Being a culture snob, I have for a long time believed that abridged novels are the equivalent of best-of albums: cop-outs for those too lazy to take on the artist's work in its original form.
I am currently about 3/4 of the way through Moby Dick, and I now realize how very wrong that attitude was. The book goes something like:
"34. The Bog
We were still on a ship in the middle of the ocean.
[five pages describing various symbolic interpretations of the color white]"
"72. The Knot
In the last chapter, I made mention of the technique by which we caught the whales we had killed. Though it adds absolutely nothing to the story, let me explain the history of the various knots we used for our ropes."
"24. On the Appearance of Whales
It occurs to me that my reader might not be familiar with the countenance of the great sea-beast. Allow me to discourse, at length, on every description of what a whale looks like that I can find, and explain what I think is wrong with all of them. (Oh, and I think a whale is a fish, even though I know it functions like a mammal. It lives in the water! It has to be a fish!)"
Seriously, Melville is doing the 19th-century equivalent of "someone said something wrong on the internet!"
2 comments:
I was just talking the other day about how Moby Dick is entirely overrated, but could be better if it were abridged.
About five years ago I went back and read all the books I read, or in some cases was supposed to read, in high school. The vast majority were much more enjoyable as an adult. Not Moby Dick.
Well, de gustibus. I liked Moby Dick just the way it is, for what it is. 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.
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