This is the thread where J.D. tries to read "Moby-Dick."

JD - if you are still floundering, skip to the last run of chapters (from a bit before Queequeg's coffin) and then afterwards go back and read the middle.

I feel you JD. Been struggling with this for years, myself. My copy is a Norton's critical edition with a shitload of notes, and it's such a battle.. Being a non-native English-speaker doesn't help, either. Kind of a funny meta-element going on, the book itself turning into a white whale..

haha this thread. i finally read all of MD in 2010 and it became basically my favorite book in the world, i think i was just too young for it in 2004.

I read it for the first time in July, devouring it in three days. Its difficulty is overstated.

What did you think about Chapter 62, "The Dandruff of the Whale"?

Its difficulty is overstated.

This! I read it over the summer and was surprised by how crazy fun it was.

this is such a great novel and not at all "difficult." makes me sad when people say that! I even think the chapters on whales and whaling are interesting. I think a big chunk of its reputation comes from the distorted memories of people having to read it as students.

ha i can see i said the exact same thing 8 years ago.

I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever.

poor devil of a sub-sub

There are three threads about Moby Dick. I have decided to give it a go. One thing is, I watched a 2 x 2-hour TV adaptation with Patrick Stewart as Ahab about five years ago and I'm afraid it might have spoiled some of the mystique for me. Still, it's a remarkably enjoyable read so far, and pretty wry/funny in places.

and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow-hill in the air

Springsteen said he read it recently and found its difficulty oversold.

That was my experience w/Springsteen.

hoping Melville did an audiobook in a fake Okie accent

it's not difficult really, not so far anyway. compared to some dickens stuff, it's fairly transparent.

something i don't understand about writing from this era is how much it can vary from contemporary to old-fashioned language.
'moby dick' (1851) might have a few archaic-sounding sentences in there, but it's fairly understandable from the writing on the whole. something like 'the woman in white' by wilkie collins (1859 - a friend and contemporary of dickens) is written pretty much exactly like a modern novel (one character even uses 'cool' as a sarcastic response). but i remember reading 'mansfield park' (1811, admittedly a lot earlier) at university and finding the protracted sentence structures near-impossible to decipher. 'bleak house' (1853) too, when i tried to read it, was extremely dense and olde-worlde in the way it was written - as though it had come from another era entirely to 'the woman in white'.

obviously different authors write differently, but the difference in language, in structure, in sentence formation etc is so wildly felt, i'd really like to know if there is a linguistic or historical reason for this?

Early and middle Henry James carries the reputation of difficulty for readers familiar with his 20th century work, but, yes, his early prose is less convoluted and more forceful than Dickens. So is Trollope, whom I vastly prefer to Dickens.

Austin does feel like a whole other world compared to some Victorians. I don't feel that same otherness when reading Dickens and Eliot, who could almost be our contemporaries. I don't know where to locate the chasm exactly. Thackeray is kind of in between.

I don't have any trouble reading Austen.

With Melville a lot of the old-timey stuff is an attempt to write like Shakespeare. (I don't like it either.)

as usual by difficult people mostly mean long, tho in this case they also mean they're bored by the whaling parts

agree w jmm that austen's style is mostly her own. i'll admit it can fatigue me, tho as w the bible or shakespeare or moby-dick (<--dialectic) it gets easier once yr in the saddle. my personal idea of difficult is virginia woolf.

i've read that melville was strongly influenced by thomas carlyle; i've only read bits of his french revolution book but the crazy rhetorical flourishes and digressions are very similar to the style of moby dick.

was just wondering if melville would have been familiar with carlye's novel sartor resartus and found this:

"This Ahab also belongs to the race of "demonical," or demon-possessed, characters discussed by Goethe in the autobiography, Poetry and Truth, which Melville had recently purchased in London. But his nearest prototype--the literary hero whose meditations his were made to resemble almost to the point of parody--was the hero of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus who believed that "all visible things are emblems; what thou seest is not there on its own account; strictly taken, is not there at all; Matter exists only spiritually, and to represent some Idea, and body it forth." Indeed, the Ahab who appears here had many resemlances to the Teufelsdrockh whose "strong inward longing shaped Fantasms for itself" and drove him toward them: he too had come to feel that the Universe, whether hostile or indifferent, was "rolling on...to grind me limb from limb"; he too had heard the words "Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil's)" and had replied with his "whole Me," "I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!"; and he too came out of his "Baphometic Fire-baptism," as Carlyle had called it, as "a specter-fighting Man" whose "Indignation and defiance" against "things in general" was "no longer a quite hopeless Unrest" but something with "a fixed center to revolve round" and whose tendency to "eat his own heart" did not disguise the fact that he had "a certain incipient method" in his "madness." - Leon Howard, Herman Melville: A Biography

the carlyle novel (if you want to call it that) is well worth a read, btw

i love melville...moby dick is a fine read, it's just daunting when the paperback is the size of a brick. seems ideal for kindle imo, breeze through without being scared off by the heft

the one dickens novel that truly broke me was little dorritt. like i dont GET this, i cant follow wtf is happening and I dont bloody care hmph

austen i find very readable and very modern in her humor

oxford put out - don't know if it's still running - a series of pocket-sized hardcover editions of classics several years ago, the moby-dick edition is hella portable and you can't even tell that it's a million pages cuz the paper is so classy and thin

heh

Moby Dick ‏@MobyDickatSea 53m53 minutes ago

God keep me from ever completing anything.

there's a reason that Austen doesn't seem comparable to the Victorians- she herself wasn't one. 60 years is a long time.

this book is extremely funny. just totally self-aware and hilarious. always assumed it would be this dry, totemic, serious thing and i'm sure we're getting to that part but the first few chapters are hilarious.

wow, haven't hought about Sartor Resartus since college

https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/historys-dick-jokes-on-melville-and-hawthorne

The issue, then, is whether serious scholars writing about famous authors can reasonably deign to take dick jokes as evidence. And if we are indeed willing to take them as evidence, just how do we go about determining what kind of evidence they are?

decided this is next on my list of things to read. in my grand, dilettantish tour of Important Literature recently i've made it through Ulysses (admittedly difficult), War & Peace (very readable, but fucking endless), and two books of Proust's In Search of Lost Time (endless, but so good i'm grateful for it) among other things. comments here making me feel like MD should be a breeze, relatively speaking. i'm actually pretty excited about it!

crapped out my new year's resolution for this

so renewing

i need to read this so i can understand the references in Metal Gear

Loved the part where the sailors are all, like, "Sperm! Glorious sperm!"

http://www.citypaper.com/blogs/noise/bcp-lil-wayne-and-birdman-like-father-like-son-20150203-story.html

^ can't believe this is 9 years old

this book now so totemic and intimidating it's just one more metaphor for itself

decided this is next on my list of things to read. in my grand, dilettantish tour of Important Literature recently i've made it through Ulysses (admittedly difficult), War & Peace (very readable, but fucking endless), and two books of Proust's In Search of Lost Time (endless, but so good i'm grateful for it) among other things

and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there drifted into my innermost soul endless processions of Important Literature, and, midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom, etc.

it's a breeze tho yes, part wisecracking naturalism, part "pomo" (tho premo) info-deluge, part insane fourth-wall-breaking comic book where people soliloquize madly ("science! curse thee, thou vain toy!"), part paradise lost. there are no better books. also by the end its dialogue is blatantly trying for shakespeare and daring you to scold it:

Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the old Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to speak.

“Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have spoiled it.”

“‘Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee? Thou seem’st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it.”

“I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these grey hairs of mine ’tis not worth while disputing, ‘specially with a superior, who’ll ne’er confess.”

“What’s that? There now’s a patched professor in Queen Nature’s granite-founded College; but methinks he’s too subservient. Where wert thou born?”

“In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir.”

“Excellent! Thou’st hit the world by that.”

“I know not, sir, but I was born there.”

“In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it’s good. Here’s a man from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man; which is sucked in—by what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind wall butts all inquiring heads at last. Up with it! So.”

The dead, blind wall butts all inquiring heads at last.

(spoiler warning)

http://40.media.tumblr.com/ae04c2d18a74f4a64a175766467580f1/tumblr_n346diPnTV1rm9irpo2_1280.jpg

I read the novel in a week, didn't find it intimidating; it felt like I was listening to an old aunt sharing stories using her peculiar quirks and speech patterns.

intimidating before commencement, while still looming.

it's a breeze tho yes, part wisecracking naturalism, part "pomo" (tho premo) info-deluge, part insane fourth-wall-breaking comic book where people soliloquize madly ("science! curse thee, thou vain toy!"), part paradise lost. there are no better books.

otm.

always a little miffed when people act as if this book consists long boring passages about whaling interspersed amongst a more traditional seafaring adventure. the whole thing is wild and funny and not a single page drags for me.

this book is nearly impossible to read. today i had lunch with a girl who claimed someone in her family tree was on the whaleship that inspired melville. (apparently there is a movie) i asked her if she ever read the book herself, and she said she thought so, a long time a go. i was like...if you had finished this friggin' book you would know!~

always a little miffed when people act as if this book consists long boring passages about whaling interspersed amongst a more traditional seafaring adventure. the whole thing is wild and funny and not a single page drags for me.

That = me on the ILB thread, will rectify.

why "nearly impossible"?

One thing that struck me about reading excerpts from it (via twitter) was how Shakesperian it is. And seems to pull off that language with some ease too. Or at least it makes me like Shakespeare a lot more than I do.

re: "nearly impossible"

It's dense. I don't have much affinity with Shakespeare or the 'history of literature." Or the ocean. Would love to read Ishmael go on about the woods though.

or go through a couple more Queequegs

I loved this novel until the part where they actually struck off to sea and then it got really boring

YUP

always a little miffed when people act as if this book consists long boring passages about whaling interspersed amongst a more traditional seafaring adventure. the whole thing is wild and funny and not a single page drags for me.

had someone articulate this complaint to me the other day and i was just like, jeez, the whaling chapters are not only extremely entertaining, they tend to necessarily explain the action of the previous chapter

anyway i have a moby-dick tattoo. this is the best book ever

"The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics."

i guess it goes on a little longer later, but the first Cetology chapter was like 14 pages and it was really interesting. was expecting it to be a dead dry 50 pages or something.

This is the first fat 19th century book I really love (almost all of my faves tend to be small-ish: Lermontov, Nerval, von Kleist, Lenz). Maybe Portrait of a Lady or The Devils.

The Moby Dick twitter account is wonderful. As well as comments on here and Melville's The Confidence Man it was the thing that actually made me try it. Need to read Bartleby next.

"First, we must ask, does it have to be a whale?"#RejectionLetterQuote for Moby Dick, a novel by Herman Melville. pic.twitter.com/WZBVCrb2RE

— Pulp Librarian (@PulpLibrarian) October 3, 2018

^^^this is the edition i have -- wit the rockwell kent illustrations -- and it's lovely

been working my way through this, they finally mentioned the whale and i'm 400 iPad pages in

the book is awesome tho

the "whiteness of the whale" chapter was...quite something.

hit my stopping point last night at the end of chapter 31, tonight we get CETOLOGY.

If y'all want fun, read Clarel.