FAMILIAR WIGUITY: A STUDY OF HERMAN MELVILLE'S BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER, COCK-A-DOODLE-Dm!, AND BENITO CERENO. Thomas Ramon Kubicek B.A., Sir George Williams University, 1970. A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF AFtTS in the Department of English @ Thomas Ramon Kubicek 1979 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY August 1979 A11 rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without permission of the author APPROVAL Name : Thomas Ramon Kubicek Degree: Master of Arts Title of Thesis: Familiar Ambiguity: A Study of Herman ~elville'sBartleby The Scrivener, --cock-A-~oodle-DOO!, - And Benito Cereno. 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Title of Thesis/Project/Extended Essay Author: ( name UJ.10 /979 (date In exploring the nature of ambiguity in 1ilelville1s Bartleby The- Scrivener, --Cock-A-Doodle-Dool, - and Benito Cereno, this thesis proceeds on the assertion that there is a develop- ment of interrogative imagination after Floby Dick. By the use of the word "interrogative" I mean to emphasize not only the consistent metaphysical inquiry in Melville's works but also - - -- -"- inquiry as compositional method. Thus, the interrogation of ambiguity that is subsumed in the symbolic complexities of the voyage and the Whale in --Moby Dick becomes a direct narrative topic in Pierre. With Bartleby The- Scrivener, the crucial question obsessing Melville -- what is the meaning of the world and its central mystery man -- is formulated, simply and briefly, as the ambiguous encounter of two men in an urban set- ting, narrated in recollection. The recollected encounter, with some qualifications, is the form of most of the tales of the 18501s, but these three tales have been chosen for study because each offers a singular perspective on the encounter with mystery. Although the interrogation of appearances was a career-long interest of Melville, of special interest in these tales is-the concern for the familiar suffaces of everyday life: faces, objects, common rituals, the processes of reason, ordinary settings. What I have termed familiar ambiguity is meant.to designate the enigmq of the familiar,.as reported by a character who has experienced the enigma but failed to under- stand it. This ambiguity is analyzed with special attention iii to three stages of apprehension:*event, point-of-view, and per- formance. On the level of event, we find that through the sud- den collapse of order in familiar appearances an unfamiliar region of moral darkness is disclosed. With point-of-view, we find that the narrator/observer is implicated through an ironic tone in the collapse of confidence, in the sense that the obser- ver's ignorance and ordinariness prevents us from fully under- standing what has happened. On the level of performance, we discover that because of a richly allusive style and symbolic complexity we are faced with a textual problem in each of the tales that corresponds to the narrative difficulty of the char- acters in trying to understand what is happening to them. This textual problem is analagous to the activity of mind in the struggle for resolution of meaning -- an activity that remains unsettled and incomplete in the text as it does in the narra- / tive. Accordingly, as such findings demonstrate, I am arguing against the critical tradition that sees Melville's short fic- tion as parables of despair. TABLE OF CONTENTS ~pprovalPage ii Abstract iii Table of Contents v Introduction 1 Bartleby The- Scrivener 8 The Problem of the Narrator 14 The Comedy of Irresolution 36 The Mystery of Appearances 52 77 The Narrator: Folk-Poet and Ambivalent Witness The Celebration of Performance Benito Cereno The Nature of Difficulty in Benito Cereno Amasa Delano as Ironic Hero The Anarchy of Appearances Enchantment and Death Epilogue List of References Bibliography XNTRODUCTION 2 . This thesis is a study of ambiguity in three tales writ- ten by Herman Melville in the 1850's. There has been a good deal of criticism on the probable literary influences in•’orming Melville's tales and on his use of symbol, but comparatively lit- tle has been published on his narrative performance in the short prose works. The aim of this study is not merely to isolate the evident ambiguities in Melville's fiction but to demonstrate that ambiguity is a feature of the narrative method itself. In general, the attitude of critics has been that after. ~oby--Dick (1851) , Melville's performance diminishes and his vision evinces a growing disillusionment with life. His start- ling autobiographical comment to Hawthorne, during the writing of --Moby Dick, that he had come "to the inmost lead of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould, I' would seem to support a denigrating attitude. However, at least in terms of output, his work after the publication of --Moby Dick matched what had gone before in both quantity and variety. Pierre was published in 1852; in four years (1853-1857), Melville wrote over a dozen tales beginning with Bartleby -The Scrivener (1853) and finishing with The Piazza (1856), and the longer narratives Israel Potter (1855) and -The Confidence-Man (1857). After 1857, and until Billy Budd in 1891, Melville devoted himself to poetry, publishing such works as Battle-Pieces and Aspects ---of the War (1866), the immense religious epic Clare1 (18761, ---John Marr and Other Sailors (1888), and Timoleon (1891). The body of this work demonstrates substantial imaginative vitality, particularly in that condensed period of work from 1852 to 1857. It is un- doubtedly true that Melville never repeated.the performance of ~sbyDick, although such a statement raises the question of whe- ther or not repetition is necessary or valuable in creative work, What has never been generally acknowledged about Melville's work after 1851, is that it does reveal a constant interest in the world and a constant experimentation with form, style, and sub- ject-matter. Thus, the critical task is to see what Melville is doing in his later work, and then to assess whether or not that work shows a progressive retreat of imagination. In Pierre, Melville dropped the'heroic mode and moved . to a much wider employment of irony and satire. More impor- tantly, from the point-of-view of this discussion, he dropped the voyage to an external encounter with extraordinary forces and adopted inland settings and a microcosmic vision of man. His vision embraced the ordinary manifestations of life, but as 2 Pierre discovers, it is "the common world of everydays" that is wholly mysterious, and that Melville chose to interrogate. How Melville wrote his work shows that he was grappling with the problems of articulating "The Ambiguities" of living and of try- ing to perceive the meaning of living in a complex world, In reading the novel, our process of discovery becomes, through the mediation of the narrator, a part of the character's struggle for illumination. It is a movement into and not out of ambiguity, "Let the- ambiguous procession of events reveal their own ambigu- 3 ousness," Pierre's narrator tells us, in that phrase capturing the individual and combined complexities of event, apprehension, nar- rative disclosure, and signifying the preoccupation with the dif- ficulties of trying to impart the fullness of even the most common experiences. When we arrive at the 'tales written after Pierke, the question becomes whether or not diminished form signifies dimi- nished vision. This question can be answered, in part, by see- ing that the tales offer a variety of treatment of ambiguity. In essence, when we are reading Bartleby The- Scrivener or Benito Cereno, we are looking at metaphysical interrogations of experi- ence in narrative form -- and not at parables -- that develop a mystery rather than finally dispel it. To comprehend Melville's notion.of ambiguity is not an . , easy matter since it eludes discursive exercise. However, we can characterize it as a condition of contrariety that resists re- solution. As F.O. ~atthiessenhas shown, Melville was very im- pressed by what he perceived as "contraries" in the visions of 4 Shakespeare's tragedies. In Melville's hands, the contraries of experience became a condition that applied to everything: to Man, to Nature, to God. Such a vision of contrariety is, even on the face of the matter, not the same as a dualistic conception of reality, where clear distinctions can be made between opposites such as "good" and "evil". An example of the difference between contrariety and dualism can be found in The Encantadas, where -- - - Melville uses the tortoise to show that life is both "black and bright" : everyone knows that tortoises ...' are of such a make, that if you but put them on their backs you thereby expose their bright sides without the possibility of their recovering themselves, and turning into view the other.