Melville and Hemingway

Melville and Hemingway: poets of the irresistible vortex that is the Deep, the surface of which we blithely skim in our daily lives, ever onward towards a receding shore…



When you've read the first few pages of Death in the Afternoon, you can be forgiven for asking yourself, “Am I really going to wade through a book on bull-fighting?” This question is analogous to the one you ask yourself when you’ve read the first few pages of Moby-Dick: “Am I really going to wade through a book on whaling?” The temptation at that point is to put the book down. But that is the moment in which you prove your mettle. Hemingway’s book is not Melville’s—for one thing, it is not self-consciously a work of fiction and, therefore, is tethered to the pale truths that emerge from the world of fact. So it is disadvantaged in the comparison, and your expectations should be fitted to the genre. But what he does with that genre is to elevate it, as far as possible, to the fictive realm of Myth. And therein lies its greatness. It is a study of tragedy, which is to say, a meditation on what it means to be a human being.