"They but reflect the things": style and rhetorical purpose in Melville's "The Piazza Tale"

If it was Melville's style that most affected reviewers in 1856, that suggests stylistic techniques might prove important in analyzing Melville's rhetorical strategies today. Indeed, this point is emphasized in a third pattern evident in the contemporary reviews. While nearly all reviewers recognized "a singularly graphic power" in Melville's descriptions, several particularly keen observers understood that Melville's "style" really was a conglomerate of many styles. Of the stories, Powell, in the review already mentioned, wrote, "they are, we admit, moulded in styles different from the peculiar setting of Typee, but that fact only proves the versatility of the pen which prepared them" (470). The reviewer for the New York Churchman echoed Powell: Melville is "remarkable for certain taking variety of style" (475), commenting that the tales lie between Typee and Moby-Dick in stylistic sensibility. In one analytical observation, a reviewer commented that "his style is felicitously adapted to the subject" (476). That even in 1856, after several books in between, Typee and Omoo were still the benchmarks for comparison of everything else Melville wrote confirms why some reviewers either hesitantly embraced the collection of tales or found their style(s) too difficult for reading. "Under the idea of being romantic and pictorial in style, [Melville] is sometimes barely intelligible" was the conclusion in the London Athenaeum (481). The review in the Newark Daily Advertiser conveyed that one "reads [the tales] with delight and rejoicing that the author has laid his rhapsoding aside, which seemed too much of Swift, Rabelais, and others" (479). It is the "rhapsoding" comment that most deserves attention. If reviewers liked "Bartleby" and similar stories, then they were apt to be predisposed to a well structured plot and dislike Melville's "rhapsoding" style. Nevertheless, other reviewers clearly were positively affected by just the reverse: the rich variety of Melville's styles.

More recent criticism has tended to neglect how Melville manipulates style to reinforce his ideas. Stein, previously mentioned, is a case in point. He emphasizes the topical patterns in the text, and how they suggest a unity in "narrative method" (315). This approach to Melville, one consistent with much scholarship in Melville Studies, is a holdover lingering from the reading tendencies of New Critics. For example, in his analysis of Mardi, Ray Browne comments, "In this work Melville is an immature bird trying too soon to fly into abstract symbolism and merely getting confused" (20). Obviously, Browne's comment assumes that formal consistency in a work is important. This presupposition has long held sway in Melville scholarship. That is, compared in terms of a consciously well ordered plot structure, Melville does not fare as well as a Flaubert, Henry James, or Charles Dickens. (7) Only recently has scholarship begun to embrace Melville's general style as a writer and his careful manipulation of character v oice through specific stylistic shifts. Paul Lyons, in a stylistic analysis of Moby-Dick, writes that "Moby-Dick demonstrates how technique becomes statement [... Melville's] style entangles personality, epistemological angle, and zeitgeist in ways that enrich its participation in meaning" (446). To Lyons, Melville's leaving styles distinct demonstrates a coherent methodology reflecting positively on Melville's rhetorical strategies. In reading Melville, these antithetical views suggest a need to revaluate our practices. If we apply Wayne Booth's model for responsible ethical criticism to Melville scholarship, we not only would complicate our understanding of Melville's rhetorical intentions, but also include an awareness of our own critical appraisals of what we value in a text (Booth 8).