Teaching Melville and style: a catalogue of selected rhetorical devices

Style, Spring, 2003 by Brett Zimmerman

"That's more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes!" (6: 168)

Ahab belittles, through a series of degrading epithets, the very gods themselves. He brings the omnipotent down to the level of mere cricket players and handicapped boxers. Meiosis here serves to emphasize Ahab's extreme blasphemy and megalomania.

PARALLELISM: the putting of like ideas in similar grammatical form, often with anaphora (the duplication of the same word or words at the beginning of successive clauses or verses):

Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle; not the dead man's ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world [...].

Moby-Dick 6: 223-24)

Pommer suggests that parallelism, along with repetition, constitutes "certain peculiarities of sentence structure and word arrangement" that Melville learned from Milton, though I find this claim unconvincing (43). The fallacy of false cause threatens Pommer's explanation if we prefer to go with Wright's suggestion that an earlier source than Milton may be responsible for Melville's use of parallelism: the King James Bible. Showing at length the extent to which Melville knew and echoed the Bible in his works, Wright maintains that parallelism is one of several "characteristics of Hebrew literature which Melville seems to have recognized and copied [...]" (166); she then shows examples of three types of parallelism in his writings: "synonymous, antithetical, and synthetic" (167). Still, I would consider Wright's suggestion, like Pommer's, a possibility rather than an unquestionable fact. Parallelism is a foregrounded feature of euphuistic prose, specimens of which Melville surely would have encountered in many Renaissance writers (such as Browne and Shakespeare) as well as in Milton and the Bible. The fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc still threatens in any case.

PARATAXIS: a scheme involving phrases or independent clauses set one after the other without subordination and often without coordinating conjunctions--the opposite of hypotaxis (see above):

The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ma through the groove;--ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it[...].

(Moby-Dick 6: 572)

While the use of hypotaxis can slow down the pace of a passage, the use of parataxis can speed it up. Since Melville is describing the fast and furious chase of Moby Dick by the crew of the Pequod, it is appropriate that he resorts to a paratactic arrangement here and there. Note, also, the use of the short, right-branching sentence structure--another way in which Melville quickens the pace of the reading. The clauses also tend to be linear, depending on the normal word order (subject-verb-object): "Ahab stooped to clear it."

PAROMOLOGIA: conceding a point either because one believes it to be true or because one can strengthen one's own argument by the concession--giving away a weaker point to take a stronger one: