Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Harold Beaver

Critical Essay by Harold Beaver

SOURCE: Beaver, Harold. “Whale or Boojum: An Agony.” In Lewis Carroll Observed: A Collection of Unpublished Photographs, Drawings, Poetry, and New Essays, edited by Edward Guiliano, pp. 111-31. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1976.

In the following essay, Beaver explores the alleged connections between The Hunting of the Snark and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?

herman melville, Moby-Dick, Ch. 42.

It was a Frenchman who first proposed that Lewis Carroll might owe a literary debt to Herman Melville. W. H. Auden had earlier juxtaposed The Hunting of the Snark with Moby-Dick.¹ Robert Martin Adams, more recently, discussed both works within the context of a single study.² Marcel Marnat not only confronted but directly compared the...
(read more)