 |
 |
> Conrad invites his readers to share his aristocratic view of the rest of > humanity. Melville's crafty satire invites them to implicate themselves in > the object of his criticism, as he does himself. I'll re-read it again, bearing that in mind. It probably won't astonish you to learn that I was, briefly, a third mate. Maybe it was aspirational - my folks came from the foc's'l. > Melville never aspired to become a ship's officer--all of his seagoing > experience was in the forecastle. He wrote four books that are concerned to > deal more realistically than Moby Dick or Billy Budd with life at sea: > Typee, Omoo, Redburn and White Jacket. A lot of Typee and Omoo take place > on land, but the others are almost wholly shipboard. Gritty realism, > Whitejacket so much so that it resulted in major changes in the treatment > of seamen aboard US naval ships. He also writes movingly about the his > relationships with other sailors. Critics have extrapolated evidence of > homosexuality from these accounts, I think with little foundation, whatever > Melville's orientation was. > A more useful comparison than H of D-MD might be H of D-Benito Cereno. I wasn't attempting a direct comparison, you understand - just a gut-feeling with no attempt at analysis. In those days, it was employed to figuring how much licquor I could drink ?-) Still, with a fair wind in the tops'l and the jiggers spread, I'll be trawling Heffer's for "Benito Cereno" and "White Jacket". Roger, Jolly.