"They but reflect the things": style and rhetorical purpose in Melville's "The Piazza Tale"

Style, Spring, 2001 by Scott A. Kemp

II. Stylistic Precursors to "The Piazza Tale"

It is important to emphasize the maturation of Melville's understanding of how style relates to his larger rhetorical aims in the period between 1848 and 1852, prior to the serialization of his fiction. Since Mardi and Moby -Dick have garnered the most attention, I'd like to focus on these works. Mardi prefigures Melville's commitment to a dialogically conceived rhetorical strategy. And Moby-Dick explores the notion that an epistemological understanding of reality is necessarily grounded in the nature of linguistic representation. Both the dialogical and the linguistic are issues that become central for Melville as he subverts the sailor-narrator's perspective in "The Piazza Tale." To start, I want to reinforce a claim made by Paul Lyons: "as Melville's enthusiasm for books increased he became less interested in synthesizing his materials, and more open about leaving literary and extra-literary styles distinct" (445). Thus, while we should recognize that formal consistency in a work is a value, we must also recognize that it may not be the best criterion for evaluating Melville--or evaluating Mardi.

Certainly the seeds for what Melville employs stylistically later can be seen as early as Mardi. Elizabeth Foster notes that the book "freed his imagination and intellect to roam the universe from the silliest custom of man to Dantean heavens, to hobnob with the great writers and thinkers of the ages, to match wits with them and learn to speak their language" (657). Her words suggest just how we should read Mardi: not as product, but as process, something many contemporary reviewers could not do. A review in the Athenaeum called the book "strange," noting that "the reader will be at once struck by the affectation of its style, in which are mingled many madnesses" (Leyda 1: 293). Confused about the resulting "product"--"pleasantry, allegory, romance, prose-poem, and adventure," this reviewer saw the book become "more and more foggy" until the end seemed a "happy release." Once again, such commentary says more about reader expectations than it does about Mardi. An important step in criticism of the book was th e movement away from seeing the book as product, and thus expecting formal consistency. Merrill Davis may have been the first to note that the book emerged as a process of change in Melville's literary methods, but his analysis also recognizes the book's "flaws." Even when the book is praised for its digressions, scholars seem still unable to let go of an interpretive model that expects unity. In That Lonely Game (1975), Maxine Moore pays homage to the book's complexities, but still her emphasis, like that of others before her, is to find "unity" in the book, in her case, one found in an astro-mythological "game." That this desire for unity is still prevalent is seen in Parker's recent biography where the book is depicted as a product of Melville's "reckless impulses," an "artistic compromise" for Melville to write a romance in defense of validating the authenticity of his travel adventures (591). Certainly Parker is commenting as much on Melville's own indecision or uneasiness regarding reader expectations a s he is on the ultimate product of Mardi. It is this uneasiness that would make him see his works as "botches" (Leyda 1: 412).