Teaching Melville and style: a catalogue of selected rhetorical devices

Style, Spring, 2003 by Brett Zimmerman

APORIA: true or pretended doubt or deliberation about an issue. Dupriez lists several similar terms: under dubitatio, he says, "The speaker hesitates, appearing not to know which word or line or argument to take, or which meaning to attach to an action" (144). Sometimes the speaker's indecision is genuine; other times it may be fake. When phony, this irresolution is called deliberatio by Dupriez-"The pretense that one is weighing the arguments with respect to a decision which has already been taken" (123). We may consider the important drumhead-court scenes in Billy Budd as aporetic; there Captain Vere, through his reasoning and rhetorical questions to the members of the court, appears genuinely to be considering the fate of Billy. It certainly appears, however, that Vere has already made up his mind to hang Billy--so his deliberations are pretended. Real deliberations are foregrounded in "Benito Cereno," on the other hand, as the mystified Delano wonders throughout whether something underhanded is going on a board the San Dominick.

BATHOS: the Greek word for depth and referring to an unintentional descent in literature when, attempting to be sublime, elevated, or passionate, a writer overshoots the mark and drops into the insignificant, the ridiculous. The term is sometimes interchangeable with "anticlimax." Bathos can appear intentionally when a writer uses it for comical or satirical purposes. Melville does so in "The Paradise of Bachelors" when he compares and contrasts modern Templars (who are lawyers) with medieval Templars (who were monk-knights):

the defender of the sarcophagus [...] now has more than one case to defend; the vowed opener and clearer of all highways leading to the Holy Sepulchre, now has it in particular charge to check, to clog, to hinder, and embarrass all the courts and avenues of Law; the knight-combatant of the Saracen, breasting spear-points at Acre, now fights law-points in Westminster Hall. (9: 317-18)

Each clause in the excerpt is comprised of two parts, the first dealing with the originally noble medieval Templars, the second with the greatly reduced and relatively pathetic modern ones. The movement in each clause descends from the grand and sublime knights to the effeminate lawyers: the "old Crusaders used to exercise their steeds and lances; the modern Templars now [...] exercise at repartee." Melville emphasizes the extent to which the modem Templars have degenerated (see below under zeugma).

CLIMAX: the arrangement of words, phrases, or clauses in order of increasing importance. A climactic arrangement sometimes involves anadiplosis (the duplication of the terminal word or words of one line or clause at the beginning of the next):

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.

(Moby-Dick 6: 159)

We see that a climactic arrangement can express causation. In the above example, it suggests the pantheistic oneness of all things in the universe. Style complements theme.