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6 Great Novels that Were Hated in Their Time | Cracked.com

Well, not exactly. It is true that Moby Dick (original title Moby-Dick, with a hyphen) is a novel that was panned by the literary world in its day, as was almost all of Melville's output. In the last quarter century of his life, and for decades after his death, his name was recognized, if at all, as only a minor figure in American literature. And it is also true that Moby Dick is now considered part of the canon of great literature.

But that doesn't mean his contemporaries were wrong.

Moby-Dick is one of those works better summarized than actually read. Parts of it are unbearably tedious, and other parts are just plain loony. Herman Melville was, in the technical parlance of psychiatry, nutty as a fruitcake. He wasn't nuts in a good sense like Quentin Tarantino or Tracy Morgan, but nuts in the same sense as those homeless elderly alcoholics ranting and raging on our city streets. In fact, that's essentially what Melville was, except that he had a home. Yet he must have done something right, or at least something memorable, because from somewhere in the tangled, drunken, unfocused mess that was Herman Melville's mind, there emerged a great yarn and some wildly original characters, and those elements were so vivid that they have eventually outweighed Melville's boring obsessions, his purple prose, and his lunacy. We are familiar with Moby Dick's color, the nailing of the doubloon on the mast, Captain Ahab's monomania and harpooner Queequeeg's savage mien. The characters and story itself have endured, even though it is virtually impossible to find somebody who has actually read the book.

I was a lit major and an American Lit teacher, so I had to read Moby Dick, but I couldn't read it straight through. Indeed, it's nearly impossible to find anyone who even claims to have read the book all the way through, and 90% of those who make that claim are lying, as you can find out if you have actually prepped to ask them some pointed questions. The novel has 135 chapters and an epilogue. Yes, it has concepts which are profound and epic in scope, but it is also filled with unbearable tedium and humdrum details. For example, chapters are entirely filled with technical descriptions of the whaling industry. Whenever I was preparing to discuss the novel, I'd flip over all the technical talk about how to extract oil and blubber, skipping forward to some place where the story seemed to advance. That's the only way I could keep focused. I'd go back later to review the tedious material, but only because I felt obligated to do so, and not with any of the joy that literary fan-boys like me normally derive from great writing.

Interestingly, the early 20th century embraced the book for the very elements that Melville's contemporaries decried: its many digressions, its opacity, its freedom from traditional narrative techniques, its multi-layered allegory, and its ambitious scope. By the 1920s, the interbellum modernists had determined that Melville was their godfather. After all, he had as much disdain for traditional literary constraints as they did! To put that in plain talk, the Lost Generation writers and critics more or less agreed that Moby-Dick was impenetrable and loony, but argued that those characteristics made it a great book, not a poor one! Why, look at Finnegans Wake for comparison!

OK, I'm kidding, but just barely.

American writers and scholars in that era wanted to establish that they were not merely England's semi-literate bastard children, and that their 19th century predecessors had not been so completely inferior to English writers as was previously thought. They sought to justify that position, and that's how Melville's reputation was rehabilitated. That tells you more about 20th century America's desperate desire to define its literary heritage than it does about Melville. You can read Moby-Dick today and see that Melville's contemporary critics may have been right. If it did not previously exist and were suddenly released today as a new book, it would be panned just as mercilessly as it was in its own day.