Somewhere in my profile I joke that I never finished Moby Dick. Has anybody? Why?
Over on defective yeti, which is a funny blog, our poor blogger has set himself the task of somehow reading the whole book and reporting as he goes: Here's his report at the 1/4 mark:
Page reached: 140 of 522 (26.82%)
Status Report: Oh, man. Chapter 32. This is probably a strong contender for the title of Most Skimmed Chapter In Classic American Literature. I would have skipped it myself if I hadn't resolved to read this book in its entirety.
Thirteen pages long -- about three times the length of the average chapter -- "Cetology" has the narrator giving an impromptu lecture on the nature of the whale, grouping the beasts into fourteen categories and offering lengthy descriptions of each. Here, Melville uses a literary technique known as OMG BORING! In some other context I might have found this engrossing, but here it's like, "Dude, you got your marine biology lecture in my adventure story!"
I wonder how many people have quit reading Moby-Dick at "Cetology". I bet this chapter is a veritable Goodwin Sands, with a thousand shipwrecked readers littering its shore.
I could have been one of them, as Moby-Dick is perilously close to violating my One-Third Reading Policy, which states that I shall abandon any book that I am not enjoying when I am a third of the way through it. Unfortunately I am determined to finish this thing, so quitting on page 174 isn't an option. But Cetology has sapped my of all momentum. Chapter 32 is a disabled vehicle in the center lane of this book's narrative.
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4 comments:
I'm wondering whether James Joyce's Ulysses might well be another "almost read" book.
Right. Never read it. I did read Portrait of the Artist as a young man, (me and the artist), which I recall as being reasonably accessible.
And I actually am reading Magic Mountain, though lately with my teaching load, I'm reading mostly student papers. Remind me not to take two MWF writing classes again.
r.
I see that Garrison Keillor's A Writer's Almanac today has a discussion of Ulysses' publication in the USA. It was serialized in a small literary magazine, which was confiscated and burned by the post office for obscenity. Maybe I should try again on Ulysses.
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/
Also discussed today is Tristram Shandy, a book I actually have read and loved. The current movie is also good fun: "Post-moderism before there was modernism" as a character in the film says.
Dude! There are dry spots, like the cataloguing of species, but when Melville's on the language is just gorgeous. I took my flickr name from this passage:
"But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enought to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.-It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.-It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.-It's a blasted heath.-It's a Hyperborean winter scene.-It's the breaking-up of the ice-bound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?"
Couldn't finish Ulyssees, though.
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