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

Style, Spring, 1996 by Michael Kearns

The following smoky sentences, from chapter 44, should be worth the consideration of those to whom they are worth considering:

Furthermore, if we consider, what is popularly held to entitle characters in fiction to being deemed original, is but something personal - confined to itself. The character sheds not its characteristics on its surroundings, whereas, the original character, essentially such, is like a revolving Drummond light, raying away from itself all round it - everything is lit by it, everything starts up to it (mark how it is with Hamlet), so that, in certain minds, there follows upon the adequate conception of such a character, an effect, in its way, akin to that which in Genesis attends upon the beginning of things. (239)

Because "consider" typically is followed by a noun-phrase complement, at first glance the initial sentence may seem to be incomplete. The usage, however, may be regarded as an acceptable although unusual formula in which "consider" is to be read as a synonym for a verb phrase that includes a complement. (When my adolescent daughters ask what's for dessert, I might respond, "Well, I'll have to consider," meaning "I'll think about it." But if I don't give exactly the right intonation to consider, I confuse them, language literalists that they are when something like dessert is on the table for consideration.) Were this the only unusual expression, the passage might be comprehensible. But the second sentence continues with odd usages: the unnecessary modifier "essentially such," the confusing shift from "itself" to "it." The verb "ray" is particularly strange. None of the definitions given in the OED includes "to illuminate," a sense that fits if we take the verb as transitive and "all" as its object, whereas the phrase "raying away from itself" is more similar to an intransitive than to a transitive structure.

The sense alters after the mid-sentence dash: the clause "everything starts up to it" identifies not intrinsic traits of the original character but the effect of such a character, first on the rest of the work containing it and then on "certain minds." "Everything starts up to it" commands no single paraphrase, and additional vagueness is added with the uncertainty about who is to be included in that group of "certain minds": does the phrase refer to readers' minds or the author's mind, or is it part of a statement about human beings in general? In the rest of the sentence, the qualifications ("adequate" and "in its way") compound this uncertainty. In sum, this passage from The Confidence-Man, like the sentences on whiteness from Moby-Dick and "Ourselves are Fate" from White-Jacket, can be read many different ways, but no single interpretation can tie together all of the passage's sentences. Any given reading is likely to be endorsed only on the basis of its critical ideology: Bakhtin-influenced critics, for instance, have recently rediscovered the multivoiced quality Foster named forty years ago.

MELVILLE'S STYLE AND THE CRITICS