“Interchapter-like digressions had been common in fiction up until the 20th century.”
I’m not saying digressions are bad as such, and in fact they do persist into the 20th and 21st century. Take “1984,” for example, with the fake political treatise it plops into the middle of the story. I love that part, and hang on its every word. Contrast that to the history of the whaling industry in “Moby Dick,” which sickens me.
Perhaps I wasn’t explicit enough when I brought up “Don Quixote” and “War and Peace,” but the purpose was to clarify that it’s not the aesthetic anachronisms of “Moby Dick” that get to me. I understand novels were different in the past, and that even if certain classics aren’t in every aspeact as readable as something written last month, that doesn’t make them illegitimate. Because unlike many other disappointments, and even though I can’t satisfactorily read them all the way through, “Don Quixote” and “War and Peace” are masterpieces. Despite what I call flaws—and I’m perfectly willing to concede that to an extent I only consider them flaws because I live in an age with different literary taste, although I might ask what a classic is but that which —I have no qualms about placing them in the pantheon.
“Moby Dick,” however, is in my opinion an egregious offender. But even if that’s prejudice, fine. I already said the digressions and such are not the main problem. The whole thrust of my post was that all its flaws (dragged-out action, long digressions, poor non-main character characterization, pretentiousness) are secondary to the problem that it is boring and impossible for me to get through.
“The Whaling interchapters in MD are actually metaphors”
Not very good ones.
“the Historical Philosophy chapters in ‘War and Peace’ can easily be skipped.”
Yes, I know, and I do. The whole point of my bringing it up, again, was to show that I can look an old books flaws and love it for what it is. And flaws they are, by the way, even if they’re relics of a bygone stylistic era. That is, if you believe, as I do, in the higher goal of unity of purpose, and in art that lasts.
By the way, I don’t think in Tolstoy’s case we are merely dealing with a different evolutionary period, as we are with Cervantes’ episodic romanticism or Melville’s contextualization. It wasn’t ever to my knowledge common to include serious essays on the philosophy of history in novels. That was some weird stuff in his era, too, I think.
In reading MD, you have to keep in mind that Melville was dealing with an industry that was reviled even at the time. He was trying to raise something as mundane as whaling to Epic scope. The whaling chapters try to take this or that aspect of whaling and try to make it Significant with a capital S - to imbue it with more meaning than anyone ever thought it could posses. And in the narrative proper, he conjures up a sense of wonder with some of the best prose every written in English. It’s also very funny. The battle at the end with three consecutive nights is genuinely Homeric. You could see his influence on everyone from Faulkner to Pynchon.
Tolstoy didn’t even consider W&P a novel.