Melville's Other Lives - (Peculiar Bodies) by Christopher Sten (Paperback)

About the Book

"This book analyzes the six stories in Melville's 'The Piazza Tales' with an emphasis on issues of embodiment-invalidism or disability, pain, trauma, enslavement, performance, monsters-and related systems of cultural values defined by race, class, and gender"--

Book Synopsis

Melville's Other Lives is the first book-length study on The Piazza Tales--Herman Melville's only authorized collection of short fiction published in his lifetime--and the first book to explore the rich and varied subject of embodiment in any published collection of Melville's stories.

As Christopher Sten shows, all of the stories in The Piazza Tales present encounters between established white male figures: a writer, a lawyer, a ship captain, a homeowner, an architect, a world traveler, and characters who are outsiders, minorities, outcasts, or "others" a seamstress, an office drudge, enslaved Africans, a traveling salesman, island castaways, the poor. In each, Melville concentrates on the trials of the human body, its pain and trauma, its struggles and frustrations. Some tales concern common trials such as illness or invalidism ("The Piazza"), the tedium of office work ("Bartleby"), or the aggravation of door-to-door salesmen ("The Lightning-Rod Man"). Others concern extraordinary trials: the traumatic violence of a rebellion on a slave ship ("Benito Cereno"), the hardships of surviving on a wasteland archipelago ("The Encantadas"), the perils of creating a monstrous "man-machine" ("The Bell-Tower"). In their concern for the cultural meanings of such trials, Melville's stories look forward to the work of Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, and other cultural materialists who have shown how cultures define, control, and oppress bodies based on their otherness. As a storyteller, Melville understood how such cultural dynamics operate and seized on our collective obsession with the human body as subject, symbol, and vehicle to dramatize his tales.

Review Quotes

A critical gem characteristic of Sten's lucidity, the beauty and craft of his prose style, and clarity of his argument. Novice and seasoned readers alike will find many surprises in these imaginative and agile readings. With its focus on rhetorics and narratives of pain, on the body pushed to and beyond its limits, the book speaks to urgent concerns in a post-pandemic world. It resonates deeply with a number of immediate crises, while connecting gracefully with deep critical traditions. It will be read as illuminating much more than Melville's short stories.

--Wyn Kelley, MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, author of An Introduction to Herman Melville

Christopher Sten's excellent book contributes significantly to our understanding of the career, literary techniques, and entwined aesthetic and political concerns of this major American author.

--Samuel Otter, University of California, Berkeley, author of Melville's Anatomies

Ingenious and persuasive. A truly original study on a topic of considerable importance to the field of nineteenth-century American literature.

--Brian Yothers, University of Texas, El Paso, author of Melville's Mirrors: Literary Criticism and America's Most Elusive Author

Sten's illuminating and fresh readings of these stories provide different paths to the same underlying concern with how bodies interact and signify, and how narrative itself is a form of textual embodiment. Indeed, the most brilliant chapters are those in which Sten employs theories of embodiment that explicitly engage narrative form. Sten thus reads "Benito Cereno" not only as a story about the trauma of captivity but also as a story in which trauma informs the divided narrative structure, which "mirrors our contemporary understanding of trauma as an experience embodied and made manifest in a delayed or after the-fact second encounter with a version of the original" (79). . . Throughout, Sten articulates the narrative and aesthetic means through which Melville challenges his readers "to recognize, appreciate, and respond sympathetically" (18) to the "bodies on trial" in these stories. . . Sympathy in these tales is not about claiming equivalence of experience, nor is it about apprehending the other; rather, it is an ethical mechanism for unsettling and challenging the self through its recognition of the other. . . I plan to use Melville's Other Lives in my own teaching.--Nicholas Spengler, ALH Online Review

The book's short chapters, lucid and energetic prose, and relative lack of complex theoretical terminology make it an ideal choice for the classroom. This is not a back-handed compliment: it is good for the field when undergraduates are able to pick up a work of scholarship about The Piazza Tales and understand it. And it is good for undergraduates to see models of genuinely masterful close reading, the sort of close reading that makes one reconsider their own interpretations, no matter how entrenched. i hope this book is the first of many book-length treatments of The Piazza Tales: the seeds it sows for future research on Melville's depictions of pain, exhaustion, boredom, and monstrosity will no doubt bear much fruit.--Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies

About the Author

Christopher Sten is Professor Emeritus of English and American Literature at George Washington University and coeditor of "This Mighty Convulsion" Whitman and Melville Write the Civil War.