Global Circumnavigation in World Literature: From the Quest Narrative to the Metaphor of Knowledge

The global circumnavigation as a literary narrative has undergone a complex evolution: from a documentary chronicle of real expeditions to a universal metaphor of the life journey, the understanding of the world, and oneself. In world literature, it serves not just as an exotic backdrop but as a structuring principle, a laboratory for testing the hero, ideas, and social norms.

1. The Phase of Documentary and Philosophical Reflection (XVI–XVIII Centuries).

The first texts were actually reports but carried a powerful philosophical charge.

Antonio Pigafetta, "The Voyage of Magellan" (approx. 1525): The chronicle of the first circumnavigation (1519-1522) is not just a description of the route but a text of collision. For the first time, a European details the total alienness of foreign worlds (Patagonia, the Philippines). The journey here is an act of heroic and sacrificial overcoming of the boundaries of the known, where success (the return of one ship out of five) is akin to a miracle.

"Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift (1726): Although Lemuel Gulliver does not undertake a technically circumnavigation, his four travels to unknown lands follow the same logic of comparative anthropological research. Swift uses the form of travel for sharp satire on European civilization, politics, and human nature. Each land is a "mirror-monstrous," hypertrophying vices or virtues. The circumnavigation (as a series of radically different worlds) becomes a method of estrangement and criticism.

2. Romanticism and Science Fiction: Travel as an Internal Quest and Utopia (XIX Century).

In the XIX century, the circumnavigation plot is romanticized and complicated.

"The Children of Captain Grant" (1868) and "Around the World in 80 Days" (1872) by Jules Verne. Verne creates two principal models. "The Children of Captain Grant" is a quest journey where the goal (searching for the father) justifies the movement along the route. Geography becomes a giant puzzle that needs to be solved. In "80 Days," travel is a sporting bet, a challenge to time and space. Phileas Fogg moves not for knowledge but for victory over the abstraction of meridians and clocks. His journey is cyclic and mechanical, and the main discovery (winning a day) is an ironic victory of human calculation over matter. Here, the circumnavigation becomes an intellectual game and a demonstration of the triumph of technology (steamship, railway).

"Moby Dick" by Herman Melville (1851). The voyage of the "Pequod" is not a true circumnavigation but a metaphysical journey into the depths of nature and madness. The hunt for the White Whale turns the oceanic expanses into a battlefield of confrontation between man and the transcendent. The route is built around pursuit, and the geographical circumnavigation emphasizes the cosmic scale of the tragedy of Ahab.

Interesting fact: Jules Verne's novel "Around the World in 80 Days" was an interactive media event. The newspaper "Le Temps," where it was published in installments, organized virtual bets on the outcome of Fogg's journey for readers. This was one of the first cases where a literary circumnavigation became a mass gaming and speculative phenomenon.

3. The XX Century: Deconstruction of Heroism and Travel into the Depths of Consciousness.

Modernism and postmodernism question the very idea of heroic conquest of space.

"Around the World on the Sailing Yacht 'Spray'" by Joshua Slocum (1900). This is a non-fiction but extremely literary autobiography of the first solo circumnavigation. The text marks a transition: travel becomes not a collective enterprise but an individual challenge, a dialogue of a solitary person with the ocean and himself. This is a precursor to survival literature and the search for the limits of personal abilities.

"Journey to the End of Night" by Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1932). Although the action of the novel is not globally, its metaphorical title and structure (a series of escapes, movements, hospitals) create the feeling of a global circumnavigation through hell of modern civilization. This is an inversion of the idea — travel does not open the world but exposes its corruption, and the hero is not a researcher but a fugitive.

"The Salmon of Doubt" by Douglas Adams (posthumous collection) and his idea. Adams humorously noted that the main problem with space is that it is "too vast." His humorous view (such as in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy") desacralizes the motif of cosmic "circumnavigations," turning them into an absurd bureaucratic routine.

4. Contemporary Literature: Ecology, Globalization, and the Search for Identity.

In the literature of the XXI century, the global circumnavigation is interpreted through the prism of ecological disasters, globalization, and the crisis of identity.

"The Conquest of the South Pole" and other texts about modern extreme travels. Books by solo travelers (for example, about circumnavigation or crossing the Arctic) continue the line of Slocum but add an ecological subtext — observing the change of the planet.