On a different note, as Mary K. Bercaw Edwards knows from her survey of Melville's printed sources in her 1987 book Melville's [Printed] Sources (Northwestern University Press, page 159), Perry Miller discusses Melville in his 1956 book The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace; see the "Index" for specific page references to Melville [pages 366-367]), which Johns Hopkins University Press reissued in a paperback edition as The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville, and the New York Literary Scene in 1997. What was referred to in the New York literary scene as "Rabelaisian" writing strikes me as a feature of Melville's writing, at least at times (for specific references to Rabelaisian writing, see the "Index" [page 368]).
However, if Mary K. Bercaw Edwards does not want to characterize Melville narrative voice as Rabelaisian, perhaps because the term strikes her as out of date, I can understand that. But I am still looking to see what other way of speaking she may have that more aptly describes Melville's wit. In my estimate, wit would work to describe Melville's wit. But she does not even use that term in either her 2009 book or her new 2021 book.
Because I have no first-hand experience of sailor talk, I do not know of wit in sailor talk. No doubt the wit referred to as Rabelaisian in the nineteenth-century New York literary scene was indebted to print sources - with which Melville was familiar. In oral tradition, the exemplar of wit might be the trickster figure (Odysseus in the Homeric epic is a trickster figure). In the New Testament, the wordplay in the Gospel of John surely involves a kind of wit. Even some of Jesus' sharp retorts in the three synoptic gospels involve a kind of wit - and the clever parables attributed to Jesus in all four of the canonical gospels strike me as involving wit of a certain kind. So if we were to explicitly allow that there is wit in Melville's narrative voice, we might also have to allow that he might have been multiple sources influencing his development of his wit.
Now, in Mary K. Bercaw Edwards Chapter 5: "Cannibal Old Me": The Development of Melville's Narrative Voice in her 2009 book Cannibal Old Me: Spoken Sources in Melville's Early Works (pages 133-201), mentioned above, she mentions the first and second Great Awakenings in passing (page 142). However, she says, "While sermons were often composed and written prior to being delivered, they are, as is true of drama or poetry, designed to be delivered orally and received aurally" (page 142). She also says, "Melville often constructs his sermon-like addresses to his readers in much the same fashion [as did the Reverend Edward T. Taylor; Father Taylor, the Sailor Preacher, who served as one model on whom the character Father Mapple is based in Moby-Dick]" (page 143). Could we perhaps characterize Father Taylor's sermons as expressing, at times, his wit? But does Melville also, at least at times, manifest his own wit in his sermon-like addresses to his readers?
In Mary K. Bercaw Edwards' new 2021 book Sailor Talk, she revisits Father Taylor. She says, "Melville's immersion in the sailors' oral world proved to be profoundly liberating to his creativity, influencing his affinity to and use of such complex blends of oral and literate sources as sermons, such as those of Father Edward Thompson Taylor, and the [1611] King James Bible. Although the word of God is [now] written, it was received by most people in the period before widespread literacy in the form of heightened [as it still is received by churchgoers today who hear biblical passages read aloud]. Melville knew the Bible both orally, read aloud in church and quoted in sermons, and as written [and printed] text" (page 81).
Now, for a learned discussion of Melville and the 1611 King James Bible, see Robert Alter's 2010 book Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (Princeton University Press; for specific page references to Melville, see the "Index" [page 193]).
More recently, in 2019, W. W. Norton published Robert Alter's translations of and commentaries on all the books of the Hebrew Bible in three handsome volumes:
(1) The Five Books of Moses;
(2) Prophets;
(3) The Writings.
The front matter in each of the three volumes includes Robert Alter's essay "Introduction to the Hebrew Bible" (pages xiii-xlii), including his further discussion of the 1611 King James Bible. Certain aspects of the ancient texts could be characterized as manifesting wit of a certain kind, but Alter himself does not explicitly use the term wit.
Now, because the Homeric epics are also considered to be founding written (and later printed) texts in our Western cultural history, I would also call your attention here to James A. Notopoulos' still useful article "Parataxis in Homer" in the Transactions of the American Philological Association (Johns Hopkins University Press), volume 80 (1949): pages 1-23. Parataxis is also common in the Hebrew Bible. Parataxis is a common feature of primary oral materials that were eventually transcribed in writing in ancient times and later printed. No doubt parataxis may also be a feature of what was later known in print culture after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the mid-1450s as the plain style, as discussed by Perry Miller with reference to New England Puritans and by Mary K. Bercaw Edwards and others.
Perhaps on a deeper level of thought, we may wonder if we today may also still draw fruit from Joseph Russo and Bennett Simon's article "Homeric Psychology and the Oral Epic Tradition" in the Journal of the History of Ideas (University of Pennsylvania Press), volume 29, number 4 (1968): pages 483-498. But also see Perry Miller's 1950 essay "The Rhetoric of Sensation," mentioned above, not only with reference to Jonathan Edwards' preaching but also with reference to Melville's mature style in his two ambitious experimental novels Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852).
For further discussion of Homeric art, also see Michael N. Nagler's perceptive 1974 book Spontaneity and Tradition: A Study in the Oral Art of Homer (University of California Press) and John Miles Foley's judicious 1999 book Homer's Traditional Art (Pennsylvania State University Press).
In broad terms, Walter J. Ong characterizes primary oral thought and expression as expressing what he refers to as the world-as-event sense of life, as distinct from the world-as-view sense of life exemplified in Plato's dialogues and in Western philosophy subsequently. See Ong's article "World as View and World as Event" in the American Anthropologist, volume 71, number 4 (August 1969): pages 634-647. It is reprinted in volume three of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukp (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995, pages 69-90).
Ong also discusses the world-as-event sense of life in his 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press, pages 111-138), the expanded version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University.
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