So those who play together stay together, eh?
The Malones also say, "When we write in intimacy, we write of strangeness and its crucial importance in healthy being, the importance of becoming excited with the strange, the new, and the different. It takes time and learning. If you have seldom been there, it takes experience to be there easily" (page 159; their italics).
In Sanborn's short 2018 book, he says, "Part of what is made available to one when one feels the strangeness of Melville's undertaking [in his experimental 1851 novel Moby-Dick] is a sense of being near to estrangeability as such, to that which makes it possible for anything at all to be, as Melville puts it in [his 18,000-line 1876 centennial poem] Clarel, 'differenced'" (page 67).
In Ong's "Romantic Difference and the Poetics of Technology [Writing and Print]" in his 1971 350-page book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: The Interaction of Expression and Culture (Cornell University Press, pages 255-283), he says, "It is a classic observation that the romantic movement can be defined in a great many ways, some complementary and some competing. But whatever way one defines it, one of the movement's characteristics - more or less central depending on the particular definition - is a preoccupation with otherness, with what is different, remote, mysterious, inaccessible, exotic, even bizarre. Some historians make more of this characteristic, some less. But virtually all scholarship falls back on it to set off the romantic movement from the neoclassicism which preceded it" (page 255).
In any event, Ong liked to say that his mature work from the early 1950s onward is phenomenological and personalist in cast. Ong celebrates the personalist cast of his mature thought by never tiring of celebrating I-thou communication as the optimal expression of his personalist orientation. In addition, because Ong thinks that we need both closeness (proximity) and distance to understand something well, he characterized his mature thought from the early 1950s onward as providing us with the distance we need to understand well how and why certain things are the way they are in Western cultural history.
But Ong also celebrates the personalist cast of his mature thought from the early 1950s onward in his interpretation of orality (in his terminology) with the expression of the personalist orientation that he values so highly. See, for example, Ong's article "World as View and World as Event" in the journal the American Anthropologist, volume 71, number 4 (August 1969): pages 634-647.
For an essay of related interest, see the anthropologist David M. Smith's 1997 essay "World as Event: Aspects of Chipewyan Ontology" in the ambitious anthology Of Ong and Media Ecology, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (New York: Hampton Press, 2012, pages 117-141).
Also in Of Ong and Media Ecology, see Thomas D. Zlatic's lengthy essay "Faith in Pretext: An Ongian Context for [Melville's 1857 Novel] The Confidence-Man" (pages 241-280).
For a reliable text of Melville's 1857 novel, see the second edition of the Norton Critical Edition of The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, edited by Hershel Parker and Mark Niemeyer (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).
In addition to my book about Ong's life and work, I draw of his thought in my article "The Female and Male Modes of Rhetoric" in the National Council of Teachers of English journal College English, volume 40, number 8 (1978-1979): pages 909-921. Granted, all of the examples to which I refer in my article involve non-fiction. However, it strikes me now that the aspects of Melville's fictional writings that Sanborn celebrates involve something like the fictional counterpart of what I describe as the female mode of rhetoric.
Now, Ong's frequently cited January 1975 PMLA article "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction" is relevant here to Sanborn's short 2018 book. In my estimate, his book is written primarily for his fellow Melville scholars, but also for other literary scholars, including graduate students in literary studies and perhaps also including other college-educated Melville readers.
Ong's January 1975 PMLA article is reprinted in the 600-page 2002 anthology An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, pages 405-427).
As to the fictional audience(s) for whom Melville wrote each of his prose narratives in the 1840s and 1850s, Sanborn provides only a few hints (e.g., page 53-54, quoting Elizabeth Savage).
Because Melville was a seasoned oral storyteller before he turned to writing his prose narratives on the 1840s and 1850s, I imagine that he was used to adjusting his stories to his live audience's reactions. Nevertheless, Melville seriously altered his own writing in his experimental prose narratives Mardi (1849), Moby-Dick (1851), and Pierre (1852).
For a reliable text of Melville's 1849 experimental novel, see Mardi; and, A Voyage Thither, edited by Harrison Hayword, Hershel Parker, and G. Tanselle; with a "Historical Note" (pages 657-681) by Elizabeth S. Foster (Northwestern University Press, 1998; first published in 1970).
For a reliable text of Melville's 1851 experimental novel, see the third edition of the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick, edited by Hershel Parker (New York: w. W. Norton, 2018).
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