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Teaching Melville and style: a catalogue of selected rhetorical devices

Style, Spring, 2003 by Brett Zimmerman

My interest in Melville as stylist evolved while directing a fourth-year English course on Hawthorne and Melville in 1994-95. To my surprise and dismay, my students' first-term essays on Hawthorne demonstrated their competence in writing about those old critical standbys, theme and characterization, but they displayed no real sensitivity to linguistic matters and their relation to theme and characterization. For example, they were not able to say impressive-sounding things like this: "Hawthorne's use of theologically weighted antithetic doublets in 'Young Goodman Brown,' 'Alice Doane's Appeal,' and The Scarlet Letter ('good and evil,' 'angels or devils,' 'Heaven and Hell,' 'sinners and saints') enables him to duplicate the Calvinistic Manichean tendency to see the world in terms of moral polarities--to recreate the Puritans' zeitgeist." Sure, my students could write about and discuss symbols and imagery, and their other instructors had trained them in various hip critical approaches to literature, but these s enior English majors had no real understanding of style: grammar, punctuation, lexis, typography, phonology, linguistics, syntax, and the tropes and schemes of classical rhetoric. (1) Thus, they were not equipped to analyze, attack, or defend a writer in terms of his or her literary style (or styles), or to say why one writer is superior to another in those terms.

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In the course on Hawthorne and Melville, I wanted to impress upon my students that style as well as theme is important in any given literary work--that not only is what a writer says significant but so is how a writer says what it is he or she is communicating. After all (at the risk of sounding too magisterial), I feel that the difference between a merely good and a truly great piece of fiction is not solely in the nature and structure of the story conveyed, or in the themes or characterization, or in the success with which the writer puts him- or herself within particular literary conventions (genres); it is mostly in the style--or, at any rate, in the way style and other components (such as themes and characterization) are complementary. The greatness lies not at the "global" but at the sentence level. That is why we can celebrate the stylistic genius of Melville--Kemp insists quite correctly that Melville's "manipulation of style emphasizes his ideas" (53)--and hold in contempt the stylistic mediocrity of Stephen King (a student favorite). To allow our English majors to graduate without being able to differentiate between the linguistic qualities of a masterpiece such as Moby-Dick and a piece of hackwork would be akin to allowing Fine Arts students to graduate without the ability to recognize the artistic merits of Michelangelo's David as compared with the failings of a botched effort such as Bandinelli's Hercules and Cacus (a work ridiculed mercilessly by Cellini in his Autobiography). Both sculptors showed their humanistic training in choosing biblical or classical subjects, both employed classical nudity, both intended their statues to be emblematic, but an art critic has to know and be able to defend the judgment that the first statue is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, ever produced while the other is an embarrassment. The difference is not a matter of subject, theme, character, or genre; it is those more "microcosmic" somethings that one artist can do so much more successfully than the other (f acial expression, musculature, sculpted veins, anatomical proportion). In literature, those "microcosmic somethings" are manifested at the sentence level.

With Hawthorne finished and the second term beginning, I had less than four months to train my mostly fourth-year English majors to appreciate matters of literary style--and the fiction of Herman Melville would be our case study (what luck!). Even before I took a graduate course on stylistics (well, it was Robert Adolph's course on the English Renaissance, which took a predominantly stylistic approach), I had an intuitive sense of Melville's linguistic brilliance and versatility. (2) Having read Moby-Dick several times before, I was able to agree wholeheartedly with Matthiessen's pronouncement that the last three chapters of Melville's great epic constitute (arguably) "the finest piece of dramatic writing in American literature" (421), and I believe that this judgment is based on more than just a story well told, on riveting characters, and a lot of action--that style is largely the explanation. A student of classical rhetoric, I was also able to concur with Short's more general insistence that Melville's "ar t shows an increasing involvement with figurative language" and that his "works reveal him to be a master of the rhetorical tradition" (4). My pedagogical introduction to stylistics would draw mostly upon the tropes and schemes of the ancient Greek and Roman rhetors, then--with a smattering of modem linguistics thrown in. To increase my students' sensitivity to Melville's language, therefore, I assembled and distributed an alphabetical catalogue of rhetorical devices with definitions and exemplifications from the Melville oeuvre. The catalogue continued to grow even after the course was finished; what follows is a considerably abbreviated version that nevertheless covers twenty-six grammatical, linguistic, and (mostly) rhetorical terms--with mini-essays.

Teaching Melville and style: a catalogue of selected rhetorical devices

Style, Spring, 2003 by Brett Zimmerman

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