Featured White Papers
Content provided in partnership with
"They but reflect the things": style and rhetorical purpose in Melville's "The Piazza Tale"
Style, Spring, 2001 by Scott A. Kemp
The solution for his "weariness," as he sees it, is to journey to his "one spot of radiance" (4). Again, the nature of the narrator's allusiveness (wide ranging) has given rise to the persistent belief that the narrator's quest is ultimately emblematic of an intellectualism equated with "enlightened ignorance," as Richard Fogle says (91).
In this view, the quest is about the limitations of an intellectualism that privileges fancy to observation. Perhaps so, but we cannot ignore the fact that the narrator associates his fairy land with economic salvation. He blatantly says that "viewed through the rainbow's medium, it glowed like the Potosi mine." Once again, as with his other economically charged language in the story, this statement immediately elicits in his thoughts his "work-a-day neighbor" (5). It is important to emphasize that the narrator's illusory perception is also displayed syntactically. Both of the narrator's preceding statements are highly figurative: not only does "glow" reflect the associatio n he is making between the Potosi mine and the glimmer on the mountain, it also represents the "glow" of his fancy with regard to that; and it is the "rainbow's medium"-figuratively-that also clouds his perception of reality. His escape is away, as Fogle rightly points out, from the "hard fact" of daily existence in favor of an "illusion" (91), but the nature of the illusion is economic: "remembering that rainbows bring out the blooms," the narrator says, he believes that "if one can get to the rainbow's end, his fortune is made in a bag of gold" (5). If the questor is a mouthpiece for Melville, as so many critics believe, it is a Melville concerned with a lot more than the nature of artistic representation or the creative imagination of the writer. That he is also concerned with a value system based on the individualistic desire to achieve a lifestyle of material wealth and ease is presented stylistically as well as topically.
