significant silence of race: La Cousine Bette and "Benito Cereno", The

In a number of works, Melville describes the interaction of dominant and marginalized cultures in a way that assumes an ethnographic understanding of the marginalized position. In his review of Francis Parkman's The California and Oregon Trail, Melville notes,

...when in the body of the book we are informed that it is difficult for any white man, after a domestication among the Indians to hold them much better than brutes; when we are told too, that to such a person, the slaughter of an Indian is indifferent as the slaughter of a buffalo; with all deference, we beg leave to dissent.

It is too often the case, that civilized beings sojourning among savages soon come to regard them with disdain and contempt. But though in many cases this feeling is almost natural, it is not defensible; and it is wholly wrong. Why should we condemn them? (231)

Parkman failed, according to Melville, in judging whether "savage" could not be happier or better than "civilized." Melville criticizes Parkman's denigration of the Indian by arguing that it is impossible to avoid the "brotherhood" of primitive and civilized much longer, for even today's civilized societies must acknowledge their primitive ancestors. In asserting "Let us not disdain then, but pity," Melville offers a response that still falls short of complete acceptance of the marginalized position as valid, yet he moves one step further along a path from intolerance to appreciation of difference.

Provisionally accepting the moral judgments of the narrative audience in order to follow the course of the fiction, the reader must shift to a position as part of the authorial audience that can criticize the cultural assumptions presented by the narrator. The flesh-and-blood reader constructs an ethical system that suits the world-view of the narrative, but he or she must also be able to interrogate that view. As Hillis Miller acknowledges,

An ethical judgment is always a baseless positing, always unjust and unjustified, therefore always liable to be displaced by another momentarily stronger or more persuasive but equally baseless positing of a different code of ethics. And yet the imposition of a system of ethics is absolutely necessary. It is necessary in the double sense that it has to be made and that there can be no civil society without it. (55)

As a comparative reading of narratives by Balzac and Melville demonstrates, the moral scheme envisioned by the narrative audience is contingent, but it must be assumed before it can be challenged by the authorial audience and the flesh-and-blood reader. The critical project must attempt more than one way of looking at the world in order to understand cultural differences.(20)

Georgia Institute of Technology

1. I employ the terms developed by Peter Rabinowitz, who distinguishes the actual, flesh-and-blood, historical audience (addressed by the author) from the authorial audience (a hypothetical audience addressed by the implied author), noting that "every author designs his or her work rhetorically for a specific hypothetical audience" (94). Rabinowitz invents a third term, narrative audience, to describe "the imaginary narrative audience for which the narrator is writing" (95). Different from the narratee, "a separate person who often serves as a mediator between narrator and reader" (95), the narrative audience "is a role which the text forces the reader to take on" (95), a role that forces us "to pretend to abandon our real beliefs and accept in their stead "facts" and beliefs that even more fundamentally contradict our perceptions of reality" (96). In Recent Theories of Narrative Wallace Martin compares Rabinowitz's "narrative audience" with the terms used by Umberto Eco ("model reader"), Gerald Prince ("virtual reader"), and Susan Lanser ("public narratee") and acknowledges Walter Ong in defining the common concept as "a quasi-fictional role that the reader is expected to play" (154). Wayne Booth, James Phelan, and William Nelles also productively distinguish the various roles of authors and readers.