"Above all", say the scholars Bryant and Springer, Moby-Dick is language: "nautical, biblical, Homeric, Shakespearean, Miltonic, 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.[36] 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".[37] 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".[38] For Arvin, the essence of the writing style of Moby-Dick lies in
the manner in which the parts of speech are 'intermixingly' assorted in Melville's style—so that the distinction between verbs and nouns, substantives and modifiers, becomes a half unreal one—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—the awareness that action and condition, movement and stasis, object and idea, are but surface aspects of one underlying reality.[39]
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"[40] and the exaggerated repetition of modified words, as in the series "pitiable", "pity", "pitied" and "piteous" (Ch. 81, "The Pequod Meets the Virgin").[41] Second, the use of existing words in new ways, as when the whale "heaps" and "tasks".[40] Third, words lifted from specialized fields, as "fossiliferous".[40] Fourth, the use of unusual adjective-noun combinations, as in "concentrating brow" and "immaculate manliness" (Ch. 26, "Knights and Squires").[42] 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 ...").[41]
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.[43]
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 quarter-deck monologue, to the point that it can be set as blank verse.[44] Set over a metrical pattern, the rhythms are "evenly controlled—too evenly perhaps for prose", Bezanson suggests.[45] 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:
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. ("Nantucket", Ch. 14).
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".[46]
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).[47] A paragraph-long simile describes how the 30 men of the crew became a single unit:
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. ("The Chase – Second Day", Ch. 134).
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.[47] 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."[48]
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".[49] 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.[50] Reading Shakespeare, Matthiessen observes, was "a catalytic agent", one that transformed his writing "from limited reporting to the expression of profound natural forces".[51]
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".[52] 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".[52]
Matthiessen demonstrates the extent to which Melville was in full possession of his powers in the description of Ahab, which ends in language
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 ... and to neither of these usages is Melville indebted for his fresh combination".[53]
Melville's assimilation of Shakespeare, Matthiessen concludes, gave Moby-Dick "a kind of diction that depended upon no source",[54] and that could, as D.H. Lawrence put it, convey something "almost superhuman or inhuman, bigger than life".[55] The prose is not based on anybody else's verse but on "a sense of speech rhythm".[56]
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."[49] 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":[49]
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![57]
In addition to this sense of rhythm, Matthiessen shows that Melville "now mastered Shakespeare's mature secret of how to make language itself dramatic".[56] 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".[56] 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".[58]
- 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—for example, 'earthquake' as an adjective, or the coining of 'placeless', an adjective from a noun".[59]
Thomas Carlyle
Since the publication of Moby-Dick in 1851, critics have continued to notice parallels between it and the work of Thomas Carlyle, 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.[60] 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".[61] 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.[62] According to 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.[63] The "shared use of the clothing metaphor" is also inspired by Sartor.[64]
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".[65]
Renaissance Humanism
Melville also borrowed stylistic qualities from Renaissance Humanists such as Thomas Browne and Robert Burton. Melville's biographer Hershel Parker notes that, during the composition of Moby-Dick, Melville read Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, and Rabelais and adopted not only their poetic and conversational prose styles, but also their skeptical attitudes towards religion.[66] Browne's statement "I love to lose my selfe in a mystery to pursue my reason to an ob altitudo"[67] 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."[68]
Ishmael also mirrors the epistemological uncertainty of Renaissance humanists. For instance, 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."[69] 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."[70]
Scholars have also noted similarities between Melville's style and that of Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy. Scholar William Engel notes that "Because Melville had Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy at his side, this encyclopedic work will serve as a conceptual touchstone for analyzing his looking back to an earlier aesthetic practice."[71] Additionally, Melville's biographer Hershel Parker writes that "in 1847, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy served as Melville's sonorous textbook on morbid psychology" and then "in 1848 [Melville] bought Michel de Montaigne's works, where he read the Essays, finding there a worldly wise skepticism that braced him against the superficial pieties demanded by his time". Finally, Melville then read Thomas Browne's Religio Medici which Melville adored, describing Browne to a friend as "a kind of 'crack'd archangel'".[72]
