"Moby Dick is considered by many academics to be the greatest work of prose fiction ever written. It was only because of Melville's refusal to simplify or condense his books to please his audience that he was able to produce this classic."
—pages 159-160, Moby Dick: Retold from the Story by Herman Melville by Henry Brook (Usborne Classics Retold)
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Ah, the irony. The above quote is from a book that simplified and condensed Melville's book, I assume, to please a modern audience.
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Moby-Dick (note the hyphen in the title, which is missing in the "retold" version) has existed in more than one version since the beginning of its publication. It was published in a censored British edition in October 1851 and an "original" American edition in November 1851. The British version removes anything that would be considered offensive to a standard British Victorian reader. Therefore, many references to sexuality, atheism, agnosticism, and anti-British sentiment were expurgated or reworked.
Moby-Dick has also been issued in many abridgments, condensations, and adaptations over the course of its more than one-hundred-and-fifty years of existence. In fact, it was a special issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Summer 2009, volume XXIX) that once again sent me on a journey into the pages of Moby-Dick from which I may never return. ; or The Whale, edited by Damion Searls, was a direct response to Moby-Dick in Half the Time by Orion Books. ; or The Whale contained all of the words and passages that had been left out of Moby-Dick in Half the Time. It is a fascinating read that stops and starts. It is the novel equivalent of the cinematic jump cut.
This Usborne Classics Retold edition of Moby Dick continues both traditions. It is an adaptation rewritten and reworked for the "9 years and up" crowd. It combines and redivides the extracts, 135 chapters, and epilogue of the original into nineteen sections with titles such as "My Pagan Friend," "Ahab's Rage," and "Four Prophecies." It also "modernizes" much of the stylized language of the original, substituting simple English for the Shakespearean diatribes and King James Bible poetic ramblings that tumble from Captain Ahab's mouth.
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In the June 2010 (volume 12, number 2) issue of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, William Hansen, in his article "So far as what there may be of a narrative": Abridgment and Moby-Dick, writes that
"These abridgments function, consciously or not, as an indoctrination on how to read. Since a majority of them were targeted towards children and young adults, an abridgment's explicit and implicit instructions on the value of reading can have a lasting impact on the reader." (page 32)I hope to read Moby Dick, this retelling, this adaptation, in order to better understand how I read, and, more specifically, how I read Moby-Dick, with all of its bulk and digressions and over-the-top language intact and complete.
3 comments:
I think the dig about the hyphen is unfair - it's widely omitted and Melville doesn't use it in the main of the narrative.
Dig for a deeper meaning in the lines you quote from the adaptation. Therein is the plea to the young reader not to dismiss difficult and rambling books. And as one truth is all truths, the retelling is but a wider plea to the same aim - go to the original. I don't believe adaptations can aspire to do much else. And there's no point reading them if you've already visited the original. As an exercise, you'd be better off trying to condense a loved book into 32 000 words, that teaches you plenty.
H Brook:
You're quibbling with me when you need not.
The observation about the hyphen is simply that: an observation, and one that is raised quite often by academics. The lack of hyphen is highlighted by the sentences that follow. There are multiple and multivalent versions and readings of Moby-Dick even within Melville's own realm of authorship. It's not meant as a "dig."
I don't need to "dig for deeper meaning in the line [I] quote," since that is the point of the entire post, and to a greater extent, my entire "Cutting In" reading project—returning to the richness and breadth and depth of Melville's original. But also to examine the variants that have arisen around it.
As to there being no point reading these adaptations when I've already been within Melville's magnum opus many times over, I find a couple of vital reasons.
The first is to highlight the pieces of Melville's text that really sing by noticing the omissions within the adaptations; with the digressions and tangents missing, Moby-Dick is merely a wonderful sea tale, so what makes those digressions and tangents really work? (Which is why ; or The Whale, edited by Damion Searls, is so valuable; it is only the excised pieces from an adaptation; we can learn a lot by examining the adapters "garbage.")
The second is to be able to expose an eight-year-old reader to a text in a format that is much more palatable on the first read; you have to drink milk before you can eat meat! (Plus, The Child has heard plenty of chapters and passages from the original; that's the "danger" of having a father in love with the novel; you absorb by osmosis.)
But thank you for your own observations and opinions, as well as for stopping by.
Troy.
I respect your researches and hope they yield fresh insights.
Best - H
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