I was wondering what Conrad thought of Moby Dick, which he surely must have known. He had some tragic captains, but mostly focused on the ordinary problems of work and career, certainly relevant to any artist. In any case, the important allegory for him was the sea itself. I think that his labor was to equate the sea with the creative imagination:
“The solitude of the sea intensifies the thoughts and the facts of one’s experience which seems to lie at the very centre of the world, as the ship which carries one always remains the centre figure of the round horizon.”
My own ideas about the inhuman are, I admit, a version of the sublime. That likely strikes many advocates of discursive art as naive—they may think that the sublime has been well critiqued. I disagree. In the art context, power has not been thought through at all.
Robert Linsley, Island Figure 2011