The Fate of Melville’s Pierre

 

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in parentheses to page numbers in the Evergreen/Grove Press edition of 1957.  (I realize the disadvantage of using an edition other than the best current standard, but I assert my privilege as a blogger outside of academic settings, without a proper library.  For a professional journal, I should certainly take the trouble of using proper references.)

  

     Melville’s Moby Dick would be, I think, America’s greatest novel were it not that the book is so intellectual, so concerned with ideas and so often occupied with the sketching and the artful manipulation of those abstractions.  Huckleberry Finn is undeniably sentimental, its comic effects of the “lower” sort, but this pandering to popular taste, not only brought the author a mass audience; it enabled the book to represent America in a way that Melville, who was busy chasing clouds in the empyrean, never attempted.  While the reading public would have welcomed from him more passably realistic tales of seamen and cannibals like those of his early publications, he turned toward giving them dramas enacted primarily on the stage of the mind.  Yet to Melville ideas had form and scent and texture and among such sensations his passions roamed wild.

     To be sure, some reviewers had praised Moby Dick.  An early British review found the writing “always good, and often admirable,” displaying “fertile fancy, ingenious construction, playful learning, and an unusual power of enchaining the interest, and rising to the verge of the sublime.”  Another, while condemning Melville’s “thrusts against revealed religion,” yet found Moby Dick fascinating, full of “flashes of truth” and “profound reflections,” concluding that the book goes “far beyond the level of an ordinary work of fiction. It is not a mere tale of adventures, but a whole philosophy of life, that it unfolds.”  In Harper’s George Ripley lauded the book’s ability to “illustrate the mystery of human life,” calling it a success because of its “richness and variety of incident, originality of conception, and splendor of description,” and adding “that the genius of the author for moral analysis is scarcely surpassed by his wizard power of description.”

      Yet the book attracted devastating criticism as well.  Another British critic called it “ill-compounded disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English, a most provoking book to endure monstrosities, carelessnesses, and other such harassing manifestations of bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise… trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature.”  A New York publication considered Ahab’s portrayal “a perfect failure,” “and the work itself inartistic,” while, to another reviewer the book excelled in nothing but “examples of bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English,” along with “rhetorical contortions, all his declamatory abuse of society, all his inflated sentiment, and all his insinuating licentiousness” [1]. 

     In the event, Moby Dick was a flop compared with Melville’s earlier books, selling only five hundred copies in the U. K. where it was first published and less than four thousand during Melville’s lifetime.   In a letter to Sophia Hawthorne, Melville expresses appreciation for her “flattering” admiration of Moby Dick.  He says he is “amazed” at her reaction, noting that “as a general thing, women have small taste for the sea” (a subject never condemned by his most hostile critics) and promising, with Pierre in mind, that “The next chalice I shall commend will be a rural bowl of milk.”  While the author may have felt that the new novel had greater sales potential, his publisher Richard Bentley was more skeptical.  He wrote Melville saying that he felt that “editorial changes” were “absolutely necessary” to Pierre’s being well-received when published. [2]

     Though he had suggested to Mrs. Hawthorne that the new book would be an appealing pastoral, his reassurance may have been mere politesse.   To his father-in-law he had written defiantly (though with prudent qualifications) “So far as I am individually concerned, & independent of my pocket, it is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to ‘fail’.” [3]  He largely succeeded in this ambition, the natural consequences of offering his readers metaphysical speculation and rhetorical fireworks rather than adventure stories.  A popular modern critic notes, “This is arguably the least read work a major author ever wrote” while another flatly declares Pierre “Melville’s worst book.” [4].

     Apart from his distinctive style, Melville also made little compromise with the received ideas of his day in the implications of his themes.  Pierre is subtitled The Ambiguities and, far from laying out a finished world-view, the book presents a vision everywhere compromised and often misleading in which the author’s levels of irony are subtle, even indeterminable.  One theme is certainly a profound skepticism, compounded by an equally radical dialectical tendency. 

     The repeated suggestion that we are unable to know much of anything at all is accompanied by other passages on the apparent meaninglessness of what we might think we know.  These themes appear throughout the novel; a few examples will here suffice.  Thus, the world, at least to Pierre or our narrator, is “inscrutable” (172), a mystery “wholly hopeless of solution” (180), containing “enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim cannot resolve” (195).  Dwelling in “Cretan labyrinths” (245), we encounter “mysteries within mysteries” (200).  Indeed, all that we can see is that we cannot see.  “For as we blind moles can see, man’s life seems but an acting upon mysterious hints” (246).  In theistic terms “Silence is the only Voice of our God” (284).

     Further complicating the unknowability of things is the tendency of feelings, ideas, and impressions to slide into their opposites, their dialectical ambiguity.   Nature itself is ambiguous (16), and we walk in “a haze of ambiguities” (212).  Even a smile is nothing but a “vehicle of ambiguities” (117).  “Let the ambiguous procession of events reveal their own ambiguousness” (253).  Green signifies both new life and decay (9), sadness is “delicious” (73), Pierre is at once alive and dead (132), there is no distinction between knowing and not-knowing (410), and this world’s incompatibility with God is really correspondence with Him (297).  Such bipolar oppositions recur in every context: the two incompatible paintings of Pierre’s father somehow merge into each other (118), in a mysterious figuration the inmates of a mental hospital convert each other (170), Pierre “is learning to live by rehearsing the part of death” (425).

     In an oddly convoluted sentence the reader is told that the “peculiar” relationship between Pierre and Isabel could scarcely be understood “were there not here thrown over the whole equivocal, preceding account of it, another and more comprehensive equivocalness, which shall absorb all minor ones in itself; and so make one pervading ambiguity the only possible explanation for all the ambiguous details.” (312)  Does this not add up to (using the fourteenth century phrase) a “cloud of unknowing”?

     Inscrutable as life may be, Pierre is certain that he is caught up in an inescapable predetermined fate in which “all events” are “the product of an infinite series of infinitely involved and untraceable foregoing occurrences” (92).  He directly envisions “those Three Weird Ones” who had woven his immutable life-course (96).  A prisoner of “Fixed Fate” (254), he feels primarily Fate’s cruelty or rather its terrifying indifference.  “Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.  Eternally inexorable and unconcerned is Fate, a mere heartless trader on men’s joys and woe.” (148)  Toward the book’s end, the plot is epitomized in the brief formula: Fate made Pierre a “desperado” (468).

     The protagonist, then, feels quite helpless, caught in the tides of destiny which, though they have no regard for human well-being, yet seem always to tilt toward the tragic.  In Pierre “all the ages of the world pass as in a manacled procession,” a continual “mournful mystery” (156).  Fate often seems positively hostile rather than impartial.   Henry A. Murray calls the book a "spiritual autobiography in the form of a novel" [5], all the more dramatic a claim since Pierre’s deterioration into what looks very much like madness makes his story seem more a third-person study in psychopathology.  Yet Melville’s own subjectivity was not the only source of his or of Pierre’s pessimism.  His view was theoretically informed by his reading of Schopenhauer (the importance of whom is clear in his extensive notes on the philosopher) and by the Hindu and Buddhist texts both Schopenhauer and Melville’s Transcendentalist friends had read. [6]

     The attitudes represented in the book, however, arrive to the reader already complicated by multiple distancing.  Are the views expressed those of Pierre, of the narrator, of Melville, of everyone with open eyes?  The reader views truth through Pierre’s consciousness further refracted through the problematic prism of words, after filtering yet again through an omniscient narrator capable of piling irony upon irony in a text which repeatedly insists from the outset that knowing another person is impossible.  After all, in the test cases most significant to the protagonist, Pierre doubts both his father and Isabel. 

     Whatever the origins of Pierre’s profound pessimism, likely a compound of temperament, neurosis, and philosophy, his end is self-destruction.  The response of the text, though, is altogether different: a retreat into language, but language animated by a carnivalesque energy of all-but-redemptive vigor.  The sense that tragedy is held at bay or at times ameliorated by aesthetic display is ancient.  The chorus of Oedipus Tyrannos associates the very sight of a beautiful performance with an orderly explicable world.  [6] Whatever ruin encompasses Oedipus, the viewers of the play may feel protected by the poise and indeed the beauty of the lines of poetry. 

     Melville similarly erects a grand rhetorical structure, sufficiently lush to displease some critics.  The language is from the start literary, clearly removed from non-aesthetic uses.  Pierre opens with a scene of pristine countryside, praised for its still perfection which turns then into an altogether conventional love scene, followed by references to other writers.  Cooper is evoked by the description of an upstate New York ancestral estate, Poe by the peculiar incestuous love between Pierre and his mother (and later between him and his supposed sister), and Hawthorne in the references to earlier generations seizing of the land (5, 39).  One unmistakable sign  of literarariness is Pierre, Lucy, and Isabel’s regular use “thou,” much as the Romantics had done, though the word by the  nineteenth century was used only in dialect, in liturgical settings, and among the Society of Friends. 

     Melville feels free to insert bravura rhetorical set-pieces at liberty, among them the paean to love (45), address to a tree (55), address to “ye Invisibles” (150), the Memnon stone story (190), and the dream-vision of Enceladus (476).  The voice of Plotinus Plinlimmon whose very name trumpets his imaginary nature, intrudes with his lectures on “Chronometricals and Horologicals” (292).  Allusions beyond the opening tribute to American literature include mentions of Spenser (6), Dante (236), the Laccoön (257), Shelley (476, 480, 489), as well as language evoking Shakespeare (269, 444). 

     The introduction of Pierre’s celebrity as an author which has seemed a deformation to many readers is yet another way for Melville to insist on the literariness of his own text as well as allowing him to gripe about the contradictions of writing for a popular audience.  Any access to the reality of lived experience is mediated though still by a highly problematic transformation in to words.  Plain speaking will not do.  According to Pierre the quality of experience requires an “irregular sort of writing” (32) which justifies his persistence in his idiosyncrasy: “I write precisely as I please” (341).  Even granted such freedom novelists in general are said to be capable of nothing but “false, inverted attempts at systematising eternally unsystematisable elements” (198).  While Pierre finds Isabel’s “mystic” guitar-playing enthralling, it remains “eternally incapable of being translated into words” (393).  

     Yet, in spite of its limitations, the narrator assures the reader that “poetry was a consecration and an obsequy to all hapless modes of human life” (191).  In the end, whether art can make Truth accessible or not, no one can deny that it is a distracting amusement, serving thus a value more profound than it seems.  “It us pleasant to chat; for it passes the time ere we go to our beds” (361).

     In one of the immense, interwoven, periodic flights of verbiage that periodically rise from the page, in a sentence running fifteen lines, “swayed” both by “the profound events that had lately befallen him” and by his need to raise some cash, Pierre proclaims his intention to write a book (394).  The combination of sublime and mercenary motives reminds the reader that the narrator’s earlier claim that he might, at least on occasion, “drop all irony” (358) is itself richly ironic.

     Pierre is a text made up of texts.  Art, which for some seems a means of penetrating appearances to a deeper reality, here is simply another mediation, a further refraction, a heightening of ambiguity, the nearest approach to reality, though profoundly insufficient.  Paradoxically, it is precisely because poetry can lie, that it can also speak the truth. 

     Pierre hurtles into an abyss opened through his own idealism, a sort of nineteenth century Don Quixote, a belated believer in ethics and in truth whose lofty values lead him astray, while other Americans grab for the main chance.  Poor Pierre is clinging to an apparently hostile deity as he is washed away in Fate’s flood.  The whole drama is enacted on a darkened stage on which the actors cannot quite make each other out and the audience is as often as not misled.  Once the tragic trajectory of the story-line is clear, the reader finds it at once agonizing and uplifting, resembling in a way grand opera, as Pierre sings lovely songs that mark his own ruin.  The verbal show as the hero collapses toward disaster sustains the reader who, lofted into imagination, walks in an elaborate and formal garden of language, the one controllable element in life.  If Pierre marches on to his own destruction, he does it on a pathway marked on every side with water-courses drawn from subterranean wells and fountains spouting from dolphins and mermen and ewers held by nymphs, accompanied by the soundtrack of a string quartet.  Should the stroller gazes at the sky, feux d'artifice blossom there.  The stage at the end of Pierre remains littered with corpses, but the scene has grandeur.  The final horror is mitigated if not denied by the masterful glory of the author’s language.  To adopt a more modest figure, whistling in the dark is whistling still.

 

   

1.  London Morning Advertiser, October 24 1851; London John Bull, October 25, 1851; George Ripley, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December, 1851; Henry F. Chorley, London Athenaeum, October 25 1851; William Young, New York Albion, November 22, 1851; New York United States Magazine and Democratic Review, January, 1852; available online at https://bookmarks.reviews/the-original-1851-reviews-of-moby-dick/.

 

2.  Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, The Letters of Herman Melville ed. 1960, to Richard Bentley, p. 151n; to Sophia Hawthorne, page 146. In this letter to his publisher, Melville suggests that the book might best be published anonymously or under a pseudonym.

 

3.   Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, The Letters of Herman Melville ed. 1960, to Lemuel Shaw, p.92.  

 

3.  The first phrase is from Richard H. Brodhead, “The Book That Ruined Melville,” New York Times, January 7, 1996; the second from Darrel Abel, Democratic Voices and Vistas: American Literature from Emerson to Lanier, p. 412.

 

4.  Introduction, Pierre, or the Ambiguities, 1949.

 

5.  Among the many studies that explore the influence of Asian thought on Melville are Daniel Herman, Zen and the White Whale: A Buddhist Rendering of Moby-Dick; Hemant Balvantrao Kulkarni, Moby-Dick, a Hindu avatar: a study of Hindu myth and thought in Moby-Dick; and Mark Backus, “Call Thee Ishmael” in Sophia Philosophia 1, iii.  For Schopenhauer, see melvillesmarginalia.org, edited by Peter Norberg and Steven Olsen-Smith.

 

6.  Lines 893-896 in Jebb’s translation: “For if such deeds [showing arrogance or disrespect to the gods] are held in honor, why should we join in the sacred dance?”

Notes on Recent Reading 43 (Bellamy, Roy, Melville)

 

Looking Backward (Bellamy)

     A peculiarly American utopian novel in which patriotism and the growth of monopolies are not so much combated by internationalism and organized labor as they are endorsed and extended until there is only one great trust and no capitalist class whatsoever.  And this occurs without violence, by a kind of general consensus.  To Bellamy who concealed his socialism under the name nationalism, the radicals of his day function as operatives of the bosses, since their extremism (which their enemies considered foreign) alienates rather than attracts Americans, retarding the interests of the workers.

     The society Bellamy imagines seems a bit frightening with the total social control of the Industrial Army exerted by technocrats who somehow he imagines would act with no self-interest or partiality or even error.  Nonetheless, he is first-rate when he gets to elaborating on the immense waste in American capitalism and the absurdity of a system in which each person strives to get the better of his fellow citizens.  To me his proposal that every worker, indeed, every individual, receive the same stipend is only reasonable, though for many it would make the whole scheme unacceptable.  Resistance to this particular policy is, however, an instructive illustration of the hold that greed has upon the human ego.  Bellamy’s projection of what life may be in the year 2000 has much to recommend it, even if it is difficult to conceive of an enthusiasm for collective effort and symbolic reward emerging in this country, in spite of the example of the military where such values are indeed strong.  Bellamy’s attacks on “individualism” must have sounded un-American to many, but his ideas were sufficiently acclaimed to spawn a newspaper and several hundred clubs devoted to advancing his vision. 

     Bellamy’s prose is pedestrian when it is not stilted (I do realizer that polite circumlocutions luxuriated in the real conversations of his day), and the novel gets by on the barest excuse for a plot.  One or two images remain with the reader at the end: the stagecoach that figures the old society near the book’s outset and the rose bush representing the transition to the new toward the end. 

     Bellamy does share with many revolutionaries of his day an optimism very rare in our own, a sense that the overwhelming majority of producers over exploiters makes the victory of the masses inevitable once they awaken to their situation.  That tone, which lasted until World War I, smells now like the springtime of the world.  

 

 

The God of Small Things (Roy)

     Roy’s first novel is filled with dazzling, poetic, playful, expressive language in a splendidly varied pattern of different characters of various ages.  She is a rhetorician of considerable power, willing to deploy striking metaphors, distortions, repetitions, and substitutions each with at least a plausible significance.  In fact, her chief fault is her exuberance which sometimes leads her to fruitless divigations, overuse of motifs, redundant expressions.  The book has a luxurious texture and often a melody arises from the words even when read silently.  Her verbal play and deep sense of pIace suggest that Roy may be an admirer of James Joyce, though her book, for all the chronological displacement and rapidly shifting point of view, remains far more accessible than even Ulysses.

     The mysterious “double-egg twins” Rahel and Estha are the book’s center.  Their lives are twisted by their family and the local circumstances in their village in Kerala, as well as by the colonial past.  Passive and inward-turning, stigmatized by their parents’ separation, they are vulnerable to mistreatment, and, when in their innocence they seek to capture joy, they find they have violated the “Love Laws” that regulate affection.  

     The sexual scenes at the end provide the reader no relief.  One before and one after the deaths of Sophie Mol and Velutha, they offer little solace.  The desperation of Ammu’s affair, her wretched survival, alone, for a few years, and the monstrous weight of guilt that haunted the sensitive twins, all these overwhelm any chance for redemptive sexuality.  At the book’s conclusion the concrete specificity of the scenes of love-making contrasts with the vast unknowns of Rahel and Estha’s lives since the traumas of their childhood.  It is, of course, the details, the “little things,” that are real, that are dependable, that anchor the ego in the everyday.  Much of the rest is muddled, obscure, or vicious.

     It took twenty years for Roy’s next novel to appear, but she was hardly idle in the meantime.  She is an active campaigner for progressive causes in the US, In India, and in the world.  I cannot recall having heard her misspeak on these topics.

 

 

Redburn (Melville)

     Contrary to some recent critics, I would agree with Melville himself who considered Redburn a piece of hackwork.  He notoriously stressed its rapid composition (two and a half months) saying that he wrote it simply to keep himself in tobacco.   His haste is evident in the padding.  Like a journalist he tosses in diverting anecdotes and the sort of detailed technical information which one finds as well in Moby Dick but without the suggestive metaphorical weight that the later book generally includes.  The book is unified only broadly as a Bildungsroman.  What exactly is the reader to make of Harry Bolton apart from the undeniable homoerotic element he adds before vanishing? 

     Yet Melville’s grander style is always in the background.  The symbolic system is perhaps not fully operative throughout the story though echoes of Biblical texts in particular occur regularly.  His rhetoric is denied the soaring heights of which he was capable, tending at times toward colloquialism.  The book’s themes, too, eschew the complexities and ambiguities in which Melville came to specialize.  The self-satire by the narrator reflecting with amusement on his younger self recurs (though, at times, his comic naivete is unconvincing and the recurring joke of his appearance in his shooting jacket is soon tiresome).

     Redburn is worth reading for what it implies about Melville’s life and about transatlantic crossings in the middle of the nineteenth century.  (I find it staggering to imagine a sailing vessel capable of carrying five hundred steerage passengers.)  It also has hints of the sublimity of which the author was capable.  In itself it is a readable narrative of which a perspicuous contemporary reviewer might have noted that readers might expect greater things to come from this author.  

Notes on Recent Reading 43 (Bellamy, Roy, Melville)

 

Looking Backward (Bellamy)

     A peculiarly American utopian novel in which patriotism and the growth of monopolies are not so much combated by internationalism and organized labor as they are endorsed and extended until there is only one great trust and no capitalist class whatsoever.  And this occurs without violence, by a kind of general consensus.  To Bellamy who concealed his socialism under the name nationalism, the radicals of his day function as operatives of the bosses, since their extremism (which their enemies considered foreign) alienates rather than attracts Americans, retarding the interests of the workers.

     The society Bellamy imagines seems a bit frightening with the total social control of the Industrial Army exerted by technocrats who somehow he imagines would act with no self-interest or partiality.  Nonetheless, he is first-rate when he gets to elaborating on the immense waste in American capitalism and the absurdity of a system in which each person strives to get the better of his fellow citizens.  To me his proposal that every worker, indeed, every individual, receive the same stipend is only reasonable, though for many it would make the whole scheme unacceptable.  Resistance to this particular policy is, however, an instructive illustration of the hold that greed has upon the human ego.  Bellamy’s projection of what life may be in the year 2000 has much to recommend it, even if it is difficult to conceive of an enthusiasm for collective effort and symbolic reward emerging in this country, in spite of the example of the military where such values are indeed strong.  Bellamy’s attacks on “individualism” must have sounded un-American to many, but his ideas were sufficiently acclaimed to spawn a newspaper and several hundred clubs devoted to advancing his vision. 

     Bellamy’s prose is pedestrian when it is not stilted (I do realizer that polite circumlocutions luxuriated in the real conversations of his day), and the novel gets by on the barest excuse for a plot.  One or two images remain with the reader at the end: the stagecoach that figures the old society near the book’s outset and the rose bush representing the transition to the new toward the end. 

     Bellamy does share with many revolutionaries of his day an optimism very rare in our own, a sense that the overwhelming majority of producers over exploiters makes the victory of the masses inevitable once they awaken to their situation.  That tone, which lasted until World War I, smells now like the springtime of the world.  

 

 

The God of Small Things (Roy)

     Arundhati Roy’s first novel is filled with dazzling, poetic, playful, expressive language in a splendidly varied pattern of different characters of various ages.  She is a rhetorician of considerable power, willing to deploy striking metaphors, distortions, repetitions, and substitutions each with at least a plausible significance.  In fact, her chief fault is her exuberance which sometimes leads her to fruitless divigations, overuse of motifs, redundant expressions.  The book has a luxurious texture and often a melody arises from the words even when read silently.  Her verbal play and deep sense of pIace suggest that Roy may be an admirer of James Joyce, though her book, for all the chronological displacement and rapidly shifting point of view, remains far more accessible than even Ulysses.

     The mysterious “double-egg twins” Rahel and Estha are the book’s center.  Their lives are twisted by their family and the local circumstances in their village in Kerala, as well as by the colonial past.  Passive and inward-turning, stigmatized by their parents’ separation, they are vulnerable to mistreatment, and, when in their innocence they seek to capture joy, they find they have violated the “Love Laws” that regulate affection.  

     The sexual scenes at the end provide the reader no relief.  One before and one after the deaths of Sophie Mol and Velutha, they offer little solace.  The desperation of Ammu’s affair, her wretched survival, alone, for a few years, and the monstrous weight of guilt that haunted the sensitive twins, all these overwhelm any chance for redemptive sexuality.  At the book’s conclusion the concrete specificity of the scenes of love-making contrasts with the vast unknowns of Rahel and Estha’s lives since the traumas of their childhood.  It is, of course, the details, the “little things,” that are real, that are dependable, that anchor the ego in the everyday.  Much of the rest is muddled, obscure, or vicious.

     It took twenty years for Roy’s next novel to appear, but she was hardly idle in the meantime.  She is an active campaigner for progressive causes in the US, In India, and in the world.  I cannot recall having heard her misspeak on these topics.

 

 

Redburn (Melville)

     Contrary to some recent critics, I would agree with Melville himself who considered Redburn a piece of hackwork.  He notoriously stressed its rapid composition (two and a half months) saying that he wrote it simply to keep himself in tobacco.   His haste is evident in the padding.  Like a journalist he tosses in diverting anecdotes and the sort of detailed technical information which one finds as well in Moby Dick but without the suggestive metaphorical weight that the later book generally includes.  The book is unified only broadly as a Bildungsroman.  What exactly is the reader to make of Harry Bolton apart from the undeniable homoerotic element he adds before vanishing? 

     Yet Melville’s grander style is always in the background.  The symbolic system is perhaps not fully operative throughout the story though echoes of Biblical texts in particular occur regularly.  His rhetoric is denied the soaring heights of which he was capable, tending at times toward colloquialism.  The book’s themes, too, eschew the complexities and ambiguities in which Melville came to specialize.  The self-satire by the narrator reflecting with amusement on his younger self recurs (though, at times, his comic naivete is unconvincing and the recurring joke of his appearance in his shooting jacket is soon tiresome).

     Redburn is worth reading for what it implies about Melville’s life and about transatlantic crossings in the middle of the nineteenth century.  (I find it staggering to imagine a sailing vessel capable of carrying five hundred steerage passengers.)  It also has hints of the sublimity of which the author was capable.  In itself it is a readable narrative of which a perspicuous contemporary reviewer might have noted that readers might expect greater things to come from this author.  

Moby Dick and the Density of the Aesthetic Text

with a note of parallel passages

and a final note on the endlessness of interpretation


Chapters are named in the text and numbered in parentheses while numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.


     Poetry in the old broad sense, referring to all aesthetic or literary texts, shares with other works of art the distinction of being the densest information-bearing codes humans have devised. Other sorts of writing aim at transparency, allowing the reader to efficiently grasp the content without being distracted by sound or form or associations or paradoxes. The fact that poetry uses these resources and more allows it to embody simulacra of any variety of the immensely complex human consciousness and to convey not only information and ideas and opinions but also emotional states, ambivalences, contradictions, and mysteries far more precisely than other forms of discourse. The poet’s use of rhetorical figures of all sorts, connotations, verbal texture, melody, etymology, and a host of other elements which are not exploited in non-aesthetic writing allows the expression of subtle shades of thought and feeling that would be impossible for the author who aims at direct statement. In fact there is no end to the interpretation of a piece of writing as each image, sound, and theme generates an ever-expanding semantic field in which waves of signification react with other waves in patterns of subtle accuracy and, in the end, fabulous complexity. The critic must decide without prescription where to begin and end a reading of any poetic passage, for, just as in a larger philosophical sense all phenomena are interlinked and ultimately one, all writing is part of one immense book. The whole is deducible from every part. With the use of the resources of figures of speech and other literary devices, what passes for rationality expressed in the sort of unequivocal exposition freshmen learn to use for practical purposes is left far behind, stalled on the ground, while poetry mounts to the sublime and strives more or less successfully to embrace the cosmos.
     Melville’s Moby Dick has always seemed to me the one novel that might challenge Huckleberry Finn as the single greatest work of American fiction. Like Emerson and Thoreau Melville is a master stylist and rhetorician, a poetic thinker ideal for demonstrating the density of the aesthetic text. Rereading Moby Dick on a trip to India I focused on a single brief passage chosen very nearly at random as I trundled along on a bus from Jaipur to Jodhpur from the beginning of the “Sunset” chapter (37).

        I leave a white and turbid wake, pale waters, paler cheeks, wheree'er I sail.  The envious billows sidelong well to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.

     In my mind Melville excels as a philosophical writer, more an allegorist led by theme like a super-sophisticated Bunyan rather than a poet marking concrete particulars like Keats or constructing enigmatic symbols like Mallarmé. Melville’s indeterminancies are indeed present -- Pierre is rightly subtitled The Ambiguities – but intellectual, and thought takes the lead in the subtle yet sensual delight in the Confidence Man's playing hide-and-seek with the reader's consciousness. His rhetoric, the palpable syntactical architecture of his sentences, their music and design, I have always admired, and the dance of his phrases is as worthy of attention as the quality of his thoughts.
     The first thing the reader notices about this passage from the beginning of the "Sunset" chapter is the perfectly regular iambic pentameter. [1] The first "and" is semantically unnecessary but required for the meter and not distracting. This cadence forms the regular background beat, the rhythm section of the composition against which melodic and harmonic elements play. The ocean waves are embodied sonically and graphically in the repetition of the letter w in the first sentence. Before that pattern has faded the word "pale" is repeated, making a sort of ghostly whitecap on the sea. The phrase "where'er I sail" so liquid with vowels for eight of its twelve letters and its only consonants the smooth sounds of wh, r, s, and a concluding l, lacking a single plosive, further the replication of the ocean on the printed page. The rhyme of sail and pail brings the clause to an end like a couplet at the end of a scene of Shakespeare.
     The decisive monosyllables of the final two clauses with less differentiation in accent provide the steady footsteps along time's lane. A disturbance is signaled by the compression of "envious" to two syllables and the b sound, rougher than what had preceded it, and this is then resolved when it is succeeded by the alliteration in s, as the sea’s surface becomes smooth once more after the speaking subject moves on.
     In tone these lines suggest an elegiac and vulnerable resignation, a sort of soft lament for the human condition. The speaker proceeds through time without expectations or hopes, but also without hesitation, never slowed though always defeated. The final words “but first I pass” suggest a sort of self-assertion or, at any rate, a heroic existential acceptance.
     I approach theme with this characterization, since for Melville as for each of us in lived experience, ideas are less logical conclusions based on evidence than moods and subjective impressions, subject always to the flickering alteration of the moment, for which we then invent adequate reasons. Melville is by temperament a thinker, and I have often qualified his literary standing by thinking him more a philosopher than a poet. In this intellectual realm he is great indeed, primarily after the manner of Plato and Nietzsche, not for the rigor of his reasoning but for the resonant chords he sets to vibrating within the reader. He is not one to settle on a thought made attractive by succinctness or clarity, much less by authority or tradition. Rather one finds near as many enigmas, contradictions, and mysteries in him as in one's own observations, should one be in the mood to look closely enough and not to scant a telling detail for the sake of ease. In this way his ideas remain as fresh as the reader’s own morning musings.
     Among the reductive formulations of the thoughts set to mingle and struggle with each other in these twenty-nine words are the following.

      1. Life is a process, a pilgrimage, a journey, though one with neither destination or reward.

      2. The human being must contend constantly with everything else, an effort signaled by turbidity                yet followed by the blankness of entropy that erases all events. The pale seas are the source of                 the paler human cheeks because sailing (which is to say living) is so inevitably rigorous and our             tender human perspective sees ourselves as unique sufferers. Nature is not merely indifferent. It             is actively hostile.

      3. Nonetheless, one somehow goes on regardless, suggesting parallels with Camus and Sartre.

      4. A further heroic response to the recognition of the human predicament is evident in the  

          construction of lovely verbal patterns expressing our woe. Such artifacts prove in part

          redemptive, in part an all-too-human way of passing the time while awaiting death.

     I have not begun to explore the passage in terms of its associations within the novel, Melville’s other work, or links to earlier or later literature. I can only here offer a few signposts for fruitful exploration. Paleness, of course, is central to the book. Even before the first chapter the “pale Usher” associated with mortality opens the book. His “queer handkerchief queer, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world” signifies the veil of maya that obscures the appalling emptiness of Ultimate Reality.
     And who can forget the similar pattern of deceptive surface over terrifying whiteness in the magnificent crescendo that closes the chapter on “The Whiteness of the Whale” (42)?

      All deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the                 charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic                 which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or                 colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even             tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge--pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a         leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses                upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that            wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol.                    Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

     Moby Dick is a classic because it reproduces a convincing projection of human consciousness, complete with affect, taste and sensibility, Weltanschauung, and experience in the most densely significant symbolic code available to our species. One might continue its interpretation as endlessly onward as the sea-waves themselves, and, like the waves, such readings are dynamic and ever-evolving. I have treated only the tiniest fraction of the great novel. Fortunately, the consideration of the text can be at any moment truncated and whatever work has been done on it may result in a rich and satisfying share, leaving always appetite for more, but no necessity to say another word.




A Note on Verbal Parallels

     Even confining one’s attention to Moby Dick, there is no end to these internal clusters of images. For example, “envious goblins” appear in “The Funeral” (69), and the billows are “destroying” as the denouement approaches in “The Chase – Third Day” (135). Related images appear in Melville’s other works. Paleness is linked to whiteness and the word “whelm” and the entire complex to mortality as a green plant dies with the coming of cold in Pierre: “the drifting winter snows shall whelm it” and, in the same chapter the reader finds a reference to “pale cheeks” (Ch. 23). Life itself is “nobly envious” in Pierre, Chapter 12. “Evil- minded, envious goblins” emerge from the sea in Mardi, Chapter 69. But there is no point in cataloguing such associations without making something of the verbal recurrences. I mean only to suggest the unlimited process of semeiosis.
     The semantic field expands immensely when one considers works by other authors. Given the fact that Melville explicitly refers to his story as a tragedy and consciously models elements of it on Shakespeare the critic might pursue parallel usage in that writer such as Pistol’s curse “ocean whelm them all!” (Merry Wives of Windsor, II, 2) or Andromache’s vision of “bloody turbulence” (Troilus and Cressida, V, 3), not to mention the hundred and forty-eight occurrences of the term “pale” in his plays.
     Had Melville ever come across Robert English’s 1777 “Elegy” for Sir Charles Saunders that includes the line “in vain the envious billows round him beat”? (Note here that unlike in Melville the hero is stronger than the billows.) Or perhaps the line “The envious billows choak’d my struggling breath” in Charles Lloyd’s 1819 collection Nugæ Canoræ in which, on the other hand, the sea is altogether triumphant. He may even have happened upon Miss E. M. Allison’s poem on Columbus “The Genoese Immigrant” which includes a reference to “envious billows angry play” published in New York eight years before Moby Dick. Whether or not any of these played a role as a source, they cause Melville’s own usage to stand out in higher relief.
     Among the most obvious relevant routes for further analysis are image systems of whiteness, water, ships, and life as a journey. Nor have I touched on etymology or connotation. Nor on parallels with epic which Melville explicitly had in mind in his use, for instance, of Homeric similes or the Biblical references suggested by names such as Ishmael and Ahab. The reading of the few lines I have selected illustrates the rich stores of meaning borne by literary texts.



A Final Note on the Endlessness of Interpretation

     What is the meaning of Moby Dick? What Eco called “unlimited semiosis” (in A Theory of Semiotics) can be traced in all writing, but especially in poetry. Though generally applicable, some limited version of the idea is a commonplace in Melville commentaries. Thus Van Doren says “Ahab has a hundred symbolical or allegorical interpretations.” [2] Author David Gilbert notes, “It's been called a whaling yarn, a theodicy, a Shakespeare-styled political tragedy, an anatomy, a queer confessional, an environmentalist epic; because this novel seems to hold all the world, all these readings are compatible and true.” [3] In her introduction to an edition of the novel Elizabeth Renker observes “ascertaining the whale’s ultimate meaning is a project [one] could pursue forever.” To John Bryant readings of Moby Dick include an extraordinary range of “seemingly flat contradictions and simultaneously co-existing divergences.” [4]

     To D. H. Lawrence, speaking of the whale:

        Of course he is a symbol.
        Of what?
        I doubt if even Melville knew exactly. That's the best of it. [5]

The catalogue of such responses could be extended indefinitely.

The fact is that literary texts are peculiarly polysemous; it is one of their foremost characteristics in contradistinction to all other sorts of writing. The best of them are often the most underdetermined. Yet they not only bear multiple meanings, their decoding goes on and on indefinitely just as our experience of time, but, like a life, or like these remarks, it is initiated and terminated suddenly and arbitrarily.



1. Carl Van Doren found Melville’s tendency to fall into blank verse “irritating.” See his essay “Mr. Melville’s Moby Dick” in The Bookman for April 1924, pages 154-6.

2. Ibid.


3. “The Endless Depths of Moby Dick Symbolism,” The Atlantic, August 20, 2013.

4. in “The Versions of Moby Dick” in The Book as Artefact, Text and Border, edited by Anne Mette Hansen. p. 258.


5. In Studies in Classic American Literature. Among Lawrence’s other comments are the identification of Moby Dick with “the deepest blood-being of the [doomed] white race.” He found the book brilliant, though its author was “hopelessly au grand serieux.”

Notes on Recent Reading [Melville, Greene, Whalen]

Herman Melville Redburn

     Redburn is clearly shallow, all the more when juxtaposed to a huge metaphorical construction like Moby Dick or a subtle metaphysical mystery like The Confidence Man. Figures pregnant with symbolic weight such as the mysterious Harry Bolton and the sinister and fated Jackson never ripen into meaning. The book is in fact filled with such false starts: the wholly fantastic trip to a London pleasure palace, for instance, or the use of the outdated Liverpool guidebook. Melville feels free to include divigations on whatever comes to mind without tying these remarks to the rest of the text. (The discussion of immigration in Chapter 58 and the passage at the end of Chapter 29 questioning whether sailors can ever “be lifted wholly out of the mire” are examples.) His several lapses into common piety (such as the conclusion of the same chapter: “God is the true Father of all”) likewise play purely to received ideas in a way the later Melville avoided. Redburn is part self-portrait, part unconvincing artifice (his ingenuousness is forced when, for example in Chapter 42 he wanders into a private club and expresses surprise at his expulsion).
     The biographers tell us that Melville was writing speedily for money when he produced what he called “a little nursery tale,” “beggarly Redburn,” “calculated merely to please the general reader, & not provoke attack.” In spite of his announced ambition to write “those sort of books which are said to ‘fail,’” economic pressure led him to write Redburn in less than ten weeks. He wrote in his journal “I, the author, know [Redburn] to be trash, & wrote it to buy some tobacco with.”
     Its strengths include the simple inclusion of the details of sea life which he knew so well: rigging, slang, the social order on board. One finds excellent paragraphs throughout such as the one in Chapter 24 describing Redburn’s learning to work aloft, comparing his sense of mastery over the canvas to Richard II’s satisfaction as quashing the Peasant’s Rebellion.


Robert Greene Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay

     Robert Greene’s name is most commonly recalled as the author of A Groats-Worth of Wit, itself remembered only because the pamphlet satirizes Shakespeare, but he also wrote a number of romances and plays, including Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Though educated at Oxford, he acquired a reputation as a demimondaine and his leaflets display considerable knowledge of the libertines and confidence men of his era. He is rightly associated with Marlowe, not merely because this play includes devil-conjuring like Faustus but also because the author was reputed to live loosely and cultivate scandalous conduct as well as opinions. Greene’s “celebrity” image, if such a term can be used of a sixteenth century man, was that of a daring immoralist, and his readers and listeners must feel a bit of the savor of safely second-hand license.
     The play is lively and entertaining enough, as it drifts from romantic reverie to slapstick to melodrama, ending in marriages. Bacon’s unregenerate servant Miles is carried off by a devil, scapegoat for all the darker psychic contents churned up by the story. After all, viewers have witnessed Lacy’s abrupt and cruel testing of his beloved, the senseless deaths not only of Serlsby and Lambert but of their sons as well, in addition to a considerable dose of Satanic conjuring, which may have seemed worst of all.
     The verse is agile and imaginative, lit with the ornaments of an age that enjoyed language, but it lacks powerful image systems. Green’s word-play entertains, no mean achievement if not the highest praise.
     There was surely plenty of spectacle (a theatrical quality that seems to dominate Broadway and a good number of today’s movies). Thematically, in the primary plot of the victory of Friar Bacon’s better self, Greene works the basic gambit of warning spectators against immoral conduct by exhibiting it for their edification. Of course, his reformation is caused not by enlightenment but by the most mundane of failures, simple fatigue and his servant’s irresponsibility. The love story of Lacy and the Fair Maid of Fressingfield, complicated by Edward’s lust as well as by Lacy’s strange misleading of his beloved, ends as satisfactorily as it would have in a ‘thirties film. The four deaths are tossed with very little reason other than to keep the pot boiling.


Philip Whalen Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head

     I have often lamented the fact that the hip people of my own generation recorded so little of their experience. In contrast to the passionate authors of the fifties, many of whom were intellectual as well as adventurous, many rank-and-file bohemians of the next wave, ten years later, took their principal art to be rock and roll. In this and in his other novel You Didn’t Even Try, Philip Whalen, the “Warren Coughlin” of Dharma Bums, records life among his Berkeley friends. Written in the sixties while he was living in Kyoto, practicing zazen, and teaching English, the title of the novel derives from Robert Greene’s play and its origin is more than coincidental, for it shines a spotlight of the learning cultivated by Whalen and the people of his circle. Though it may not be a novel of the highest standard, Imaginary Speeches reminds us that the hip scene was never limited to Kerouac and Cassady, and the discourse in the counter-culture of the time was not necessarily dominated by “goofing.” Though they do violate taboos (smoking a bit of dope and hanging out with gay people was much more edgy half a century ago), Whalen’s characters also pursue “elite” high culture: they prepare elaborate European meals and play string quartets with their friends. One of the principal figures in the book is a poet of somewhat irregular habits, but another is a linguistics professor at Berkeley who seems fully to participate in academic hustling. The reader is best advised to first go through Whalen’s poetry, some of which is first-rate, but the novels have for me a casual charm of their own.

Dead Reckoning

I had meant to use this as the opening essay for a chapbook of poems. It was not until after I had put the collection together that I idly searched the phrase only to find not one but two poetry collections published during 2010 were titled Dead Reckoning. Am I swimming with the Zeitgeist? is it simply a commonplace idea? or the instant appeal of a more richly suggestive phrase than most?




In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds.

 
                 from Walden



     Dead reckoning improves with experience, since the navigator must rely not on the revelation of instruments, but on a few precise calculations, based on an uncertain starting point, extrapolated with the rapid subconscious computation we call intuition. Without certainty but with dispatch, the sailor takes all the available data into account and moves on, always unsure whether the morrow will bring a new found Eden or a school of sea monsters or, more likely, something far more complicated between.
     The territory between heaven and hell, between void and plenum is where the action is. History begins after Eden, when the plot thickens. With Hopkins I am greedy for that play of unpredictable patterns, glad for the pied beauty of dappled things, the irregularity of the calico cat’s colors, the chiaroscuro of the bright day forest floor. My heart, I confess, is an English garden far from M. Le Nôtre’s French style and always, for better or worse, neglected in spots, intensely cultivated in others, and overgrown in little-planned ways.
     The reader or writer moves through a book as the traveler moves over the face of the globe, facing always the unknown. When I first arrived in Europe I had no itinerary at all, but simply set out, and in this I had the precedent of Byron’s Childe Harold who addressed his vessel at embarkation, saying he cared not “what land thou bear’st me to,/ So not again to mine.” But then one never returns to quite the same place after a journey, whether reader or writer or tourist.
      I was once called a bricoleur, and I suppose I might plead guilty. My last book was divided into categories, but at bottom it, too, like the present collection is this and that, here and there, moving with the moment from one focus to another without architectural connections, rather as the eye does over the field of view. I admit that what results is a rag-bag, as Pound called his Cantos, a variety show in which a juggler or dog act may succeed a singer, as, indeed, once a hurdy-gurdy player preceded my poetry in what struck me as a most effective opening, and, if this collection is a hodge-podge, it is so only to the extent that the day just passing could be similarly described. I like to think my method has something in common with the young child whose arrangements of objects, using whatever is at hand, are quite often entirely arcane to some, but pregnant with intimate significance for the maker and for others who know how to play.
     The fact is that, apart from the word’s adoption by Levi-Strauss and Derrida, the most common meaning of bricoler is “to fiddle or tinker” and thus “to make do with what is available.” Does this not parallel the catch-as-catch-can character of consciousness as one combines every new impression with the myriad that have come before to create an ever-changing model of the real? Everyone who has not received stone tablets from on high is, after all, fiddling and tinkering with the little that is known, making do.
     My home’s kitchen runs at what I fancy to be a high standard, though with a methodless method. We buy utterly without plan and always privilege the cheap. This leads to fresh products, whatever is plentiful and in season, good in both quality and price. So what-it-may-be becomes the basis of the week’s menus. For cooks with catholic tastes and a bit of knowledge, this method cannot fail. For poetry, the reader may judge.
     Just as every fruit has a particular grace in form and flavor, so has every place. I have lived in cities and countryside, in the West, the Midwest, the East, and abroad, moving not due to some grand career plan or life design, but because of slight or chance circumstances, and the appeal of a new scene, a series of “pavannes and divigations,” to use Pound’s lovely title. But who can do other than wander? Our very existence is dependent on countless unlikely conditions back through generations to the dawn of life, itself all but impossible – indeed, every fact is as improbable as a lightning strike or lottery win.
     Not my writing alone, but my reading as well has always been altogether desultory, more dependent on what turns up in the Salvation Army or what catches my eye in a chance glance at a review than any scheme. I read works from every land and every age and admit that immense breadth cannot fail to compromise depth, but I doubt I shall reform.
     Billiard players also use the verb bricoler, meaning in this context to play off the cushion, that is, to pursue one’s goal by indirection, just as literary texts use irony and metaphor rather than “straight” talk. These poems, then, may be seen as a sort of scrapbook, a collage, reminiscent of motley, tossed together in the backyard of the brain, art’s own atelier.
     Starbuck, anxious about Ahab’s leadership, muses "...and in these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the error-abounding log?" But which of us has access to one with fewer flaws?

Dead reckoning is good for to sail for the Deadman;
And Tom Deadlight he thinks it may reckon near right
Melville, from “Tom Deadlight”