“He was trying to raise something as mundane as whaling to Epic scope.”
He was trying, and gave job security to generations of literary critics in the process, but I say he tried too hard, hence my calling it pretentious. He doesn’t earn his grandeur and epicness in the classic manner of Shakespeare and Milton due to his boringness, nor in the modern manner of Kafka due to his bloatedness.
“he conjures up a sense of wonder with some of the best prose every written in English”
One man’s best prose in the history of english literature is another’s ambien, I guess.
“The battle at the end with three consecutive nights is genuinely Homeric”
I hear people say this sort of thing, and I trust they believe it, but it sounds like Dyson vacuum ads telling me about their incredible technological feats. You’re not curing cancer; it’s just a vacuum, guy. “The Iliad” is still riveting after thousands of years, and I offer as proof my being unable to stop reading it, even though I was assigned only a few chapters that night. It actually hurt my class performance, as I finished weeks ahead of schedule, then had to go back and write a paper as if I just finished it.
Needless to repeat, Melville did not nail me to the seat. I couldn’t read a page without thinking about what I can do once I’m finally free.
“You could see his influence on everyone from Faulkner to Pynchon.”
I don’t know about those authors in particular, aside from the fact that Faulkner is, if not equally, somewhat as pretentious. I also don’t know when he was added to the cannon, but he couldn’t help but be massively influential when critics never stop talking about him and he’s required reading for generations. This is a bad thing, in my opinion. Just as the outsized influence of other frauds in the house of the classics, for instance Joyce, is a bad thing.
“the outsized influence of other frauds in the house of the classics, for instance Joyce”
LOL This ignorance isn’t worth pursuing anymore.
“He was trying to raise something as mundane as whaling to Epic scope.”
You have now given a reasonably succinct description of why Moby Dick sucked donkey dicks.
If you try to write an epic, you have already failed.