"They but Reflect the Things": Style and Rhetorical Purposes in Melville's "The Piazza Tale"

TLDR: The lack of critical attention to Melville's style may be a matter of timing with regard to when he began writing his tales as discussed by the authors, which is the period just prior to 1853 that has been the focus of most scholarly attention.

Abstract: That Herman Melville found a locus of generative power in language's multiple possibilities--uses, meanings, and expressions--is unquestioned. Curiously absent, however, among the major studies of Melville's short fiction is discussion of just that: how Melville's style relates to his larger rhetorical choices during the writing of his serialized fiction, 1853-56. (1) Only R. Bruce Bickley, in The Method of Melville's Short Fiction, declares to connect Melville's "fictional methods" with his overall artistic vision (x). Bickley's aim is not sentence style, however, but an examination of "structure, narration, and characterization" as those elements contribute to the "essential meanings of his tales" (xi). Though described differently, Bickley's discussion of Melville's "technique" is actually another analysis of the topical patterns in the tales exposing the ironic stance of Melville's first person narrators (126). The lack of critical attention to Melville's style may be a matter of timing with regard to when he began writing his tales. Critically, it is the period just prior to 1853 that has been the focus of most scholarly attention to Melville's stylistic thrusts. In Brian Foley's words, "during the years 1848-51, while Melville's imagination was teeming with new ideas gleaned from his reading, he sought a new mode of expression, one that could encompass a multiplicity of modes" (267). With that backdrop, it's not surprising that Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre have become central works in the Melville canon for examining Melville's stylistic concerns. As appropriate as that may be, it still does not fully explain why such inquiry would not be directed into what is Melville's most mature period as a publishing author. One obvious explanation is that Melville's ideas invite attention. That is, as John Bryant says in the introduction to Melville's Evermoving Dawn (1997), as "traveler, ethnographer, allegorist, humorist, tragedian, philosopher, closet dramatist, psychologist, biographer, novelist, talespinner, and poet," Melville "could speak volumes" (5). Two other reasons are implicitly manifest in Michael Kearns's analysis of Melville's style: "the critics who argue most persuasively recognize that Melville's style has a rhetorical effect that can be connected in some way to his interest in what's inexplicable, ineffable about human experience" (54). One, this suggests that because Melville scholars have historically connected his style to larger metaphysical concerns, we have come to accept benignly this relation without close analysis of the syntactical component in his sentences; and, two, because Melville's metaphysical "ideas" are seen as his most defining characteristic as an author, less emphasis is placed on his stylistic innovations. To these explanations I would like to add one more: the lack of analysis of Melville's style in his serialized fiction between 1853 and 1856 is due to the implicit yet prominently hel d belief that the hermeneutical key to understanding Melville's narrative artistry is best seen in analysis of his longer prose narratives. (2) If style as a rhetorical choice is central to Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre, then it is worth examining during Melville's tenure as a serial writer between 1853 and 1856. Indeed, from the linguistic minimalism of Bartleby in "Bartleby, the Scrivener," the epitaph inscribed on Oberlus's gravestone in the "Encantadas," to the court documents in "Benito Cereno," it is clear that Melville's concern with language uses, meanings, and expressions continues into his short fiction. For these reasons, Melville's short fiction is worth closer examination in the way his syntactical sentence structures inform an understanding of his larger rhetorical choices during the period 1853 through 1856. (3) As arguably the most stylistically embellished tale in the Melville ouevre, "The Piazza Tale" is exemplary for analysis. What makes "The Piazza Tale" unique in the context of the other stories in the Piazza Tales collection (1856) is that it was written exclusively to introduce the collection, and as an introduction it anticipates in rhetorical purpose many moves Melville makes in the other tales. …