My former department chair (in both objective and subjective senses of 'former') comments on the post below:
Clearly written at different time, a combination of fiction and journal. It is an important economics text, since little of the knowledge of the day-to-day operation of whaling is known from any other source.
Still, an interesting point, separate from taste. No book like MD could possibly be published today. Everything is edited.
Some of this really is just a matter of style and taste: despite repeated forays into New England literature from the first half of the 19th century, I've never liked it. Not Melville, nor Hawthorne, nor Thoreau, nor Emerson--none of them.
I commented to a friend that Melville's sentences in Moby Dick remind me very much of Fitzgerald, especially his earlier works. The form is all there: many-claused sentences, the self-awareness, and the near-constant humor. But Melville seems (to me, at least) to lack the polish and the snap of Fitzgerald.
The contrast for me has been especially heightened because I've also been reading my way through the work of Emile Zola. He's an interesting figure in this light because he does, more or less, exactly the thing Melville is attempting: interspersing his novels with various insights about economics and human psychology. And though I don't agree with much of either, I can't help but think Zola is more effective in his task. Therese Raquin contains many dubious passages about the psychological characteristics of various personality types, but it's hard to deny Therese herself is a well-drawn character.
My brief speculation as to the difference would go as follows: Jorge Luis Borges has an essay in which he talks about the gradual usurpation of allegory as an accepted form of storytelling. I'd submit that this change happens somewhere over the course of the 19th century. Captain Ahab is not an especially well-drawn character: he has a collection of personal tics and one overwhelming motivation: to capture Moby Dick. One may read that, as the introduction to my edition helpfully pointed out, as representing any number of things. Thus, though the story is important, it is important at least as much for the allegorical readings it makes possible as for the text itself. And, I think, to find that an interesting possibility, one has to believe in the importance of allegory--but as Borges points out, very few people can manage that these days.
Zola, by contrast, is telling a story in which some of the characters function as tokens of types, rather than symbols. The meaning beyond the text itself is restricted to whether one finds the type convincing; Therese may or may not be a neurotic, but she is not all women, or nature, or anything else similarly abstract.
But perhaps the real take-away is that there used to be a time when novelists strove to make great statements about economics, politics, or society, by compiling the evidence and trying to present as realistic a picture as they could. The absence of that is both striking and saddening.
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