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Absolutism in Melville's Pierre
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Of all Melville's novels, the one which has proved most challenging to the critics, and which has been handled least satisfactorily by them, is Pierre—possibly because its great suggestiveness and its many levels of meaning make difficult any attempts at its analysis. Although, as Newton Arvin points out, an evaluation by literary standards shows Pierre to be “one of the most painfully ill-conditioned books ever to be produced by a first-rate mind,” its “badness is an active and positive, not merely a negative one ... the badness of misdirected and even perverted powers, but not of deficiency or deadness.” For, in its textural richness, which amounts, indeed, to a symbolic plethora, and in its ambiguities, the novel offers an almost limitless expanse for critical exploration.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952
References
1 Herman Melville (New York, 1950), p. 219.
2 Raymond M. Weaver, Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic (New York, 1921), pp. 342-343. The autobiographical element in Pierre is also discussed by Henry A. Murray, ed. Pierre or, The Ambiguities (New York, 1949), pp. xxi-xxv. Furthermore, it should be remarked that all critics admit to a more or less extensive autobiographical influence on Pierre.
3 Richard Chase, Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York, 1949), pp. 103-141.
4 William Ellery Sedgwick, Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind (Cambridge, 1944), pp. 137-172, and Robert S. Forsythe, ed. Pierre or The Ambiguities (New York, 1930), pp. xxix-xxxi.
5 This point of view is expressed most fully by Arvin, pp. 219-225. It is also touched upon by Willard Thorp, “Herman Melville” (Literary History of the United States, ed. Robert Spiller et al., i, 441-471), p. 456; and by F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London, 1941), p. 255.
6 All quotations from Pierre are taken from Murray's edition, cited in n. 2, above.
7 This idea is implicit in Murray's statement that “Pierre is Oedipus-Romeo-Hamlet-Memnon-Christ-Ishmael-Orestes-Timon-Satan-Cain-Manfred, or, more shortly, an American Fallen and Crucified Angel” (introd. to Pierre, p. xx). Pierre is, at one time or another, identified with all the persons listed here in much the same way as he is identified with Hamlet, Memnon, and Christ.
8 Chase remarks that the last scene in the novel shows the completion of Pierre's act of mental withdrawal, which he considers to be the main theme of the book. He says: “We seem to see the events of this book through the mouth of a dark cave into which we are slowly retreating; at the end it is as though we had turned our faces to the inner wall of this Platonic cave (a city jail, as it turns out), beholding only the shadows of reality” (p. 103). This interpretation is provocative and does not, in actuality, conflict with the concept of the simultaneity of all time.
9 That mankind in general at least dimly perceives this concept, Melville implies in such passages as the following, which describes man's reluctance to acknowledge that anything desirable has retreated beyond his reach into the past: “When the substance is gone, men cling to the shadow. Places once set apart to lofty purposes, still retain the name of that loftiness, even when converted to the meanest uses. It would seem, as if forced by imperative Fate to renounce the reality of the romantic and lofty, the people of the present would fain make a compromise by retaining some purely imaginative remainder. The curious effect of this tendency is oftenest evinced in those venerable countries of the old transatlantic world; where still over the Thames one bridge yet retains the monastic title of Blackfriars; though not a single Black Friar, but many a pickpocket, has stood on that bank since a good ways beyond the days of Queen Bess; where still innumerable other historic anomalies sweetly and sadly remind the present man of the wonderful procession that preceded him in his new generation” (p. 314).
10 Sedgwick (n. 4, above), pp. 145-146.
11 See Thorp (n. 5, above), p. 457, for a similar statement about this meaning of Pierre. Speaking of the “ambiguous sexual relationships” (i.e., the relationships of Pierre with Glen Stanly, with Isabel, and with his mother) to be found in the novel, Thorp says: “They are evidently related to a theme which he states early in the book, though he does not develop it or in any other passage the it to the theme of the ambiguous nature of ultimate reality. The passage comes just after Pierre goes to make his morning call on Lucy. It is a kind of Benedicite in praise of young love, but in its deeper meaning it declares that Love, natural love, drives the demon Principle which is the sire of Want and Woe further and further back into chaos.... When Pierre deserts Lucy and love to do what he thinks is his heaven-directed duty, his chance for happiness departs. The demon Principle enters his earthly Paradise.”
12 Just as demon potentialities existed in the love-principle that ruled Saddle Meadows, so love potentialities are to be found in the demon-principle that rules the Apostles. Plinlimmon's pamphlet, “Chronometricals and Horologicals,” which serves as an ethical guide to the Apostles, contains certain modified humanitarian tenets. Plinlimmon says: “If a man gives with a certain self-considerate generosity to the poor; abstains from doing downright ill to any man; does his convenient best in a general way to do good to his whole race; takes watchful loving care of his wife and children, relatives, and friends; is perfectly tolerant to all other men's opinions, whatever they may be; is an honest dealer, an honest citizen, and all that; and more especially if he believe that there is a God for infidels, as well as for believers, and acts upon that belief; then ... such a man need never lastingly despond, because he is sometimes guilty of some minor offense” (p. 251). Among the Apostles, however, this embryonic humanitarianism did not develop into the love-principle. In actuality, the Apostles were humanitarian because they were selfish; they were kind to others only for the sake of their own happiness.
15 Of these societies, Chase remarks (pp. 134-135) : “There are three cultural levels in Melville's vision of world-historical destiny as we find it in Pierre. The first is Religion. The second can be called Conventional Society and is represented by Pierre's mother, Lucy's mother, Glen Stanly (European-culture-in-America), and Frederic Tartan (the military element in society ...). The third cultural level is Bohemia. When Pierre, Isabel, and Delly go to New York, we recall, they take up quarters in a building which was once a church but is now the living quarters of assorted impoverished intellectuals. This Bohemian society, Melville seems to be saying, has inherited not only the buildings of a once flourishing church, but also its spiritual and moral functions: it is the duty of the secular intelligentsia to furnish the leadership once furnished by religion.” That the social structure of Pierre may have an enriched meaning if it is considered in the terms of the pattern which Chase outlines, I should be the last to deny. I feel, however, that the basic significance of the social order which Melville describes may be found in its structural use, which offers for comparison analogous societies, one governed by the love-principle and the other, in the absence of love, by the demon-principle.
14 In spite of Pierre's sacrifice for Isabel, his feelings towards her seem to be dominated by the contrary qualities of lust and a sense of duty, rather than by love; at any rate, the love element in their pseudo-marriage is not strong enough to counteract the demon-principle that governs the society of the Apostles. Thorp's remarks on the subject (quoted above, n. 11) imply this idea, as does Arvin's more scientifically psychological statement. Arvin says (p. 224) : “The incestuous relationship with Isabel cannot move to any erotic consummation, and cut off at last from all avenues of emotional fulfillment, Pierre goes mad with accumulated hostility.”
15 In this discussion of Melville's use of contrasting, though analogous, societies to press home his point about the identity of good and evil, I disagree with Matthiessen, who says that Pierre has little to do with society, since the hero's radicalism is personal and his tragedy individual. Pierre, Mattheissen says (p. 469), “has no time to think of himself in any coherent connection with society; he is submerged by the ghastly consequences that have followed his idealistic act.” There seems, however, to be sufficient evidence (much of which I have adduced) to show that, whether or not Pierre meditated upon society, Melville certainly did. Although in Pierre Melville is not concerned with particular social criticism, he does show himself to be concerned with the over-all meaning of the social structure.
16 Thorp (see n. 5), p. 457.
17 “Pierre, the Fool of Virtue,” AL, xxi (May 1949), 203.
18 Although the ambiguity presented by this speech—that the ultimate reality may, in truth, have no reality—remains unresolved at the end of the novel, it is less significant, so far as the structural pattern is concerned, than is the statement that virtue and vice are but facets of the same absolute. Since the complete action of Pierre is based on the assumption that in the universe there are forces which transcend human understanding, the principal terms used for a consideration of the novel must permit the discussion of absolutes.
19 Arvin (see n. 1), p. 221.
20 Here I disagree with Hillway (pp. 201-206), who believes that Melville used the Plinlimmon pamphlet to state a non-Christian standard of conduct, which he balanced against the Christian standard with the intention of showing that the non-Christian standard is false. (See n. 17, above.)
21 See Matthiessen, p. 470; Chase, p. 113; Arvin, pp. 228-229.
22 Hillway, p. 201.
23 The material used in this paper was, for the most part, gathered for presentation as a report in the Melville seminar conducted by Dr. R. H. Fogle of Tulane University, whose suggestions I have found most helpful.