"Ultimately what kills me about Heated Rivalry is not just its dazzling, galvanic love story, nor its commitment to both narrative and erotic caretaking, but how it makes me feel about the not [yet] here of Melville’s imaginaries. I recently talked about the show and the novel with Rachel O’Connell, a literature scholar and new friend. She cracked open what I’ve been scrabbling at in my HR/MD monomania: the literary genre of contemporary MM romance provides one structural realization of an imagined world that Melville was trying to write into being in Moby-Dick. The messy, unfinished architecture of the novel cannot, as Ishmael confesses, 'be here, and at once, perfected.'
And not just in the novel: After all, Melville had asked Nathaniel Hawthorne to his cottage. In 1851, while composing Moby-Dick, he wrote Hawthorne a series of letters as heated by mid-19th-century standards as any scene in Heated Rivalry. In inviting his own possible situationship to come to his home—in his first known letter to Hawthorne—Melville, like a doped-up, concussed Shane, affects a lightness that doesn’t disguise its own feverishness: 'I am not to be charmed out of my promised pleasure […]. Your bed is already made, & the wood marked for your fire. […] I keep the word ‘Welcome’ all the time in my mouth, so as to be ready on the instant when you cross the threshold.' This 'welcome,' pleasurably effervescent on the tongue but freighted with the unsaid, is Melville’s version of the Canada Dry ginger ale and Coca-Cola that Ilya and Shane stock for each other."
-- Hester Blum in Public Books
The literary genre of contemporary MM romance realizes an imagined world that Melville was trying to write into being.
