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?”