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Chronometricals and horologicals in relation to Isabel's early life : the world of language and...

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Chronometricals and horologicals in relation to Isabel's early life : the world of language and the world of sound in Herman Melville's Pierre, or, the Ambiguities / Katsuya Izumi

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Identifier	Thesis 1691
Author	Izumi, Katsuya
Title	Chronometricals and horologicals in relation to Isabel's early life : the world of language and the world of sound in Herman Melville's Pierre, or, the Ambiguities / Katsuya Izumi
Publisher	Central Connecticut State University
Date	2003
Resource Type	Master's Thesis
Notes	Critics have been struggling to find a consistent theme that permeates Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, the Ambiguities (1852). There is the pamphlet on which a lecture by a man named Plotinus Plinlimmon is written down in the middle of the story. It is about two temporal concepts called “Chronometricals and Horologicals.” It seems inevitable that we scrutinize this pamphlet, so that we can grasp what Melville tries to communicate in this novel. I am trying to demonstrate that the worlds of language and sound in the early life of Isabel Banford reinforce Plinlimmon’s theories of “Chronometricals and Horologicals” in the pamphlet. Isabel��s narration in Book VI of Pierre is very significant because it changes the life of this story’s protagonist Pierre Glendinning. It seems that she explains how she becomes conscious of this world by acquiring her linguistic ability. Yet Melville has her use the power of sound, instead of speech (or language), by giving her a guitar and putting musicalness to her speech, when she narrates her early life. In order to express the mystery of her life, she uses the power of sound which seems to be able to entail many more various things than language. This difference between language and sound seems to correspond to the difference between chronometricals, represented by only one time at Greenwich, and horologicals, represented by many local times. Sound can go beyond the boundaries that limit language. We need to discuss Melville’s religious thought because Plinlimmon attaches some aspects of Christianity to the term chronometricals. Discussion about one of Melville’s short stories, “The Lightning-Rod Man” (1854), can be helpful when we try to find out which aspects of Christianity Melville and Plinlimmon talk about with the word chronometricals. It becomes clear that Melville criticizes the self-righteous aspect of Christianity by using Plinlimmon’s idea of chronometricals. Noticing this point and the relationship between the pamphlet and Isabel, we can even refer to recent studies of Melville in which critics attempt to find the reflection of nineteenth-century American cultural movement in his novels. To find out the importance of Isabel’s musical sound, which can be categorized into the horological in my interpretation, we will discuss Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851). In the novel, speech, unlike writing or the record of history, functions in the same way in which sound functions in Melville’s Pierre. Isabel expresses herself by playing the guitar. We will notice that Melville tries to insert the power of sound into Isabel’s narration because the history of her past cannot be known to anyone, and as a result, cannot be interpreted in language. Hawthorne seems to connect the past and the present by using the power of speech, which is unsettling language, instead of writing, but Melville uses the more ambiguous and unsettling sound even in literature to describe Isabel’s life because her past is so fathomlessly mysterious that it cannot be expressed by language. While Melville and Plinlimmon criticize the self-righteous aspect of Christianity, Melville even criticizes the power of language which can work so as to suppress other possible meanings. Melville, who did not, according to Hawthorne, feel comfortable with his belief in God or Christianity, could not believe in the power of language to express what he had in his head and heart. By seeing Plinlimmon criticize the self-righteous aspect of Christianity and by connecting it to Isabel’s world of speech in her early life, we can realize that Melville, with “chronometricals,” criticizes something which can suppress people’s free will. As opposed to the power of language, the power of sound may be able to express the mysterious past of Isabel, and ambiguous sound can be thought to be connected to the horological which represents all local times and which Plinlimmon recommends in the pamphlet. To support the importance of horological sound, we should refer to the difference between the country and the city because nature in the country is associated with the musicalness that Isabel has in her guitar playing. We also discuss Reverend Falsgrave, Pierre’s mother’s minister, who has the ambiguities (his ambiguous answers to Pierre’s questions) and the musicalness (the way in which he moves) so that we can establish the connection between Isabel and Plinlimmon’s pamphlet more convincingly. If we attach the chronometrical aspect to all kinds of celestial deeds in Pierre, Pierre’s rescue of Isabel is chronometrical. Yet his rescue as a messiah is not self-righteous because he turns his back to his self-righteous mother and the traditions of his family. We will look at how differently he is from society, and then, we may be able to obtain some clues to talk about the implied conclusion of the inconclusive pamphlet and the conclusion of Pierre in which Pierre and Isabel seem to be united. Then, we can even contribute to the argument of Melville’s scholars about whether or not Melville agrees with Plinlimmon. Connecting Plinlimmon’s pamphlet and Isabel’s early life, we can categorize many things in this story either into chronometricals or into horologicals and we, as a result, can discover what Melville wants to say in Pierre by what he does not express clearly in language.
Subject	Melville, Herman, 1819-1891. Selections. 1984 -- Criticism and interpretation
Department	Department of English
Advisor	Heitner, John A
Type	Text
Digital Format	application/pdf
Language	eng
OCLC number	52487280
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Chronometricals and horologicals in relation to Isabel's early life : the world of language and the world of sound in Herman Melville's Pierre, or, the Ambiguities / Katsuya Izumi

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