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I am also reading it for the first time right now. I am absolutely blown away by it. It has an energy to it that is difficult to convey, as if it was written by
by scop 5y ago
I am also reading it for the first time right now. I am absolutely blown away by it. It has an energy to it that is difficult to convey, as if it was written by a mad man all in one sitting.
There are sentences or paragraphs that go on and and on I find myself thinking "Ok Melville went a little too far here" and then, by golly, he brings it all together in a flourish.
The language is simultaneously as descriptive as anything I've read, yet curiously opaque. It's perhaps best described by a passage from a novel of similar linguistic stature, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian:
> It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.
- defen 5y agoMcCarthy lists Moby-Dick as his favorite book [1]. The otherwise-impenetrable sentence "The Dipper stove." from the first page of Blood Meridian will be immediately understandable to anyone familiar with early 19th century whaling expeditions. [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-venom.html?_r=2 https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/s...
- everybodyknows 5y agoI don't know what Melville thought of Shakespeare, but we can trace a stylistic line through Meridian, Moby Dick, Macbeth. All three have a mad project of egotistic ambition, sooth-sayers of doom, and great helpings of gore along the way to the catastrophe foretold. Sooth-sayers are of course, always correct, whether they appear as a trio of witches, world-weary Parsee, or a decrepit "disordered Mennonite".
- scop 5y ago“otherwise-impenetrable” is a great way of characterizing McCarthy and Melville. Often I am left mystified at what I just read, but have sensed something of great weight and gravity…I suppose that’s life, eh?