More Moby Blogging

My son and I have gotten up to about Chapter 35 of Moby Dick; he's still interested, although Melville's language sometimes mystifies him completely.

I had forgotten how much of a slice-of-life realistic novel Moby Dick is. We remember Captain Ahab's mad quest and the high-school English essay allegories, but we forget how much of the book is just the prosaic details of life aboard a whaling ship. The odd little social niceties of the mates dining with the captain and how cheerless their meal is, while the harpooneers eat at the same table afterwards and have a grand old time harassing the steward.

I also have to say that Herman Melville is absolutely shameless about padding his text. There's really no other explanation for including a chapter blatantly lifted from his reference books (Chapter 32: "Cetology") and a whole chapter (Chapter 35) devoted to stretching a whimsical comparison (between sailors standing watch on the mast-head with statues atop pillars) far, far beyond the breaking point. I don't mind the author taking time to let us get to know the ship and the characters in order to give us a baseline of normality for Ahab's mad obsession (and Melville's own personal observations of sea life are acute and fascinating) -- but throwing in stuff from other people's books is really too much.

Modern readers tend to forget how much of 19th century literature has simply dropped out of the canon. Does anyone outside a college English program read Trollope any more? Or anything past the first line of Bulwer-Lytton's novels? The shift in prose style that began in the late 19th century was a profound shift in how people read. Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling still sound fresh and contemporary, but earlier writers are work.

 

Comments

[barrett]

My favorite example of a book that just disappeared is Oliver Goldsmith's "the Vicar of Wakefield". If you've seen any schoolbooks from the 19th or early 20th Century the book seems to have been ubiquitous and familiarity with it is casually assumed.

But just try to find someone familiar with it today.

[Dwtwiddy]

Austen and Dickens are still on sale at BJs. And Trollope *should* be among their number. He's better than either.

-D*

[Francesca Berger]

Thanks for reminding me of Trollope. I'm making a list of 19th-century authors I've neglected since their stuff is all available free as e-books now. I've got a few of the Bronte sisters on my Kindle right now...