“true” but “as if invented”?: Melville’s Oceanic Voyage in the Etchings Review and “The Piazza”

Abstract

This paper explores how Melville’s Etchings review and “The Piazza” are his sarcastic critiques of social, literary, and artistic conventions rather than his literary manifestos. I demonstrate how Melville in these two texts intertwines the use of fictional narrative personas with the complicated fusions of binaries between calm and tense and between fascination and sarcasm. Through this, I also verify that “The Piazza” and, by extension, The Piazza Tales are not so much Melville’s compromise turning to the popular genre with simple subject matters and themes as another example of Melville’s fluid, oceanic texts. Ostensibly a story of the disillusionment of the traveler-narrator’s fairyland fantasy, Melville’s “The Piazza,” especially the narrator’s “inland voyage” to the “oceanic” landscape and mindscape, embodies and reinforces the oceanic philosophy and aesthetics reflected in his previous sea novels like Moby-Dick. I scrutinize the metaphorical sea of Melville’s “The Piazza” as an allegorical and philosophical site for renegotiating his investigation of human society and culture.