The Piazza Tales

By Todd Webb and Herman Melville

This is the only short-story collection published by Melville during his lifetime. The present text is that of the first publication (all but the titular piece first appeared in Putnam's Magazine from 1853 to 1855). The volume includes a chronology and is accompanied by 222 explanatory notes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Universitas Press
• Release date: Sep 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781988963921

Book preview

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Introduction

Todd Webb

It is generally agreed among critics and readers alike that the novel Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) is Herman Melville’s outstanding achievement. For all its genius, however, this tale of Captain Ahab and his monomaniacal pursuit of the white whale that tore off one of his legs can seem like an intimidating book, particularly for students encountering the world of nineteenth-century literature for the first time. The Piazza Tales is more approachable and just as compelling as any of Melville’s longer works. In its six short stories, we find, among other fascinating characters, an office worker who refuses to work, a shipload of rebellious slaves, at least one charlatan, several unhinged sailors, some outright madmen, a marooned woman, and a secretive, self-destructive inventor. In addition, as pretentious as it might sound, there are life lessons to be learned, and solace to be had, in the two undoubted masterpieces of the book: Bartleby, the Scrivener and Benito Cereno. The first will be relevant as long as paperwork endures, while the second is a commentary on race relations that is as vital today as it was when it was written in the mid-1850s.

This introduction begins with an account of the origins of The Piazza Tales (1856), starting with Herman Melville’s life as a writer, including his early triumphs, the series of critical and financial disasters that brought him to the world of magazine writing by the early 1850s, and the way he used his already well-honed talents as a novelist in the new medium of the short story. From there, we will discuss the stories themselves, suggesting, in the process, some key themes or contexts that might inform our reading, particularly the individual and social impacts of capitalism, the foolhardiness of racism, and the perils of idealism. Finally, we will conclude with a discussion of the ways that critics and general readers responded to The Piazza Tales when it was first published, as well as Melville’s later life and reputation as a writer.

From Triumph to Disaster

Until the autumn of 1851, Herman Melville’s personal and professional prospects seemed to be gradually improving. He was born on 1 August 1819 into a family that proudly boasted heroes of the American struggle for independence among their forebearers. Despite that auspicious genealogy, Melville’s father struggled to make his way among the cut-throat capitalists of the early United States, losing first his money, then his mind, and finally his life in the effort in 1832. After attending school, Herman Melville took up teaching, but, in 1839, he made the decision that shaped everything that came after: he signed on as a crew member of a ship sailing from New York to Liverpool, England. Acquiring a taste for life at sea, Melville returned to the United States and, in 1841, joined another vessel, the Acushnet, that voyaged to the Pacific on the hunt for whales and the precious, clean-burning oil contained in their blubber that helped light houses around the world. As the historian Greg Dening writes, the expedition was made up of days of boredom in which men tested their sufferance of one another and teased the limits of power and authority over them. Days of ugly labour, engulfed in greasy black smoke, covered in the blood and slime of death (94). After absorbing and then tiring of this dull, sometimes dangerous, and almost always hard and grimy working world, Melville jumped ship in the Marquesas islands and lived with its native people for a time, before returning home in 1844, following several other high-seas adventures. Drawing on all those experiences, Melville published four novels between 1846 and 1850, all well reviewed by newspapers and journals and embraced by the reading public. But, amid this extraordinary winning streak for a young, relatively inexperienced author, Melville became more adventurous, pushing the boundaries of the standard sea story in his allegorical novel Mardi and a Voyage Thither (1849), which, as one of his biographers puts it, began to lose his public, who wanted to hear more about the sirens and savages of Polynesia (Delbanco 5). Instead, Melville plunged yet deeper into experimentation in both subject and style in his sixth book, written after he married Elizabeth Shaw, of a wealthy and influential clan of New England jurists, and moved his growing family to a farm near the town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, with its view of the sometimes snow-shrouded hump of Mount Greylock. The day that Moby-Dick; or, The Whale was published, in early November 1851, was undoubtedly the happiest . . . of Melville’s life (Parker 883).

Then everything went wrong. Though it received some favourable notices in the press, the public response to Moby-Dick was underwhelming. During Melville’s lifetime, Andrew Delbanco points out, the novel never came close to selling out its first edition of 3,000 copies, and when, in December 1853, the unsold copies burned up in a fire in the publisher’s warehouse, few noticed and fewer cared (6-7). By the time of that catastrophe, however, Melville had already published his seventh and most challenging novel to date: Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852). Ignoring his waning popularity with critics and the public, perhaps even in growing contempt of it, Melville veered away from his initial aim of producing a best-selling potboiler and doubled-down on the metaphysical speculation and jabs at Victorian morality that had shocked and dismayed some readers of Moby-Dick, throwing in some barely coherent melodrama for good measure. As a result, even for twenty-first century readers familiar with more experimental forms of storytelling, Pierre reads like a narrative nervous breakdown (Robertson-Lorant 304). In its own day, the novel met with some of the most hostile reviews in the history of American literature. According to one newspaper, it was the craziest fiction extant and a work that might be supposed to emanate from a lunatic hospital. Another, warming to this theme, declared that Herman Melville has gone ‘clear daft’ and advised that he should be put under medical supervision or at least prevented from writing and publishing until he had regained his senses (Leyda 455-6, 463). The most damning critics, however, simply stated that Mr. Melville does not improve with time. His later books are a decided falling off, and his last scarcely deserves naming (Leyda 466) and that his fancy is diseased, his morality vitiated, his style nonsensical and ungrammatical, and his characters as far removed from our sympathies as they are from nature (quoted in Miller 310). It would be difficult for any author to come back from such a punishing critical disaster. But, at a time when Melville’s family obligations were becoming more pressing, the failure of first Moby-Dick and then Pierre was also a financial disaster.[1] His seventh novel sold only a little over 1,400 copies in the United States and Britain and, thanks to the poor terms that he felt compelled to accept when he contracted to write it, Melville ended up owing his publisher money. In response, his family began to pull political strings in an effort to find him paying work in the American diplomatic service. Melville’s career as a writer seemed to be over.

Creating The Piazza Tales

It was at this low point that Herman Melville turned away from his faltering career as a novelist and embraced magazine writing. Though he had written some short pieces for newspapers and other publications before 1852, a letter from the publishing firm of G.P. Putnam and Company, which was in the process of founding a new literary journal, arrived at just the right moment. The note announced the firm’s intention to publish an Original periodical and asked for Melville’s assistance as a contributor (Leyda 461). He was happy to oblige. Bartleby, the Scrivener; A Story of Wall-Street appeared in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, in two parts, in the November and December issues of 1853. The Encantadas; or Enchanted Isles, a longer work, was published in three installments in March, April, and May 1854. At least one American newspaper hailed it as a return to the form of Melville’s earlier, more approachable novels after what seemed like the misfires of Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre. One of the editors of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine wrote to let Melville know that the only complaint I have heard about the Encantadas was that it might have been longer (Leyda 488). Perhaps encouraged by these responses to his work, Melville wrote three more stories for the magazine: The Lightning-Rod Man, The Bell-Tower, and Benito Cereno, published in August 1854, August 1855, and in three issues between October and December 1855, respectively.[2] The editors at Putnam’s had some doubts about the form and style of both The Bell-Tower and Benito Cereno, but decided that they were too good to lose (Leyda 502). The magazine was certainly willing to pay for what Melville was producing. He likely earned just over $700 for his five stories, which came to about $5.00 per page––$2.00 more than the standard rate at Putnam’s. Melville’s relatives were justified in thinking him well paid, at least in relation to other magazine-writers of the day (Hayford 484).

Despite this handsome return on time invested, Melville was still plagued by money issues. It was in this context, needing to make more cash to cover his many obligations, that he suggested collecting his stories from Putnam’s Monthly Magazine and publishing them as a book, with an additional story, The Piazza, written specifically for the collection. Early in January 1856, the firm of Dix and Edwards let Melville know that it was disposed to undertake what was soon titled The Piazza Tales on financial terms agreeable to both parties (Correspondence 283), even though, as one of their editors put it, I don’t think Melville’s book will sell a great deal . . . He has lost his prestige,––& I don’t believe the Putnam stories will bring it up (Leyda 510). The Piazza Tales went on sale in May 1856. Whether or not its critical and public reception bore out Dix and Edwards’ grim predictions will be a subject for the last section of this introduction.

For now, however, it is worth noting that the world of mid-nineteenth-century periodical literature had certain advantages for a writer in Melville’s precarious professional and financial position. As Melville’s most diligent biographer, Hershel Parker, explains, in publications like Putnam’s Monthly Magazine stories were published anonymously and a reader would not have to get past the barrier of any devalued author’s reputation, though in practice names were often leaked to the press (163). For example, Bartleby the Scrivener appeared with no byline whatsoever, but, within a few months of its appearance, newspapers and fellow writers had identified it as a work by Mr. Melville (Leyda 484). The case of the The Encantadas was similar: it was published under the name Salvator R. Tarnmoor and yet it was clearly recognizable as Melville’s newest piece (Leyda 485). As easily penetrable as it was, this notional anonymity nevertheless gave Melville the opportunity to experiment with form and style, free from worries about the carping of hostile critics or the preconceptions of the wider reading public. In the process, as the scholar Graham Thompson writes, Melville helped invent the modern short story (57). That development was taking place, at the same time, among writers across the western world, Thompson points out; but, unlike Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy in Russia, or George Eliot in England, who began as writers of shorter works and then became novelists, the trajectory of Melville’s career was the opposite. He came to this new literary form with the methods of a novelist already well developed. In fact, the restraints imposed by the magazine format in terms of both length and editorial demands for popularity and sales, compelled Melville to hone his skills. He developed a more natural feel for dialogue and sustained control of narrative point of view (Parker 179) than were evident in his already-published novels, as well as a flare for succinct characterization that some critics of the time felt was the equal of anything found in the immensely popular writings of Charles Dickens. As one newspaper put it, in the stories that made up The Piazza Tales Melville’s style is . . . no longer quite the same. It is matured by the experience, the study, and the labors of years . . . Melville combines the excellencies of his early and later style, to the advantage of both (Leyda 485).

One of the practices from his earlier works that Melville continued to draw on to good effect in The Piazza Tales was his tendency to seek inspiration from his own life and from past or current events. Moby-Dick, for instance, had been shaped, in part, by his experience of the Pacific whale fishery aboard the Acushnet and by a tale about a white whale, Mocha Dick, written by Jeremiah Reynolds and published in New York’s Knickerbocker magazine in May 1839. Similarly, to give just two examples, Benito Cereno and Bartleby, the Scrivener were deeply grounded in Melville’s personal and wider contexts. As the historian Greg Grandin has demonstrated, Benito Cereno was an amalgam of Melville’s life as a sailor, a chapter from the American sea captain Amasa Delano’s Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817), and the history of the Haitian revolution. Modern scholars suggest that the tone and substance of Bartleby, the Scrivener were based on an equally complex series of sources, including the Bible, the influence of which permeated nineteenth-century American culture and society, though Melville’s own religious beliefs were agnostic at best; a book by James Maitland, The Lawyer’s Story, an excerpt from which was printed in several New York newspapers in early February 1853; and encounters Melville had with the clerks, or scriveners, who worked in the legal office of two of his brothers––a world of inky drudgery that Melville had always shunned for himself, but that he recognized as the possible setting for a short story that is now counted among the great achievements of world literature (Delbanco 212, 213).

Capitalism and Race

Both Bartleby, the Scrivener and Benito Cereno are open to any number of interpretations, as is the case with any substantial work of literature. While paying attention to the critic Dan McCall’s warning about the dangers of over-contextualization, of reducing Melville’s stories to mere reflections of his own circumstances or reading, the analysis suggested here is grounded in several of the key historical and literary contexts that Melville drew upon when writing both stories. It is also shaped, it must be admitted, by concerns that are still with us in the twenty-first century. The gulf of time separating our day from mid-nineteenth century America has rarely seemed so slight. Like the people for and about whom Melville originally wrote, we live in an era of growing division between the wealthy and the poor, and of increasing tension between races, punctuated by sometimes violent protest. In Bartleby, the Scrivener and Benito Cereno, Melville seems to have been both recording the strains and stresses of his own society and prophesying many of our current troubles.

Bartleby, the Scrivener starts in a straightforward, almost comical way, but its plot becomes knottier and darker as it moves towards its bleak denouement. The setting is an office in the heart of New York City’s financial district on Wall Street. The narrator, a lawyer who prides himself on doing good work among rich men’s bonds, and mortgages, and title-deeds, runs a business that is barely functional even before Bartleby arrives. His two clerks, nicknamed Turkey and Nippers, have the tedious job of copying and checking complex legal documents, but only amount between them to one full-time employee (Delbanco 213) thanks to their many eccentricities, sometimes abetted by an errand boy whom they call Ginger Nut. Needing extra help, the lawyer decides to hire another scrivener: the pallidly neat, pitiably respectable Bartleby. The lawyer is impressed by the extraordinary quantity of writing that his new clerk completes during his first two days of employment, but then, on the third day, Bartleby declines to accept one of the standard tasks assigned to him with the phrase I would prefer not to. As the story unfolds, Bartleby’s acts of passive resistance mount: he refuses to leave the office; he refuses to work altogether, instead silently staring out a window at a dead brick wall; he refuses to accept his termination, despite what the lawyer considers to be a generous severance offer; and, finally, he refuses to eat, starving himself to death in the Tombs, the New York City prison. The lawyer cannot explain Bartleby’s actions beyond the vague report that they might have been triggered by a previous clerkship at the Dead Letter Office at Washington, disposing of undeliverable mail. Perhaps no explanation is possible. As the critic Elizabeth Hardwick points out, Bartleby’s inscrutability is tied to his laconic nature. Out of some sixteen thousand words in the story, she notes, "Bartleby . . . speaks only thirty-seven short lines, more than a third of which are a repetition of a single line, the . . . retort: I would prefer not to" (324).

Revealing so little of himself to his officemates makes Bartleby into one of the most compelling of Melville’s creations, as do his efforts to come to grips with his working world. Along with Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut, Bartleby and his employer are trapped in a drearily mechanical existence (Reynolds 295). They must keep pace with the growing demands of their work, despite what the lawyer describes as its dull, wearisome, and lethargic nature. And the environment in which they labour offers no respite. There is no direct sunlight to relieve the oppressive atmosphere of their Wall Street office. As the narrator states, one set of windows looks out on the white wall of the interior of a spacious skylight shaft while the other offers only an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall. Overall, the lawyer declares with magnificent understatement, the views from his office are deficient in what landscape painters call ‘life.’ This constant gloom, which Bartleby refuses to leave until he is taken away to the Tombs, suggests that there is no happy present, much less future, for he and his coworkers: there is no getting ahead, no American Dream to be realized, through dedication and hard work. Instead, as the historian C.L.R. James writes, they are doomed, like millions of men and women in our own day, who spend their strength, vitality and capacity for living, day after day, taking down . . . checking, filing and then looking for documents which are to them as dead as the dead letters Bartleby handled (107). The demands of the lawyer’s business, servicing the financial needs of rich men, have transformed paperwork into one of the soul-destroying sins of American capitalism. It is also a source of conflict within the office and, by inference, society. The thing that Bartleby and the lawyer have most profoundly in common, paperwork, is also what drives them apart, the essayist Ben Kafka observes; The copying has to get done, whether Bartleby prefers to or not (219). The narrator wants to help Bartleby, but he is repeatedly thwarted by the silent scrivener’s unwillingness to meet the basic requirements not only of his job, but, ultimately, of human existence.

Melville further sharpens his critique of capitalism’s personal and social impacts by drawing on one of the oldest tropes of western Christendom. Bartleby can be seen as a Christ figure. After the lawyer announces the clerk’s advent as his employee, Melville teases us by having parts of Bartleby’s story parallel the schedule of Jesus’s resurrection (Delbanco 215). As we have seen, the scrivener first declares his preference to do nothing on his third day in the office, just as Christ is resurrected on the third day following his crucifixion. In addition, the narrator notes that he would have fired Bartleby after his first act of passive resistance had there been any thing ordinarily human about him. Instead, the lawyer convinces himself, after reading several works of theology, that he is dealing with a being sent to him for some mysterious purpose by God. The identifiers continue to accumulate. Bartleby, like Jesus, makes converts, with Turkey, Nippers, and the lawyer himself beginning to use the word prefer in their everyday speech. And, near the end of the story, the narrator denies having anything to do with Bartleby three times, just as Saint Peter denied Christ––"three times, Dan McCall emphasizes, not two, not four" (5).[3] Yet, if Bartleby is a stand-in for Jesus, he is a strange sort of messiah. Christ promises that, come the end of days, the meek shall inherit the earth; Bartleby seems to be promising a millennium free of paperwork. As a troubler of individual consciences, however, the scrivener proves every bit as effective as the preacher from Galilea. Bartleby’s odd gospel and squalid death upset the church-going lawyer’s spiritual complacency, filling him, for the first time in his life, with a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy. Whatever antagonism there might be between them as employer and employee, the lawyer discovers that he and Bartleby are both sons of Adam, joined by a common bond of earthly suffering. But, the narrator’s final cry––Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!––suggests that no amount of moral worth, or spiritual growth, can remedy what is wrong with this world. In other words, the lawyer’s failure to save Bartleby points to the hard lesson that one man following gospel dictates is no panacea for [the] systemic social problems (Hayes 215) created by capitalism.

If the narrator of Bartleby, the Scrivener is naïve to think that he can save the clerk from his fate, Captain Amasa Delano, in Benito Cereno, possesses a capacity for self-deception that is almost limitless (Delbanco 238). That naivety in the face of the growing foreboding that he should feel over the course of one day in 1799 is an essential element of the story’s plot. Commanding the Bachelor’s Delight, Delano encounters a ship drifting into a cove along the west coast of South America. It is the San Dominick: a Spanish-American slaver that, it is apparent even from a distance, has suffered some sort of catastrophe. Delano boards the vessel and discovers a strange scene: unchained slaves on the deck, some of them polishing hatchets; very few white crewmen anywhere to be found; and a dreary, spiritless captain, Don Benito Cereno, accompanied almost everywhere by his black servant or devoted companion, Babo. Pressed by Delano, Cereno explains, vaguely, that the San Dominick has been the victim of clumsy seamanship and faulty navigation, and that much of the crew have died, some of fever, along with the owner of the slaves, his friend Alexandro Aranda. Despite growing signals that all is not as it seems on this ship, Delano cannot bring himself to believe what becomes obvious to the reader––that what the American captain is witnessing is the aftermath of a successful slave mutiny. That realization only dawns on Delano when Cereno flings himself off his own ship, pursued by a vengeful Babo, intent on killing the Spaniard and seizing control of the Bachelor’s Delight. As the rebellious slaves try to make for the open sea, they tear away a canvas shroud covering the prow of the San Dominick, revealing the skeleton of the murdered Aranda fastened to the hull above the chalked words "Follow your leader." The story ends with Delano and his crew capturing the slave ship and putting down the revolt. Through a legal deposition by Cereno, we then learn what happened on his ship and, in a brief afterword, Babo’s grim fate.

For this short story to work, as we have already noted, it is necessary for much of the action to be described from the point of view of the gullible Captain Delano, but by adopting that necessarily limited perspective, Melville is also making a point about race relations in mid-nineteenth century America. The real Amasa Delano, on whose memoirs Melville drew, was as grasping a capitalist as any other sailor on the make in that period. As Greg Grandin notes, the real Delano spent most of his time on the slave ship trying to talk to the actual Benito Cereno about compensation. He was glad to offer his assistance to the drifting ship, but . . . he expected to be paid for his effort (217). And even after the real Delano put down the slave mutiny, he tried to get money out of Cereno, pursuing his claim in the courts of Spanish America. Melville leaves all of this out of his story. Instead, he presents a version of Delano that is kind-hearted but trapped by the superficialities of his own perception of the world (Grandin 234). It is simply impossible for Melville’s Delano to imagine a world in which black men and women would be intellectually capable of organizing and carrying out a successful mutiny, much less plotting to disguise their actions and forcing white men to play along. While the mastermind of the conspiracy, Babo, stays by Cereno’s side to make sure he plays his part in the subterfuge, Delano can see nothing but steady good conduct and a spectacle of fidelity on the slave’s part. If Delano suspects anyone of wrongdoing, it is Cereno, whose apparent haughtiness and aloof behaviour the American reads as bad manners or the actions of some low-born adventurer, masquerading as an oceanic grandee. For Delano, the slaves are too stupid to act on their own. This stubborn racism, coming from a man who admits that slavery breeds ugly passions in man, is only overcome when Cereno leaps off the San Dominick, followed by Babo with a knife in his hand. In this refusal to accept reality until the very moment when disaster looms, Melville’s Delano is an avatar for many white Americans of his day. For them, slavery was justified, in part, because they were convinced that black people were inherently inferior.

There are several ways in which Melville points out the foolhardiness of such racism in Benito Cereno. One of the most subtle, but significant, of his devices involves the time and setting of the story. The real Amasa Delano came across Cereno’s ship in 1805, not 1799, and it was named the Tryal, not the San Dominick. By making what may seem, at first glance, to be two small changes, Melville draws a parallel between his semi-fictional slave ship and one of the Atlantic world’s great dramas of human liberation: the Haitian revolution. As the historian Henry Adams writes, the northern plain of the French island colony of Saint Domingue was swept with fire and drenched with blood (257) in August 1791, as thousands of slaves rose up and smashed the tyranny of their plantation-owning masters. Under the leadership of the brilliant and charismatic black revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, this uprising turned into the only successful slave revolt in modern history. After defeating French

Reviews for The Piazza Tales

[poquette_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Piazza Tales is a collection of six stories of varying length, which are the only collection of short pieces published during Melville's lifetime. These stories present a good cross-section of Melville's writing and the themes he addressed, particularly in his later work.The title story "The Piazza" is a small masterpiece, which is about as direct a representation as one will find of Melville's unique combination of Romanticism, Stoicism and situational irony. To read this story and see these elements at work informs one's understanding of each of the stories that follow. The story opens with several pages of the "isn't nature sublime" type of writing which had been out of fashion for at least two generations before Melville's time. However, there is a point to this, because it sets the reader up for what eventually takes place.The narrator's house is situated in a valley that is surrounded by mountains, but the house is lacking a porch or veranda — Melville's term is "piazza." As he says, "The house was wide — my fortune narrow; so that to build a panoramic piazza, one round and round, it could not be." He could only afford to build on one side.After considering the vistas from each side, he settles upon the northern prospect, which provides a view of Greylock, a veritable "Charlemagne" among mountains. By and by, as he sits on his new porch gazing off into the distance, he gradually becomes aware of a construction high up the mountainside, which he finally decides must be a house rather than a barn because of the chance reflection in a glass window, which spoke of human habitation. As he recovers from a long illness, the "golden mountain-window" puts him in mind of the fairy queen Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream, which he had just been reading, and he fancies "the queen of fairies at her fairy window; at any rate, some glad mountain-girl." He decides it will do him good, "it will cure this weariness to look on her." So he prepares to "push away for fairy-land — for rainbow's end, in fairy land."After a long journey by horseback and by foot, he reaches the lone cottage, and there he finds — not a fairy queen or even a fairy princess, but a tired and lonely girl at her sewing who, come to find out, had been gazing longingly across the valley and wondering who lived in a house she had spotted.The narrator neglects to tell her that it is his house, for he has seen the futility of idle dreams of idealized faraway places. He returns home a wiser man. "Enough. Launching my yawl [figuratively] no more for fairy-land, I stick to the piazza. It is my box royal. . . . Yes, the scenery is magical — the illusion so complete.""The Bell Tower," which concludes the book, also ties its philosophical lesson up in a neat little bow: "And so pride went before the fall." This story is also a haunting tale, not so much by the events related, but in the poetic language Melville employs:"As all along where the pine tree falls, its dissolution leaves a mossy mount—last-flung shadow of the perished trunk; never lengthening, never lessening; unsubject to the fleet falsities of the sun; shade immutable, and true gauge which cometh by prostration — so westward from what seems the stump, one steadfast spear of lichened ruin veins the plain."No speed-reading is possible here. The very language forces the reader to take it slow and drink in the deepest meaning.The other stories include "Bartleby the Scrivener," a perennial favorite, "Benito Cereno," which draws on Melville's years at sea, "The Lightning-Rod Man," an amusing vignette, and "The Encantadas; or Enchanted Isles" — such an ironic title — which presents the Galapagos Islands in ten sketches. This latter has more in common with a long travel piece from The New Yorker than a short story. Melville's descriptions of the islands and various characters who dwelled there temporarily, seem more fact-based than imaginative. Two of the sketches have all the elements of good storytelling, but it is unclear whether the events portrayed actually occurred or were a seaman's tales. Regardless, "The Encantadas" is fascinating reading.The whole collection, in fact, is very much worth reading, and "The Piazza" seems to set a tone which gives a kind of unity to these otherwise very individual stories.

[drfp_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A pretty middling collection of tales, though nothing too inaccessible for Melville. The two novellas - Benito Cereno and Barteby - are definitely the stand outs here, though even suffer from requiring Melville to explain to you constantly why main characters behave in such ridiculous ways (why a lawyer would keep on paying a man who doesn't do his work or obey orders; why a captain sees so many signs of treachery but is repeatedly distracted by a sneeze or a swoon). The other tales aren't bad, but they're neither here nor there.

[lisamaria_c · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a collection of 6 shorter pieces, not a novel, published in 1856. As a whole I far prefer them to Moby Dick or Billy Budd. I don't care for "The Piazza" (although it does boast the rarity of a female character in Melville) or "The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles" (10 sketches about the Galapagos Islands that are far more "tell" than "show.") "The Lightening-Rod Man" about a pushy door-to-door salesman is mildly amusing and "The Bell-Tower" is a rather traditional story reminiscent of Poe or Hawthorne. But the prizes of this collection are the two novellas: Benito Cereno and Barteby, the Scrivener. Benito Cereno is a brilliant example of the "unreliable narrator" and the way that subverts the racist assumptions of the day (and the point of view character) is masterful. Barteby I've heard described as Kafkaesque. It's black comedy, but it is funny.