by a word whose internal repetition in two languages (one “dead,” as they say, the other “living”) I like:aujourd’hui, a French adverb that, my dictionary explains, includes as its last syllable the Latinhodie, “in this day” (fromhocanddie).

Today, it is a day...

BUT WHO IS THIS Cotton Mather, and who are these spirits of his? Born in 1663 (his father, Increase Mather, was a renowned pastor in Boston), dead in 1728, he was one of the major clerical figures of early New England Puritan society. Aspiring to succeed to his ancestors, the Reverend Richard Mather and John Cotton, themselves renowned ministers of the sect during the founding generation of the Massachusetts Bay colony, he encountered an obstacle that stood temporarily in the way of his vocation: Mather had to overcome the stammering from which he suffered. Cotton Mather, one might say, resembled...

I IMAGINE A VOICE in a text that, like the light of a glow-worm digging its way through the ages and marking the countdown (thedeath-tick) of the instant in which it will emerge, would retroprospectively confess that it is returning—it was sent or emitted so long ago—that it isreturning from the future.

This voice could be Gabriel’s, the false prophet who returns to sender the dead letter summoned from the past by one who has trespassed, but reverses it into a prediction that would reach Ahab from the future and about his future.

This voice, though,...

I REMEMBER ONE DAY WHEN (will you forgive me?) I overheard one of your conversations on the telephone: you were speaking of yourself—of each of us—as of an island, and to the other voice, which was no doubt protesting, you replied laughing, as if by an ironic concession, that we were all, minimally and in any case, peninsulas.

This is also the way in which Father Mapple’s audience is described inMoby-Dick. Each of them is like an islet. Each of them could be part of an archipelago. The audience awaiting Father Mapple in the chapel is, in...

Just a few more words, in front of the poster—or rather, its memory—through which everything has happened.

A few words before it is, perhaps, in the generalized shipwreck, completely washed away by the sea, much like Noah’s placards, which lie at the bottom of the Pequod’s hold.

Do you remember the announcement?

That whaling voyage is now over. And its story will be able to begin, which is to say, begin again.

The voyage, then, once again.

And on a blank page.

But what is the whiteness of a page?

What is the virginity of paper?

Visiting a...