The Piazza Tales

by Herman Melville

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Genres: Classics, Fiction, Short Stories, Literature, American, Adventure, 19th Century

360 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1856

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the time of his death, Melville was no longer well known to the public, but the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival. Moby-Dick eventually would be considered one of the great American novels.
Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a merchant ship and then on the whaler Acushnet, but he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands. Typee, his first book, and its sequel, Omoo (1847), were travel-adventures based on his encounters with the peoples of the islands. Their success gave him the financial security to marry Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of the Boston jurist Lemuel Shaw. Mardi (1849), a romance-adventure and his first book not based on his own experience, was not well received. Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both tales based on his experience as a well-born young man at sea, were given respectable reviews, but did not sell well enough to support his expanding family.
Melville's growing literary ambition showed in Moby-Dick (1851), which took nearly a year and a half to write, but it did not find an audience, and critics scorned his psychological novel Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852). From 1853 to 1856, Melville published short fiction in magazines, including "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby, the Scrivener". In 1857, he traveled to England, toured the Near East, and published his last work of prose, The Confidence-Man (1857). He moved to New York in 1863, eventually taking a position as a United States customs inspector.
From that point, Melville focused his creative powers on poetry. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) was his poetic reflection on the moral questions of the American Civil War. In 1867, his eldest child Malcolm died at home from a self-inflicted gunshot. Melville's metaphysical epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land was published in 1876. In 1886, his other son Stanwix died of apparent tuberculosis, and Melville retired. During his last years, he privately published two volumes of poetry, and left one volume unpublished. The novella Billy Budd was left unfinished at his death, but was published posthumously in 1924. Melville died from cardiovascular disease in 1891.

Reviews

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

LA TERRA DELLE FATE


Arrowhead, la casa di Melville a Pittsfield, fotografata da Arthur C. Haskell nel 1934.

Il racconto che fornisce il titolo alla raccolta (1856, credo l’unica scritta da Melville) è quello che fu scritto per ultimo e che non uscì prima su rivista.
Sono sei in tutto: uno si chiama “Bartleby lo scrivano”, un altro “Benito Cereno, un terzo “Le Encantadas”…
E con questo credo sia chiaro che si tratta di un insieme di gemme importanti, tra le quali il breve racconto del titolo non sfigura affatto.
Solo di questo voglio parlare qui, perché gli altri menzionati sono troppo importanti e meritano discorso a parte.


Monte Greylock, nella catena degli Appalachi, in Massachusetts, che Melville vedeva da Arrowhead.

La piazza del titolo è una veranda: la veranda che un uomo fa costruire nella sua nuova casa in Massachusetts.
Veranda che non può girare intorno alla costruzione, ma può abbracciare un solo lato. L’uomo sceglie che sia quello che affaccia a nord, verso la montagna che domina la valle.
A fine giornata, quando la luce cambia, luce a cavallo (in inglese si chiama magic hour, ed è davvero una minuscola porzione di giornata dotata di luce magica), l’uomo si siede nella veranda a godere il panorama.
Sulla montagna, lassù in alto, c’è una luce, o un riflesso, qualcosa che brilla, e spicca: l’uomo ne è attratto, incuriosito.



Fino al punto da decidere di scalare la montagna per andare a vedere chi abita lassù: deve essere una persona ben felice, così in alto, vicino alla vetta, prossimo al cielo.
Quando arriva alla casa della montagna scopre che a viverci è una ragazza, Marianna, che passa la maggior parte del suo tempo a filare e guardare a valle, verso una casa con la veranda, chiedendosi chi possa essere il fortunato abitante, che sicuramente deve essere ben felice, felice di…

L’uomo scopre, insieme al lettore, di che natura è fatto un miraggio (come la balena bianca). Capisce di che natura è l’illusione.
Marianna e l’uomo sono due facce della stessa moneta, un doppio che condivide la stessa solitudine, lo stesso vuoto esistenziale, ma non possono stemperarlo incontrandosi, entrambi dovranno continuare a portarselo dentro dietro e addosso.


Edward Hopper: Second Story Sunlight, 1960. Whitney Museum, New York.

Melville mette insieme poche pagine, una quindicina, dense, struggenti, strazianti, e impietose.

Ma, ecco come massacrarle - racchiudendole, e definendole, con un proverbio:
l’erba del vicino è sempre più verde.
Non credo si farebbe di meglio tirando fuori:
non è tutto oro quello che luccica.

[Sergio · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Le Isole Incantate” di questo libro sono quelle che compongono l’arcipelago della Galàpagos, gruppo di isole di origine vulcanica situate nell’Oceano Pacifico nella zona pertinente all’Ecuador.

Quest’opera dello scrittore americano Herman Melville [1819-1991], pubblicata a puntate nel 1854, è l‘espressione di un diario di viaggio dell’autore che affronta non solo temi geografici e scientifici di grande godibilità ma anche la storia delle isole, il folklore locale ed episodi di naufragi e vicende di grande umanità, accadimenti di sopravvivenza e drammi umani, con un tono partecipe, privo di indulgenza, che li rende più veritieri.

In particolare colpisce il lettore il dramma della meticcia Hunilla giunta sull’isola Norfolk in compagnia del giovane marito e del fratello per raccogliere olio di tartaruga ignorando cosa il fato ha deciso per lei o le peripezie del generale Villamil saldato, per il suo impegno in guerra, dal governo peruviano con la concessione a titolo definitivo dell’isola di Charles sulla quale accadranno episodi di brutale violenza. Questa lettura quanto mai affascinante, mi ha letteralmente catturato, regalandomi un piacere inaspettato.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection consists of the following short stories of Herman Melville:

✨ Piazza - Really enjoyed this tale about the contrast between imagination and reality. Perhaps the old adage "the grass is always greener on the other side" would apply here. Melville writes with beautiful, flowing descriptions. 4-stars

✨ Bartleby - The infamous scrivener who would "prefer not to". I have posted a separate review for this story. 5-stars

✨ Benito Cereno - Uncomfortable read about mutiny on a slave ship. I have posted a separate review for this story. 4-stars

✨ The Lightning-Rod Man - Just a strange little short story. 2.5-stars

✨ The Encantadas - Sketches of the Galapagos Islands. Melville plays to his strength here, which is the power of description. However, I felt these sketches went on far too long and became somewhat boring. 3-stars

✨ The Bell-Tower - A strange, macabre tale of artist, creation, and overstepping the bounds. 3.5-stars

I give the overall collection 4-stars because it includes two of Melville's very best shorts.

[Tristram Shandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

“’What are you knotting there, my man?’
‘The knot,’ was the brief reply, without looking up.
‘So it seems; but what is it for?’
‘For someone else to undo,’ muttered back the old man, plying his fingers harder than ever, the knot being now nearly completed.”

This Gordian knot scene from the novella Benito Cereno seems to me typical of much of the writing with which Herman Melville graced the world as many of the yarns he spun abound in mysterious knots that resist easy untangling. The Piazza Tales, published in 1856, is a collection of six stories of different length, five of which Melville had submitted to Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in the three years before, many of them illustrating the enigmatical and ambiguous nature of Melville’s writing, as a way, perhaps, not so much to suggest a clear message which is merely to be unearthed, but to point out the idea that our view on the world is through a veil of different shades of grey – the colour grey being a recurring motif in the tale Benito Cereno. Perhaps no story is so much riddled with riddle in this collection as Bartleby, the Scrivener, which makes us wonder both about the leniency of the narrator and about Bartleby’s inner life. This is why I felt intrigued to write a separate text about this well-known story. All the other tales will be dealt with in more brevity in the following.

The collection opens with The Piazza, which is the only story that was not previously published in Putnam’s Monthly but which Melville wrote expressly as an introduction to the collected Piazza Tales. It is basically a straightforward tale about the grass being always greener on the other side, straightforward in meaning only, but not in style, which is needlessly wordy and purple. The Piazza might easily do the entire collection a disservice in that it frustrates and annoys the page-ploughing reader. Take my advice and skip it if the first two pages don’t appeal to you, but do read the other tales.

Benito Cereno, the longest tale in this collection, is based on an actual event, which was adapted by Melville. Aptly starting on a foggy morning on a sea of leaden grey covered with a sky of like hue, in the otherwise deserted port of a small Chilian island, the story tells us how an American captain of a sealer, by the name of Delano, and his crew encounter a mysterious Spanish ship in bad condition. They find the crew extremely decimated, the black slaves on board having taken over the duties of the missing sailors and officers as best they can, and the captain, Benito Cereno, in a withdrawn, haughty and gloomy mood, always accompanied by his faithful black servant Babo. Delano is described as an optimist, outgoing and naïve, and so, many of the things he sees, which would have put a more circumspect person on his guard, but briefly raise suspicions in him, which are then dispelled by Delano’s shame of thinking his opposite in number capable of foul play or by his romantic notion of the blacks as “noble savages” and, not least, by his conviction that they are not intelligent enough to hatch evil plots. Melville throughout keeps up an extremely high level of tension, adds numerous incidents that give reason to suspect danger but he also indirectly criticizes the “benevolent racism” of his protagonist and implies that slavery is an institution that will undermine the seeming innocence of the comparatively young American nation:

”Ah this slavery breeds ugly passions in man.”

The Lightning-Rod Man reads in many ways like a whimsical Poe story and it has us witness the visit of a salesman in lightning-rods and fears, the latter costing much more than a dollar a foot, at the house of a customer who does not set great store by his mercenary alarmism. The story ends like this:

”But spite of my treatment, and spite of my dissuasive talk of him to my neighbors, the Lightning-rod man still dwells in the land; still travels in storm-time, and drives a brave trade with the fears of man.”

What a clever caveat against all those lightning-rod men and women still being around in our present day and age, when they seem to come a dime a dozen, selling their pardons of a good conscience and the illusion of security!

Melville’s finest prose in this collection will probably be found in The Encantadas, a number of sketches on the Galápagos Islands, which are based on prior visits of Melville’s to those islands and describe the character of the isles, their flora and fauna but also tell the stories of the Chola widow, of a failed republic and of the evil hermit Oberlus. When I look at photos of the Galápagos Islands on the Internet, I cannot help thinking that Melville was playing the Smelfungus here to some degree, exaggerating the bleakness and inhospitableness of the place but he still manages to enchant his readers with his inimitable and sometimes quirky prose. Here is what he says about the penguins, so you see what I mean:

”Their bodies are grotesquely misshapen; their bills short; their feet seemingly legless; while the members at their sides are neither fin, wing, nor arm. And truly neither fish, flesh, nor fowl is the penguin; as an edible, pertaining neither to Carnival nor Lent; without exception the most ambiguous and least lovely creature yet discovered by man. Though dabbling in all three elements, and indeed possessing some rudimental claims to all, the penguin is at home in none. On land it stumps; afloat it sculls; in the air it flops. As if ashamed of her failure, Nature keeps this ungainly child hidden away at the ends of the earth, in the Straits of Magellan, and on the abased sea-story of Rodondo.”

All these sketches are introduced by passages from Edmund Spencer’s The Fairie Queene, which gives a sense of unity to those ten pieces often different in tone and style. His tale about the Dog-King, for instance, seems a political and satirical parable, not unlike Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, whereas the sketch about the Chola woman deftly plays with narrative perspectives and the gap between the knowledge of a narrator and a reader or listener.

The concluding story, The Belltower is written in the vein of Hawthorne’s tales and deals with the megalomania of an artist, who is ultimately killed by his own creation. Like the introductory tale, it is quite wordy throughout but this also adds to the Renaissance atmosphere of the text, and there are also passages, whose rhythm, when the words are read aloud, sounds like poetry, as this one: ”like sailors on yards, or bees on boughs, unmindful of lime and dust, and falling chips of stone”.

To sum it all up, The Piazza Tales may start with an unpromising tale but once you have got past it, you will often see Melville at his best.

[Note: I learnt a brilliant new word from Melville, which I plan to integrate into my active vocabulary: tatterdemalion.]

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

This works contains some of Melville’s best known shorter works, consisting of six short stories: “The Piazza,” “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” “The Lightning-Rod Man,” “The Encantadas” and “The Bell-Tower,” and a brief biographical sketch that contributes to one’s reading of the texts. While the sea is the natural setting for many of Melville’s best known works, only two of these stories take place on the waters – “The Encantadas” and “Benito Cereno.” I often get the sense reading Melville that he is more comfortable on the open waters of the sea than on land. His characters are often solitary men of great character. But, as he demonstrates in “Bartleby” and the other works in this collection, the tales of these men work equally well on the land as on sea, though Melville’s descriptions of the sea and of nature are more vivid than his descriptions of modern society, perhaps because the sea represents for the author freedom and openness, though not without its own share of problems created by both nature and civilization.

In these works, Melville deals with several themes but the thing that most sticks out to me is Melville’s dissatisfaction with the changes wrought by advancing civilization: technological progress and mechanization, dehumanization, etc. Melville was not alone in these concerns. We find similar worries in the works of Freud, Marx, Emerson, Dickens and many others of the period. It was a time of rapid and turbulent change. These great minds were not anti-change, so much, but they realized, as Emerson writes, that “Society never advances. . . . For every thing that it is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. . . . The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.” It was a give and take. But, was what we were giving up greater in some ways than what we received?

In Melville, we find this loss and we often come across characters who feel alienated from the society they live in, not unlike those characters we encounter in the works of Kafka. On the open waters of the sea, these men are able to escape from the problems of modern society (perhaps, though we often encounter law and mutiny [power] even there) but there they are confronted with the problems of nature, which like the major problems of society, many men feel powerless against.

This series of stories opens with “The Piazza,” a semi-autobiographical tale about longing, expectation and reality. The narrator’s visions of a magical fairyland are crumbled when he makes the long journey to the house whose lights dazzle him from afar only to find it a modest shack peopled by the lonely Marianna (she often daydreams of what the narrator’s house must be like) and her brother. His dreams dashed, the narrator returns to his farmhouse choosing to ignore reality and live in his fantasy. The next story, Bartleby, hardly builds on the first, but we still find a disappointing reality and a lonely man at the center of the story (Melville’s own persona built into his characters).

The story of Bartleby unfolds in a depressing, viewless Wall Street office, not the venue one expects for a work by Melville. It is – not unlike other Melville works, but to a much greater degree – a very sociological work. As sad as the case of poor Bartleby is, this is also a very humorous story and, though I don’t know that this work was an influence in any way, it is not difficult to view similarities between Melville’s Bartleby and John Kennedy Toole’s eccentric Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces. As much sympathy as one may attempt to feel for Bartleby throughout the course of the story, and as much as one may feel at the end when his former employer laments that he (Bartleby) was formerly employed in the Dead Letter Office (a place that represents rejection, to some degree, and alienation, an unsuitable fit for many, but particularly one of Bartleby’s constitution), it is almost impossible not to chuckle throughout as Bartleby delivers his iconic lines to his employer’s every request: “I would prefer not.” Comical though the story is at times, Melville’s deeper messages about dehumanization and hopelessness are anything but funny.

“Benito Cereno,” the next story in The Piazza Tales, has a much more serious tone than Bartleby, but it was – perhaps because I was too preoccupied throughout attempting to identify Melville’s views on slavery and allowing the racist messages to make me itch with discomfort – a difficult one for me to appreciate. On the one hand there are obvious moments of racism, but at the same time, the narrator laments, “this slavery breeds ugly passions in man.” Getting past all that, I was dazzled as always by the symbolism in Melville’s work and the ambiguity involved. I pondered long after finishing the story the exact meaning of the “follow the leader” remark. Was Cereno’s leader in reference here Aranda? Babo? Or perhaps even a Deity? I think it rests on the interpretation, though it would be interesting to determine precisely the author’s intent.

After a story like “Benito Cereno,” Melville returns to humor with “The Lightning-Rod Man,” a very short and entertaining tale allegedly based on Melville’s own experiences with such a peddler of wares, a man who uses fear to manipulate his buyer. On a basic level it is a wonderful critique of salesmen and advertising, on a deeper level it can be read as a story about religious conversion, particularly so because of the final words: “The hairs of our heads are numbered, and the days of our lives. In thunder as in sunshine, I stand in ease at the hands of my God. . . . I read in the rainbow that the Deity will not, of purpose, make war on man’s earth.”

The next story, and by far my favorite, is “The Encantadas; or Enchanted Isles.” The first three sketches in that work were simply (to draw upon the title itself) enchanting. Melville finds himself back on the seas, in very comfortable territory, painting a picture of the Galapagos Islands or Enchanted Isles that is simply mesmerizing. Much as “Moby Dick” cultivated in me a strong interest in whales for some weeks after reading it, so the first chapters of this work had me googling tortoises like a fiend. Much like in “Benito Cereno,” where Melville’s story was shaped by a primary work, Amasa Delano’s A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, here his story builds upon his own experiences and his readings on the Galapagos Islands, particularly Captain David Porter’s Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean. He also prefaces each sketch with excerpts from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, a technique that contributes greatly to the magic of each sketch as independent works of art in themselves. Reading the first sketch in this work, it is abundantly clear that Melville’s heart belonged to the sea, as his descriptions of the life on islands and the waters is so captivating: “It is to be doubted whether any spot of earth can, in desolateness, furnish a parallel to this group. . . . to them change never comes; neither the change of seasons nor of sorrows. . . . rain never falls. . . . they are cracked by an everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky. ‘Have mercy upon me,’ the wailing spirit of the Encantadas seems to cry.” This work awakened something in me like few works of literature do – maybe its exploration of unfamiliar terrains and species, or perhaps Melville’s mystical descriptions – and though it waned somewhat as the work progressed, it was still a marvelous piece.

Finally, in closing was “The Bell-Tower,” which, along with “The Piazza,” was in my opinion, one of the weaker works contained in this collection, but its critiques of modern society and technology and the work’s symbolism haunt the reader long after the work’s end. What implications does scientific progress have for humanity? Is there not some truth to Emerson’s claim that “For every thing that it is given, something is taken”?

Melville was, we find here in these stories (and his better known works, like Moby Dick), a man of his times, but also very much ahead of his time, a man who struggled with the rapidly changing life of the 19th century, with all its blessings and misfortunes, but who also transcended the limits of 19th century art and literature.

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been studiously avoiding Melville's Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, which is on the 1001 list. The members of the group reading that list here on Goodreads have a sort of love/hate reaction to it; one of the things most often mentioned against it is the writing style. I decided I could preview that style by reading some of the author's shorter fiction.

The title story is the one I liked best. The language and style are poetic, and the story lends itself quite well in that direction. Bartleby, The Scrivener is said to be a story of loneliness. Benito Cereno started rather slow, but was a great adventure tale which I like best after The Piazza. the Lightning-Rod man was very short - an example (to me) of one's need to resist false sales pitches. The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles, was not to my liking at all, and unfortunately, was the longest of the six stories. It might have done well in its time, but there are many documentaries now on the Galapagos, so that I was not unfamiliar with both the scenery and some of the stories. The Bell Tower was, well, different than stories I might pick up on my own.

The GR description calls these short stories. I think that is half true. Half of them are what I would think of as short stories and the other half amble toward novella. I'm glad to have read them, but I didn't like them well enough to pick up Moby Dick. Perhaps some day, but that day won't be soon.

[Ivan Stoner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think what I love about Melville is that he has an endless depth of earnestness. Melville is never condescending. Melville doesn't scoff. Melville believes in the best of himself, his reader, and the world.

There was this guy named Andrew who I went to school with. He always raised his hand in class to talk. Normally that kid is annoying. But Andrew was not, because Andrew didn't raise his hand for the pleasure of hearing his own voice, or because he was a suck up. Andrew just earnestly wanted a spirited and high-level discussion in class. Andrew thought everyone in class was amazing and was baffled that he was often the only one raising his hand. He could not understand why all these smart people who he was sure had interesting and brilliant things to say would sit there silently.

That's Melville. Read the Piazza Tales and aspire to your better self. Bartleby is a fantastic short story. Benito Cereno invites thoughtful analysis. The titular story (The Piazza) is an underappreciated gem. It's a rich account of the protagonist's view across a mountain vale, and his eventual journey to a picturesque (from a distance) homestead situated within. It is, I think, about struggles of faith. It is not, as appears to be often thought, a trite "grass is greener" parable.

[Quirkyreader · Rating 4 out of 5]

I gave this book a 4 because of "Bartleby The Scrivner", which happens to be one of my favourite stories. If the story wasn't in the book I would have given it no stars. Many of the stories were disjointed and I found myself thinking about other things while reading.

[Miguel Alves · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't believe the first four pages of the first story here are Melville debating on installing a piazza in his backyard while alluding to Classical Studies textbook stuff like the most pompously spoken home décor TV show ever. Pretty deflating beginning, but luckily, the other tales are mostly great, and even this first one grows into something intriguing by its last few pages.

"Bartebly" was damn great. Everyone was saying it but I was still surprised. Super modernist writing from the mid 19th century.

"Benito Cereno" would be incendiary as fuck if written today because of how ambiguous it is in its view of race and slavery. Written in a time when slavery was still widespread and culturally accepted in the States, it's extracts from the premise of a slave revolt on a ship some maddingly insidious commentary, but it's uncomfortably to read today because it doesn't take a firm stand morally, or maybe it does but it's not immediately clear. I'm not even sure, it requires more readings to even figure it out and that's pretty scary since anything like this written today would make the "moral message" pretty clear. Just from an artistic point of view, though, it's pretty fascinating how not being bogged down with a straightforward and simple moral message allows a story to have way more striking and multifaceted commentary, even if its politics are shakier.

As for the other tales, I just gotta say "Las Encantadas" has a 15 line long description of these giant turtles Melville saw in the Galápagos, and I never thought I would be so hyped to be reading about turtles. Melville makes them sound so out-of-this-world badass, using intense war and architecture imagery, and repetitions and I don't even know what other figures of speech, elevating the tortoises into gloriously decaying Roman colosseums. This paragraph alone is worth the whole book and made me remember what I loved about reading Moby Dick.

TL;DR Melville is awesome, turtles are awesome

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all) · Rating 2 out of 5]

A star and a half. My first acquaintance with Melville was a dramatised version of Bartleby the Scrivener shown on PBS back in the late 60s or early 70s. It was wonderfully well done and intrigued me.
Fast forward twenty-something years and I found myself forced (the operative word) to read Moby-Dick or, The Whale to help the students I tutor. I've so far read it twice, and it does not grow on me. Faugh. It was a huge FLOP when it came out, and if it hadn't been for Alexander Woolcott, it would have faded away, just like most of the rest of Melville's work. I honestly think that all of it hasn't because of the puffing of the Whale. Lyrical? Spare me.

Aside from Bartleby, the rest of the stories in this collection suffer from overdescription, overwriting and underdevelopment. It's all "words, words, words". We have a word for it in Spanish: Verborrhea. Melville basically admits plagiarising another source for the "Encantadas" story, and I've always wondered if he didn't just copy an encyclopedia entry on whales wholesale. Wouldn't surprise me.
If you love it, well done you. Long may you wave. I don't.
I'm done here--I hope.

[Pamela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining collection of short stories/novellas, full of lush descriptions of landscapes and oceans. Bartleby the Scrivener is probably the most famous of the collection, a quirky story of a young lawyer’s clerk who suddenly refuses to do the tasks he is employed for. I also enjoyed the tense and mysterious Benito Cereno and another quirky offering The Lightning Rod Man

[Everett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here’s a pretty thought provoking piece about slavery, liberties, and Melville’s Benito Cereño-https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/ca...

[Jane Cathleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bartleby is fantastic but the other stories are dull. Would not recommend.

[birdbassador · Rating 4 out of 5]

i picked it up for bartleby which i had somehow never read but en passant with all the allegorical stuff about desire etc. seems to be the resounding message that it is incredibly easy to trick sailors

[Vera Maharani · Rating 2 out of 5]

...and with this ended my No-Fun Reading November.

Melville is truly a master in description. I think he loved that descriptive style so much, I feel like these short stories consisted of 85% description. He could describe sea and I would feel the seasickness. In fact, mostly I feel only seasickness. Considering currently I am far away from any large body of water, I would say that is something.

No doubt this is an artful collection of short story (I am particularly intrigued by 'Bartleby the Scrivener') but most of the time I could not enjoy it. At some point my head aches. I truly doubt my reading comprehension skill after I read this, because I need to read some part several times to understand it, although Melville have described it so elaboratively. Perhaps that elaborateness is the problem, I don't know...

I am glad I finally finished it, though, I hate not finishing books. But to read it again? I would prefer not to, thank you.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ecantadas parodies Biblical cadence, travel articles, naturalistic reportage, Dante, and Spenser; in a mix that is comic and bizarre, Melville’s Inferno. Other highlights of this underrated collection are the dark Faustian bargain/Frankenstein/Tower of Babel styled, science and hubris, parable of the “Bell Tower”, grotesque comedy and allegory of the exploitation of fear for commerce in “Lightning Rod Man”, brutal farce of “Benito Cereno”, and that masterpiece of narrative genius and absurd comic horror “Bartleby”

[Sheida · Rating 1 out of 5]

I enjoyed Bartleby's story but the rest of the short stories in this book bored me to tears.

[Illiterate · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Bartleby" and "Benito Cereno" are amazing. The other tales are more uneven.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

(1856). Never reprinted in Melville’s lifetime, though it contains Bartleby and Benito Cereno. Can you imagine? I didn’t reread those two, but the rest of the stories are:

——
The Piazza—1856. Densely poetic. The syntax is such that you’d think Melville were writing in meter, in trochees. (At one point it sounds like Hiawatha, but then Melville was writing like that before the Longfellow poem). Charming story. Allegorical—mysteriously so, but a clue can be found in this passage:

“…I could not bear to look upon a Chinese creeper of my adoption, and which, to my delight, climbing a post of the piazza, had burst out in starry bloom, but now, if you removed the leaves a little, showed millions of strange, cankerous worms, which, feeding upon those blossoms, so shared their blessed hue, as to make it unblessed evermore—worms, whose germs had doubtless lurked in the very bulb which, so hopefully, I had planted…”

Similarly when the narrator peers too closely into his “fairyland” he finds a miserable, complaining girl who looks upon his dim and distant house on an opposite hill as her own fairyland. As with the wormy flowers, something about beauty doesn’t bear too close a scrutiny. However, Melville is wise enough to shrug off this “ingrate peevishness” and to see a morbid sensitivity for what it is. Later, another metaphor:

“…she pointed down the steep to a small garden patch near by… where, side by side, some feet apart, nipped and puny, two hop-vines climbed two poles, and, gaining their tip-ends, would have then joined over in an upward clasp, but the baffled shoots, groping awhile in empty air, trailed back whence they sprung.”

The two will not be repeating this visit.

Allusions:

Melville makes an oblique and amused reference to the recent European Spring.

Also it was nice to see the Emerson quote “He builded better than he knew,” from the 1846 poem The Problem.

——
The Lightning-Rod Man—1854. Absurdist tale, satirizing lightning safety precautions. The narrator finally shuns these as blasphemy, which in some sense Safetyism is.

“While I thus pleasantly spoke, the stranger eyed me, half in wonder, and half in a strange sort of horror…”

Another Melville story where the narrator out-crazies the crazy.

———
The Encantadas—1854.

“Ropes were dropt over, and presently three huge antediluvian-looking tortoises, after much straining, were landed on deck… black as widower's weeds, heavy as chests of plate… shaggy, too, here and there, with dark green moss, and slimy with the spray of the sea. These mystic creatures, suddenly translated by night from unutterable solitudes to our peopled deck, affected me in a manner not easy to unfold. They seemed newly crawled forth from beneath the foundations of the world… With a lantern I inspected them more closely.”

Everyone’s favorite version of Melville: nature writing, travelogue, lore, musings, poetic fancies. There’s a really heartbreaking scene where Melville’s ship has to abandon a bunch of dogs on an island, and a crazy story about a grandiose misanthrope who took dominion over one of the isles.

Marginalia: Melville must’ve succeeded the HMS Beagle’s exploration of the Galápagos Islands by just a few years. Seems like Darwin was also struck by their forbidding aspect, calling the archipelago “that land of craters.”

More quotes: “As a secure retreat, an undiscoverable hiding-place, no spot in those days could have been better fitted. In the centre of a vast and silent sea, but very little traversed—surrounded by islands, whose inhospitable aspect might well drive away the chance navigator—and yet within a few days' sail of the opulent countries which they made their prey—the unmolested Buccaneers found here that tranquillity which they fiercely denied to every civilized harbor in that part of the world.”

“…this man, feeling that it was sure death to remain there, and that nothing worse than death menaced him in quitting it, killed seals, and inflating their skins, made a float, upon which he transported himself to Charles's Island, and joined the republic there.”

——
The Bell-Tower—1855. Cool short story. Gothic sci-fi set in renaissance Italy. Melville supplies several possible readings to the mystery: mundane, supernatural, and religious.

Quote: “The homicide was overlooked. By the charitable that deed was but imputed to sudden transports of esthetic passion… A kick from an Arabian charger; not sign of vice, but blood.”

Marginalia: Melville refers to that particular 19th c. “enthusiasm” of finding the supposed wellspring of life: “As little did his scheme partake of the enthusiasm of some natural philosophers, who hoped, by physiological and chemical inductions, to arrive at a knowledge of the source of life, and so qualify themselves to manufacture and improve upon it.”

[wally · Rating 5 out of 5]

bartleby..."i would prefer not to..." read this one, of the 6 tales w/i the piazza tales, in high school. could be i read them all, just don't recall, but bartleby made an impression. "i would prefer not to." HA HA HA HA! ginger nut, "he's a little luny.......all those dead letters...

began "the lightening-rod man" last night...and finished just now...yeah, "the lightening-rod man still dwells in the land."

onward and upward.

enchanted islands, whatever, starts out w/this spooky strange description of the galapagos, i guess. strange currents, even stranger placements of islands on a map that aren't there to explain the currents. turtle dinner!

seems like most of these stories contain an element of the macabre.

the six tales: the piazza, bartleby, benito cereno, the lightning-rod man, the encantadas, and the last, the bell-tower.

i don't the placement, in time, of melville and most-holy darwin--it'd be even more of a hoot if melville was never aware of darwin, if he came before the best.

as in the encantadas, there are tales of the galapagos--the place where most-holy darwin put on his thinking cap and changed the world. ha! what's so incredibly delicious about this story of the six is the 3rd sketch, as melville titled each description of one of the islands--rock rodondo.



rock rodondo is this tall--250'--tower of rock inhabited mainly and only by birds....'suddenly an innumberable flight, of harmefull fowles about them fluttering cride, and with their wicked wings them oft did smight, and sore annooyed, groping in that griesly night.'

ha!

the birds, the birds, most-holy darwin's birds. the hoot--ha!--is that this rock, seen from a distance, is oft mistaken for the sails of some spanish admiral's ship, stacked up with glittering canvas. the birds, you see, have shat upon the rock, and there is along birdlime streaks of a ghostly white staining the tower from sea to air, readily accounting for its sail-like look from afar.

tell that to the congregation assembled before the feet of most-holy darwin--all the knotty, pining for an excuse from sunday school....ha ha ha ha! but no, alas, the heretic, me...what i find so highly amusing and satisfying about the "debate" over creation/evolution is the irony so present in the assembled congregation of most-holy darwin. they will brook no "debate". the debate, as mr gore is wont to say, is over.

nevermind all the "assume"..."presumably"...this that and the other thing...the debate is over, evolution is a fact...burn the heretic, or at least, minimize and marginalize them to the margins of history. how noble is man.

in this sketch, too, melville says, i know not where one can better study the natural history of stange seafowl than at rodondo...so yeah, i'll have to take a look at the chronology of the two, melville and most-holy darwin.

...say like "natural selection"---man has been friggin with 'natural selection' the more to assuage his guilt that a shore bird should not be selected for advancement...and if that means putting binders and shackles on his fellow man to the point where the poor son-of-a-bitch starves, so be it. how noble is man.

the 5th sketch, about the frigate and the ship flyaway is another macabre tale--this one about what seems like a ghost-like vessel, there and gone again. a short piece.

the 7th sketch is ripe for hollywood...an isle where a man, rewarded for his efforts for the spanish king, is given an island where he sets up his kingdom, complete w/willing pioneers he recruits from peru. we've probably all read...is it jack...gaaaaa, can't think of the writer's name....he wrote the girl next door....have a copy out in the porch, but anyway, the creole, melville 'forgot his name'...ha!....sets up shop and things come to pass. so they're on this island and he has an army of dogs...etc etc...

the 8th sketch, norfolk isle and the chola widow is a sad tale, full of woe. if you're a dog lover, this one pulls on the heart strings...hunilla is the chola widow....teeta & tomoeeta, two that left with her, her dogs.

i enjoyed some words in this one...'if some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. events, not books, should be forbid....' etc.

hood's isle and the hermit oberlus, sketch ninth...another good one....today wer have hermit oberlus abounding in plenty...like t.s. eliot said...about the ribbon roads...man living on them, not knowing or caring who his neighbor be unless his neighbor make too great a disturbance....or in other stories, i forget where....here was a man who so hated society that he lived aloof, miles away.

people lament the city, the congregants there, but all i see around me are those who have so shunned the society of men that they are islands amongst themselves. we pride ourselves on being "diverse" yet we are anything but. if hell is other people, that is no where more evident than in the hatred and hostility i've no doubt my words about most-holy darwin will trigger. man dis-aggregates more than he congregates and if he congregates, you can bet that there those on the out looking in will get the shit beat out of them, sooner, rather than later. you see this on-line, as well, as we have terms such as "newbies" "trolls" etc, often misapplied simply due to the heat of the moment and the ability that anonymity offers.

there's a great image in this one about the hermit: plebian garter snakes to this lord anaconda...


the last tale, the bell-tower is macabre in spades. also, it harkens back to redondo rock. ha! this guy builds this tower, works at installing a mechanism of bells, etc. baddadonna by name, him. the last line is great....'and so pride went before the fall.'

i love it! why? because of the esteem and avowed 'righteousness' of those who congregate at most-holy darwin's shrine. here we have a tale of a tower of rock, often mistook for something else, this tower of rock where most-holy darwin plied his trade. in this mad mad mad world of ours, where man is to be made guilty for the natural selection of nature, man is shackled and starved for a creed. and we have no problem with that!

in fact, tempers flare and those who disagree with the dogma are shunted to the side, ignored, belittled, and nobody sees the irony in that! ha ha ha ha ha! shall one call himself galileo and ask, well, what did the whales do, dear heart? whilst waiting for all those beneficial mutations to occur? tread water? and then, when the whales said, fuck that noise, we're going back to the ocean, did they again, tread focking water, again for millions of years, presumably waiting again for those beneficial mutations? ha ha ha ha ha!

and those oh-so-clever pundits of the knotty piners, poking fun and ridicule at the bishop who declared unequivocally that the world began on october 4, 4004 b.c......these folk who poke fun at that declaration, have no problem accepting, w/o argument or thought....the idea that there is world enough and time enough for how many millions of coincidental mutations to happen, one after another, whales treading water whilst waiting..sheesh!

so, go ahead, shunt me to the side, marginalize and minimize....this is the way the world works.


these stories were a joy to read, more so for the macabre element, something that seems alien, given the assumptions i was schooled in....but really, when you consider moby dick...not really unexpected, nessy pas?

[Markus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two duds but Bartleby is enough to elevate any collection

[Davis Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I consider this to be the greatest collection of short fictions to ever be composed by an American writer. The supernatural, the sublime, the ironic, the grotesque, the speculative, the absurd, and the eternal exist in equal and overwhelming proportion in Melville’s whimsical, exalted prose; each story is a high adventure. I’ve examined the two great novellas - Bartleby and Benito Cereno - in separate reviews, but here are some brief thoughts on the other four:

The Piazza: If Melville had only written this piece, we would be desperately searching for any other sheets of paper that might perhaps have belonged to him. An ethereal metatheatrical fantasia, as opulently layered and textured as a Wagner opera and as pure and rustic as a folk tune. A fundamental manifesto of Romantic doctrine and the foundational Melville text.

The Lightning-Rod Man: It’s easy to be taken slightly aback by this brief parable, significantly more didactic and self-conscious than his other works. But it’s a standout model of a true short story, and I’m surprised that it hasn’t been frequently anthologized.

The Encantadas: Aside from the formal innovation (it’s obviously a novella...or is it?) and the mystical lyricism, I was a touch disappointed by how this was handled and would probably call it the weakest story in the collection. In a way it’s Melville at his best - experimental, beautiful, and contemplative - but it seemed to ramble on instead of packing relevance into every sentence as is his norm, reading like a disheveled travel memoir, which was maybe the intention. Still a consummate display in the art of literary atmosphere, and a good example of how to make something interesting out of almost entirely descriptive prose.

The Bell Tower: Employing a heavy, unwieldy, yet richly absorbing prose that points to the lexical gymnastics of Billy Budd, Melville concocts a deceptively straightforward tale that clearly betrays a deep affinity with the other great American Dark Romantics - Hawthorne and Poe - but the epic quality of its presentation and its more naturalistic than psychological emphasis bespeaks the author's entirely distinct voice.

[Nina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Having already read Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno, I decided I might as well read the remaining four short stories of The Piazza Tales. With the exception of The Bell-Tower, I really needn't have bothered. The Piazza is so long-winded and written with such flourishing language (sentences longer than a page with roughly 50 commas in them) that it is difficult to separate the highfalutin prose from the story's substance. The Lightning-Rod Man doesn't seem to have much substance at all, and The Encantadas was so boring that I ended up just skimming it (a word of warning to fellow animal lovers - skip this one if you're fond of dogs and turtles). However, The Bell-Tower is quite good, at least for the most part - it has a quality reminiscent of Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne - but then it gets a little too long-winded and ends up over-interpreting what would have been a nice, little gothic tale if left unexplained. As for Bartleby, the Scrivener and Benito Cereno, see separate reviews here (Bartleby) and here (Benito).

[Kirk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Depending on which biography you read, Melville was either so bitter over the failures of MOBY DICK and PIERRE that he started writing extended allegories on the lameness of the literary marketplace OR he was just plain old batshit bonkers. Either way, it's hard to read these stories without projecting the myth of the tormented Romantic artist onto them. That's too bad, because the biographical angle gets in the way of some truly fantastic writing. There is "Bartleby," of course, and "Benito Cereno," but the lesser-known ones deserve more attention: I'm particularly fond of "The Lightning-Rod Man." My fave, however, is "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" (which didn't originally appear in THE PTs but has been collected with them throughout the 20th cent). This sketch is so diabolically simple in structure it's easy to overlook the more complex points it makes about the exploitation of labor. I guess I'm more of a Melville guy than a Hawthorne; MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE seems tame compared to this collection.

[Lisa (Harmonybites) · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gets four stars overall, but only because of the great "Bartleby the Scrivener" and the very good "Benito Cereno", both of which I had already read. The rest of the stories are a mixed bag: the title story has an interesting premise but little payoff; "The Encantadas" is a weird mix of poetry, travelogue and fiction (I would have rather read an extended story just about Hunilla, the stranded widow of Norfolk Isle); "The Bell-Tower" is an intriguing mystery that Melville ruins by over-explaining at the end; and "The Lightning-Rod Man" is a mediocre fairy tale. The slapped-together feel of this collection makes it almost seem like some shady modern-day publisher plundered the public domain for a cheap e-book, but Melville actually published this during his lifetime, way back in 1856.

[Cheryl]

When I removed into the country, it was to occupy an old-fashioned farm-house, which had no piazza—a deficiency the more regretted, because not only did I like piazzas, as somehow combining the coziness of in-doors with the freedom of out-doors, and it is so pleasant to inspect your thermometer there, but the country round about was such a picture, that in berry time no boy climbs hill or crosses vale without coming upon easels planted in every nook, and sun-burnt painters painting there. A very paradise of painters. The circle of the stars cut by the circle of the mountains.

Some with blatantly racist themes, continuing the debate as how we think about art when an artist is problematic. His narrative about nature is of the times, perpetuating it as scary and desolate, and I really, really wonder if any part of him on viewing the Galapagos tortoise felt any awe at all. It doesn't seem human to not feel something. Why I dislike the classics.

Now, for a house, so situated in such a country, to have no piazza for the convenience of those who might desire to feast upon the view, and take their time and ease about it, seemed as much of an omission as if a picture-gallery should have no bench; for what but picture-galleries are the marble halls of these same limestone hills?—galleries hung, month after month anew, with pictures ever fading into pictures ever fresh. And beauty is like piety—you cannot run and read it; tranquillity and constancy, with, now-a-days, an easy chair, are needed. For though, of old, when reverence was in vogue, and indolence was not, the devotees of Nature, doubtless, used to stand and adore—just as, in the cathedrals of those ages, the worshipers of a higher Power did—yet, in these times of failing faith and feeble knees, we have the piazza and the pew.

In summer, too, Canute-like, sitting here, one is often reminded of the sea. For not only do long ground-swells roll the slanting grain, and little wavelets of the grass ripple over upon the low piazza, as their beach, and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray, and the purple of the mountains is just the purple of the billows, and a still August noon broods upon the deep meadows, as a calm upon the Line; but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the silence and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house, rising beyond the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the Barbary coast, an unknown sail.

BARTLEBY

My chambers were up stairs, at No. —— Wall street. At one end, they looked upon the white wall of the interior of a spacious skylight shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom.

This view might have been considered rather tame than otherwise, deficient in what landscape painters call “life.” But, if so, the view from the other end of my chambers offered, at least, a contrast, if nothing more. In that direction, my windows commanded an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade; which wall required no spy-glass to bring out its lurking beauties, but, for the benefit of all near-sighted spectators, was pushed up to within ten feet of my window panes. Owing to the great height of the surrounding buildings, and my chambers being on the second floor, the interval between this wall and mine not a little resembled a huge square cistern.

THE ENCANTADAS; OR, ENCHANTED ISLES

Take five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outside city lot; imagine some of them magnified into mountains, and the vacant lot the sea; and you will have a fit idea of the general aspect of the Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles. A group rather of extinct volcanoes than of isles; looking much as the world at large might, after a penal conflagration.

And as for solitariness; the great forests of the north, the expanses of unnavigated waters, the Greenland ice-fields, are the profoundest of solitudes to a human observer; still the magic of their changeable tides and seasons mitigates their terror; because, though unvisited by men, those forests are visited by the May; the remotest seas reflect familiar stars even as Lake Erie does; and in the clear air of a fine Polar day, the irradiated, azure ice shows beautifully as malachite.

But the special curse, as one may call it, of the Encantadas, that which exalts them in desolation above Idumea and the Pole, is, that to them change never comes; neither the change of seasons nor of sorrows. Cut by the Equator, they know not autumn, and they know not spring; while already reduced to the lees of fire, ruin itself can work little more upon them. The showers refresh the deserts; but in these isles, rain never falls. Like split Syrian gourds left withering in the sun, they are cracked by an everlasting drought beneath a torrid sky.

Neither will any one be surprised at meeting these last, after observing the conflicting currents which eddy throughout nearly all the wide channels of the entire group. The capriciousness of the tides of air sympathizes with those of the sea. Nowhere is the wind so light, baffling, and every way unreliable, and so given to perplexing calms, as at the Encantadas.

Against my own purposes a pause descends upon me here. One knows not whether nature doth not impose some secrecy upon him who has been privy to certain things. At least, it is to be doubted whether it be good to blazon such. If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men? Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid. But in all things man sows upon the wind, which bloweth just there whither it listeth; for ill or good, man cannot know. Often ill comes from the good, as good from ill.

[Emily D. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the writing of Melville, and the on-the-seas backdrop is always fun and exciting. I had already read Bartleby on its own and didn't realize it was a part of a larger collection of stories. "Benito Cereno" was the longest and most interesting of the remaining stories. It is about as terribly racist as one could get and super disturbing to take in. Aside from that aspect, the plot is highly suspenseful and I read it with a constant anxiety and annoyance at the main character's back-and-forth between suspicion and calm.
The first Piazza tale and the Lightning-Rod man were interesting but the last two stories couldn't hold my interest very well. The stories individually range from 2 stars to 4.

[Enrico · Rating 2 out of 5]

Now I see why people only ever read Bartleby and Benito Cereno 😴😴😴

[Jan Gerd · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bought this because I liked "Bartleby, The Scrivener" by Melville, which is part of this collection. Turns out - none of the other stories in the book is as good as Bartleby (in my opinion).