I am attempting that Mount Everest of literature – Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. I am at no stopping point; I have merely reached a point where it is necessary to jot down some thoughts and empty my head before the reading may continue. My apologies for the grandiloquence of style – I have nothing to plead but that Melville is infectious.
A massive stylistic difference stands out to me between this book and more modern literature. We as modern readers have come to expect an action-based plot – where the actions that we are reading about are interesting for their uniqueness and that pertinence to the story which makes that story unique. So far, this has been the narrative of a rather ordinary sea voyage. Melville implies that the colorfulness of the characters are not atypical of the time and the sailing ships – the religiously unbending Quakers who nevertheless reconcile their zeal for the next world with the practicality required to live in this one; the three barbaric harpooners who are genteel and a good sort of fellow (barbarism only implies that they are not Christian, not that they are ‘barbaric’ in the sense of the word as we use it today.) The other sailors seem no more nor less noteworthy than any of their unmentioned counterparts ought to be, and the hiring Captains on shore implied that Harpooners were usually an odd lot. The weather was extremely cold in New England before the ship left port – who ever heard of such a thing? Oh, everyone? Nevermind, I guess that’s normal too. In short, almost a third of the way through the book, and it has been a narrative of entirely mundane events. No wonder many modern readers have trouble getting through this story – if you are not alive to learning more about the mundanities of whaling and cetology than you maybe thought possible, you’re going to close the book and leave it off well before ‘anything happens’ by your definition of the word.
Another stylistic difference is the use of allusions and epithets to color the narrative. He has shown me truly how badly versed in history, mythology, folklore, and pretty much everything else I truly am. This is another turnoff for many modern readers – we have lost so many of our classical and historical allusions that the reading is either incomprehensible or ceaselessly bogged down in searching for references. What would in the past have been a one or two-word descriptor that allows the author to paint a vivid picture is now a colorful liability. How many people trying to read the story now outside of England know who Nelson was, and why he might have a statue in Trafalgar square, and how that might be relevant to a sea-faring novel? How many of you know Trafalgar square? Removing the rhetoricity from this question for a moment, did you as a reader of this discussion know it? If not, have you looked it up yet? Are you going to be incredibly lazy and wait for me to tell you that he was an Admiral of the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars known for brilliant tactics and strategy, and that he was fatally shot during his victory at the battle of Trafalgar? If you don’t know what the battle of Trafalgar is and won’t look that up either, I despair for you.
It is of note that a great many highly religious people in these United States would do well to read Moby Dick. We are one-hundred-sixty years after it is published, yet Melville is able to more clearly write about religious tolerance than many people who profess to have learnt something in the intervening years.
No comments:
Post a Comment