Travel by Sea: Herman Melville

Abstract

William P. Trent, considering a great sweep of American literature from the early seventeenth century onwards, wrote of Melville’s Moby-Dick that ‘If it were not for its inordinate length, its frequent inartistic heaping up of details, and its obvious imitation of Carlylean tricks of style and construction, this narrative of tremendous power and wide knowledge might be perhaps pronounced the greatest sea story in literature’.¹ D. H. Lawrence, writing some twenty years later, is happy to dispense with all Trent’s caveats, describing Moby-Dick as ‘an epic of the sea such as no man has equalled; […] the greatest book of the sea ever written’.² The novel is undoubtedly a sea-bound adventure, a closely-observed narrative of an ocean pursuit. Yet the fluidity of this work enables it to bypass all generic classifications; it is ill-adapted to the maritime section of a book store. In classifying Moby-Dick as a ‘Titanic’ book, T. E. Lawrence ranges it alongside the works of landlubbers Dostoevsky and Nietzsche rather than alongside those of Conrad or Defoe: ‘Do you remember my telling you once that I collected a shelf of “Titanic” books (those distinguished by greatness of spirit, “sublimity” as Longinus would call it): and that they were The Karamazovs, Zarathustra, and Moby Dick’.³