I just finished Herman Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, and I have emerged convinced that the modern-day revisionists are right: this once most reviled and misunderstood Melville novel is actually among his best.
But why is it so effective? The back cover of the Penguin Classics edition informs me the novel is to be read as a "satire on the Gothic-Sentimental novel." But I'm not sure that's quite right.
Pierre certainly has some themes in common with other more overt satires and parodies of the Gothic romance, such as Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey and Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm. Like those works, Pierre is fundamentally a critique of people who insist upon making themselves and others miserable through pursuing phantasms and hobbyhorses of the mind.
As the epigraph of Peacock's novella—drawn (with some adaptation on Peacock's part) from Samuel Butler's Hudibras—aptly epitomizes the theme:
There's a dark lantern of the spirit,
Which none see by but those who bear it,
That makes them in the dark see visions
And hag themselves with apparitions,
Find racks for their own minds, and vaunt
Of their own misery and want.
The same epigraph could well have stood at the frontispiece of Melville's novel. Pierre unfolds the story of a young man whose combined lack of self-awareness as to his own motives and susceptibility to the hobgoblin of virtuous consistency (the "cursed conceit of being richt," as Hugh MacDiarmid would have called it) leads him and everyone he loves to perdition.
But where I hesitate to extend the parallel to Peacock and Gibbons any further—or to join in calling Pierre a "satire"—is that these former works, which could indeed be called satires or parodies of the Gothic romance—are thoroughly funny.
Pierre, by contrast, is not quite a comic treatment of the theme. While its protagonist's self-made sufferings do at times reach extremes that border on the ludicrous—and Melville writes at times with an archness that approaches mockery (though in this regard, he hardly differs from the standard editorial voice of the sly 19th century novel-narrator)—it is ultimately convincing in its tragedy.
Indeed, Pierre works quite well as a Gothic-Sentimental romance in its own right. If it is indeed a "satire" of the genre, then it is unusual among such in also being an unusually effective example of the school it is meant to satirize. Its entangling plot, involving borderline incest, illegitimacy, Oedipal attachments, family disgrace and disinheritance—is as thrilling as, say, The House of the Seven Gables (albeit with a major difference—that Melville—as he warns us he may do, early in the novel—does not fully unravel all the mysteries he propounds, even in the novel's final episodes. Some of them, as the title portends, will be left as "ambiguities").
"Satire" doesn't then quite seem to fit this novel—still less does "parody." I think the best term for the genre to which it belongs is probably "Irony," in the sense that Northrop Frye gave it. That is, the novel is "an Irony," using the term as a category of literary work.
Pierre has the outward trappings of a Romance. But where, according to Frye, Romance in the true sense is populated by people larger than life and greater than ourselves, Pierre gives us a protagonist who is ultimately of our own proportions. This is not, to be sure, how he conceives of himself, at first—nor is it even how he seems to us, when we first open the novel (to the contrary, he is introduced to us as an archetypal Romance hero). But it is what he has been reduced to, by the novel's end, through the events he must undergo. This is the hallmark of the Fryean definition of "Irony"—and Pierre, by the book's end, relates to us, the readers, in the role of an eiron.
This is also what gives the novel its distinct feeling of modernity. It is a product of disenchantment. Pierre, its hero, enters the world believing that it will obey the laws of Romance. But he finds—to his ruin—that it instead obeys the laws of conventionality and self-interest.
Here we see Frye's concept of the "low norm"—the idea that people make themselves most ridiculous when they aspire toward the empyrean, without acknowledging the fleshly strings that still tie them to Earth. It is the same theme as the novels of Samuel Butler (not to be confused with the author of Hudibras mentioned above). Butler's great lesson was: there is nothing more dangerous than the sort of intellectual pride that insists on consistency, and of worrying the bone of every moral or rational idea to the utmost extent it will bear.
It is, again, the same theme that Peacock or Gibbons had in mind: the point made by the epigraph from the other Samuel Butler: that people should not "rack their minds" in pursuit of ideological and pseudo-moral hobgoblins of their own devising. And so, too, we have a pamphlet that Pierre finds in one scene, authored by one "Plotinus Plinlimmon," that offers the same worldly counsel, in so many words:
For flesh-and-blood creatures such as ourselves, we may in fact do more harm chasing after perfect and unattainable virtue than we can ever commit while accepting our own limitations. This is the sin for which Pierre is so cruelly punished, at Melville the narrator's hands. He is a dupe of his own deluded sense of virtue. He is at last—as he puts it—"the fool of Truth, the fool of Virtue, the fool of Fate."
The disenchantment Pierre undergoes in the process of making these harsh discoveries is too bitter to be comedic (at least to my stomach). But the loss of his illusions is what makes him relatable to us as readers. He leaves the pages of storybook legend and becomes a modern man before our eyes (as symbolized through his literal transportation, between the front- and back-halfs of the novel, from the antique countryside to the modern metropolis). This is what makes the novel an "Irony" in the same way that Northrop Frye defined Kafka's The Trial as an irony. Which is, of course, not the same thing (in either case) as being funny.
Pierre's ultimate disillusionment—the abuse of his innocence and murder of his naiveté—can be genuinely tragic, even at the same time that it is ironic (much as Kafka reaches the height of genuine tragedy in The Trial's closing pages). This is the effect that Melville's novel achieves so well. I found it genuinely heartbreaking, even as many of its Gothic elements are so outré and overwrought. Pierre is punished for his flaws, like all great tragic protagonists—but also like all great tragic protagonists, the punishment has an element of disproportion and unreason. He is the victim, ultimately, not of justice or Providence, but of Fate. As in all great tragedy, he is at last nothing more than the sport of the gods.
Why should he be punished at all though? What is this fatal flaw of Pierre's, other than the quite innocent fact of pursuing virtue to the point of dangerous excess? As Melville indicates, it is the fact that he is self-deluded; hence, his virtue is not all what it seems. Pierre believes he acts from wholly altruistic motives—and does not see, or does not allow himself to see, the adder of sexual egotism that is concealed within his choices. What appears to his mind, then, to be an act of ultimate self-sacrifice—worth pursuing even if it costs him his happiness and destroys the lives of the people around him—is actually motivated by something all-too-human. To quote a poem by Philip Larkin: "He was out for his own ends/ Not just pleasing his friends."
Melville wryly hints at such. In a passage humorously disclaiming any willingness to paint his hero as less than an ideal paragon, he acknowledges nevertheless that Pierre's actions are perhaps shaped by "mere contingent things." His resolution (and for those who want no spoilers before reading the book, stop here) to live with his purported half-sister as if she were his wife, is perhaps not exclusively due—Melville implies—to his noble-hearted desire to rescue her from the stain of illegitimacy—and to spare his father's posthumous reputation—as it is to a far more Byronic motive. Likewise, his former affianced Lucy, is led to take part too in an increasingly scandalous ménage, with both Pierre and the half-sister, by refusing to look motives of love and sexual jealousy in the face, and instead finding virtuous rationales for all their decisions.
In all of this, Melville reveals himself as a modern man. He was writing psychoanalytic fiction before there was even an "Oedipal" label to fix on things. If the most revealing trait of many another 19th century writer—the one that makes Tennyson, say, at times read so much like an overgrown child—is their lack of self-awareness; their belief that virtue can be the only wellspring of their actions—Melville, in this novel, takes a great detonation charge to these notions. No wonder the novel was disliked and considered "immoral" upon its first appearance! Melville had caught the age with its pants down.
Is he to be celebrated for this—or resented? Melville considers both possibilities. As in the no-less-misunderstood later novel, The Confidence-Man, Melville here is greatly concerned with whether harsh "Truth" is actually to be preferred to pleasing "illusions." "Truth will not be comforted," as a character cries in despair, in a passage in The Confidence-Man—and much the same cry from the heart can he heard on many pages of Pierre. Melville takes seriously the possibility that revealing the truth does not lead to anything better—the possibility that finding one truth may only open the door to still other and deeper mysteries, which may never be unlocked.
Perhaps the truth, then, is not doing anyone any favors. Perhaps, as the "baleful thought" occurs to Pierre in one passage, "the truth should not always be paraded; [...] sometimes a lie is heavenly, and truth infernal." Perhaps it is better never to leave the realm of storybook Romance in which Pierre is born. Perhaps we should not be disenchanted. As the character Luka argues, in Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths: what good is truth? Whom does it help? Which does more to comfort the sufferer in their afflictions—the truth, or a lie?
Melville, however, insists on plunging on regardless. He does not so much give us a reason as to why he is doing so, as simply to confess that he can't help himself. And in this, too, he shows himself to be a modern. We are driven to truth even though it be our bane (perhaps because the illusion, once seen as illusion, can never become otherwise to us, no matter how much we might wish it to return in the form of genuine belief). So, Let us have truth, we say—the ugly truth, the naked truth—even at the price of our most sacred illusions...
And thus we gladly join Melville on this quest—for the sheer fascination of the perilous plumbing into the depths and the ever-thickening mystery, if for nothing else. As Melville writes, in a passage that could serve as the epigraph of every psychological novel published since—every work of Freudian psychoanalysis too: "I shall follow the endless, winding way,—the flowing river in the cave of man; careless whither I be led, reckless where I land."
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