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

Style, Spring, 1996 by Michael Kearns

Despite their variety, critical studies of Melville's style display a strong continuity. From the 1940s and 1950s all the way through to this decade, critics have shown an ongoing interest in the emphasis of Melville's style on process, multiplicity, and indefiniteness and in its use of figurative and rhythmical language. Not only professional but general readers of Melville's novels sense that certain phenomena, such as the "ineffable" and the "chaotic," are essential to Melville even though they are nearly impossible to describe. Parts of Melville's work bear a strong resemblance to that "boggy, soggy, squitchy picture" Ishmael viewed in the Spouter-Inn, a picture with "a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it" (Moby-Dick 12).

Although all four categories of criticism yield fairly traditional explanations of Melville's style, together they also suggest some points about his intransigent sentences. The biographical approach offers the possibility that if Melville worked the way many other writers work, then he occasionally had a "felt sense" of what he wanted to say if not the precise words with which to say it. (Sondra Perl discusses the role of the "felt sense" in the writing process and Alice Brand the related importance of emotions in driving intention.) As a participant in a society and a literary culture that still held romantic notions about the importance of inspiration, he probably felt authorized occasionally to suggest, rather than to spell out, by means of ungrammatical or semantically strained punctuated sentences, just as Whitman felt authorized to mix freely together formal and colloquial levels of diction. Some recent novelists have attempted to explore beyond the boundaries of language and rational thought, developing linguistic means for rendering the ineffable. (For discussions on the work of such novelists, see Kawin, Guetti, and Saldivar). Melville can be read this way as well, with the assumption that his styles were his means of "subtilizing" such inexplicable psychological phenomena as the fascinating terror evoked by whiteness, the terrible fascination of incest, and even the conflicted desire of readers for artful artlessness.

A writer who operates (either intentionally or intuitively) on the level of "felt sense," suggestion, and "subtilizing" will probably demonstrate two of the types of difficulty described by George Steiner: the tactical and the ontological. Tactical difficulties such as sentences that cannot be coherently parsed, display what might be termed "anti-grammar"; such difficulties often create in readers "a distinct sense in which we know and do not know, at the same time" (40). Ontological difficulties result from a violation of "the contract of ultimate or preponderant intelligibility between poet and reader, between text and meaning" (40). They lead to "blank questions about the nature of human speech, about the status of significance, about the necessity and purpose of the construct which we have ... come to perceive as a poem" (41). Melville's intransigent sentences display anti-grammar, for instance, when they play fast and loose with prepositions or mix transitive and intransitive senses of verbs, and they violate the contract between writer and reader by using rhetorical devices that assert a self-erasing or tautological explanation.