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

Style, Spring, 1996 by Michael Kearns

My main interest in the remainder of this essay, however, is to regard the model of deterministic chaos metaphorically more than mathematically, using it to generate a question of a different sort than those raised by biographical, metaphysical, and other approaches to Melville's style. The most important such question is this: What might be the "initial conditions" that result in clusters of intransigent sentences? The answer requires acknowledging that if "initial conditions" include the readers experiencing the sentences - that is, if a rhetorical perspective is taken - then the whole system changes since some readers will not even notice their intransigence. I have demonstrated that the passages from Moby-Dick and The Confidence-Man cited above contain intransigent sentences, but their effect on normal semantic and syntactic relationships is not so great as to make the passages unreadable. In fact, if critics' use of these passages is any indication, the sentences pose more problems for the general reader than they do for the Melville specialist. In his description of three types of reading strategies - perception, comprehension, and interpretation - George Dillon emphasizes that interpretation governs the other two types, especially "when a text is grammatically irregular, obscure, or elliptical: the processes of perception and comprehension do not get enough data, or enough consistent data, to select a reading, so one imposes a propositional structure or contextual frame which supports one's sense of what the passage should be saying" (xxii; my emphasis). Melville specialists, unless they set out to find sentence-level problems, read either to confirm or to apply what they know; because they have interpretive strategies solidly in place, they will not experience the intransigent passages as such. Encountering "Ourselves are Fate," for example, which clearly contains "tactical difficulties" of the sort Steiner describes, the specialist has an extensive system of relationships that aids in the interpretation of the key term "Fate" and in the identification of the "two senses" in which the word can be understood - senses, I repeat, that the passage does not specify.

The general reader lacks the background to impose a propositional structure on this passage and thus may encounter the full force of the flawed syntax. But this reader also desires to understand and therefore may make a preconscious choice to interpret the sentence roughly as the specialist does: "Oh, sure, we make our own fate, and the fate we make reflects our character." For the specialist as well as the general reader, this interpretation is "what the passage should be saying" based on the local context and on the role we in the twentieth century typically assign to "fate." Once a passage is interpreted, discrepancies between this interpretation and what the passage can be proved to mean cease to exist. A reader's drive to interpret controls this rhetorical system in exactly the same way that the person who manages the pipeline slows down the pumps when a turbulent condition is imminent. For readers who have strong defenses against tactical difficulties, "sensitive dependence" on such difficulties (or on other initial conditions) simply cannot be present.