I'm trying. Lord knows I am trying. But Moby Dick is KILLING me. The idea was to reacquaint myself with great literature in the hopes of said reading affecting my own attempts to write. But Herman Melville spends so much time in the minutia of sailing, sailors, and whales that I am 391 pages into this bloated tome and I am begging for relief.
The central plot is of Captain Ahab and the great white whale. It is their relationship for lack of a better word, that should drive this story. But like a bad Sunday School lesson "what did that mean to you?", Melville throws an early encylopedia of footnotes at the reader. Have nothing to do with the central plot - just knew the info and wanted us to know he knew.
Say - did Melville ever teach at a seminary?
I think I recognize this MO.
I recall reading once upon a time that the fiction of a certain era was quite often slowed down (or, in fact, interrupted outright) by those sudden and lengthy outbursts of data. Read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea--same thing. Man of La Mancha--same type of thing. Three Musketeers . . . yup, there it is again. And don't even get me started on The Count of Monte Cristo.
ReplyDeleteWierd. I wonder if perhaps they felt that the level of minute detail lended a certain credence, a feel of realism, to the book?