Saturday, February 28, 2015

More hyphenated compound modifiers

Mount Assiniboine Sunburst Lake
Image Credit: Kurt Stegmüller via Wikimedia Commons

Cluster of compound modifiers in September 1852
Scenes Beyond the Western Border

As everybody knows, the use of  "participial modifiers" and "hyphenated compounds" is typical of Melville's prose in Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852). Citing Walter E. Bezanson on "Moby-Dick: Document, Drama, Dream" (Companion to Melville Studies) and Warner Berthoff on The Example of Melville, the Wikipedia entry for Herman Melville highlights these elements as important, even defining features of Melville's writing style:
Melville's early works were "increasingly baroque"[87] in style, and with Moby-Dick Melville's vocabulary had grown superabundant. Bezanson calls it an "immensely varied style."[87] Three characteristic uses of language can be recognized. First, the exaggerated repetition of words, as in the series "pitiable," "pity," "pitied," and "piteous" (Ch. 81, "The Pequod Meets the Virgin"). A second typical device is the use of unusual adjective-noun combinations, as in "concentrating brow" and "immaculate manliness" (Ch. 26, "Knights and Squires").[88] A third characteristic is the presence of a 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...").[89] After the hyphenated compounds of Pierre, words and phrases became less exploratory and less provocative. Instead of providing a lead "into possible meanings and openings-out of the material at hand," the style now served "to crystallize governing impressions."
--Wikipedia/Herman Melville
 
Our previous Dragooned post on compound modifiers compared the parallel constructions of "all-forbidding quadrangle" in Melville's Pierre and "world-forbidding battlements" in the September 1852 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border." In the same grammatical vein, many more hyphenated compounds (most with participial -ing forms) occur in Scenes and Adventures in the Army--especially in Part II, first published in 1851-1853 as "Scenes Beyond the Western Border."

These are the ones I have found so far:
1. every heaven-born hue --Scenes and Adventures p64
2. ever-restless youth --Scenes and Adventures p67
 3. ever-varying policy  --Scenes and Adventures p196

4. self-forgetting, thou --December 1851
5. sky-reflecting waters  --January 1852
6. a worn and well-singed rug  --April 1852
7. the spirit-striving chase --April 1852 [hyphen added in book version]
8.  a light dust-bearing breeze  --June 1852
9.  ever varying and fantastic beauties  --June 1852 (no hyphen)
 10. A false and self-consuming fire!  --July 1852
11. gentlemanly and mild-looking man  --July 1852
(hyphen added in revised book version)
12.  the spirit-stirring chase 
--July 1852 (no hyphen in magazine version; added in revision to book version)
13.  ever-heaving surge  --September 1852
14. snow-shining spire  --September 1852
15. river-feeding rain  --September 1852
16. fire-created and blasted, but icy throne!  --September 1852
17. blanket-enduring mornings and evenings 
--September 1852
 18. never-conquered Indians  --September 1852
(please don't forget world-forbidding battlements  --September 1852)
19. cinder-scattering clouds --March 1853
20.  only and all-sufficient revelations  --May 1853 [compounds with all- are frequent in Melville's Pierre, including "all-sufficing income"]
21. Heaven-bestowed key  --May 1853
22-23. many white-robed fair,— the far-reaching couples
--May 1853
24. far-echoing solemn thunders [--May 1853; "thunders" changed to "voice" in book version: revised to "far-echoing voice"]
25. heaven-descended attributes  --May 1853 [deleted in the book version; compare "heaven-begotten Christ" and the "heaven-aspiring, but still not wholly earth-emancipated mood" of Melville's Pierre in Pierre.]
26. cold cloud-attracting and condensing mountain-tops
--August 1853
[here the compound modifier apparently was misunderstood, resulting in typographical error: corrected with hyphen in the book version, Scenes and Adventures, 413]
27. desolation-loving vegetables --August 1853 [compare "utter night-desolation" and "all-desolating" in Melville's Pierre.]
28. — the poor dollar-dealing sinners
(only occurs in book version, Scenes and Adventures p355; added in revision of August 1852 dialogue)
29.  ever-heaving bosom --Scenes and Adventures, p65 ["ever" only occurs in the book version, where "ever-heaving bosom" replaces "sullen heaving bosom" from previous two magazine versions (1835 Military and Naval Magazine and July 1842 Southern Literary Messenger).]
30. heaven-bestowed beauty --Scenes and Adventures p364 (occurs only in the book version, in revised dialogue from the August 1852 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border.)
31. crowd-created and encouraged pleasures  --Scenes and Adventures p65; occurs only in the book version.
 Honorable Mentions from May 1853 :
gala-gloss to all surroundings
glaring ball-room mockery
The September 1852 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" displays at least six hyphenated compounds, the most of any single installment in the series. The next biggest cluster (at least five instances) appears in May 1853. As noted already, such hyphenated compounds prominently contribute to the mannerist style (sometimes termed rococo) of Melville's Pierre, first published in August 1852.

Impressive as the September 1852 group is (for example "snow-shining spire" and "world-forbidding battlements"), I love the May 1853 instances best of all, in particular those employed in describing the fantastic scene adapted from Dante's Paradise:
...the many white-robed fair,— the far-reaching couples, floating in that fairy dance, revolving,—like the moon around the sun, in circling circles.
Then again, dollar-dealing sinners is hard to top, something added later in revision of the August 1852 dialogue.

compound modifiers with "forbidding"

First published within a month of each other, and both texts conjoin "forbidding" with the idea of desolation, with the image of an empty, desolate physical location:
He held the artless, angelical letter in his unrealizing hand; he started, and gazed round his room, and out at the window, commanding the bare, desolate, all-forbidding quadrangle, and then asked himself whether this was the place that an angel should choose for its visit to earth.  --Herman Melville, Pierre (August 1852)
Devil's Gate, on the Sweetwater, Fremont County, Wyoming - NARA - 516896
Devil's Gate, on the Sweetwater, Fremont County, Wyoming
William Henry Jackson  via Wikimedia Commons
I was joined, after our frugal supper of dried meat, at the watch-fire of the bivouac, by my friend Frank, who came, I suppose, to while a dull hour; but to give him his due, he brought up some coffee, and we made in tin cups refreshing and strong sleep-dispelling draughts.
"Heaven knows," he said, "why guards should watch in this valley of desolation, with world-forbidding battlements; we might sleep a month, safe from aught save grizzly bears."  --September 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border and Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 378
Speaking of compound adjectives with hyphens, you probably noticed another one in the example above from the September 1852 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border":
sleep-dispelling draughts
Melville's Pierre is notable for its idiosyncratic and poet-revealing grammar of compound modifiers, such as when the hero proclaims himself to Isabel "thy leapingly-acknowledging brother!" The example of "all-forbidding" occurs immediately after the reading of Lucy Tartan's letter to Pierre in which she promises to keep silent about their love
"till we meet where the ever-interrupting and ever-marring world can not and shall not come."--Herman Melville's Pierre 
Also exemplified in Melville's Pierre is the use of compound modifiers with world as the first term. To the unique metaphor of mountains as "world-forbidding battlements" in Scenes Beyond the Western Border, compare:
Related post:

Saturday, February 21, 2015

self-consuming fire

For Children The Gates of Paradise copy D object 7
William Blake via Wikimedia Commons
These fritters feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.  --Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

Guide me, gird me, guard me, this day, ye sovereign powers! Bind me in bonds I can not break; remove all sinister allurings from me; eternally this day deface in me the detested and distorted images of all the convenient lies and duty-subterfuges of the diving and ducking moralities of this earth. Fill me with consuming fire for them; to my life's muzzle, cram me with your own intent. Let no world-syren come to sing to me this day, and wheedle from me my undauntedness.  --Herman Melville, Pierre (1852)

 "I. F. Ay! it is a fire that consumes; and sometimes burns to ashes the hearts and hopes of proud men..."  --July 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border
The "fire that consumes" got revised to "false and self-consuming fire" in the book version of the July 1852 dialogue:
— A false and self-consuming fire! that sometimes burns to ashes the hearts and hopes of proud men...--Scenes and Adventures in the Army, p333
I. F. in the July 1852 version stands for "Imaginary Friend." In the next installment, August 1852, the Imaginary Friend is named "Frank." In the 1857 book version, all references to the Imaginary Friend have been deleted and "Frank" is just called "Friend."

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Has something to say about feudal estates being founded on theft

Image Credit: Allgäuer Seenland
Examples below are both from 1852, and the context in both is book publishing!
Concerning the draught for the title-page, it must be confessed, that on seeing the imposing enumeration of his titles—long and magnificent as those preceding the proclamations of some German Prince ("Hereditary Lord of the back-yard of Crantz Jacobi; Undoubted Proprietor by Seizure of the bedstead of the late Widow Van Lorn; Heir Apparent to the Bankrupt Bakery of Fletz and Flitz; Residuary Legatee of the Confiscated Pin-Money of the Late Dowager Dunker; &c. &c. &c.") Pierre could not entirely repress a momentary feeling of elation.   --Herman Melville, Pierre (August 1852)

If the book be European, and larded with sonorous titles,treat of antiquities, (venerable in guide books,)of the stereotyped romance of ruins, converted by a prurient imagination from dens of robbers to seats of chivalry, and abodes of beauty,then, all success to it!  --Scenes Beyond the Western Border, September 1852