Editing Moby-Dick (section)

==Style==
"Above all", say the scholars Bryant and Springer, ''Moby-Dick'' is language: "nautical, [[biblical]], [[Homer]]ic, [[Shakespearean]], [[Miltonic]], [[Cetology|cetological]], [[alliterative]], fanciful, [[colloquial]], archaic and unceasingly [[allusive]]". Melville stretches grammar, quotes well-known or obscure sources, or swings from calm prose to high rhetoric, technical exposition, seaman's slang, mystic speculation, or wild prophetic archaism.<ref name="Bryant and Springer 2007, xv">Bryant and Springer (2007), xv</ref> Melville coined words, critic [[Newton Arvin]] recognizes, as if the English vocabulary were too limited for the complex things he had to express. Perhaps the most striking example is the use of verbal nouns, mostly plural, such as ''allurings'', ''coincidings'', and ''leewardings''. Equally abundant are unfamiliar adjectives and adverbs, including participial adjectives such as ''officered'', ''omnitooled'', and ''uncatastrophied''; participial adverbs such as ''intermixingly'', ''postponedly'', and ''uninterpenetratingly''; rarities such as the adjectives ''unsmoothable'', ''spermy'', and ''leviathanic'', and adverbs such as ''sultanically'', ''Spanishly'', and ''Venetianly''; and adjectival compounds ranging from odd to magnificent, such as "the ''message-carrying'' air", "the ''circus-running'' sun", and "''teeth-tiered'' sharks".<ref>Arvin (1950), 204-205. Arvin's italics.</ref> It is rarer for Melville to create his own verbs from nouns, but he does this with what Arvin calls "irresistible effect", such as in "who didst ''thunder'' him higher than a throne", and "my fingers ... began ... to ''serpentine'' and ''spiralize''".<ref>Arvin (1950), 206. Arvin's italics.</ref> For Arvin, the essence of the writing style of ''Moby-Dick'' lies in

<blockquote>the manner in which the parts of speech are 'intermixingly' assorted in Melville's style{{mdash}}so that the distinction between verbs and nouns, substantives and modifiers, becomes a half unreal one{{mdash}}this is the prime characteristic of his language. No feature of it could express more tellingly the awareness that lies below and behind ''Moby-Dick''{{mdash}}the awareness that action and condition, movement and stasis, object and idea, are but surface aspects of one underlying reality.<ref>Arvin (1950), 206</ref></blockquote>

Later critics have expanded Arvin's categories. The superabundant vocabulary can be broken down into strategies used individually and in combination. First, the original modification of words as "Leviathanism"<ref name="Lee 2006, 395">Lee (2006), 395</ref> and the exaggerated repetition of modified words, as in the series "pitiable", "pity", "pitied" and "piteous" (Ch. 81, "The Pequod Meets the Virgin").<ref name="Berthoff 1962, 164">Berthoff (1962), 164</ref> Second, the use of existing words in new ways, as when the whale "heaps" and "tasks".<ref name="Lee 2006, 395"/> Third, words lifted from specialized fields, as "fossiliferous".<ref name="Lee 2006, 395"/> Fourth, the use of unusual adjective-noun combinations, as in "concentrating brow" and "immaculate manliness" (Ch. 26, "Knights and Squires").<ref>Berthoff (1962), 163</ref> Fifth, using the participial modifier to emphasize and to reinforce the already established expectations of the reader, as the words "preluding" and "foreshadowing" ("so still and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene ..."; "In this foreshadowing interval ...").<ref name="Berthoff 1962, 164"/>

Other characteristic stylistic elements are the echoes and overtones, both imitation of distinct styles and habitual use of sources to shape his own work. His three most important sources, in order, are the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton.<ref>Bercaw (1987), 10</ref>

The novel uses several levels of rhetoric. The simplest is "a relatively straightforward ''expository'' style", such as in the cetological chapters, though they are "rarely sustained, and serve chiefly as transitions" between more sophisticated levels. A second level is the "''poetic''", such as in Ahab's quarterdeck monologue, to the point that it can be set as [[blank verse]].<ref>Bezanson (1953), 648, italics Bezanson's</ref> Set over a metrical pattern, the rhythms are "evenly controlled—too evenly perhaps for prose", Bezanson suggests.<ref>Bezanson (1953), 648–49, italics Bezanson's</ref> A third level is the ''idiomatic'', and just as the poetic it hardly is present in pure form. Examples of this are "the consistently excellent idiom" of Stubb, such as in the way he encourages the rowing crew in a rhythm of speech that suggests "the beat of the oars takes the place of the metronomic meter". The fourth and final level of rhetoric is the ''composite'', "a magnificent blending" of the first three and possible other elements:

<blockquote>The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. ''There'' is his home; ''there'' lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.<br />
("Nantucket", Ch. 14).</blockquote>

Bezanson calls this chapter a comical "[[prose poem]]" that blends "high and low with a relaxed assurance". Similar passages include the "marvelous hymn to spiritual democracy" in the middle of "Knights and Squires".<ref>Bezanson (1953), 649</ref>

The elaborate use of the [[Homeric simile]] may not have been learned from Homer himself, yet Matthiessen finds the writing "more consistently alive" on the Homeric than on the Shakespearean level, especially during the final chase the "controlled accumulation" of such similes emphasizes Ahab's [[hubris]] through a succession of land-images, for instance: "The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a ploughshare and turns up the level field" ("The Chase – Second Day", Ch. 134).<ref name="Matthiessen 1941, 461">Matthiessen (1941), 461</ref> A paragraph-long simile describes how the 30 men of the crew became a single unit:

<blockquote>For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.<br />
("The Chase – Second Day", Ch. 134).</blockquote>

The final phrase fuses the two halves of the comparison; the men become identical with the ship, which follows Ahab's direction. The concentration only gives way to more imagery: the "mastheads, like the tops of tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs". All these images contribute their "startling energy" to the advance of the narrative. When the boats are lowered, the imagery serves to dwarf everything but Ahab's will in the presence of Moby Dick.<ref name="Matthiessen 1941, 461"/> These similes, with their astonishing "imaginative abundance," not only create dramatic movement, Matthiessen observes: "They are no less notable for breadth; and the more sustained among them, for an heroic dignity."<ref>Matthiessen (1941), 462–63</ref>

===Assimilation of Shakespeare===
[[F. O. Matthiessen]], in 1941, declared that Melville's "possession by Shakespeare went far beyond all other influences" in that it made Melville discover his own full strength "through the challenge of the most abundant imagination in history".<ref name="Matthiessen 1941, 424">Matthiessen (1941), 424</ref> This insight was then reinforced by the study of Melville's annotatations in his reading copy of Shakespeare, which show that he immersed himself in Shakespeare when he was preparing for ''Moby-Dick'', especially ''[[King Lear]]'' and ''[[Macbeth]]''.<ref>Grey (2006), [https://books.google.com/books?id=l2HLCQAAQBAJ&q=Lear 253]</ref> Reading Shakespeare, Matthiessen observes, was "a catalytic agent", one that transformed his writing "from limited reporting to the expression of profound natural forces".<ref>Matthiessen (1941), 428</ref>

The creation of Ahab, Melville biographer Leon Howard discovered, followed an observation by Coleridge in his lecture on ''Hamlet'': "one of Shakespeare's modes of creating characters is to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in ''morbid'' excess, and then to place himself. ... thus ''mutilated'' or ''diseased'', under given circumstances".<ref name="Howard 1940, 232">Howard (1940), 232, italics Howard's.</ref> Coleridge's vocabulary is echoed in some phrases that describe Ahab. Ahab seemed to have "what seems a half-wilful ''over-ruling morbidness'' at the bottom of his nature", and "all men tragically great", Melville added, "are made so through a certain ''morbidness''; "all mortal greatness is but ''disease''". In addition to this, in Howard's view, the self-references of Ishmael as a "tragic dramatist", and his defense of his choice of a hero who lacked "all outward majestical trappings" is evidence that Melville "consciously thought of his protagonist as a tragic hero of the sort found in ''Hamlet'' and ''King Lear''".<ref name="Howard 1940, 232"/>

Matthiessen demonstrates the extent to which Melville was in full possession of his powers in the description of Ahab, which ends in language
<blockquote>that suggests Shakespeare's but is not an imitation of it: 'Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked from the skies and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!' The imaginative richness of the final phrase seems particularly Shakespearean, "but its two key words appear only once each in the plays&nbsp;... and to neither of these usages is Melville indebted for his fresh combination".<ref>Matthiessen (1941), 428–429</ref></blockquote>

Melville's assimilation of Shakespeare, Matthiessen concludes, gave ''Moby-Dick'' "a kind of diction that depended upon no source",<ref>Matthiessen (1941), 429</ref> and that could, as D.H. Lawrence put it, convey something "almost superhuman or inhuman, bigger than life".<ref>Quoted in Matthiessen (1941), 429</ref> The prose is not based on anybody else's verse but on "a sense of speech rhythm".<ref name="Matthiessen 1941, 430">Matthiessen (1941), 430</ref>

Matthiessen finds debts to Shakespeare, whether hard or easy to recognize, on almost every page. He points out that the phrase "mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing" at the end of "Cetology" (Ch.32) echoes the famous phrase in ''Macbeth'': "Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."<ref name="Matthiessen 1941, 424"/> Matthiessen shows that Ahab's first extended speech to the crew, in the "Quarter-Deck" (Ch.36), is "virtually blank verse, and can be printed as such":<ref name="Matthiessen 1941, 424"/>

{{Poem quote|But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat,
That thing unsays itself. There are men
From whom warm words are small indignity.
I mean not to incense thee. Let it go.
Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn—
Living, breathing pictures painted by the sun.
The pagan leopards—the unrecking and
Unworshipping things, that live; and seek and give
No reason for the torrid life they feel!<ref>Matthiessen (1941), 426</ref>}}

In addition to this sense of rhythm, Matthiessen shows that Melville "now mastered Shakespeare's mature secret of how to make language itself dramatic".<ref name="Matthiessen 1941, 430"/> He had learned three essential things, Matthiessen sums up:

* To rely on verbs of action, "which lend their dynamic pressure to both movement and meaning".<ref name="Matthiessen 1941, 430"/> The effective tension caused by the contrast of "thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds" and "there's that in here that still remains indifferent" in "The Candles" (Ch. 119) makes the last clause lead to a "compulsion to strike the breast", which suggests "how thoroughly the drama has come to inhere in the words".<ref>Matthiessen (1941), 430–31</ref>
* The Shakespearean energy of verbal compounds was not lost on him ("full-freighted").
* Finally: Melville learned how to handle "the quickened sense of life that comes from making one part of speech act as another{{mdash}}for example, 'earthquake' as an adjective, or the coining of 'placeless', an adjective from a noun".<ref>Matthiessen (1941), 431</ref>

=== Thomas Carlyle ===
Critics have seen parallels between ''Moby Dick'' and [[Thomas Carlyle]]'s work, particularly ''[[Sartor Resartus]]'' (1833–34), ''[[On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History]]'' (1841) and the ''[[Critical and Miscellaneous Essays]]'', which Melville read while writing the novel.<ref>{{cite book |last=Gravett |first=Sharon |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8Nvdx-4-CzoC |title=The Carlyle Encyclopedia |publisher=[[Fairleigh Dickinson University Press]] |year=2004 |isbn=978-0-8386-3792-0 |editor-last=Cumming |editor-first=Mark |location=Madison, NJ / Teaneck, NJ |pages=316–317 |chapter=Melville, Herman |url-access=limited}}</ref> James Barbour and biographer Leon Howard write that "Carlyle's rhetoric is reflected" in much of the dialogue of Ahab and Ishmael, while Melville uses ''Sartor''{{'}}s philosophical concepts of "an emblematic universe" and a "weaver god" "almost in Carlyle's words".<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Barbour |first1=James |last2=Howard |first2=Leon |date=1976 |title=Carlyle and the Conclusion of ''Moby-Dick'' |journal=The New England Quarterly |volume=49 |issue=2 |pages=214–224 |issn=0028-4866 |jstor=364499 |doi=10.2307/364499}}</ref> [[Alexander Welsh]] argues that Carlyle figured "largely in the undertaking of ''Moby Dick''", noting that the "figure of the sheep in 'The Funeral' ... is taken directly from Carlyle", specifically the essay "[[Boswell's Life of Johnson]]" (1832) and that the "language of herring and whales, fleets and commodores" may have been borrowed from ''Sartor''.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Welsh |first=Alexander |date=1958 |title=A Melville Debt to Carlyle |journal=Modern Language Notes |volume=73 |issue=7 |pages=489–491 |jstor=3043017 |issn=0149-6611 |doi=10.2307/3043017}}</ref> According to [[Paul Giles (academic)|Paul Giles]], ''Sartor'' "furnished Melville with a prototype for his playful iconoclastic style in ''Moby-Dick''", particularly in its narrative strategy and romantic ironic paradoxes.<ref>{{cite book |last=Giles |first=Paul |url=http://archive.org/details/cambridgecompani0000unse_z2g4 |title=The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville |date=1998 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |editor-last=Levine |editor-first=Robert S. |editor-link=Robert S. Levine |location=Cambridge |page=233 |chapter='Bewildering Intertanglement': Melville's Engagement with British Culture |url-access=registration}}</ref> The "shared use of the clothing metaphor" is also inspired by ''Sartor''.<ref>{{cite book |title=Moby-Dick: Centennial Essays |publisher=[[Southern Methodist University Press]] |year=1953 |editor1-last=Hillway |editor1-first=Tyrus |page=84 |editor2-last=Mansfield |editor2-first=Luther S.}}</ref>

[[Jonathan Arac]] sees in ''Moby-Dick'' "a direct appropriation" of Carlyle's "Hero". "Ahab", writes Arac, "is very much a Carlylean hero", which Carlyle's "romantic image of [[Cromwell]] helped Melville to create". Carlyle's portraits of [[Dante Alighieri]] and Shakespeare in "The Hero as Poet", the third lecture of ''On Heroes'', "offered models that helped Melville to develop as a reader and to achieve the definition of himself as a writer that made ''Moby-Dick'' possible".<ref>{{cite book |last=Arac |first=Jonathan |url=http://archive.org/details/commissionedspir0000arac_p6e5 |title=Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne |date=1989 |publisher=Columbia University Press |isbn=978-0-231-07116-1 |location=New York |pages=149–151 |url-access=registration}}</ref>

===Renaissance humanism===
During the composition of ''Moby-Dick'' Melville also read Renaissance Humanists such as [[Thomas Browne]], [[Robert Burton]], and Rabelais. [[Hershel Parker]] notes that Melville adopted not only their poetic and conversational prose styles, but also their skeptical attitudes towards religion.<ref>{{cite book |last=Parker |first=Hershel |title=Melville's Reading and Moby-Dick |date=2018 |publisher=Norton |pages=507–509}}</ref> Browne's statement "I love to lose my selfe in a mystery to pursue my reason to an ''ob altitudo''"<ref>{{cite book |last=Browne |first=Thomas |title=The Major Works |publisher=Penguin |page=69}}</ref> mirrors both in ethos and poetics Ishmael's "I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it."<ref>{{cite book |last=Melville |first=Herman |title=Moby-Dick |publisher=Norton |page=20 |edition=3}}</ref>

Ishmael also mirrors the epistemological uncertainty of Renaissance humanists. For example, Browne argues that "where there is an obscurity too deepe for our reason ...[reason] becomes more humble and submissive unto the subtilties of faith ... I believe there was already a tree whose fruit our unhappy parents tasted, though in the same chapter, when God forbids it, 'tis positivley said, the plants of the field were not yet growne."<ref>{{cite book |last=Browne |first=Thomas |title=Religio Medici |publisher=Penguin |page=71}}</ref> Ishmael similarly embraces paradox when he proclaims "Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye."<ref>{{cite book |last=Melville |first=Herman |title=Moby-Dick |date=2018 |publisher=Norton |page=280 |edition=3}}</ref>

Scholars have also called attention to similarities between Melville's style and that of Robert Burton in ''[[Anatomy of Melancholy]]''. William Engel notes that Melville had Burton's book at his side, and says "this encyclopedic work will serve as a conceptual touchstone for analyzing his looking back to an earlier aesthetic practice."<ref>{{cite book |last=Engel |first=William |title=Early Modern Poetics in Melville and Poe |date=2012 |publisher=University of the South |page=12}}</ref> Additionally, Hershel Parker writes that in 1847, ''Anatomy of Melancholy'' served as Melville's "sonorous textbook on morbid psychology" and in the following year he bought a set of [[Michel de Montaigne]]'s works. In the ''Essays'' he found "a worldly wise skepticism that braced him against the superficial pieties demanded by his time". Melville then read Browne's ''[[Religio Medici]]'' which he adored, describing Browne to a friend as "a kind of 'crack'd archangel'".<ref>{{cite book |last=Parker |first=Hershel |title=Melville's Reading and Moby-Dick |date=2018 |publisher=Norton |pages=504–505}}</ref>