Herman Melville Writing Style

The Pequod is boiling down its own catch at night. Ishmael has the tiller, the try-pots throw red light up into the rigging, and he lets himself watch the fire until he loses his bearings. He turns back to find the ship running the wrong way. Melville gives the procedure straight, the way a whaleman would give it, and then in the last paragraph of that chapter he converts the try-works into a warning about looking too long at anything that burns.

Work first, then the turn. That order is the entire method. Reverse it and you get pathos with nothing underneath. Most imitations of him amount to that.

He also declines to say what his objects mean. Ahab nails a gold doubloon to the mast as a prize, and much later the crew files past it one man at a time, each of them reading something different off the same coin, and no reading is corrected. The whale gets the same treatment across a book that classifies it, prices it, paints it, and argues about the color white for a full chapter without settling anything.

Halfway through, the machinery changes without apology. The first person gives way to scenes printed as a play, with stage directions and speech prefixes, and Ahab gets soliloquies no sailor could have overheard. There is a structural reason a witness narrates the story of a man consumed by something he cannot explain, and Conrad later built Marlow on the same principle. The short fiction runs the method at close range. Bartleby's lawyer describes his clerk for pages and accounts for him not once, and Benito Cereno hands the reader an American captain who misreads a whole ship before the court documents at the end supply what was in front of him.

The essay chapter

He halts the chase, writes an essay, and restarts. The placement is the whole trick: the essay sits where it will raise the price of the next event, so the knowledge lands before the confrontation instead of explaining it afterwards. Cetology and the chapter on whiteness both work this way. The hard part is that the essay has to be worth reading on its own terms and load-bearing at the same time, which means knowing what the following scene costs before you write the thing that makes it cost more.

The passed-around object

Ahab nails a gold doubloon to the mast as the prize for the first man to raise the white whale, and much later the crew walks past it in turn. Ahab reads himself in the coin's markings. Starbuck reads a sign from God, Stubb reads a joke about the zodiac, Flask works out how many cigars it would buy, and Pip stands in front of it conjugating the verb to look. No reading gets corrected. The object stays literal, the readings stay incompatible, and the narrator declines to settle it, which is the part most writers flinch at.

Borrowed stage directions

Melville stops narrating and prints a scene as theatre, with a stage direction and a speech prefix for each nation aboard, and he gives Ahab soliloquies on the same licence. The gain is access without a reporter, since nobody has to have been standing there to overhear it. The cost is a visible seam, and he accepts the seam. That acceptance is what imitators find hardest, because a change of form announces that a form is in use, and the announcement has to be worth making.

The witness who cannot explain

The obsessive gets a narrator standing beside him. Ishmael has enough composure to tell a story and enough honesty to admit he cannot account for his captain, which leaves the obsession intact rather than diagnosed. Explanation would finish the reader's job for them, and a finished job is forgettable. The difficulty is discipline, because every draft wants the scene where somebody finally says what is wrong with the man. Cutting that scene is what keeps the book from closing.

The long withholding

The animal is discussed, sorted, painted, priced and feared long before it shows itself. Delay only works when the waiting time is spent loading, and Melville loads it with technical facts that will be collected later: how the line runs through the boat, how a boat is stove, what happens to a man who puts a foot inside a coil. By the time the whale surfaces the reader knows the mechanics of dying at sea. The knowledge is what frightens, and the animal merely activates it.

The register drop

After a metaphysical run he sets down a short flat sentence made of trade words, and the drop does two jobs at once. It rests the ear, and it makes the claim that came before sound like something a working man said rather than something a philosopher performed. Raising a register is easy. Coming back down without embarrassment is the harder half, and it is the reason his grandeur reads as earned instead of borrowed from a pulpit.

Direct address

He breaks off and speaks to somebody who cannot answer. The reader, a dead sailor, the sea itself. The move changes the contract. Narration reports, address demands a response, and the reader stops being an audience and becomes a party to the argument. Melville opens the book by instructing you to walk the waterfront and look at the men staring out at the water, which puts you on the pier before any character exists. He returns to the device whenever a scene threatens to turn into spectacle, because a spectacle has viewers and an address has witnesses.

The catalogue

Melville enumerates until the list itself turns into an argument. Cetology sorts whales into folio, octavo and duodecimo. The apparatus belongs to the naturalists, and Darwin used it in earnest, but Melville drives it far enough that the joke and the awe arrive together. One detail would give you an image. A list gives you a law, and then the failure of the law, since the categories visibly strain against the animals they are meant to hold. He tends to close a catalogue on the item that will not fit, which converts information into unease.

Sustained analogy

One comparison gets set up and then lived in for a whole chapter, and while it lasts it governs word choice. The ship becomes a state, a factory, a church, a courtroom, and each version changes what the crew's obedience means. Because the analogy runs long, its seams show, and the seams do the work: at some point the ship stops resembling a state and the difference becomes the argument. A tidy one-line metaphor decorates a paragraph. One you have to maintain for pages starts making structural decisions on your behalf.

Comic deflation

A sentence climbs toward the sublime. Melville cuts it off with something plain, cheap or rude. The cut protects the sublime rather than mocking it, because a reader who has laughed will accept a bigger claim than a reader who has been solemn for an hour. It also demonstrates that the writer is watching his own effects, which is the only thing that makes grandeur bearable. The device fails in the hands of somebody using irony to avoid commitment. Melville jokes about the small things and stays dead serious about the large one.

Writing the sermon and skipping the labor

The grand register is the easiest part of Melville to copy. On its own it is the least use. His abstractions are paid for in advance with rope, oil, weather, wages and procedure, so by the time he generalises, the reader has a physical world to measure the generalisation against. Strip that out and identical sentences read as a man announcing depth. The diagnosis takes a minute. Underline the abstract nouns in your paragraph, then find the nearest thing a character could pick up. If that thing is several sentences away, the paragraph is floating, and cadence will not anchor it.

Treating any interesting tangent as fair game

Melville's tangents carry freight. Sorting whales into classes doubles as an argument. Can a thing be known at all? The description of the boat's gear doubles as a death warrant. The chapter on whiteness is a nerve laid bare before the animal ever surfaces. Each one is attached to money, rank or danger, which is what keeps the reader's stake alive while the plot idles. A tangent with no stake attached reads as a writer enjoying himself, and the reader concludes the book has stopped needing them.

Telling the reader what the whale means

A symbol with an official reading has stopped working, and Melville built an entire chapter out of the failure to agree on one. Writers copying him tend to do the opposite. They set up a loaded object, then hand a character the explanation, usually in dialogue and usually near the end. That explanation is a receipt. It tells the reader the transaction is closed and there is nothing left to carry out of the book. Keep the thing in play instead: handled, argued over, misread by somebody sympathetic, and left on the page without a verdict.

Running the voice at one volume

Melville at full thunder from end to end would be unreadable, and he knew it, which is why the book keeps stopping for flat exposition, ship's business and jokes that reset the ear. Imitators hold the pitch high because the pitch is what they noticed, and the effect goes numb by the second chapter. Contrast is what makes intensity legible. A sentence about a man's soul reads as enormous when the sentence before it was about the price of oil. Take out the price of oil and the soul goes quiet.