A more attractive CM Narrator

[Hardeman]

Those who look in the CM for an omniscient narrator to tell the reader what is real are disappointed. To me Melville intentionally shifts responsibility for opinion and judgments onto the reader. Chapter 2 “Showing That Many Men Have Many Minds” gives a variety of the initial “epitaphic comments, conflictingly spoken or thought” to the deaf and dumb stranger who remained “happily oblivious” to the comments or so it seems. Here we are given the structure for the following chapters where someone with confidence like the deaf and dumb stranger interacts with others who have different responses to their perceived reality. The reader is left to judge the meaning as the narrator like a good teacher only describes the setup for the interlocutors.

Perhaps it has been my experience with a purple faced authorities, crippled war vets who were always upbeat despite their mangled bodies, and blacks who know how to digest swallowed pride that gives me a compassionate response to Black Guinea and his interlocutors. For they show me how to be free from that master impostor in each of us that needs to feel superior to others. Black Guinea's confrontation with the wooden legged man illustrates an awareness that succeeds “as if instinct told it that the right or the wrong might not have overmuch to do with whatever wayward mood superior intelligences might yield to.”

Black Guinea is a master of confidence confronting an adversary who thinks he knows more than the dog like being before him. Like everyone the wooden legged man is conned by the illusion in his own head. This fact is repeated throughout the CM and it is reinforced by the use of litotes, each of which offers the reader to decide for oneself their affect on the story line's meaning. I propose the reader as the trustworthy narrator.  

Just another voice in the "Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man .  .  . uniting the streams of the most distant and opposite zones, pours them along, helter-skelter, in one cosmopolitan and confident tide."

[Phil Walsh]

People looking for an omniscient narrator may not be the only ones baffled. Some of the critical response to CM also seems to posit that people looking for a _consistent_ narrative voice also come away baffled.

When a narrator paints a scene where people are deliberately throwing buttons into a man's mouth--causing him pain, and laughing to themselves that the beggar expected a coin and instead got nothing but a sore lip--when the narrator blandly describes this scene as though it were all in good fun and those people are just being playful, it's rather challenging to come up with a charitable analysis of either the narrator or those people, isn't it?

--Phil

[Phil Walsh]

On 08/23/2016 10:05 AM, Phil Walsh wrote:
>
> When a narrator paints a scene where people are deliberately throwing
> buttons into a man's mouth--causing him pain, and laughing to
> themselves that the beggar expected a coin and instead got nothing but
> a sore lip--when the narrator blandly describes this scene as though
> it were all in good fun and those people are just being playful, it's
> rather challenging to come up with a charitable analysis of either the
> narrator or those people, isn't it?
>

Even if you look at that behavior and say to yourself, "They're
human--no more or less human than me--I too am completely capable of
such behavior," there is still, to me, no avoiding the fact that the
behavior is horrible.

--Phil

[Hardeman]

Phil,

Thanks for the response. Not unlike a sermon you have decided to see Black Guinea as a “beggar” in the role of a victim mistreated by people not wholly unaffected by him but lacking a correct response which you say should be charitable. You are acting as a compassionate narrator according to my hypothesis of Melville forcing you to find your meaning rather than his.

What if Black Guinea's mascaraed as helpless is a way to demonstrate that greatest value of charity is for the giver of alms not the receiver. If one abuses the chance to help someone the abuser losses confidence in compassion for him self so that when faced with charity in others he resents it. When the merchant gives alms to Black Guinea those who did not where conned by their own emotions as Melville shows us;

“Done in despite of the general sentiment, the good deed of the

merchant was not, perhaps, without its unwelcome return from the

crowd, since that good deed seemed somehow to convey to them a sort of reproach.”

I trust you will consider this as a perceived reality and not wholly without the efficacy of a devout sentiment towards your “isn't it” charity.

One has only to read the thousands of comments on the internet relating to the current political climate to see that many lack confidence in charity.

Melville's narrator is forcing us the reader to face this reality.

Hardeman

[Phil Walsh]

Thanks, Hardeman, this was very helpful. --phil

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[Ffrangcon Lewis]

[Ffrangcon Lewis]

Hello Phil and Hardeman,

                                          Your dialogue is most interesting, and perhaps I should keep out of it and just read, yet I'd like to add a couple of points.  I love Hardeman's choice of quotation.  The 'multiform pilgrim species' perhaps reminds us that Melville begins the notational and geographical process leading to 'Clarel' in the same year as CM is published.  The idea that we are all pilgrims might seem radically theological and/or radically democratic, as might the ostensible praise of uniting distant and opposite zones in a 'confident and cosmopolitan tide.'  If this sounds Whitmanic in isolation, in context it seems to me to emphasise the currents and counter-currents rather than the forward impetus.  To put it another way, an older figure who perhaps lurks behind the palmers in both CM and 'Clarel' is Geoffrey Chaucer, who has been challenging his readers about the trustworthiness of his narrative voices for many centuries.  Are his palmers palmed off on us?  It is not easy always to tell.  I find myself admiring aspects of both Phil's and Hardeman's insights.  One reason for that is possibly that 'CM' explores the multiple tensions which exist between democracy and capitalism, among its many other preoccupations.  Melville may entrust the interpretation, but that is not necessarily the same as allowing us to find our interpretations adequate or, indeed, worthy of trust.

Thanks to both once more,

Ffrangcon Lewis