THE TRIPLE THRUST OF SATIRE
IN MELVILLE’S SHORT STORIES: SOCIETY,
THE NARRATOR, AND THE READER

At the end of the nineteenth century Herman Melville was remembered as a comic writer. He was listed among America’s literary comedians in a Harper’s essay in 1890, and Robert Louis Stevenson remembered him as a "howling cheese."¹ But Raymond Weaver’s biography (1921) began to put Melville’s humor back into context. Melville was a complex artist of vitality and robustness, at whose knee always stood "that chosen emissary of Satan," the comic spirit.² Yet Melville’s humor is not "satanic," calling down curses on "the damned human race," to borrow Twain’s phrase; rather, through his humor Melville points up the imperfections and incongruities of our world, those discrepancies between the light and the dark that remind us, as Melville observes in Billy Budd, that "the arch interferer, the envious marplot of Eden, still has more or less to do with every human consignment to this planet of Earth."³

Melville’s humor, Edward Rosenberry explains, runs a gamut from the "jocular-hedonic" stage of Typee and Omoo through the more imaginative psychological and intellectual humor of Mardi, Moby Dick, and The Confidence-Man.⁴ Yet always in Melville, irony and satire lie at the heart of comedy. Northrop Frye identifies the object of ironic comedy as "social revenge," where humor "ridicule[s] and scold[s] an audience assumed to be hankering after sentiment, solemnity, and the triumph of fidelity and approved moral standards."⁵ Although Frye is speaking primarily of stage comedy, his observation suggests some of the patterns in Melville’s satirical first-person magazine stories—except that Melville seems to be taking "social revenge" on three different audiences. First of all, his narrators operate as conventional satirists, either openly ridiculing or gently chastising social groups or institutions for their failures or inadequacies. Secondly, through Melville’s use of ironic self-portraiture, the narrators themselves inadvertently become objects of satire sometimes, in fact, revealing themselves to be guilty of the very things they find reprehensible in society. Finally, Melville’s rhetorical method in his tales lays a subtle trap for the reader. We tend to like Melville’s narrators in spite of their shortcomings; they are engaging characters whose sketches and stories either entertain us or elicit our sympathy. The effect of this rapport is that we allow ourselves to be half-persuaded by these narrators’ misguided attitudes and notions; thus we become an object of the satire that we would like to believe is pointing elsewhere.

Melville varies aesthetic distance considerably in his satiric tales, but his method remains essentially the same. "The ’Gees," a late magazine sketch, is one of the more overt examples of Melville’s three-fold satire and serves well as a paradigm for his technique. On the surface, "The ’Gees" is a satiric characterization of a social "class," Portuguese-Negro crossbreeds from the island of Fogo. Descendants of convicts placed on the isle some centuries earlier, the ’Gees were gullible and ignorant, and they were occasionally recruited as sailors because they would work for little or no wages at all. Melville uses the persona of a congenial, worldly wise sailor to satirize the ’Gees, but the seaman unintentionally discloses his own inhumanity even as he jokes about the inadequacies of the crossbreeds.

Although he pretends to be an objective authority, the sailor soon reveals his callousness and his bias against the ’Gee. "Of all men," the sailor generalizes, "seamen have strong prejudices, particularly in the matter of race. They are bigots here. But when a creature of inferior race lives among them, there seems no bound to their disdain."⁶ While he is speaking of the prejudices of other seamen, the sketcher also speaks for himself; the ’Gee is a "creature of inferior race." Indicative of the sketcher’s own coarseness and insensitivity, his favorite satirical device is animalistic simile. The ’Gee can kick like a wild zebra, and to "know" a ’Gee, one must study him as one would a horse; stand squarely before him and note "how he looks about the head, whether he carry it well; his ears, are they over-lengthy? How fares it in the withers?" Odor is another distinctive attribute of the crossbreed: "Like the negro, the ’Gee has a peculiar savour, but a different one—a sort of wild marine, gamey savour, as in the sea-bird called haglet."

At times the seaman’s sense of humor is healthier, however. In these instances Melville’s satirical technique operates at the third level, tempting the reader to adopt the sailor’s prejudicial viewpoint; for in laughing with him at the ’Gees, the reader in effect supports the seaman’s perspective. For example, we enjoy the sketcher’s humorous use of rhetorical comparison. He notes that the ’Gees’ "physicals and spirituals" are in "singular contrast": the crossbreed "has a great appetite, but little imagination; a large eyeball, but small insight. Biscuit he crunches, but sentiment he eschews." In a comic aside to the reader, the seaman goes on to explain that a "green" ’Gee is "of all green things the greenest. . . . Besides, owing to the clumsiness of their feet . . . green ’Gees are wont, in no inconsiderable numbers, to fall overboard the first dark, squally night; insomuch that when unreasonable owners insist with a captain against his will upon a green ’Gee crew fore and aft, he will ship twice as many ’Gees

as he would have shipped of Americans, so as to provide for all contingencies."

Near the end of his sketch, Melville’s sketcher innocently observes: "The innate disdain of regularly bred seamen towards ’Gees receives an added edge from this. The ’Gees undersell them, working for biscuit where the sailors demand dollars. Hence, anything said by sailors to the prejudice of ’Gees should be received with caution." Parallel with his technique in other magazine satires, Melville’s rhetoric in "The ’Gees" treats us to an entertaining and seductive comic surface that "should be received with caution," lest our own lack of humanity show through.

"Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs" and "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" are essays in social criticism that contrast American and English institutions and cultural attitudes. Although the social landscape of the diptychs is broader than that of "The ’Gees," Melville’s use of an ironic persona increases the satiric force of his sketches. The narrators of the diptychs see themselves as social critics of sorts, but each ironically becomes a tacit supporter of the institution that he criticizes, and he tempts us to become the same.

"Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs" satirizes the hypocrisy of charity in America and England. In the first half of the diptych Melville criticizes the pseudo-philanthropist, one who views the poor sentimentally and romantically and rationalizes his own basic selfishness. As the sketch opens, the celebrated but appropriately named poet "Blandmour" explains that the poor have nothing to be concerned about because they can extract both physical comfort and sustenance, gratis, from Nature’s gifts. Rain-water, particularly, serves as "Poor Man’s Plaster" and "Poor Man’s Eye-Water," and helps to make "Poor Man’s Egg" and "Poor Man’s Pudding."

The water imagery of the first sketch underscores through ironic counterpoint the limitations of Blandmour’s theory. When the narrator goes on a wet Monday to Poor Man Coulter’s hut to try a bowl of Poor Man’s Pudding, he finds Martha Coulter finishing her wash and standing on a "half-rotten, soaked board to protect her feet, as well as might be, from the penetrating damp of the bare ground." It is not surprising that the poor woman looks "pale and chill," and the child she expects adds to her paleness; its life can only be one of hardship. Water as a force for decay and deterioration rather than as a heavenly bounty, permeates the home. The fire logs make "a sad hissing, and vain spluttering" in the hearth, and the house itself is old "and constitutionally damp." The Coulters live a

cheerless and depressing existence, and what little food they have, although William had to go in debt for it, is mouldy and inedible. Through the imagery of his sketch, Melville illustrates that human experience often contradicts the assumptions of "the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed."

The second half of the diptych, "Rich Man’s Crumbs," satirizes London’s annual Lord Mayor’s Day Charity, in which the city’s beggars are given the leftovers from the Lord Mayor’s grand banquet. In this sketch, in contrast to the Coulters’ passive acceptance of poverty, Melville portrays the violence to which deprivation can lead. Melville’s sardonic catalog of the paltry scraps of meat and pastry tossed to the poor is a prologue for the inevitable conclusion of the event: the unsatisfied mob, in a spontaneous explosion of rage and frustration, wrecks the banquet hall to protest the insincerity as well as the insufficiency of the "noble charity." Like Blandmour, the city functionary who takes the narrator to the hall is unresponsive to real human need, and he brags about the "magnanimous" charity so unselfishly given by the Lord Mayor.

In this diptych Melville disparages American society for reinforcing a false sense of democratic pride and equality among the rich and the poor:

the American paupers’ hesitancy to accept charity and their awareness of "the smarting distinction between their ideal of universal equality and their grindstone experience" only "minister to the added wretchedness of the unfortunate." British society, on the other hand, blithely accepts poverty as an institution worthy of both praise and show.

Melville’s rhetorical technique increases the satiric force of the diptych, for both the narrator’s and the reader’s degree of humanity and social commitment is tested equally with Blandmour’s and the English functionary’s. The narrator had "half choked" on the bitter and mouldy Poor Man’s Pudding and had left Dame Coulter’s house "laden down" with a sense of the "deleterious quality" of the atmosphere. Yet that evening, as he sat on Blandmour’s "comfortable sofa, before a blazing fire," he effectively denies that either he or Blandmour have any obligation towards the poor: "[Blandmour,] you are not what may rightly be called a rich man; you have a fair competence; no more. Is it not so? Well, then, I do not include you, when I say, that if ever a Rich Man speaks prosperously to me of a Poor Man, I shall set it down as—I won’t mention the word." At the conclusion of the second half of the diptych, the narrator’s disavowal is repeated. He had almost been trampled by the outraged mob of beggars at the Lord Mayor’s Charity, and that night as he lay "bruised and battered" on his bed, he sighed: "Now, Heaven in its kind mercy save me from the noble charities of London . . . and Heaven save me equally from the ‘Poor Man’s Pudding’ and the ‘Rich Man’s Crumbs.’" The question

implicitly directed to the reader comes as a kind of social and moral challenge: who, then, is going to save the poor? To decline Melville’s gambit is to become an object of his satire.

Melville’s satiric technique in "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" also makes demands on the reader’s sense of social responsibility, even as it raises important questions about cultural progress. At first glance, "The Paradise of Bachelors" is a characteristically Melvillean celebration of bachelorhood, and one finds in it echoes of the bachelor suppers and "smoking club" gatherings in Typee, Mardi, and White-Jacket On another level, however, the first sketch, like the more allegorical "Tartarus of Maids," is a complex satire on cultural impotence and dissolution.

Initially, Melville’s narrator recognizes some of the larger cultural implications of what he sees at Temple Bar. At the beginning of his sketch, for example, he laments the fact that England’s modern-day descendants of the royal order of Knights-Templars have been reduced "from carving out immortal fame in glorious battling for the Holy Land, to the carving of roast-mutton at a dinner-board"; these "degenerate" Temple Bar lawyers, he continues, apparently "think it sweeter far to fall in banquet than in war." Yet as he partakes in the lawyers’ conviviality, to say nothing of their good food and drink, his attitude begins to change and so, too, does the reader’s. The narrator soon rationalizes that, after all, the knight’s fall from former greatness "has made him all the finer fellow," for he is no longer proud, gruff, and "hard," but instead "genial," "mellow," and hospitable. No matter if Temple Bar is a snug oasis of self-indulgence, insulated from the demands and ordeals of life. "The thing called pain, the bugbear styled trouble," the narrator states, "these two legends seemed preposterous to their bachelor imaginations. How could men of liberal sense . . . and convivial understandings—how could they suffer themselves to be imposed upon by such monkish fables? Pain! Trouble! . . . No such thing.—Pass the sherry, sir."

As the narrator wraps up his account of his evening’s festivities in Temple Bar, he says no more to denigrate the "band of brothers" he now feels a part of. What objectivity he had maintained initially in his sketch is lost by its conclusion, and the reader, also, cannot help acknowledging the seductiveness of life at Temple Bar; a life of conviviality and leisure does have its attractions. With a spontaneous "burst of admiring candor" the narrator exclaims to his smiling host, "Sir, this is the very Paradise of Bachelors!" At the end of the sketch, however, Melville again suggests the impotency of life in bachelor hall. After dinner the lawyers regale themselves with an immense horn of snuff, which Melville describes in phallic terms; at home, later, some of the men read the Decameron before

retiring. For personal fulfillment, Melville implies, the bachelors are capable only of turning inward upon themselves, autoerotically, instead of outward to spiritual and cultural challenges.

"The Tartarus of Maids" more overtly satirizes the spiritual and cultural failings hinted at in "The Paradise of Bachelors." In this celebrated sketch Melville puns with his magazine audience’s sense of propriety and decorum, while at the same time using an elaborate anatomical allegory to condemn man’s willingness to yield his moral and social responsibilities to the machine, in the name of "progress" and "civilization."

The story opens with the narrator’s symbolical sexual journey down the front of the female anatomy, followed by a veiled account of the sex act (Melville broadens his pun and his symbolism in revealing that his protagonist is a "seedsman" who needs to buy seed-containers from a nearby paper mill). The journey is an ironic contrast to the celibacy and withdrawal of the bachelors in the previous sketch, but it also contrasts with the inhuman "mating" of the factory girls to the machines they are forced to serve. As Melville’s sexual allegory grows more obvious, it becomes less playful. Man has even allowed the machines to take over the sacred reproductive processes themselves from the girls; it requires only nine minutes for the white, germinal pulp to go from the "abdominal heat" of the vats to the waiting arms of an attendant—a former nurse—as finished paper.

The two halves of the diptych yield important insights into Melville’s attitudes towards mid-nineteenth-century civilization. W. R. Thompson contends that the two sketches are more than wry satires on "New World industrialism" and "Old World leisure"; they are an expression of Melville’s concern about the spiritual "inertia" and social evils of both European and American society.⁷ On one level, Melville warns us in "The Tartarus of Maids" that if man permits machines to take over his biological responsibilities, at least symbolically if not actually, mechanism may someday force him to abdicate moral control, too. The proud manager of the factory, old Bach[elor] , is appropriately named, for he refuses to recognize the physical and mental strain which his female workers must endure. Oblivious, too, is his assistant Cupid, who serves as pimp for the girls by arranging and supervising their perverted "marriage" to the machines. But on another level Old Bach and his subordinate, like the Temple Bar lawyers, and like Blandmour and the British official in the previous diptych, symbolize society’s studied avoidance of its deepest problems.

Basic to the meaning of "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," and a direct function of Melville’s satiric method, are the final responses of the narrator and the reader to what they have witnessed.

Despite his skepticism about life at Temple Bar and the working conditions in the factory, the narrator nevertheless allows himself to become yet another victim of the devitalizing forces he confronts; in withholding criticism at the end, he resembles the protagonist in "Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs." In "The Tartarus of Maids," one notes especially, he is awed by "the metallic necessity" which governs the machinery, and although he fears that, somehow, mankind itself is being flattened and rolled in the grim inevitability of the engines, not once does he consider cancelling his order with the mill. The machinery’s "autocratic cunning" and "unbudging fatality" hold him spellbound, and perhaps us, too. Will the reader, Melville seems to ask, have the character to fight actively against those forces that dehumanize life?

Melville’s religious satire in "The Two Temples" is well known; the basic thrust of that diptych is that the narrator has a more authentic spiritual experience sitting with the working class in a British theater than listening to a sermon in a fashionable American temple. Melville’s "social revenge" on the church is more subtly displayed in "The Lightning-Rod Man," which I will look at briefly in closing. Most critics read this allegorical tale as a satire aimed at nineteenth-century Christianity, specifically at those ministers who, like the lightning-rod salesman, use warnings of damnation and doom as rhetorical leverage on unbelievers or backsliders.⁸ Yet I contend that the story not only satirizes those who fear lest God’s wrath strike at any moment, but also those, like the overly devout narrator, who all too readily accept the Almighty’s plan for them.

The narrator is a likeable and engaging figure whose values may well be those of the reader’s. He symbolically stands by his hearth and affirms his belief in man, even when warned by the salesman to "quit" the fireside and avoid men, especially tall ones, during thunderstorms. We tend, therefore, to adopt his point of view when he assumes his confident stance ‘‘at ease in the hands of my God’’ when confronted by the salesman’s pitch. But Melville does not imply that the narrator’s stance is any more tenable than the salesman’s. Careless and cocky, the narrator’s enthusiasm for the "glorious" and "noble" storm is a little imprudent, after all. Lightning probably has more scientific than theological import, and its powers have to be reckoned with. Lightning killed a servant girl in Canada a year earlier; what guarantee was there that the bolts crashing outside the narrator’s own house would not just as arbitrarily destroy him?

Thus the rhetorical irony and satire in "The Lightning-Rod Man," as in the other tales, is directed at the narrator and the reader, as well as at the

object of the narrator’s criticism. Melville puns sexually and theologically when the salesman brags about the powers of his copper lightning-conductor, contending that the Canadian (Catholic) iron rods are faulty whereas his is "the only true rod." But is the narrator’s "rod" any truer or more potent than either of these? Always the skeptic, Melville would say that the Unknown remains unknowable and would choose the middle ground between capitulation to fear on the one hand, and serene confidence in the efficacy of God’s plan on the other. Amidst the humor and repart6e of the story, Melville as implied author also satirizes the reader who accepts the narrator’s position without question.

In this tale, "The ’Gees," and the two diptychs, Satan, "the envious marplot of Eden," inhabits both Melville’s narrators and the social landscapes they survey. As "arch interferer," he reinforces man’s egocentricity and continually denies him the power to discern the truth about himself or about the society he creates. Yet the comic spirit in Melville is also, like Satan, devious and seductive. Melville’s narrators are entertaining and persuasive in their own right, and human, like us; their points of view towards the ’Gees, towards the poor, towards life at Temple Bar and the factory operations, and towards the lightning-rod salesman are understandable, almost defensible, it would seem. As soon as a communion between narrator and reader is established, we, too, become Melville’s satiric victims.

FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

NOTES