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

Style, Spring, 1996 by Michael Kearns

4. "Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows - a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?" The sense of this sentence is strained by the paradoxical statement that whiteness is both an absence and something concrete and by the assertion that a void can be meaningful. What actually causes the breakdown of sense is that the sentence's question-and-answer structure implies that what it asserts (there is a blankness, this is the all-color of atheism, and we do abhor it) arises from the opening question about the essence of whiteness, but the two categorical opposites (absence and presence, blank and meaningful) cannot be resolved into a meaningful and unambiguous proposition or set of propositions.

While critics who have used these sentences to argue about the meaning of Moby-Dick agree on the most general level about the gist of the sentences, they offer widely divergent views about what specific propositions the passage may be advancing. Nor has anyone considered what effect the passage is likely to have on readers who attempt to analyze its structure. As with the sentence "Ourselves are Fate," these sentences, as well as the ones considered below, apparently did not pose a problem to the editors of the Northwestern-Newberry edition.

Like "The Whiteness of the Whale," chapters 14, 33, and 44 of The Confidence-Man are frequently cited by Melville specialists and usually interpreted as Melville's commentary on the problematic relationship between fiction and experience and the expectations of readers regarding that relationship. Elizabeth S. Foster describes the peculiar quality of the language in The Confidence-Man as "double-writing" (xix) and R. W. B. Lewis as "self-erasing" (272). Lewis's label provides a good starting point because it describes how the sentences move forward grammatically but seem to nullify what has gone before, thus carrying with them no unambiguous propositional content. The chapter headings themselves exhibit a variation on this characteristic:

Chapter 14: Worth the consideration of those to whom it may prove worth considering (69)

Chapter 33: Which may pass for whatever it may prove to be worth (182)

Chapter 44: In which the last three words of the last chapter are made the text of discourse, which will be sure of receiving more or less attention from those readers who do not skip it (238)

In these headings, self-referentiality combines with an ironic double-voiced discourse (created by the addresses to "those to whom" and "those readers") to call into question any assertion that takes the chapters themselves as straightforward expressions of Melville's views on fiction. An even clearer warning comes near the end of chapter 44: "In the endeavor to show, if possible, the impropriety of the phrase, Quite an original, as applied by the barber's friends, we have, at unawares, been led into a dissertation bordering upon the prosy, perhaps upon the smoky" (239). References to smoke carry metaphoric weight in this novel, linked as they are to devilish behavior of an ambiguously benevolent sort or to benevolent behavior of an ambiguously devilish sort or to ambiguous behavior of a devilishly benevolent sort. Smoke is thus as problematic a phenomenon as whiteness, and for the same reasons: the word smoke carries a complex mixture of malevolent and benevolent associations, and actual smoke interferes with perception.