felis_ultharus | (no subject)

Current Music: Place d'Armes (Canadian/queer lit)

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So I finally finished Moby-Dick, and I have to say it was 120 pages of the best novel 19th-Century America produced. Too bad it was 620 pages long.

Some thoughts:

He's really good at creating characters and painting scenes. He's terrible at dialogue, editing, and plotting. The initial scenes of the inn, the church, and Ishmael's first night with Queequeeg are quirky, bizarre, and wonderful -- and the final battle is cool.
Unfortunately, between these is 500 pages of dross. This novel could have been greatly improved if they'd encountered Moby-Dick just as they pulled away from the harbour.
I'm sure there is someone out there who's said, "What I want is a novel that reads like a highly inaccurate cetology manual, and which spares no detail however excruciating." People are strange creatures, and for every desire conceivable there is at least person who's experienced it. I, however, am not that person.
The guy who wrote the introduction noted that while writing the second half of the book, Herman Melville had been reintroduced to Shakespeare. This is likely the inspiration of the atrocious soliloquys that plague the second half. Reading Shakespearean speeches written by Melville is a little like watching Pauly Shore do Hamlet.
The book is terribly edited. I mean, at one point, Ahab has both feet. He's frequently running. The ship's architecture changes. And why the hell didn't the editor catch the fact that Ishmael is frequently narrating Ahab's internal monologues? If Ishamel's meant to be an unreliable narrator, it's very clumsily handled.
The book manages to both be vague and yet heavyhanded -- all that allegorical imagery gives the impression that you're being browbeaten with some hamfisted point of view, but it's impossible to say what that point of view actually is. Reading Moby-Dick is a little like being beaten by an angry mob who've rallied behind an illegible or blank banner, so you can't even tell why they're beating you up.
On that note, Moby-Dick is not so much a whale as a floating Rorshach inkblot. He's been described by literary critics as everything from God to Satan to Nature to Fate to America to Democracy to Racism to Non-white Races to Monarchy to whatever-else-is-being-written-about-him-at-this-moment. The novel is confused enough to support this and any other point.
Somewhere out there, there has to be Ishmael/Queequeeg slash, and it is a safe bet that it is better than the novel.

In short, I recommend anything past the first 100 pages only to my enemies. I now move on Place d'Armes, by Scott Symons.

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Can I metaquote this?

As I said, certainly ^_^

Thanks for the review. Moby Dick is on my list of books to read. I've wanted to read it for years.

*grins*

I really have trouble imagining that my review would encourage anyone to read it, but thanks for this.

Hah! You summarize my opinion of Moby Dick far, far more precisely and eloquently than I ever could. Particularly the comment about an inaccurate and excruciatingly detailed cetology manual...

I'm not entirely sure I'd go for it even if it were excruciatingly accurate, of course.

Heh.

Melville actually intended - at least initially - for MD to be much shorter than it was. But Hawthorne (surprise!) inspired him to do a literary experiment: an encyclopaedic novel of the whale.

Anyone who comes to MD hoping for plot reaaaallly needs to stay away from the smack, because the plot is as irrelevant there as it is in almost every single Pynchon novel. It's all about Everything Else. Gargantuan Metaphors, Plays On Words, Ahab As God, Ishmael as Innocence, etc. In short, MD tries to literally be almost an experiential novel, that seeks to be an experience of synesthesia; engaging all the senses (you can thank Charles Baudelaire for that handy little term).

The novel actually didn't do very well when it came out, since audiences just didn't get it. Only around 1910 did people even start picking it up and saying "...Waitaminute, this is a really peculiar novel." Apparently Melville was also trying to be a part of the (supposed) US tradition of encyclopaedic novel (see later examples: Gaddis, Pynchon, Foster Wallace, etc).

Oh, I'm fully aware there's a context for it, a set of literary movements at the heart of it, etc, etc, etc. I did do nine years of English literary studies at university.

However, after all that time -- after hearing professors babble about how Finnegan's Wake was the greatest book ever written because hardly anyone ever finishes it, and how another writer is sadly unrecognized by an ignorant public because of their utterly incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness style -- I realized that what English literary studies really needs is a few critics with the guts to say "This is a truly awful book."

I always respected teachers who brought themselves to say that.

Moby Dick is certainly not the ninth-circle-of-hell awful, but I don't think it's much closer to the circle of the virtuous pagans, either. I think focus is a necessity in a novel, whatever its other goals, and any literary movement that abandons focus might as well be abandoned by readers.

Here from Metaquotes.

Oh gods, yes. My HS College English class required a paper on a book each semester, and the teacher had a list of books we could choose from, each of us doing a different book. I think by the time he got to me I had a choice of War and Peace, House of the Seven Gables, and Moby Dick. I chose Moby Dick. This decision has haunted me ever since (as has the subsequent decision to read David Copperfield for the second paper).

OTOH, Gregory Peck made an awesome Ahab.

I'm half-convinced that the purpose of high-school English classes is to get kids to stop reading. Don't know where you grew up, but in my little corner of Canada, we had the most agonizingly depressing Canadian prairie writers foisted upon us until we wanted to immitate the many suicides in those books.

All I learnt there was to avoid the prairies.

I still went into Canadian lit as an adult, and people are always shocked when I tell them there are enjoyable Canadian writers. They don't think such things are possible, if they grew up here.

The conclusion that I drew from four years of reading "great literature" was that great literature != enjoyable reading. And I would read anything in print, back then. Cereal boxes, instruction manuals, you name it. And apparently if it is fun to read, it cannot qualify as great literature.

Of course, I was the one who complained that our book had bits missing from the Wife of Bath's Prologue when we read the Canterbury Tales. Ok, "inadvertently blurted out, out loud during class" is probably a better representation of what actually happened. ;-)

*finally has a chance to use his Chaucer icon in context*

If I hadn't gone into Canadian lit, medieval lit was my second choice. I did do a lot of it when I did my master's. I like the sound --- and if I can use the word -- the taste of middle English on my tongue. It's like chocolate to the blandness of modern English.

(The "Wyf of Bath's Prologue" is so wonderful in the original that I can't even read it translated anymore.)

Chaucer was coming to English, of course, in an age when "serious literature" was generally written in either French or Latin or Italian, and English was considered only good for entertainment. There had been a few exceptions, but mostly Chaucer was working in a language considered suitable only for frivolous stuff.

He even had to defend the idea of putting meaning in a story, by putting his two stories Sir Thopas and Melibee together.

Then came a steady stream of artists whose work was either beautiful (all those sonnets) or fun, or (in Shakespeare's case) both, as well as being meaningful.

But then came the Romantics, who declared that all great artists were misunderstood -- which was fine in their case, because they could mostly manage either fun (Byron) or beauty (Coleridge/Shelley) or wonder (Blake).

But with the Modernists, a great artist had to be misunderstood, and if an artist were popular, they were a failure. They also wanted "hard literature" -- wanted to make their readers work. Any pleasure to be gained from their effort was to be the pleasure obtained by effort.

Melville was in many ways the first American modernist.

Then of course the Postmodernists came, and said that all judgements on a novel were culturally-based, and therefore useless. And they soldified English literary criticism as a field that only studied dull and useless writers, and inculcated these in the professors and teachers who came after.

Literary studies now mostly kills a love of reading, and drives out the people most passionate about books. Most of what's left are failed writers, and Postmodernists with a particular political chip on their shoulder.

The rest of us are going to have to set up an alternate real literary studies somewhere else.

I have been acquiring Canadians lately. May I friend you? You're neat. (yes, I know my user profile has nothing at all about me, because I am LAZY)

Anyway, I minored in Medieval Studies, which was my way of having my medieval music performance classes count for something. ;-) Didn't take the Chaucer class, because it conflicted with something in my mostly useless first major (Religion, focus on Bible Studies), but that hasn't stopped me from reading random bits of it now and again. Most of my ME reading is cookbooks these days, though, or will be once this dratted B.A.S. is finished and I have time to play again. And someday I will learn enough Old English to not have to resort to translations of Maldon (or having my consort recite it to me, which is much niftier). I admit it, I'm a hobby Medievalist. ;-)

Chaucer is also coming to English at the end of a time when the Norman aristocracy was having an OMG it's SAXON!! crisis, when they were having to teach French because nobody spoke it anymore. The 13th century, which is my favorite period of cultural study, is a giant essay in the attempt to reaffirm a cultural identity that is steadily being assimilated into the greater Englishness.

Certainly ^_^

And the best medieval recipe I ever came across (not from the eating-perspective, but from the hearing-about perspective) was one that required you to roast a peacock, then put the feathers back on, then spear its head so it remained upright, insert aqua-vitae-soaked rag in its beak, and light the rag so it breathed fire.

This is among the things one learns in the footnotes of Iris Origo's The Merchant of Prato, a study of a medieval merchant.

Oooh, another source! *makes note for next library trip*

Harleian MS. 4016

55 Pecok rosted. Take a Pecok, breke his necke, and kutte his throte, And fle him, [th]e skyn and the ffethurs togidre, and the hede still to the skyn of the nekke, And kepe the skyn and the ffethurs hole togiders; drawe him as an hen, And kepe [th]e bone to [th]e necke hole, and roste him, And set the bone of the necke aboue the broche, as he was wonte to sitte a-lyve; And abowe the legges to [th]e body, as he was wonte to sitte a-lyve; And whan he is rosted ynowe, take him of, And lete him kele; And [th]en wynde the skyn with the fethurs and the taile abought the body, And serue him forthe as he were a-live; or elle[3] pull him dry, And roste him, and serue him as [th]ou doest a henne.

Here: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=cme;cc=cme;rgn=main;view=text;idno=CookBk

Sloane MS. 1986 says gyngeyre for the sauce, which would probably be tasty.

It's not slash if it's canon.

I loved the first part of Moby Dick, and then I admired some of the chapters that were done in weird formats, like play scripts, newspaper reports, and what else.

I'm about maybe not quite halfway through. I WILL finish it one of these years.

"It's not slash if it's canon."

True that.

The parts done as plays made me think he would've been happier writing a play. And it probably would've been a more quality work -- a lot of the stuff he was trying to do works better on the stage than in life.

Not the parts about whale anatomy, though -- though most likely in a stage production, we'd have been spared.

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