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"They but reflect the things": style and rhetorical purpose in Melville's "The Piazza Tale"
Style, Spring, 2001 by Scott A. Kemp
In reviewing the syntactical components in the story, what becomes evident in just a few sentences is the issue of perspective. Just as in Moby-Dick, these rhetorical choices announce a primary preoccupation of the tale itself: human perception of reality is reflected by the arbitrariness of linguistic representation. The language of the unnamed narrator in "The Piazza Tale" is entangled, just as his perception is. So when he says the farmhouse he bought "had no piazza--a deficiency the more regretted," he is also speaking--in a nice representation of dramatic irony--of a "deficiency" he has with viewing the world around him, a deficiency in perspective. And as his baroque sentence style and direct allusions illustrate, that deficiency is not just physical; it is also psychological: he is embedded in romantic ideations that are at odds with his lived reality--a reality, due to his economic constraints, he seems unwilling to accept psychologically.
The stylistic excess of the narrator's sentences is also reflected in the tale's Renaissance allusions. One of the central allusions in the tale is to Cervante's Don Quixote. Coming just after the speaker sets off on a quest to locate what he perceives as a "fairy-land," the allusion informs both the nature of the questor and the reading of his quest. Seeing "drowsy cattle" that "seemed to walk in sleep," the narrator says, "Browse, they did not--the enchanted never eat. At least, so says Don Quixote, that sagest sage that ever lived" (6). Characteristically, the narrator inverts the normal order of subject and verb, placing "browse" awkwardly at the beginning of the sentence. Additionally, the allusion illustrates to what extent he is immersed in the system of values that Don Quixote represents--one also commensurate with the baroque style of his sentences. It can be argued that the narrator is being self-mocking in saying Quixote is the "sagest sage who ever lived." But even if he is, he is lost on just ho w ironically influenced he is by Quixotic values. A passage from Don Quixote is illustrative. In the pitch black of night and hearing the banging of hydraulic hammers, Don Quixote, "fearless as ever, climbed up on Rocinante and, taking up his shield, set his lance" and in hyperdramatic fashion said,
Let me tell you, Sancho, my friend, that I have been born in this Age of Iron, by the will of Heaven, in order to restore the Age of Gold--or the Golden Age, as they usually call it. I am the man for whom all dangers are expressly reserved, and grand adventures, and brave deeds. I, let me say once more, am the man destined to resurrect the Knights of the Round Table, the twelve Peers of France and the Nine Worthies, and the man who will make the world forget the Platirs, the Olivantes and Tirants, the Phoebuses and Belianises, and the whole mob of once famous knights errant, by accomplishing such extraordinary things, in this Age in which I find myself, such wonders, such feats of arms, that they will forever darken the brightest of theirs. (103)
