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7 The Normative Center, the Illustrative Stamp, and the Joycean Epiphany And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights , did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick The threads of a story come from time to time together and make a picture in the web . . . which stamps the story home like an illustration. —Robert Louis Stevenson, Memories and Portraits I wish to begin this chapter by coining two terms: the normative center and the illustrative stamp. The concept of a normative center is employed in political discourse to signify a cultural mainstream, but I wish to appropriate the term for literary criticism and use it in a completely different fashion. In novels, especially in the sentimentally charged nineteenth century, we often find a moment of time in which tensions cease and the author portrays relationships in the ideal, giving us a glimpse of “how things ought to be.” Such scenes offer an ethical standard against which readers may judge, whether consciously or not, other events. The normative center, as I conceive it, is a device of authorial judgment; by giving readers a criterion of relations in the ideal, the author enables them to assess the actual, that is, what transpires throughout the bulk of the novel. Such normative centers are necessarily extremely brief, for if tensions were to cease for too long the novel would be undermined. Novels are about conflict, but normative centers enable us to evaluate that conflict. Take, for example, normative centers from the following classic American novels of the nineteenth century. Near the end of Nathaniel Hawthorne ’s The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne lets down her hair and removes the letter that brands her an adulteress, as she and Arthur Dimmesdale have an intimate conversation in the forest while Pearl plays nearby. For the first time in the novel, we realize something that surely we knew but 154 Normative Center, Illustrative Stamp, and Epiphany   155 that had nonetheless eluded our fullest comprehension: these characters are a nuclear family—a mother, a father, and their child. Just before effecting this transformation, Hester annunciates her real feelings about their illicit sexual union—“What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so! We said so to each other!” (170)—renouncing the gendered mask of penitence she has been forced to assume for seven years. But this passage lasts only a few pages; when subsequently Pearl does not recognize her mother, Hester must gather up her hair and resume wearing the letter. Nevertheless, the image of this nuclear family serves as a contrast to their shattered relations throughout the novel, and the “higher law” for which Hester speaks stands as an evaluation of the lesser laws of society that pervade the text and determine the lives of its characters. Likewise, at the end of chapter 87 of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, “The Grand Armada,” the whaling boats float into the midst of the “enchanted calm” of a whale nursery and are “visited by small tame cows and calves; the women and children” of the whales they’ve been hunting. While even such dedicated predators as Queequeg and Starbuck are transfixed by the sight of pregnant whales and mothers nursing their newborn, Melville presents Ishmael and the reader with a vision of what should be our relation to the nonhuman world, delight rather than murder prompted by vengeance or utilitarian pursuits, and this vision further enables Ishmael to discern the joy in himself that lies beneath his eternally “unwaning woe.” But, as with The Scarlet Letter, the realities depicted in the text resume: a maimed male whale with a cutting-spade protruding from his tail churns through the water, in his agony wounding other whales, and “the submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries” vanish (422–26). There are other normative centers in Moby-Dick—e.g., Ishmael’s vision of human kindness and validation of hearth and home in “A Squeeze of the Hand”; the metaphor of the Catskill eagle at the end of “The Try-Works.” Those occupy only a paragraph each, while the one in “The Grand Armada” is a mere two pages in a novel of over six hundred pages. Despite their brevity, they remain in the reader’s memory, serving to condemn the text’s many scenes of obsession, rapacity, violence, and waste in the whale hunt. Hawthorne’s forest scene...

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