Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick
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I also put together a collection of Melville’s short fiction, which includes “Bartleby”: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/herman-melville/short-fict...
Since I checked out your profile to see what kind of person does these beautiful things for free...can you tell me why it is so hard to order online from ikea?
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/herman-melville/moby-dick/...
Could not agree more 170 years later. My girlfriend and I are currently reading the book aloud to each other before bed and almost every page is a master work of the English language.
There are sentences or paragraphs that go on and and on I find myself thinking "Ok Melville went a little too far here" and then, by golly, he brings it all together in a flourish.
The language is simultaneously as descriptive as anything I've read, yet curiously opaque. It's perhaps best described by a passage from a novel of similar linguistic stature, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian:
> It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.
[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/s...
All three have a mad project of egotistic ambition, sooth-sayers of doom, and great helpings of gore along the way to the catastrophe foretold. Sooth-sayers are of course, always correct, whether they appear as a trio of witches, world-weary Parsee, or a decrepit "disordered Mennonite".
SPOILERS:
So most of the book is just a beautiful snapshot of a very odd slice of life in the early 1800s, namely whalers. However, not just any whaler, the book is very clear on this, sperm whalers. Also, not just any sperm whalers, nantucketers. Even though the majority of the crew is international, they are on a nantucket ship, with a nantucket captain, and are thus honorary nantucketers. Ok, so anyway, most of the book is just about learning what their life is like, and it's unusual in the way because Melville literally had to teach us everything about this unusual slice of life, to get the rest. My point though is throughout all of this, which is like 90% of the book, the language and tone is somewhat plain and often times light hearted. There are a few moments where its serious, like when there's the electrical storm and Ahab fixes the compass, or when they're towards the end of their journey and they see another ship of nantucketers who weren't driven to kill the whale, but just to make money and they're just rolling in the dough, throwing everything overboard just to make more room for more sperm oil.
MORE SPOILERS:
Any way, then in the end is really where we see a huge dramatic shift in language. For one thing it becomes *hard*, even as a native speaker the sentence structure, word choice, and ideas being conveyed are just harder. Basically what's happening this whole time is Ahab is trying to kill the whale, is failing to do so, and we're sort of consummating what sort of felt inevitable the whole time but from Ahab's perspective. I think in this sense, Moby DIck is really unique because it's almost two stories: there's all the fun stuff about learning about whaling, and then there's the artful part of it. The change is very dramatic.
Any way, I think it's a great book, but it's very different than say Typee, where the whole book stays in the same tone as the first part of Moby Dick that I described. The last 50 or so pages of Moby Dick, are borderline psychedelic.
The Original 1851 Reviews of Moby Dick - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15209719 - Sept 2017 (29 comments)
Related:
'Bartleby the Scrivener' – Herman Melville (1853) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28671613 - Sept 2021 (3 comments)
The Man Who Edited Melville (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24736842 - Oct 2020 (1 comment)
Herman Melville at Home - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20547911 - July 2019 (2 comments)
What Happened to the Book Herman Melville Wrote After ‘Moby-Dick’? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16983571 - May 2018 (16 comments)
Why Does Moby-Dick Sometimes Have a Hyphen? (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12939407 - Nov 2016 (19 comments)
I Used Google BigQuery to Map the Locations Mentioned in Herman Melville's Books - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11573730 - April 2016 (2 comments)
White whale in the big smoke: How the geography of London inspired Moby-Dick - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10728471 - Dec 2015 (2 comments)
Bartleby, the Scrivener: An interactive, annotated story of Wall Street - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10449293 - Oct 2015 (9 comments)
Before Moby-Dick, There Was “Two Years Before the Mast” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9877987 - July 2015 (12 comments)
I have to agree with this. The book certainly has its merits, but story isn't one of them...which is sad because I think there could be something interesting in the vendetta story, but 90% of it was spent discussing whaling (which is interesting on its own).
On subsequent reads (and especially listening to it read aloud and as an audiobook), my opinion turned on its head. The structure reflects whaling, with weeks of discussion about ropes and navigation punctuated by relatively brief periods of excitement.
Ahab and the whale are left vague because that makes them grander in the imagination than they could possibly be when thoroughly described. The whale is just out there looking for squid, it's the people on the boat that have made it out to be something different.
The point is that while most of the book is incredibly boring, that's a feature and not a bug.
“To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, the Whale
It wasn't until a decade after college that I picked up another Steinbeck novel. and after finishing Cannery Row, the only question i could ask myself was, WTF were my teachers thinking assigning Grapes of Wrath vs some of his much shorter, less complex works that could be read in a couple days. The whole book is shorter than the section of Grapes that most people describe as being the slog you have to get through to enjoy the rest of the novel.
I read a lot, and I can say with a fair bit of confidence the one long lasting result of assigning these books in HS is to guarantee most people have a life long repulsion for long "classics".
I've called it "an overdose of Dead Poet's Society" before. Shakespeare plays, Steinbeck, Moby-Dick: they'll all make the majority of the class tune out if they're presented as a treatise on the human condition. Shakespeare is meant to be performed on a stage, not read from a book. Discuss his codification of character archetypes and plot tropes, perhaps even some wordplay choices. At 16 years old, "a treatise on the human condition" is pretentious puffery. Even those teacher's pets who take it seriously are merely LARPing as well-rounded individuals.
My dislike of how Shakespeare was taught in HS is from a different angle. The problem wasn't that the stories were unrelatable: that was during the peak of my fantasy-reading years. I disliked how much focus was put on the iambic pentameter as some special sauce for "understanding what it means to be human" and other overdoses of the Dead Poet Society ethos.
I love classics and every time I read one there's a moment when I think to myself "I'm so glad no one is going to make me write an essay on this." I don't have to try to pull out the major themes, I don't have to discuss about the character's motivations, I don't have to consider the novel in the context of what was going on in the writer's life time. I can just let it wash over me, I can just enjoy it.
It's a miserable and joy-killing way to approach reading. Even as I look back to the books I read in High School I don't think any every became my favorites. The Great Gatsby is a fine book but when I look back on it I remember all the sections where we had to point out 'symbolism'. What a drag.
Holystone the decks!
FWIW, that is the experience of many English speakers; it's a feature, not a bug, so to speak.
Thanks, looks like a book I would enjoy, I'll read it now.
Reminds me of some of the stuff I enjoy in Umberto Eco's historical novels where he dives deep into some historical worldview, often one we now know is wrong, though I think in this case Melville was relating the current state of the art of his age, but both do so quite poetically.
Some of the cod-Shakespearean bits were a bit more of a drag for me. Something for everyone maybe.
U up? Who dis? :emoji :emoji :emoji
I'm not sure if I'm nostalgic, sad or just a little bit of, "get off my lawn."_
https://newatlas.com/last-telegraph-message/28314/#:~:text=I....
Relative to wages in the 1860s, telegrams were very expensive.
https://www.portablepress.com/blog/2016/10/where-the-money-w...
People could write unpublished books back then just as well, and people can be locked out of the publication process today. The difference is that "reasons" were given by a person and today you're locked out by an Algorithm that doesn't even tell you why.
> James Kinneavy is largely credited with reintroducing the importance of kairos into the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition and, thus, the composition classroom. According to Kinneavy, kairos is “the appropriateness of the discourse to the particular circumstances of the time, place, speaker, and audience involved”
That era was just starting by 1850, but showed in some language, especially in newspapers, and to an extent Mark Twain.
Hemmingway remains the exemplar though.
I strongly suspect that the ornate language also served trust and signalling purposes. With faster communications, that could be indicated by other means (returning texts immediately rather than long exhortations of faith, fearing the correct gods, and infinite gratitude to one's superiors, should one have any). This turns up in business correspondence, and the history of business writing and messaging as communications increased in speed and bandwidth are interesting. A small handful of companies (the Souther Pacific Railroad, DuPont Chemical, General Electric) had an absolutely outsized impact on standards of correspondence and recordkeeping, particularly from about 1880 -- 1910 or so. Even standardisation of fields on memos, most of which were later reflected in RFC 822 email message headers, date to this time, and were aimed at improving ease of reference and filing.
A brilliant book, possibly my favourite of all the books I have read, which is a lot, and certainly one that I have enjoyed re-reading time and again. Tragic that it wasn't more widely appreciated in Melville's lifetime. A must read.
And many of the chapters essentially nonfiction, a sort of encyclopaedia of Whales and Whaling.
"Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!"
Similar with Count of Monte Cristo as well, the details of the Mediterranean smuggling trade it goes into is simply amazing.
(I love all of Dumas' works)
Which certainly did not improve it as a novel.
Lots of good Victorian writing is like that
Charles Dickens - Any of his works
Rudyard Kipling - Remembered now for children’s books but also wrote some amazing novels and poetry for adults. He has written some pretty trippy stuff too. I remember a poem about all the structural parts of a ship talking to each other in a storm and another short story about an engineer that’s a sort of fever dream mixed with a monsoon flood at the bridge he’s building.
Oscar Wilde - e.g. The Nightingale and the Rose is a masterwork of pathos. http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/NigRos.shtm...
A lot of literature from that period paid attention to the the rhythm and flow of the sentences, if you read any of it aloud it rolls off the tongue compared to modern writing.
I usually read a book in a couple of sittings. This favors lighter fare, with copious excitement to keep one engaged.
I could never do this with Moby Dick. But with a 10-30 page reading per day, you hear about some interesting thing: perhaps mostly whaling and sailing, perhaps advancing the plot and characters. It's not enough to sustain an excited big read, but it's certainly enough to make you wonder about what you'll read next.
The chapters average 3-4 pages long. I think this is a hint that it's intended to be consumed in morsels.
When I was a child, I have read Moby Dick and I have enjoyed every part of it very much, including the so-called boring parts about the history of whaling and so on.
At that age most of what was described in the book were new things for me, so they were interesting.
Half a century later, I would never have patience to read any similar book, as it is extremely unlikely that any such book could contain anything that I have not read before.
It's also streamed every year.
https://www.whalingmuseum.org/program/the-moby-dick-marathon...
https://www.hawaii-guide.com/maui/sights/whalers_village_mus...
My wife visited the museum on Nantucket and said that was also a very enjoyable experience.
Melville and Joyce are the two well respected literature authors I can't stand.
In the modern vernacular, "jumping the shark."