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A Review of Herman Melville's The Piazza Tales |
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Herman Melville's The Piazza Tales exhibits instances of grace, moral self-awareness, and opportunities for readerly evaluation of narrative projections upon unwitting accomplices as to be found where else in modern literature? Bartleby's descriptor, for instance, bestows humanity upon humanity upon the blankness that is the titled character. Captain Delano expounds various internal and emotional, as well as psychological, explanations for Benito Cereno's visible and unseemly characteristics. The protagonist of the title story traverses the circularity of the possibility of the life lived beyond one's abode as superior to one's own, and, returns home, comfortable in a new-found awareness of personal deception. Blankness upon which each narrator may prescribe a workable solution to ambiguity. Individual attempts at explication, which, in the telling, become the outcomes of the tale. How else should modernism attempt its goals? What else, for instance, is modernism for? Yet, Melville allows for personality, and goodness (egad!) to apply themselves; for character, and misunderstanding, and language (good god!) to replace, or supercede, their replacements: namely: evasiveness, angularity, verbal anxiety (to name a few.) We find in the tales an exactness of the man allowed to manifest itself in explanation! The color of the character of those describing speaks for itself; the essence of the narrators peppered, seemingly, with the goodness, curiosity, insistence, of their author; or, perhaps, this is simply the reviewer projecting his desires upon their page. |
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