Literacy rates in the 1800s were low. Therefore, being literate was a status symbol, and there was more focus on the idea that you could be more literate than someone else. I think what happened in that time was a kind of competition, where critics like these had a tendency to write things that are more difficult to read, in an attempt to prove how much more literate they are. If you wrote something that a plebeian could understand, you're obviously not as literate.
So there was a lot of criticism of the superficial aspects of the writing - "bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English". The words and the "English" are excessively focused on.
Today we take literacy for granted, and anyone who tries to sound more literate is shunned (/r/iamverysmart).
> think what happened in that time was a kind of competition, where critics like these had a tendency to write things that are more difficult to read, in an attempt to prove how much more literate they are.
Are... these reviews considered difficult to read or especially overwritten, then? Or did you mean something else?
> bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English
Are these not legitimate grounds on which to judge a book? To the extent that these are smaller concerns for modern reviewers (are they?) I'd guess it has more to do with our having settled on a style of prose that allows little variation and is very simple, for a large majority of literature. We now expect and receive little poetry in our prose, to put it another way.
I don't think Moby Dick suffers from bad rhetoric, etc - although some of these reviews may do.
Language has become Hollywoodised over the last few decades. We've lost the ability to express colour and imagination through language - not just through plot or predictable genre tropes.
Modern fiction is more like a journalistic description of a movie or TV show, and less like an independent medium that sculpts language into story structures for its own sake.
I wouldn't say that the use of language in writing is a superficial thing to focus on. The language is the medium through which the author expresses whatever information they're trying to convey. It's always going to be one of the top two things to focus on when critiquing a work of fiction.
All interpersonal communication in any medium is semantically lossy- language is an intermediary through which you are attempting to encode a concept or story or feeling, so that someone else can decode your words into a similar concept/story/feeling whatever inside their own head. Language is the middleman, and an author's skill with language imposes a ceiling on how well they can transfer their ideas to other people.
In the case of fiction, language serves double duty as an art form in and of itself. Both the medium and the message are components of a creative work. Otherwise, every novel would be nothing more than outlines of plots describing sequences of imaginary events, which would be pointless.
I would also disagree with the characterization of /r/iamverysmart- in principle at least, it isn't there for shunning people trying to sound literate. It's for teasing people (usually teenagers or college undergrads going through a phase) who have started to learn interesting things about the world, who are very impressed with their own knowledge, and are expressing ignorance and narcissism rather than the 10-megaton knowledge bombs that they think they're carpet bombing everyone with. Not that I'm in favor of shunning anyone who isn't harming others- it's too mean-spirited and easy to abuse.
I don't see this at all. In fact, I think you have this exactly backwards. The negative criticisms here are by men who see themselves as plain-speaking (writing) commonsense types and see Melville's work as radical and unconventional. Literacy as a status symbol could only have meaning within a very small public sphere - in other words literacy was extremely high within the group that could be expected to do ANY reading AT ALL. There have always been people who write with deliberate obscurity to appear smarter but the language of these reviews and their concerns with language are entirely straightforward in terms of the standards of their day.
And although now we've pushed literacy up from 80% to 90-something percent, I wonder whether literacy is actually lower than it was in the 1850s. More people are literate, but those who are literate are on average less literate, because we've pushed our educational standards down in an effort to pick up those last 20%.
I think that sort of competition still very much exists. It's just that - in the Anglosphere, at any rate - the baseline for literacy is far higher. You need only look at the snobbery involved in choice of newspaper to see it.
I think the the critic who said there is “abundant choice reading for those who can skip a page now and then, judiciously” nails it. This book is a journey, and is like many works mixed together.
1) “I will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.” By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
2) “How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.”... “Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”
3) “In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.”
4) The narrator is also pretty open-minded and gracious towards different cultures. “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”
The other aspect of the novel that people familiar with it only by its reputation often underestimate: it's humor.
It's a sly often oblique humor, by turns Shakespearian, Victorian, and almost anachronistically postmodern. But it permeates the novel and is there right in the opening paragraph:
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
By the time I got through that sentence, the fourth in the novel, I was in.
Finally, one additional quote from the novel that stuck with me:
for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
The next sentences following your quote are also hilarious:
> ...then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.
The humor gives Ishmael an everyman quality. Unlike Cato's grand "philosophical flourish", Ishmael "quietly" takes to the sea. Simultaneously, Ishmael has the mind of a poet, such as when he refers to taking to sea as his response to wanting to shoot himself or someone with "pistol and ball." Melville is basically saying that men, like Ishmael, go to sea so they won't go postal.
The narrative part of the novel is fine. It's about 80-100 pages of a good thriller at sea and morality tale of revenge. The problem is that the book is 500+ pages, not 100. The other 400 are a tome and treatise on whales, whaling, and whaling culture/philosophy, which are truly tedious. You don't have to skip pages judiciously, you have to skip whole chapters liberally.
The criticism of Ahab having no method to his madness is on point as well.
A film teacher of mine used to always quote Northrop Frye as saying "The category judgement precedes the value judgement." As in: it's a great thriller, but a terrible romance. Moby Dick is hard to classify, and (by this logic) harder to judge. Those approaching it as a novel had every reason to call it a failure. Melville was pushing himself. In jazz I've heard this called "going out." It's something you earn.
His lesser-known works like "Bartleby the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno" are much more coherent and approachable (they stick to a familiar category), but still have much of that slow, mysterious otherworldly quality and are well worth reading (in my humble opinion).
In a group improvisation, I understand "going out" as one person, usually a soloist, exploring another direction (a rhythmic idea, a motif, anything) where there's some risk that you won't come back, i.e. you might derail the whole thing. I grew up in New Orleans knowing lots of musicians and this is just my recollection. The closest documentation I find is about playing "outside," which is more specifically about using extended or unconventional harmonies. I've heard this usage in college settings, but I was referring to the more general concept.
"Stepping out" might be a more mainstream version, and it's apparently the title of like fifty albums.
The climax of the book takes 500+ pages to get to (at least that is what I remember). Finally Ahab fights the dang whale! Too much about whales.. I get it .. whales are big... get on with it..
"But if there are any of our readers who wish to find examples of bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English, we will take the liberty of recommending to them this precious volume of Mr. Melville’s"
Gotta love the quote, though, "Our author must be henceforth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who occasionally tantalize us with indications of genius, while they constantly summon us to endure monstrosities, carelessnesses, and other such harassing manifestations of bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise…"
So there was a lot of criticism of the superficial aspects of the writing - "bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English". The words and the "English" are excessively focused on.
Today we take literacy for granted, and anyone who tries to sound more literate is shunned (/r/iamverysmart).