>randomly goes into long descriptions of nothing
>for no reason inserts an original catalog and classification system of "whales"
was he the most successful autist?
nah Hugo's hard to find unabridged because he's too autistic to be worth extra 100g of book
>>7719825
I'm listening to Hunchback of Notre Dame now and the tangents he goes off on are so rich and captivating that I am becoming motivated to incorporate such a technique on the next book I work on. It's the scope that's impressive; I don't know what you imbeciles mean by 'autistic' but these men are immortalized because of their works.
>>7719836
I mean I learnt more about a defunct Paris sanitation network from that book that I thought you could learn about a sanitation network without becoming an engineer.
>>7719836
If you just want to write about tangential shit that has nothing to do with your initial premise, write textbooks.
>>7719824
Are the parts where he goes off the rails and writes about things totally unrelated to the story as bad as everyone says they are?
>>7719836
They're immortalized for the relevant parts of their books, which are brilliant. Nobody talks about or cares about the factual diatribes they go on.
>>7719824
Encyclopedic digression is something almost all epic writers do to one degree or another. They have a lot of curiosity, and write for others who do, with little regard for those who don't. It has nothing to do with autism, and everything to do with the appetite for information. It certainly does not exclude the socially skilled, who get that way because they'd rather know than not know, and become as good at listening to gossip as at telling it.
>>7719824
The amazing thing is, Melville had never been on a whaling ship and half the stuff he put in (like whales having a barbed tongue) was total nonsense. So it's not just a whale encyclopedia, it's a BAD one.
>>7720713
Not really. Some are quite funny.
DFW, Pynchon, Joyce, Heller, Melville, Nabokov, Kafka, etc...why do you constantly trash them, /lit/? Why are you guys so stupid?
>>7722401
>The amazing thing is, Melville had never been on a whaling ship
LOL
cetology
>>7722630
Why are you stupid enough to respond to obvious trolls
>>7720713
No, and fuck the ADD faggots who say they're bad. I'm not any kind of patrician or anything but Moby-Dick only works as well as it does, thematically and narratively, with those sections. They're as important as the whale chasing and sperm-squeezing.
>>7722401
HE DID IT
HE FUCKING DID IT THE ABSOLUTE MADMAN
>>7722829
This.
