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

If Melville himself felt his works were "botches," it should come as no surprise that we too, as readers, should feel similarly torn when reading his works. But the confusion we feel in reading Mardi is not just the result of a writer learning his craft, as Parker, Browne, and others imply; while certainly it is true that Melville was expanding as an author, the "artistic compromise" with which Parker suggests Melville was struggling in Mardi actually never ceases in his writing. If we assume Mardi was the product of an immature author, then we immediately invalidate the clear choices Melville made in keeping various literary styles distinct--Yoomy's songs and the dramatic structure of chapter 180 being good examples. If we accept, however, that Melville's rhetorical aim was intransigence, then we can see the book in a different light. Michael Kearns, in linking Melville's style with his overall rhetorical aims, sees Melville employing a generative model of chaos in his writing. This model is specifically se en, says Kearns, at the syntactical level: "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" (58). Although his focus is Moby-Dick, the stylistic thrusts Kearns notes can later be seen in "The Piazza Tale" and earlier in Mardi.

Whereas Bickley focuses on Babbalanja's speeches in chapter 180 in showing Melville's "improvisational method" for writing (3), I want to focus on chapter 155 to show a similar thrust, but one that may better explain how we as readers should respond to knowledge or coming to epistemological understanding (that is, as process). I focus on this chapter not because Taji and the others in their shallop reach landfall--that would be looking at plot--but because this chapter contains what may be seen as a template for how to read Melville's use of style later in his later works. To contemporary reviewers, chapter 155 must have seemed like another "rhaposoding" event in a very loosely knitted plot intertwined with metaphysical meanderings, yet here we get the "wild soup of Yoomy, the wild chronicles of Mohi, and wilder speculations of Babbalanja." They not only "divert" Media in smoking, but they also divert our attention away from the search for Yillah, which, as the story progresses, actually becomes ancillary to the discussions between the searching men. Curious about "neap tides" and their relationship to the moon, Media in this chapter "turned over Babbalanja for an encyclopaedia, however unreliable," for an answer. Quoting from an "older and better authority [Bardianna]," Babbalanja refers to a specific chapter titled "On Seeing Into Mysteries Through Mill Stones." That Media knew Babbalanja to be an unreliable source and still demanded the information of him may indicate "product" was not his goal. For Media, the information itself is not so important as the process of its delivery and the epistemological quest for the information. Moreover, Babbalanja understands this. Accused of not being patient for wisdom, he says, "Ay, keep moving is my motto," then follows with the story of "Midni the ontologist and entomologist" (504).