Melville, or the ambiguities
I’m part way through The Piazza Tales, a collection of Herman Melville’s longer short fiction – or shorter long fiction, depending on how you look at it – what might, these days, be considered “novelettes” or “novellas” or some similar hideous term. Some are old friends, like “Bartleby,” others are new to me. But there’s one unifying thread, as there is to all of Melville:
No one, past or present, mastered words so well, so completely as Melville. If you want to know what words are, how they work, how they keep mutual companionship – in comity, in argument, while conspiring in dark corners – Melville is the handbook.
Moby Dick is not just the Great American Novel that writers were looking for throughout the 20th century, it’s probably the best single novel ever written. I hedge with “probably” to give others room to disagree; for myself, from what I’ve (admittedly limitedly) read, there’s nothing to compare.
In the same vein, “Bartleby” is [probably] the finest short story ever penned. It’s one of the very few in any language to achieve iconic status – we all know “Bartleby,” just as we know Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” But “Bartleby” does not hinge on a plot twist and it does not depend on orchestrated mood or a shrapnel barrage of adjectives like Poe’s revered horror pieces.
In Moby Dick, the depth of story and character match the style throughout, creating not just a sense of personal myth but something outside and above time – and all in the context of a rip-snorting tale of inevitable destiny.
Some complain of the alternating chapters that illuminate the details of whaling. I find them marvelous. Melville loved observation, loved the velvet of description, the exactitude of detail. No one could paint a richer yet more precise picture in words, and the mechanisms of whaling – of all things pertaining to ships and the sea – flowed from him like a hillside spring.
Moby Dick is a mostly sober book, in keeping with its themes of torment and fate. “Bartleby,” by contrast, bubbles with a levity of soul that finds humor even in the disintegration of a man into semi-catatonic madness. It’s not a matter of laughing at the infirm, more a tender-hearted sense of the world at large remaining good while evil wins one small battle. No one but Melville could have written a story with quite the same sense of the narrator’s mystified delight at being present at Bartleby’s unfolding.
Moby Dick and “Bartleby” are Melville’s two signal successes, and had he never written another word they would secure him an unequalled position. Yet much of Melville’s writing never quite reached true storytelling. So enamored of words and style, he would sometimes shed all care for coherent plot. But even his lesser works – even his relative failures – are engrossing, absorbing.
In the current collection, “The Piazza” is as sturdily constructed a word-tower as anyone could ask, but what is it, exactly, as a story? The “plot,” fairly simply, is the narration by a man of his isolated life on a Central American mountainside, where he has had constructed for him the perfect realization of a piazza to accompany his purchased house – a space ideal to all seasons.
From this spot, he spies faraway a house and treks to visit its owner, a young woman living alone. They talk, she tells something of her life, he tells almost nothing of his, then he leaves, never to return. We know little of either character, at base, or why he chooses to abandon a woman who could have been – what? – friend, lover, spiritual associate? But, oh my god, the wordsmithing, the sumptuous flow of sentence and description!
“Benito Cereno” is another of Melville’s many sea tales, a short novel or long story recounting the meeting of an American ship captain, Delano, with a semi-derelict vessel near the shore of a deserted island off the Chilean coast. (The story is based on the recountings of the actual Delano of his encounter in 1799.)
He boards the floundering near wreck to find a young Spanish captain, Cereno, his reduced crew, and their cargo of slaves, who have experienced virtually every conceivable malady that the ocean and the winds could lay upon them – gales, extended calms, hunger, thirst, scurvy and lethal fevers. All officers and passengers have died and the remaining crew has been reduced to a handful. Cereno has descended beyond melancholy into near dissolution, saved from total collapse only by his black attendant, Babo.
Any astute reader today would quickly pick up on the actual state of affairs aboard the San Dominick, and I don’t doubt that was likely the case with Melville’s initial readers as well. Seen this way, “Benito Cereno” feels drawn out – something of a insult to the perspicacity of Captain Delano. But this seems not to be Melville’s concern. He is writing the tale, and to him the writing is all. Character is a matter of description – internal as well as external – rather than an attempt to present a real and whole person. The tale ends with the supposed deposition of Cereno, told in so different and archaic a style as to seem hardly possible to be written by the same hand.
I can’t leave off Melville without his wondrous literary debacle, Pierre, or the Ambiguities. Had it ever been completed – could it ever have been truly completed – it would rank as the purest example of style ever put on paper.
I was given the HarperCollins edition of 1995 to review and found that I just couldn’t do it, despite notes out the legendary wazoo. The trials Melville went through trying to get the “real” version published are likely run through fairly well on Wikipedia, so I’ll skip all that. What we have in the HC “Kraken Edition” is essentially two mss. badly glued together. The first two-thirds are uniquely brilliant, unlike anything else put into language. The latter third is a mishmash of disconnected bits and pieces without any linear reason to be.
Would I recommended reading Pierre? The first part, without the least reservation. The second – personally, I think plowing through what might well be scratchings from the chicken-house floor does a disservice to Melville. Leave that to the scholars.
It’s now almost 20 years since I read Pierre. I remember nothing of plot, not much of character, though it’s lauded as a psychological masterpiece. What I recall in those first roughly 300 pages is style, style, style – a proliferating multitude of styles. For in different chapters, even different sections within the same chapter, Melville switches styles, not just between those that might have influenced him or which he might have inherited, but wholly new styles of his own invention. Writing in the 1850s, he anticipated virtually every manner, form and quirk of writing to emerge in the next hundred years. Here you see bits of Proust, of Faulkner, of Joyce – ever, for god’s sake, a smatter of Gertrude Stein.
What Melville had in mind I couldn’t say. Perhaps, at the deepest level, he couldn’t have either – there, possibly, lie the real ambiguities. But what he created – and what he might have completed, or perhaps did complete but never published – is a magnificent, monumental piece of work, the meticulous outpourings of one of the greatest of all creative minds.
Often when I read modern novelists, I admire their construction, the edifice of fiction they have constructed from solid, interlocked fictional bricks. And I think (not to say the thought is true in any way, but to emphasize a point), I think, “I could write as well, as fully as that” (though I haven’t done so and likely never will). But when I open Melville, I think, “I could never write with such creative precision. My words could not kiss the feet of his.”
by Derek Davis