Melville's chaotic style and the use of generative models: an essay in method - Herman Melville

Style, Spring, 1996 by Michael Kearns

"Ourselves are Fate." So ends chapter 75, "'Sink, Burn, and Destroy' - Printed Admiralty orders in time of war," of Melville's White-Jacket (321). This strangely constructed sentence does not seem to have troubled any of the editors, typesetters, or others involved in preparing the original editions and copies on which the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's works is based, nor does it seem possible for a hyphen to have been dropped. On this sentence, moreover, the Northwestern-Newberry editorial appendices are silent.

Readers of Melville know, of course, that silences are often dizzyingly vocal, even multivoiced. And so this one. The strangeness of the construction may become more apparent if we replace plural with singular forms: "Myself is fate [I am fate?]. Herself is fate. Yourself is [you are?] fate." Melville was far from being a careful proofreader of his own work; perhaps he simply meant to write "Our selves [our personalities] create our fate" - a fairly straightforward rendition of the "character is destiny" motif. On the other hand, the original might be taken as an elliptical construction: "Our selves are the result of the operation of fate," or more succinctly, "Our selves are fated," or with a twist, "We ourselves are fated." This reading fits the context established by the preceding paragraph but not the one in which "Ourselves are Fate" occurs, which insists that "in our own hearts we fashion our own gods" (320). Nor does the immediately preceding sentence provide much help: "In two senses, we are precisely what we worship" (321) - the "two senses" are left unspecified and cannot be inferred from the immediate context.

"Ourselves are Fate" is a small example of what I shall refer to as Melville's chaotic style: strings of words that are punctuated as sentences but are flawed either semantically or syntactically or both, that command no single parsing, and that occupy positions of rhetorical emphasis. This style, which can be found in other significant passages but has not been considered by Melville specialists, is my main theme, and it can be usefully discussed with the help of the generative model of deterministic chaos. I will describe two ways in which to apply this model, one mathematical, the working out of which is beyond my scope here, and the other metaphorical, using several features of deterministic chaos to generate new observations about Melville's problem sentences. Both applications follow accepted procedures for using models to understand a problematic domain (in this case, Melville's style); hence they differ from the way in which scholars in the humanities and human sciences have used chaos theory in the past few years. It is because of this difference, I will argue, that the promise of chaos theory as both an analytical tool and a generative model has not yet been fulfilled.

THE CHAOTIC STYLE: EXAMPLES

Punctuated sentences that are both flawed and indeterminate appear in passages frequently cited in discussions of Melville. (By "punctuated sentence" I mean any string of words that begins with an upper-case letter and ends with a mark of end punctuation, whether or not that string forms a grammatically complete sentence. Hereafter when I use "sentence" alone I mean "punctuated sentence.") The three final paragraphs of Moby-Dick's infamous chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale," for instance, contain a number of such sentences (194-95). For the sake of readability, I have numbered sentences and commented on each individually.

1. "Though neither [the colt nor Ishmael] knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere those things must exist." The use of "with" implies both "for" and "within" - a straightforward case of double meaning, which, however, may cause a reader to strain just a bit.

2. "Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright." The grammatical parallelism emphasizes a contrast: one visible world apparently formed one way but an unspecified number of invisible spheres definitely formed another. As with the previous sentence, a repeated preposition is used in an odd way: what does it mean to be "formed in" either love or flight? And whose fright?

3. "Is it that by its [whiteness's] indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?" The secondary senses of metaphors here seem not just mutually contradictory but jumbled: "indefiniteness shadowing forth voids" implies something physically intangible yet visible that is external to the perceiver, but "stabbing us from behind" suggests something tangible and hidden from view, and "stabbing with thought" suggests something intangible. How do all these stabbings happen when we view the Milky Way, which is visible "out there" rather than hidden behind us? In fact Melville is probably attempting to have Ishmael render the felt sense of an inexplicable psychological phenomenon, a point I will discuss later.