[In the following essay, Rowe discusses Pierre as Melville's critique of nineteenth-century literary production, suggesting that the novel is his farewell to writing as he conceived it before Pierre, and that it serves as a bridge to The Confidence-Man.]

The founders of Rome …—Romulus and Remus—are, according to the tradition, themselves freebooters—represented as from their earliest days thrust out from the Family, and as having grown up in a state of isolation from family affection. …

The immoral active severity of the Romans in this private side of character necessarily finds its counterpart in the passive severity of their political union. For the severity which the Roman experienced from the State he was compensated by a severity, identical in nature, which he was allowed to indulge towards his family—a servant on the one side, a despot on the other.

—Hegel, The Philosophy of History

In his Introduction to the 1949 Hendricks House edition of Pierre, Henry A. Murray criticizes Melville for not providing a clearer cultural motivation for Pierre's alienation: “Melville does not present us with a pertinent spectacle or analysis of American society, nor does he state explicitly what forces of the culture are so inimical to his spirit that he and his hero are driven to condemn it in toto. … This hiatus in emotional logic is one of the outstanding structural defects of the novel.”¹ Murray very clearly identifies a central problem that has caused both contemporary reviewers and twentieth-century scholars to judge Pierre as Melville's most incoherent work. What little explicit commentary Melville gives the reader about social issues appears in those chapters set in New York, after Pierre has crossed his Rubicon and rebelled against his family. Indeed, what Murray terms “this hiatus in emotional logic” applies equally well to the customary division critics make between the pastoralism of the domestic romance at Saddle-Meadows and the surrealism of the episodes in the city. Instead of offering us the naturalist's microscopic examination of urban corruption, Melville focuses on Pierre's efforts to write his “infernal book.” Instead of the pastoral romance of Saddle-Meadows giving way to the gritty realism of New York, we find pastoralism transformed into a metafictional romance in which virtually every urban experience relates to Pierre's problem of artistic creation. The social issues in Pierre thus appear to be forgotten as Melville shifts his attention from the domestic conflicts at Saddle-Meadows to Pierre's artistic problems in the city.

Yet this problem may well be a consequence of our critical methods rather than an inherent defect in the work's composition and structure. This is not to say that Pierre is an unacknowledged masterpiece. Quite the contrary, the novel is full of difficulties that I shall not try to resolve, intending as I do instead to use them to clarify Melville's contempt for “the man of letters” and thus for himself. Melville's wicked critique of authorship is not, however, simply a symptom of madness or uncontrolled ranting. His indictment of idealist philosophy and literary practice, especially focused on the Transcendentalists, is coherent and profound, because it recognizes how powerfully such abstractions would serve the political purposes of the new American ruling classes. At the same time, he could find no acceptable alternative to this complicity of the author with those more powerful authorities whom Melville judged to have ruined the republican dream from the beginning. Intricately worked out in the very novelistic form Melville had come to detest, his critique of ideology in Pierre remains a testament to the limits of literature as a force for political reform. In Pierre, Melville bids farewell to the literary forms of romance and the novel neither because he had lost control of them nor because he had lost control of his own life, unless we understand that life to be inseparable from his conception of his vocation as an author. What he recognizes instead is how powerfully these forms contribute to the social forces of domination they so often claim to contest. The argument of Pierre is thus too coherent and too convincing to result in any other conclusion than that Literature is the enemy.

Above all, it is literature's inclination to make its fantasy credible that troubles Melville, because he recognizes this tendency toward “fictional realization” as comparable to the work of ideology in naturalizing otherwise arbitrary social fictions. Among the many literary forms, romance and novel tend particularly to accomplish this work of naturalization by way of characters and dramatic situations that substitute interpersonal psychologies for more complex social and economic forces. In Pierre, Melville focuses on family relations both at Saddle-Meadows and in New York because he recognizes that the family is the institution through which the dramatic social changes of Jacksonian America would be rendered acceptable and normal. And it is the family as the focus of the fiction of manners—whether it be the sentimental romance or the “novel of social manners”—that had such a powerful influence on Melville's readers. As a primarily bourgeois form, the nineteenth-century novel of social manners quite obviously helped legitimate its middle-class readers and their values, often by ruthlessly criticizing aristocratic pretensions. Insofar as bourgeois values are identified with democratic sentiments, the novel became the primary literary form of urban and industrial America. It is, of course, quite conventional to notice how the novel of social manners from Jane Austen to Henry James concentrates on the specific social functions of a fictional family. More often than not, the family's class identification governs other mimetic criteria, even in writers, like Trollope and James, for whom bourgeois values are considered necessary to the well-ordered state. Even so, it is surprising how often literary critics treat such family relations in phenomenological and psychological terms. By personalizing characters and dramatizing interpersonal conflicts, novelists tempt readers to identify with characters in ways that encourage the use of psychological and phenomenological terms to understand the narrative functions of characters. One consequence of this critical inclination is the relative neglect of the social and political significance of family relations in fiction. In short, the form of the novel and the reader-competence it constructs often work contrary to the larger class significance that “character” and “the family” are supposed to convey.

Social historians traditionally have had as much difficulty studying the social functions of the family as literary scholars have had. Whereas literary critics tend to treat fictional families in psychological terms, social historians have relied on demographic statistics and other empirical data that do not adequately reflect the family as a form of social behavior. As Mark Poster has written, “While quantitative demographic studies are needed, they cannot provide historians with a concept of the family that can pose the important questions and render the family intelligible in premodern and modern Europe.”² Only recently have works like Philippe Ariès' Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life and Jacques Donzelot's The Policing of Families begun to combine psychological and traditional sociological approaches to the family in order to understand the particular mediatory function played by families in the relation of individual behavior to communal practices.³

The rediscovery of the family by the social historian has interesting consequences for the literary critic. Literary critics interested in the political functions of artistic forms should find theoretical suggestions in the work of those social historians who have begun to write the “social psychology” of the family as a historical institution. The analogy between the family and art is not merely coincidental; both employ discursive practices that explicitly combine public and private terms and values. Both the family and the artistic work are representational forms that must address the bases for their actual and nominal authorities (parent and author), the origins and ends of such authority (biology and genius; history and tradition), and the status of those subject to such authorities (children and readers).

I have suggested that Melville's concentration on family relations and artistic creation in the two major movements of Pierre has encouraged critics like Murray to consider Melville's often strident social criticism to be unjustified or inexplicable. I want to argue that Melville's social criticism in Pierre is focused primarily on the social psychologies of the nineteenth-century family and Romantic theories of art. I want to demonstrate not merely how the family and art serve different social purposes, which are often disguised by the naturalness and privacy of the family and the idealism of art, but also how the family and art participate with each other in maintaining a nineteenth-century American politics of self-reliance.

The social history of the nineteenth-century American family is one of the principal concerns of Michael Paul Rogin's Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville. In its attention to the socio-economic impact of Jacksonian America on the family, Rogin's study gives historical specificity to Eric Sundquist's psychoanalytical approach to the question of nineteenth-century literary authority, so often figured in metaphors of paternity, in Home as Found. Both critics pay special attention to Pierre as Melville's defensive autobiography. Pierre is both Melville's willful rebellion against the aristocratic pretensions of his mother's family, the Gansevoorts, and the fictional confession of his failure to live up to his aristocratic ancestry. Characterizing himself in Pierre as a dilettante and literary dabbler, Melville also associates himself with Pierre's unsuccessful efforts to champion those characters exploited by the Glendinnings: the illegitimate Isabel, the vanishing Indian, the black slaves kept by Pierre's ancestors. Rogin calls Pierre a “bourgeois family nightmare” that employs Pierre's initiation into urban life to explore the crisis of the family occasioned by the rapid industrialization of Jacksonian America: “The adolescent male, coming of sexual age, symbolized the disruptive forces at work in Jacksonian America. Poised to break free from his family of origin, sexually and in his working life, he was the locus for Jacksonian anxieties about the disruption of the preindustrial family. The chaste woman … was society's agent to discipline him.”⁴

The great transformation of America from an agrarian to an industrial economy in the first half of the nineteenth century brought with it the customary problems associated with industrial production: the alienation of the laborer from both the finished product and the control of his own labor, the growing division between the workplace and the home, and the migration of workers from rural towns to unfamiliar cities. It is commonplace to speak of the social consequences of the capitalist economy that began to govern American production in this period, but American capitalism did much more than merely establish the economic determinants for social changes. Ideology may be defined as the collective effect of different discursive practices designed to naturalize or normalize new social practices and working relations. In the simplest Marxist terms, this naturalization is accomplished by means of an apparently “free” exchange of labor-power for wages, whereby the disruptive and alienating owners and workers would appear to be part of a larger democratic process. Much of Marx's attention in Capital concerns just how this apparently “free” exchange between laborers and capitalists is, in fact, a fated, determined means of subordinating laborer to owner, thus reproducing the master/servant hierarchy at the heart of capitalism. In fact, it is the way in which capitalist ideology mystifies these master/servant relations as much as the different historical and economic conditions that distinguishes capitalist class relations from feudal hierarchies.

Another, more complicated and more subversive method of normalization, however, occurs in the diverse forms and institutions of everyday life that have little apparent connection with the means of material production. What Louis Althusser has described as the process of interpellation and Antonio Gramsci as hegemonic discourse approximates the complex means by which ideological values are internalized and psychically lived by apparently “free” individuals under capitalism.⁵ The family is, of course, one of those social forms, even though it is directly involved in social production and reproduction. In an elementary sense, the labor force depends upon the production of the family. Yet because its means of production seems so self-evidently natural and biological, the family is an especially attractive medium for disguising ideological messages and thus contributing to the naturalization of new social relations. Engels' The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State is the classic Marxian work on the relation between private, psychological relations and ideology, but both Marx and Engels treat the family as secondary to the mode of production. As Poster observes, for Marx and Engels, “the family is epiphenomenal compared to the mode of production. In general their writings relegated the family to the backwaters of superstructure.”⁶

Engels' note to the third German edition of Capital makes clear that the origin of the family was a troublesome issue for Marx: “Subsequent and very thorough investigations into the primitive condition of man led the author to the conclusion that it was not the family that originally developed into the tribe, but that, on the contrary, the tribe was the primitive and spontaneously developed form of human association, based on consanguinity, and that out of the first incipient loosening of the tribal bonds, the many and various forms of the family were afterwards developed.”⁷ As sketchy and sometimes contradictory as Marx's critical remarks on the family are, they focus with some consistency on the bourgeois family. Yet even the vulgar Marxian distinction between economic base and ideological superstructure permits Marx and Engels to comprehend the mystification of economic motives as natural attachments and the legitimation of a deceptive “individualism” achieved in the bourgeois family. For in its reflection of capitalist alienation, the bourgeois family is where the “private individual” is at home, rather than in the more public groups Marx associates with the historical origins of social organization. As Raymond Williams observes, “the dominance of the sense [of the family as a] small kin-group was probably not established before the early nineteenth century.”⁸ In effect, the biological legitimacy of the “family” belongs to nineteenth-century capitalism, and such modern kin relations are integrally related to historically contemporary conceptions of the individual.

Hegel has a great deal to say about the family, in part because his own philosophical project so explicitly attempts to legitimate bourgeois individualism. Hegel understands the family as the active and historical mediation between individual and social forms of self-consciousness. The very centrality of the family in Hegel's philosophy reflects his emphasis on individual self-consciousness, which would serve nineteenth-century American capitalism as a convenient philosophical justification for entrepreneurial practices. Nevertheless, the main thrust of Hegel's idealism was toward a concept of “self-consciousness” that would find its dialectical realization in a larger social self-consciousness rather than in the mere exchange of the father's authority for that of the capitalist or ruler. In Hegel, the family is the virtual unconscious of man's social impulse and the historical process by which such an unconscious achieves conscious form involves the transformation of the family's privacy into public forms of social existence. For Hegel, the state does not merely imitate the structure of familial authority, it dialectically transforms that authority with the aim of achieving the ultimate self-governance citizens would achieve in Hegel's ideal community. In the course of such transformation, the limited authority of the family is negated.

In Pierre, Melville seems to criticize urban America for having forgotten or neglected the significant social role played by the family. In the pastoral world of Saddle-Meadows, social life is organized around such ruling families as the Glendinnings. In New York, Pierre encounters unruly mobs, decadent aristocrats, eccentric artists and philosophers. The carnivalesque world of the city is distinguished by the alienation of different groups and individuals, as well as by the absence of those family ties that offered Pierre some stability in the country. Even in his rebellion against his family, Pierre attempts to create a surrogate family, composed of Lucy, Isabel, and Delly, as if to compensate for the isolation they all experience in the city. In this view, Melville's social criticism appears to be quite conventional; Pierre's “fall,” like that of industrial America, is his loss of those stable family associations that ought to have been the basis for his initiation into social life.

Pierre's rebellion against his family and his rejection of the stability of Saddle-Meadows, however, cannot be so easily allegorized as urban America's repudiation of the stable, preindustrial family. Like Hegel, Melville understands family and social relations to function dialectically. Melville devotes a great deal of attention to the Glendinnings' structured and closed world in order to prepare the reader for Pierre's discovery of Isabel's illegitimacy and his subsequent rejection of his heritage. The father's sin is not just his adultery with Isabel's mother but his even more pernicious refusal to accept publicly his responsibility for Isabel: that is, to establish visible signs of kinship with her. The customs and practices that encourage such secrecy are those of the preindustrial family and the class relations governed by a landed gentry. Thus it is understandable that Murray finds Melville's social criticism in Pierre unmotivated. Rather than exploring the significance of the Glendinnings' fatal flaw in the particular social world they govern, Melville seems to change the subject from rural to urban social issues, from aristocratic to bourgeois discursive registers. By the same token, the landed aristocracy represented by the Glendinnings seems hardly a worthwhile object for Melville's criticism. Given the rapid change from rural to urban economies in Jacksonian America, Melville's attack on an outmoded form of aristocratic rule seems unnecessary. In fact, the Glendinning family and its “secret” refer more tangibly to the plot of some European romance than to concrete social problems in nineteenth-century America.

Viewed from the perspective of Hegel's conception of the family as the “unconscious” of the state, however, Melville's concentration on the preindustrial, aristocratic family may be an indirect approach to his criticism of American capitalism. Melville stresses the European character of the Glendinning family, as if reminding democratic Americans that they might be working to produce a society that will merely repeat the hierarchical class systems of Europe. Nineteenth-century Americans were familiar with the ways southern planters imitated the pretensions of the European aristocracy. Northern industrialists frequently justified urbanization as a way of encouraging democratization and overcoming the inherent hierarchies of landed estates. By the same token, the common nineteenth-century American assumption that agrarianism and industrialism constituted two distinct spheres is by no means historically accurate. As Carolyn Porter has shown, “farming was no more impervious to the forces of specialization, rationalization, and commodification than was household manufacture or urban life, once we recognize that America was not merely a predominantly agrarian society, but a capitalist agrarian society.”⁹ American capitalism had a vested interest in promoting the different mythologies of the country and the city, preindustrial feudalism and the “free exchange” of labor under capitalism, Old World aristocracy and American democracy. By developing the narrative contiguity of country and city, aristocratic family and democratic mob, Melville may be suggesting in Pierre that the origins of urban corruption are to be found in the well-ordered estates of the landed gentry.

Hegel's idealist treatment of the family's relation to the state may help us formulate this problem in terms pertinent to the romantic ethos of Pierre. According to Hegel, the ultimate function of the family is to serve the state, virtually by acknowledging the insufficiency or limitation of the family structure as an enduring historical principle. Hegel's version of Oedipal triangulation is supposed to effect the rite of passage from family to state, from biological repetition to historical time and change. Within the narrow family, Hegel's unrealized self is metaphorized as “brother and sister,” both of whom remain in bondage to an external, abstract notion of authority that is at once the father and the divine. In the family, the dialectic of self and other is worked out in terms of brother and sister, precisely because “the brother … is in the eyes of the sister a being whose nature is unperturbed by desire and is ethically like her own; her recognition in him is pure and unmixed with any sexual relation.”¹⁰

In one sense, Hegel here repeats the nineteenth century's ideology of the ideal, chaste, unsexed “family,” which served the purpose of repressing and controlling those sexual energies threatening a rational social order. In this regard, Hegel's metaphor of “brother and sister” for the familial dialectic of self and other merely reinforces the ideology's spiritualization of family relations in the manner Rogin has analyzed so well: “Family ideologists sought not only to intensify the bonds between mother and son, but also to spiritualize the relations of husband to wife. Pierre's game of brother and sister is supposed to establish the closeness of this son to his mother. But it also calls attention to those family reformers who, purifying the marriage bond of power and appetite, modeled the relations of husband and wife on those of brother and sister.”¹¹ Pierre's habit of calling his mother “sister” certainly follows this ideology of the family. The spiritualization of family relations helps maintain a sharp distinction between the “proper family” and the impropriety or illegitimacy associated with sexuality. Melville's use of the conventions of the fair lady and dark woman to represent, respectively, Lucy and Isabel suggests how feminine propriety depended upon the repression of the sexual. In keeping with Melville's general critique of American transcendentalism, Pierre identifies idealization and spiritualization with psychic and cultural repression of basic drives and appetites. This idealization of family relations is the object of Melville's critique of ideology in Pierre, because it is one of the principal means of disguising the ruling class's legitimation of its right to rule. By doubling Pierre's treatment of his mother as “sister” and his incestuous relation with Isabel, Melville renders extremely ambiguous the customary distinctions between the proper family and illegitimate sexual relations.¹²

Hegel's interpretation of the unsexual relation of brother and sister as a model for familial self-consciousness thus appears to work in accord with those nineteenth-century family ideologists criticized by Melville. In terms of his larger social argument, however, Hegel stresses this relation of brother and sister in order to identify the limitation of the family and its necessary transcendence in the social order. Dividing unrealized self-consciousness into brother and sister, Hegel establishes an unsexual relation of self and other that is the abstract model for proper citizenship in the state. Within the narrow circle of the family, the metaphors “brother and sister” are reminders of the self's dependence on external authorities—God, father, Nature. Hegel wants to demonstrate that the apparently self-moving history of the family does not produce genuine historical growth and change but merely reproduces the same structure. Given the ways the European aristocracy based its power on complex family genealogies, Hegel's argument has immediate relevance for the changing class structures of early nineteenth-century Europe. The desire of the family remains purely sexual or reproductive—natural and thus not yet spiritual (or self-conscious) in the proper sense of historical Weltgeist. Within the family, the individual remains in bondage to natural authority, which rules that the “individual” has no particularity beyond his/her identification with the species reproduced. The unsexual relation of brother and sister signifies for Hegel that neither brother nor sister possesses an independent and reproductive power equivalent to the natural sexuality that continues to govern the family.

By the same token, the apparent authority of the father and mother is equally dependent upon the law of biological reproduction, which they merely follow. No matter what venerable origins or trappings of power the family employs to claim its independent identity, it continues to perform the same subservient function: the reproduction of the species. Within the family form, the child's rebellion is thus always doomed merely to repeat what it attempts to escape: the hierarchical relation of the individual to an external law. Working at that relation, laboring to overcome such externality—father, God, Nature—the son or daughter merely reproduces it in the subsequent role of husband or wife. Insofar as the son's Oedipal aggression fails to negate the family and transform it into the larger forms of social law and citizenship, the son must experience his transformation into a father as incestuous. Metaphorically, spiritually, such philosophical incest does weaken successive generations, since it reminds the individual that his “freedom” is already fated, that his “rebellion” is merely natural, that his “self-consciousness” is simply a biological mirage rather than a genuine product of human reason. The consequence of recognizing such a limitation to individuation in the reproduction of an unchanging and external natural law can result only in what Hegel terms “unhappy consciousness,” which is his own version of philosophical madness, of absolute “ambiguity.”

The “illegitimacy” of the family depends upon its failure to bring its own natural legitimation to self-consciousness: the transformation of natural law into social practice. The son realizes this potential in the family by rebelling against the father and discovering his destiny as a citizen: “The individual who seeks the ‘pleasure’ of enjoying his particular individuality finds it in the family life, and the ‘necessity’ in which that pleasure passes away is his own self-consciousness as a citizen of his nation.” In short, rebellion against the family works ideally to transform the natural and biological family into the more populous social “family,” insofar as Hegelian dialectics may be read in organic, evolutionary terms. Within the natural family, there are only sons and daughters, fathers and mothers; the son doubles the father, the daughter the mother. Within its own reproductive cycle, then, the natural family always grows more abstract and general, working against the destiny of the human spirit to individuate itself, to realize and complete natural law as human history. What remains purely external to the “son” within the confines of the family ought to become the internal and self-regulating principle of ethical authority within the well-ordered state: “It is knowing the ‘law of his own heart’ as the law of all hearts, knowing the consciousness of self to be the recognized and universal ordinance of society: it is ‘virtue,’ which enjoys the fruits of its own sacrifice, which brings about what it sets out to do, viz. to bring the essential nature into the light of the actual present,—and its enjoyment is this universal life.”¹³

For Melville as well, the nineteenth-century family is an inadequate substitute for a truly democratic society. Melville understands, however, how the family deceives the individual with the illusion of its own self-sufficient “community” and how it is also the primal site of transformation—from self to other, nature to culture. In the former case, the “family” remains a formalist work; in the latter case, the “family” is an active social and historical force. These different functions of the “family” may be understood primarily in the ways they organize the labor of those identified with the elementary “society” of the family. Indeed, it is the labor of the family—in the double sense of what the family produces and what is the social consequence of a certain family structure—that Melville recognizes as an indirect means of understanding the power and function of nineteenth-century ideology.

By her own account, Isabel achieves her initial awareness of herself as a consequence of her labor:

“I must have been nine, or ten, or eleven years old, when the pleasant-looking woman carried me away from the large house. She was a farmer's wife; and now that was my residence, the farm-house. They taught me to sew, and work with wool, and spin the wool; I was nearly always busy now. This being busy, too, this it must have been, which partly brought to me the power of being sensible of myself as something human. Now I began to feel strange differences. When I saw a snake trailing through the grass, I said to myself, That thing is not human, but I am human.”¹⁴

Indeed, Isabel's sense of the “old bewilderings” that haunted her adolescence are certainly associated with her sense of alienation from a stable human community. When she has grown and become a burden on the farmer's family, she asks the farmer's wife to “‘hire me out to some one, let me work for some one’” (124-25). Knowing little of the ways of the world, Isabel still senses that her departure from even this adoptive family requires some change in the conditions of her labor. Whereas her labor for her adoptive family had seemed to her equivalent to the physical and psychological maintenance the family gave her, her adult labor involves her in an exchange economy, in which wages mark the difference between the labor that produces the self (labor for the self) and the work that produces society. Melville uses “The Story of Isabel” to present a critical reading of the conventional paradigm for romantic self-consciousness. In her spiritual and physical growth, Isabel—unlike Wordsworth in The Prelude—learns how integral concrete labor is to the development of a psychological personality. And she experiences as well the first consequences of the alienation of the worker from her proper labor, her only true product: that sensuous human activity realizable only within a social community.

Isabel's mystical guitar is a metaphor for the sort of social product that ought to issue from such human labor. Isabel tells Pierre that she bought the guitar from a peddler who “had got it slyly in part exchange from the servants of a grand house.” It is especially important, I think, that Isabel specifies that “with part of my earnings, I bought the guitar. Straightway I took it to my little chamber in the gable, and softly laid it on my bed” (125). A few sentences earlier, Isabel also indicates just what sort of labor had earned her the means of buying the guitar: “My work was milking cows, and making butter, and spinning wool, and weaving carpets of strips of cloth.” These bucolic labors are conventional enough, except that in series they offer a little genealogy of human labor from agrarian activities to cottage industry. Measured against Isabel, Pierre is especially inexperienced in the ways of ordinary labor, particularly those involving even the most elementary manufacturing. His “labor” in the course of the novel includes his work as a writer, occasional hunting, and the “work” of honor, which is to say the labor of melodrama.

Nevertheless, Isabel's labor does not signify some growth in the direction of social integration, even though the development of the series clearly suggests such socialization. Milk produces butter, just as wool produces cloth for carpets. Like Hester Prynne, Isabel is often shown sewing, and her labor as a seamstress seems nearly to objectify in the work of her hands the weaving and vining of her black hair. All such labor, however, fails to produce her “own” image, as labor in Hegel's ideal society promises. Exchanging money for the guitar, Isabel is prompted by some intuition or identification with the instrument, even though she confesses she “had never seen a guitar before.” “There was a strange humming in my heart,” she says, and it is this claim (and many others like it) that convince us that she is some version of Hawthorne's mystical women. As it turns out, the guitar is a crucial figure in the melodramatic plot, because it contains the mysterious, gilt signature, Isabel, which Isabel takes as her own name. And in Melville's romance of coincidences, the guitar is revealed to have been acquired by the peddler from the mansion at Saddle-Meadows, fueling Isabel's intuition that it was her mother's guitar. This would account for the guitar being in the possession of the servants, to whom it must have been given by Mary Glendinning in some equally intuitive understanding of its illegitimate associations. The peddler acquires it from the servants “slyly,” suggesting some cheat in the exchange, as if the guitar must perpetuate its illegitimacy in its repeated circulation: the economy of illegitimacy. The peddler, of course, lives upon an exchange economy, insofar as he makes nothing in his own right. His “slyness” is precisely his “craft,” because perfectly honest, market-value exchanges would leave him penniless. To the value of the goods he offers, he must add the “cost” of his labor, which more than anything else amounts to his “slyness.”

Ironically, Isabel's wages are part of an exchange economy in which the need to purchase some means of self-expression (the guitar) reflects the fact that Isabel's actual labor is alien, not an integral part of her spiritual and psychological development. Indeed, Isabel's sense of her alienation from any society may well be her intuition of the conditions governing the laborer in such an exchange economy. And it is this sense of alienation that provokes her not just to “uncover” her family origins but also to imagine that family to be the means of protecting her from a hostile, alienating world. It should not surprise us, then, that guitar and family origins are so intimately related in the plot: art as a “leisure-time” expression of the inner self and the family as a “private” validation of the self are related defenses against alienating labor. Isabel's regression from socialization to the narrow circle of her lost family heritage may also be understood as her rebellion against the romantic ideal of Bildung that her own story tries to sketch out. And this regression, like Pierre's own failure to grow “beyond” the love or conflict of the Glendinning family, expresses the failure of the larger social order to overcome (or at least use productively) the alienation of its workers.

What the guitar does for Isabel is effectively swerve her labors from her own socialization (from cows to carpets, Nature to Culture) in the direction of a self-expression that is at once sexual and illegitimate. In the context of the explicit sexual themes of Pierre, Isabel's first act of placing the guitar on her bed reminds us of the feminine form of the instrument. Insofar as it hides Isabel's own assumed name beneath a removable panel (I assume this is a decorative cover of the opening in the sound-box: a sort of hymen), the guitar serves as a sexually suggestive metonymy for Isabel herself. In this regard, we might conclude that her labor has provided her the concrete means (wages) of achieving self-expression that may communicate with the world.

Unlike the Memnon Stone, which is a mere ancient “gimmick” that simulates the voice of the divine, and unlike Westervelt's “trick” of the “Veiled Lady” in The Blithedale Romance, Isabel's guitar represents a genuine artistic desire to give objective, and thus communicable, form to her self-consciousness. By transforming work into wages, then into the music of the guitar, Isabel's labor initiates the transformation of individual activity into a social function, of mere existence into socially significant being. This constant metamorphosis is Emersonian, and it would place metaphor at the heart of the human project of bringing the world to self-consciousness. As a genuine “product” of Isabel's own labor, the guitar assumes a “real body,” much in the manner of Whitman's poetic body, insofar as it “embodies” those universals by which human beings recognize each other as fundamentally social. Yet we must remember that the guitar is initially not the product of Isabel's own labor. The guitar becomes her own only as she labors upon it, learning how to make the music by which her story is told to others.

The guitar “plays,” however, as if independent of Isabel herself, the dreamy story of her life, and Isabel understands the music to have only one purpose: to establish contact with her “brother,” Pierre. In this sense, then, the music of the guitar merely plays the family tune, thus guaranteeing that Isabel will “legitimate” the name within the guitar as her “origin,” her “mother.” As such, the guitar does not serve the higher function of art in Hegel of mediating between citizen and divine, between social history and universal order, but merely “mystifies” and “enchants” Isabel and Pierre in the magic circle of the family. In effect, the guitar negates Isabel's more earthly labors, and it does so precisely by serving as a fetish for her absent family. This lost family is Isabel's imaginary compensation for her lack of social integration. The nineteenth-century sentimental romance used plots like Isabel's story to suggest the uniqueness of the illegitimate child's social exclusion; Melville's more encompassing plot eventually transforms Isabel's eccentric fate into the repressed story of respectable sons and daughters. By the end of the narrative, virtually every important character will have been revealed as inherently illegitimate. A substitute for her social labor, the guitar offers two compensations in place of a true democracy. In the plot, the guitar divulges the secret of Isabel's family lineage and origins. As a musical instrument, it provides the spiritual and ideal pleasures of art in compensation for labor that within this social context fails to produce any psychic or social growth.

Without claiming much knowledge of nineteenth-century guitar production in America, I want to suggest that the name in the guitar may well be simply a trade or model name. Even in cottage industry, the name inside a guitar would normally be taken as that of its producer rather than its owner, except in the case of some expensive, custom guitar designed for a titled aristocrat. The cottage industry serving a feudal aristocracy like that at Saddle-Meadows could only sign the same name for producer and owner, since the lord or lady of the tenant lands “owns” both the means of production and the identity of the producers. The landed gentry gives titles to all the products of its lands, legitimating those products only with its signature. One of the functions of art in such feudal societies is to provide the tokens of that name, ranging from the architecture of the manor house to the trophies and objets d’art in the great hall.

Yet the secret signature in the guitar is an illegitimate name, even if we assume that it is not the real name of the elder Pierre Glendinning's Frenchwoman. The unconscious of the aristocratic Glendinning line is its very illegitimacy, which is not to say simply that the veneer of respectability is maintained to hide the unauthorized affair of the father. Critics as various as Murray, Milton Stern, Sundquist, and Rogin have called attention to the genealogy of the Glendinnings out of Pierre's paternal great-grandfather, who, “mortally wounded, had sat unhorsed on his saddle in the grass, with his dying voice, still cheering his men” in battle against the Indians in the French and Indian War (5-6). This event, of course, gives its name to Saddle-Meadows, which continues to be haunted by the usurpation that initiated this American aristocratic line. As Carolyn Karcher observes, “Melville in fact comments on the double irony that America may have sold her democratic birthright for an aristocratic mess of pottage, and that the ingredients constituting that pottage—lineage, title, landed property—are all tainted.”¹⁵

The history of aristocratic pretensions is described by Melville in terms of those “incessant restorations and creations” designed to mask their artificial origins, which on close examination generally betray the theft, piracy, and military conquest that Marx considered the means of the precapitalist accumulation of capital (10). Critics have often connected the Glendinnings' aristocratic pretensions with Pierre's fantastic conception of himself and the melodrama that such a self-image seems to require. More interesting is Melville's contention that the rise of the bourgeoisie, which he generally traces to the execution of Charles I and the exile of Charles II, leads, not to an authentic democracy, but merely to the manufacture of new and explicitly arbitrary titles in the place of those social institutions that would transcend the family and thereby realize a larger human community. The history of the English peerage is a chronicle of such artificial titles: “For not Thames is so sinuous in his natural course, not the Bridgewater Canal more artificially conducted, than blood in the veins of that winding or manufactured nobility” (10).

Anticipating subsequent critics who would complain that his aristocratic romance has little to do with American democracy, Melville calls attentions to the Dutch patroons, like the Gansevoorts, whose lineages dwarf the more limited spans of their English equivalents, “those grafted families” who “successively live and die on the eternal soil of a name” (10). The difference between these American aristocrats and the English is that the former stake their claims to nobility on the property that they possess, whereas the English gentry make vain appeals to the past, often to fictionalized lineages: “But our lords, the Patroons, appeal not to the past, but they point to the present. One will show you that the public census of a county, is but part of the roll of his tenants. Ranges of mountains, high as Ben Nevis or Snowdon, are their walls; and regular armies, with staffs of officers, crossing rivers with artillery, and marching through primeval woods, and threading vast rocky defiles, have been sent out to distrain upon three thousand farmer-tenants of one landlord, at a blow” (11).

Murray points out that Melville is recalling in this passage the militiamen who set out from Albany on December 9, 1839, to subdue “a strong force of anti-rent farmers assembled on the Helderbergs” (435). The Anti-Rent protests in New York between 1839 and 1846 give strong historical credibility to Melville's argument that America does indeed have a powerful feudal aristocracy. The conventional reading of this passage as Melville's effort to defend America against English jibes at its “newness” and its “lack of history” does not address Melville's curious insistence on the appeal by American aristocrats to the present rather than to the past. Melville foresees in this passage the peculiarly American aristocrat who by the end of the Civil War would be known in caricature as “the Tycoon.” This aristocrat makes no appeal to the past but relies instead on the accumulated wealth that quite literally expands his present, giving him authority over the historical moment. Indeed, this aristocrat's power is essentially antihistorical, bent as it is upon turning the “resources” of the past into the enduring image of this master. In this regard, the urban capitalist and the landed patroon have much in common.

Melville stresses the size of these feudal Dutch estates in New York by observing that they often exceed county boundaries and may include greater populations on their “rent rolls.” The very mountains of the region serve as the “walls” of these estates, suggesting that the patroons' rule is not simply extensive but presumed to be natural. In Melville's landscape, the New York State Militia enters the picture in response to the provocation of the Anti-Rent agitators. It would not have been lost on the mid-nineteenth-century reader that such rebellion parallels quite explicitly the motives for the American Revolution.

Melville specifically associates this American aristocracy with Eastern and pre-Christian cultures: “These far-descended Dutch meadows lie steeped in a Hindooish haze; an eastern patriarchalness sways its mild crook over pastures, whose tenant flocks shall there feed, long as their own grass grows, long as their own water shall run. Such estates seem to defy Time's tooth, and by conditions which take hold of the indestructible earth seem to cotemporize their fee-simples with eternity. Unimaginable audacity of a worm that but crawls through the soil he so imperially claims!” (11). On the one hand, Melville merely seems to make these associations to stress the unexpectedly venerable character of these American princes. On the other hand, he understands how these Dutch patroons imitate the chaotic and irrational despotism that nineteenth-century westerners popularly associated with the “mysterious” Orient. Hegel is a familiar figure of this “orientalizing” by which nineteenth-century Europeans rationalized their ethnocentrism and imperialism, and he repeatedly uses India to represent the moral anarchy of the East: “If China may be regarded as nothing else but a State, Hindoo political existence presents us with a people but no State. Secondly, while we found a moral despotism in China, whatever may be called a relic of political life in India, is a despotism without a principle, without any rule of morality and religion: for morality and religion (as far as the latter has a reference to human action) have as their indispensable condition and basis the freedom of the Will. In India, therefore, the most arbitrary, wicked, degrading despotism has its full swing.”¹⁶ Melville stresses the military claims to rule both of the Glendinnings and the Dutch patroons he considers typical of an American landed aristocracy. Like Hegel's Indian monarchs, Melville's American princes are products of a social situation lacking any rational political principle that might coordinate the various and conflicting claims to power and authority. This seems confirmed by the New York State Militia, on order of Governor Seward, acting as if it were the private army of these threatened landowners.

Hegel considers the “history” of India to be no history at all, merely the record of the acts and possessions of different princes and their numerous wars. In particular, Hegel stresses how family genealogies take the place of the public events we normally associate with history: “It is the struggle of an energetic will on the part of this or that prince against a feebler one; the history of ruling dynasties, but not of peoples; a series of perpetually varying intrigues and revolts—not indeed of subjects against their rulers, but of a prince's son, for instance, against his father; of brothers, uncles and nephews in contest with each other; and of functionaries against their master.”¹⁷ For Hegel, the Hindu prince merely serves as a fetish for the still-struggling spirit of social self-governance—a spirit that Melville understands as America's democratic dream. Hegel's Hindu genealogies of princely families find their equivalence in Melville's conception in Pierre of the image or portrait of the father as the ultimate product or fetish of a patriarchal aristocracy. The patroon or patriarch is possible only as a consequence of a fragmented, essentially unpolitical society, like the anarchic New York that Pierre discovers on his first evening in the city with Delly and Isabel. Just this chaos of the urban realm gives special credibility to the apparently pastoral order represented by the Patroon's country estate.

In Capital, Marx develops Hegel's arbitrary Hindu despot as a historical and rhetorical figure for the development of capitalism. Sketching the history of cooperative labor, Marx notes, “The colossal effects of simple cooperation are to be seen in the gigantic structures erected by the ancient Asiatics, Egyptians, Etruscans, etc.” For Marx, cooperation in the labor process of precapitalist societies generally depends upon “the common ownership of the conditions of production.” In Marx's own myth of social origins, cooperative labor reminds us of the essentially collective motives for socialization. On the other hand, Marx recognizes that the “sporadic application of co-operation on a large scale in ancient times, in the Middle Ages, and in modern colonies, rests on direct relations of domination and servitude, in most cases on slavery.” Marx is careful to distinguish this cooperation of slave-labor from capitalist cooperation, which seems to begin with the “free wage-labourer” selling “his labour-power to capital.” This mystified “free-exchange” enables the capitalist to make “coordinated labor” appear to be a consequence of his ownership and management of the labor-power that he has purchased.¹⁸ Less explicit because more subtly contrived as a “free exchange” in the rhetoric of capitalism, the capitalist's exploitation of labor nonetheless finds a precedent in the forced labor of slaves in ancient times rather than in the tribal cooperation of primitive hunting tribes or agrarian societies.

In particular, Marx calls attention to the “colossal works” of this coordinated slave labor in terms designed clearly to gloss his theory of surplus value. The monumental projects undertaken by such coordinated labor forces are generally made possible by large state surpluses often generated by military conquests. These monuments are thus testaments to the surplus value on which the ancient despot based his political power—the “capital” of domination. Indeed, the labor force is itself often composed of just such a “surplus,” insofar as the slaves committed to such great works were often the spoils of war. In addition, the monuments built by such despots often serve no other purpose than to represent that arbitrary power in the form of such purely ceremonial structures as tombs, pyramids, and obelisks. Failing to recognize that it is their coordinated labor alone that produces such objects of wonder, these workers take such productions as symbols for the despot's power and authority. As such, these ancient monuments—so often appropriately dedicated to death and/or a religious or military ideal—are testaments to social waste as well as dramatic illustrations of the kind of reification that will be the ultimate product of capitalism. Having quoted a long section of Richard Jones's Textbook of Lectures on the economics of such colossal projects among the ancients, Marx concludes by making explicit the implications of such despotism for the rise of capitalism: “This power of Asiatic and Egyptian kings, of Etruscan theocrats, etc. has in modern society been transferred to the capitalist, whether he appears as an isolated individual or, as in the case of joint-stock companies, in combination with others.”¹⁹

The colossal works of Hegel's and Marx's ancient despots have a curious association with Terror Rock, or the Memnon Stone, in Pierre and with the name of the Glendinning estate, Saddle-Meadows, which memorializes Pierre's great-grandfather's subjugation of the Indian. In subtler ways than the oriental despot, however, Melville's American aristocrat legitimates his usurpation of Nature, “savage,” and tenant-farmer by means of those signs and symbols (representational forms) that constitute his “estate” or “property.” It is thus little wonder that on the eve of his break with his family Pierre burns the “‘mementoes and monuments of the past’” that he had so fondly collected over the years. With special deliberation, he burns the chair-portrait of his father, whose image now seems to speak to him only of the father's adultery and illegitimate child, Isabel: “‘It speaks merely of decay and death, and nothing more; decay and death of innumerable generations, it makes of earth one mold. How can lifelessness be fit memorial for life?’” (197). What the coordinated labor of soldiers, tenant-farmers, artisans, and painters produces is merely the personality of the ruler. And that personality is already a fetish for the labor of others that has actually produced such an image: the portrait of a father or the military saddle of a great-grandfather. This transformation of the living labor of the community into “heir-looms” is precisely a labor that “speaks merely of decay and death,” a subtler version of Marx's “commodity fetishism” and an anticipation of Lukács' more developed conception of reification in History and Class Consciousness. It is a lineage without a proper history, insofar as it merely repeats the illegitimate authority of the ruler. Viewed in this manner, Pierre's grandfather's patriotism in defending “a rude but all-important stockaded fort, against the repeated combined assaults of Indians, Tories, and Regulars” during the Revolutionary War can no longer be understood as an unqualified valor in the name of democratic ideals (6). Reread according to the aristocratic lineage that such “patriotism” has produced, the grandfather's sacrifice serves to maintain only his family's power rather than the ideals of a social democracy. The grandfather merely repeats the conquering will—and its antihistorical bias—that the great-grandfather initiated in his combat with the Indian during the French and Indian War. In the course of making these close associations between the acts of “founding” the American Glendinnings by the great-grandfather and the “founding” of America in the Revolutionary War, Melville renders ambiguous the presumed “origin” of America's break with its European heritage. And by suggesting an ironic repetition of such “origins” in the New York State Militia's suppression of the Anti-Rent protesters in 1839, Melville transforms the democratic revolution into the secret consolidation of a new, American aristocratic power.

Pierre's own gesture of rebellion, including the burning of these fetishes, ought to involve some self-conscious rejection of the limitations of the family in favor of a larger social relation. But like most “young Americans,” Pierre bids instead for radical individualism: “‘Henceforth, cast-out Pierre hath no paternity, and no past; and since the Future is one blank to all; therefore twice-disinherited Pierre stands untrammeledly his ever-present self!—free to do his own self-will and present fancy to whatever end!’” (199). In his own will-to-power, Pierre hardly restores America to the social revolution in which it ought to have found its origin; Pierre merely repeats that illusory “revolution” by which his ancestors supplanted the authority of others with that of their own family name.

The truth of “descendedness,” Melville argues, involves an infinite regression: “For as the breath in all our lungs is hereditary, and my present breath at this moment, is further descended than the body of the present High Priest of the Jews, so far as he can assuredly trace it; so mere names, which are also but air, do likewise revel in this endless descendedness” (9). As radical breaks with the past, his ancestors' militarism and Pierre's rebellion against his family repudiate the history that is carried in every “name.” Even as Pierre destroys the fetishes of the past, he begins to reproduce the rhetoric of such fetishism—of the oriental despot, the English aristocrat, the Dutch patroon—in his vainglorious self-reliance. For Melville, the only genuine nobility derives from our involvement in the process of constructing a human community, not from those apparently ahistorical “images” that monumentalize the family or the self. Our shared air, which circulates in the very breath of our speech, is the guarantee of a shared humanity, of a “family of man,” whose only proper labor is the construction of a social habitation—that is, a history—for such being. For the American, such historical labor (labor as history) ought to involve the production of a new relation to Europe rather than a simple break with that inescapable past. This, I take it, is the function of the “recognition scene” near the end of Pierre, when Isabel and Pierre encounter “another portrait of a complete stranger—a European,” which “was as much the father of Isabel as the original of the chair-portrait” (353). This scene is actually a crucial scene of méconnaissance, insofar as it seems to plunge Pierre into despair regarding his folly in assuming a portrait to be evidence of actual bloodliness. On the other hand, the portrait of the stranger is used by Melville not merely to absolutely mystify family origins for the sake of plot reversal or some philosophical quandary; the portrait of the European stranger reminds us how every “origin,” every tradition, every history is the product of our social labor—whether such labor be “imaginative” or “material”: “But perhaps there was no original at all to this second portrait; it might have been a pure fancy piece; to which conceit, indeed, the uncharacterizing style of the filling-up seemed to furnish no small testimony” (353). As “a pure fancy piece,” the portrait serves to expose the unconscious of Pierre's determination to legitimate Isabel through his own artistic labor. Yet, as the coordinated work of the historical and social imagination, the portrait may serve as a figure for the relation to Europe that American democracy ought to be working to produce.

What inhibits this historical labor is thus not just the family, oppressive as it is represented in the lineage and fortunes of the Glendinnings, but also individualism and its contemporary cant for Melville: Emersonian self-reliance.²⁰ Hegel's philosophical labor and Marx's more material labor both insist that the individual can realize himself only in and through an otherness that he works to produce, transform, and ultimately internalize as his own social bond. Social history is just this perpetual process of self-transcendence as the means of self-realization. In capitalism, however, the dialectic of self and other is transformed into a dualism between worker and owner, wages and capital, change and repetition, materiality and idealism, other and self: horologicals and chronometricals. Marx's theory of surplus value describes the ways that the capitalist steals the labor-power of the worker by manipulating the working day or mystifying the amount of capital actually consumed in production. The aim of surplus value in capitalism is for Marx, however, considerably more significant than the simple accumulation and expansion of capital. The first aim is to establish the most elementary class distinction: the laborer stakes his being on his physical body, which is successively “used up” in the production process; the owner finds his being in capital, whose very accumulation is a psychic defense against his fear of illegitimacy, a constant reminder that he has a material identity that “grows” in time rather than shrinks (as does the laborer's labor-power). And because it “grows” without the capitalist's labor, surplus value assumes the appearance of a natural organicism, a simulation of the Nature that industrial capitalism displaces. This chimerical organicism finds its pre-capitalist precedent in the peculiar pastoralism of Saddle-Meadows and the special brand of American aristocracy enshrined there.

In Pierre, physical labor is always at odds with individual identity, with an ideal of “self-reliance.” Isabel's romantic imagination equates self-consciousness with productive labor, but Isabel experiences only the alienating effects of her own labor. Indeed, the nearly mystical art of her guitar seems to be a compensation for the failure of her daily labor to produce the identity (spirit) she desires. Charlie Millthorpe's father, “a very respectable farmer,” illustrates this discrepancy between what Henry James, Sr., called “doing” and “being”: “Pierre well remembered old farmer Millthorpe:—the handsome, melancholy, calm-tempered, mute, old man; in whose countenance—refinedly ennobled by nature, and yet coarsely tanned and attenuated by many a prolonged day's work in the harvest—rusticity and classicalness were strangely united. The delicate profile of his face, bespoke the loftiest aristocracy; his knobbed and bony hands resembled a beggar's” (275). Melville uses farmer Millthorpe to illustrate the general observation that “the political and social levelings and confoundings of all manner of human elements in America, produce many striking individual anomalies unknown in other lands” (275). These “anomalies,” of course, ought to be the signs of an authentic American revolution, which would transform the illegitimate family of the aristocrat into a genuine democracy. But in this context, the signifier of poverty is labor; the signifier of wealth is idleness. The wear and tear of honest farming is considered unnatural, already hints of incipient death: “knobbed and bony hands.” The “undiluted” transmission, the sheer repetition, of genetic traits is assumed to be the result of a mere inheritance that is more properly the work of nature: a “countenance … refinedly ennobled by nature.”

The Millthorpes, themselves dependent on the aristocratic and feudal authority of Saddle-Meadows, “loosely and unostentatiously traced their origin to an emigrating English Knight, who had crossed the sea in the time of the elder Charles” (275). Thus, farmer Millthorpe's labor is considered a degradation of such ancestry, and it is little wonder that his poverty and death are rumored to be consequences of drunken dissipation. Insofar as the wear and tear of human labor results in nothing but the apparently enduring identity of the aristocrat, labor is quite literally dissipation and effectively “unnatural”—other than itself. Given these circumstances, then, it is hardly surprising that Charlie Millthorpe aspires “to be either an orator, or a poet; at any rate, a great genius of one sort or other. He recalled the ancestral Knight, and indignantly spurned the plow” (279).

Oratory, poetry, “great genius of one sort or other,” we know involve Pierre's own project to “gospelize anew,” to write the infernal book that would declare his rebellion against the Glendinnings' hypocrisy and assure his fortune and reputation. Indeed, the “labor” of writing is given considerable attention by Melville, both in his representation of Pierre's anguished struggle at the Church of the Apostles and in his general observations on the differences between physical and intellectual labor. Even before he rebels against his family and departs Saddle-Meadows for New York, Pierre himself has worked and earned, after a fashion, by virtue of his trivial lyrics: “The Tropical Summer: a Sonnet,” “The Weather: a Thought,” “Life: an Impromptu,” “The late Reverend Mark Graceman: an Obituary,” and so on. Like the “heirlooms” he burns, Pierre's poems are mere fetishes for his poetic self. Both literary formalism (a sonnet) and philosophical idealism (a thought) reify nature and thus speak only of the death of spiritual grace that they have helped to produce (“The late Reverend Mark Graceman: an Obituary”). The name “Reverend Mark Graceman” seems to anticipate “Mark Winsome” in The Confidence-Man, who quite clearly is a caricature of Emerson. The actual products of Pierre's juvenile imagination parody the idealizations of Nature and death that characterize literary transcendentalism. More specifically, Pierre's poetizing may indicate that the labor of idealism often produces the death of the spirit that the poet and scholar hope to realize in their works.

Emerson repeatedly affirms the dignity of labor that unites intellectual and manual work: “I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for the learned as well as for unlearned hands.” Yet what unites different kinds of labor for Emerson is their mutual concern with the production of a spiritual self. Emerson is quick to warn us that work performed without regard for the soul it serves may well be enslaved by other temporal masters—convention and fashion: “And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action.”²¹ Emerson characteristically gives heavier weight to the work of man than to the work of the world. Because the “dignity of labor” requires a spiritual understanding of man's role in a natural economy, the labors of idealists—“of the poet, the priest, the lawgiver, and men of study generally”—have special authority in Emerson's division of labor. In “Man the Reformer,” his address to the Mechanics' Apprentices' Library Association of Boston in 1841, Emerson seems to take perverse pleasure before such an audience in distinguishing between “intellectual exertion” and “the downright drudgery of the farmer and the smith”: “I would not quite forget the venerable counsel of the Egyptian mysteries, which declared that ‘there were two pairs of eyes in man, and it is requisite that the pair which are beneath should be closed, when the pair that are above them perceive, and that when the pair above are closed, those which are beneath should be opened.’” The manual laborer is all too quickly deceived by the apparent reality of the products of his labor and thus lured to accumulate and possess objects that ought to be mere symbols of the soul. The genius of the poet and scholar finds its wealth in its own activity; when genius confuses earthly and transcendental rewards, then it falls as Bellerophon did:

He may leave to others the costly conveniences of housekeeping and large hospitality and the possession of works of art. Let him feel that genius is a hospitality, and that he who can create works of art needs not collect them. He must live in a chamber, and postpone his self-indulgence, forewarned and forearmed against that frequent misfortune of men of genius,—the taste for luxury. This is the tragedy of genius,—attempting to drive along the ecliptic with one horse of the heavens and one horse of the earth, there is only discord and ruin and downfall to chariot and charioteer.²²

Emerson's description of the discipline and worldly privation of the man of genius is parodied in Melville's description of Pierre at work in his bare, cold room in the Church of the Apostles. And Emerson's warning that genius must not confuse the “horse of the heavens” with the “horse of the earth” or the eyes that “are above” with the eyes that “are beneath” is caricatured in Plotinus Plinlimmon's pamphlet, “Chronometricals and Horologicals.”²³

Melville criticizes Emerson's idealist foundations for human labor by suggesting that the special work of the intellect may serve merely to preserve us from the more difficult and concrete labor of producing a workable society. Emerson's labor of and for the self might require privation and “unworldliness” precisely because such alienation is its secret product. Transcendental idealism thus may be viewed as an elaborate system of psychological defense against the alienating consequences of more material labor in capitalist America. Until he faces the exigencies of earning a living for his own “family” in the city, Pierre has spent all of his literary earnings on cigars, “so that the puffs which indirectly brought him his dollars were again returned, but as perfumed puffs; perfumed with the sweet leaf of Havanna” (262). Melville parodies romantic idealism by transforming the spiritual activity of Emerson's genius or the human desire for transcendence in Wordsworth's image of “wreaths of smoke / Sent up, in silence, from among the trees” into the ephemeral vapors of self-reliant man—what T. E. Hulme terms the “circumambient gas” of romanticism.²⁴

“This towering celebrity,” Melville writes, “—there he would sit smoking, and smoking, mild and self-festooned as a vapory mountain” (263). This ironic identification of Pierre-as-juvenile-author with the Memnon Stone suggests that this formalist conception of poetic spiritualization is designed principally to obscure the self, to give it a protective outer wrapping (literally, a “white jacket” of smoke) that would protect it from the mob. Unlike the music of Isabel's guitar, the smoke from Pierre's poems and cigars protects and isolates the self, rather than serving as its virtual embodiment and medium for communication: its externalization, in Hegelian terms, in and for sociohistorical circulations.

In its own way, this figuration of Pierre as poet is the equivalent of the chair-portrait of his father. Both conceal a secret of illegitimacy that is related to their equally false claims to authority. The father's adultery is discovered in his mysterious smile in the portrait in the same way Pierre's plagiarism from other authors is revealed in his own ambitious work. Melville's description of Pierre as a “vapory mountain” also helps explain his paradoxical act of burning the chair-portrait. What Pierre intends as an act of rebellion serves as the means of protecting his father from exposure, insofar as Pierre finds in the portrait some family resemblance to Isabel:

Painted before the daughter was conceived or born, like a dumb seer, the portrait still seemed leveling its prophetic finger at that empty air, from which Isabel did finally emerge. There seemed to lurk some mystical intelligence and vitality in the picture; because, since in his own memory of his father, Pierre could not recall any distinct lineament transmitted to Isabel, but vaguely saw such in the portrait; therefore, not Pierre's parent, as any way rememberable by him, but the portrait's painted self seemed the real father of Isabel; for, so far as all sense went, Isabel had inherited one peculiar trait nowhither traceable but to it. (197)

The curiously prophetic quality of the chair-portrait, whether it be an effect of the painter's genius or merely Pierre's excited imagination, suggests an artistic function different from the defenses of Emersonian idealism or Pierre's protective veil of poetic smoke. The portrait of the father brings together the aristocrat's conscious desire for authority and the unconscious illegitimacy that fuels such desire.

Like his ancestors, Pierre wants to turn himself into an enduring figure in the landscape, precisely by protecting himself from the “mob” (such as the one that assaults Delly, Isabel, and Pierre in that infernal first night they spend in the city) and at the same time rebelling against his predecessors by willfully “authoring” his own unnatural family of Isabel, Delly, and, ultimately, Lucy. It is a family composed of nothing but “sisters” and a “brother,” we are quick to notice, recalling our earlier remarks about the relation of brothers and sisters in the metaphorics of the Hegelian family. Contemptuous of the various efforts of vanity presses and journals to exploit his minor celebrity, Pierre himself merely reproduces, even in his haughty denial of their overtures, the cult of authorial “personality” these publishers labor to produce. Like the aristocrat and capitalist, he vainly tries to father himself and a family to render honorable such imaginative incest.

Melville's representation of Pierre as some “vapory mountain” also associates him with the natural landmark at Saddle-Meadows, Terror Rock or the Memnon Stone, which later in the narrative will come to mythic life in Pierre's dream of Enceladus, the earthbound Titan. Earlier, I interpreted the Memnon Stone as a version of those colossal monuments Hegel and Marx associated with the despotism of Asiatic and Egyptian rulers. Although a natural formation, the Memnon Stone is discovered by Pierre, “the first known publishing discoverer of this stone, which he had thereupon fancifully christened the Memnon Stone” (132). The stone becomes Pierre's colossus, his monument to the natural surplus the genius ought to have in reserve. The cavity at the base of the rock and its general phallic suggestiveness make the Memnon Stone a figure for a hermaphroditism that is particularly appropriate either to the false self-sufficiency of the Glendinnings or to Emerson's self-reliant genius: American aristocrat or radical individual. It is interesting to note that the Church of the Apostles' architecture is the urban equivalent of the rock, insofar as the new tower where Pierre has his rooms rises out of the courtyard of the old church. The hermaphroditism of the rural and urban forms—the former associated with the aristocracy of the Glendinnings and the latter with either Pierre's writing or the law and commerce in the buildings below—suggests the self-generative powers of the “original character” in The Confidence-Man: “The original character, essentially such, is like a revolving Drummond light, raying away from itself all round it—everything is lit by it, everything starts up to it (mark how it is with Hamlet), so that, in certain minds, there follows upon the adequate conception of such a character, an effect, in its way, akin to that which in Genesis attends upon the beginning of things.”²⁵

Yet, such an “original” in both Pierre and The Confidence-Man, whether literary character turned author or citizen turned despot, remains Melville's grandest illusion—the secret passion of the idealist not merely to participate in nature's economy but to originate and thus dominate that economy. Such self-procreative and ahistorical formalism belongs only to the impossible realm of the “chronometrical,” and as such it is as “self-consuming” as it is “self-producing.” It is, in a word, an incestuous form of artistic production that merely produces its own obscurity, weakness, and ultimate death. By the same token, it obscures its actual origins, which in the case of Pierre's writing must be termed the historical conditions—necessities and exigencies—under which he must work. The unified religious authority of the old Church of the Apostles has been replaced by the apparent dualism of material vs. ideal, utilitarian vs. transcendental. The lawyers and shopkeepers in the renovated church exercise their very real powers over the workers in the city by maintaining the illusion of freedom represented by the dreamers and freethinkers occupying the tower. The “freedom” of such idealism (of Emerson's self-reliant genius) is, in Melville's scrutiny, merely a double of the servitude it hopes to escape; it is a reflection of the poverty and alienation of those who work to preserve such masters.

Such an interpretation of Pierre's art as the idealist version of the oriental despot's colossal monuments—testaments to his arbitrary power, accumulated economic surpluses, and exploitation of labor—revises considerably the conventional reading of Melville's oft-quoted glimpse into the pyramid of the human soul:

The old mummy lies buried in cloth on cloth; it takes time to unwrap this Egyptian king. Yet now, forsooth, because Pierre began to see through the first superficiality of the world, he fondly weens he has come to the unlayered substance. But, far as any geologist has yet gone down into the world, it is found to consist of nothing but surface stratified on surface. To its axis, the world being nothing but superinduced superficies. By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid—and no body is there!—appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of man! (285)

Generally interpreted in the context of Melville's nihilism or as his existential affirmation of the groundlessness of being, this passage deals less with man's essential nature (his “geology,” as it were) than with the “nothingness” he produces by way of his labor to idealize the world in the service of material interests. In this passage, Melville not only indicts transcendental idealism for offering us an absolutely elusive notion of “spirit” or “soul,” he also connects such idealism with those idealizing arts of political rulers who would mask their illegitimate power and their exploitation of workers in the form of majestic symbols of their supernatural authority. This political mystification initiates a historical process of labor through which we quite literally unmake ourselves and transform the natural energies of our bodies into alien, unnatural objects. “Nothingness” is not for Melville the essential condition for being that it would become for the twentieth-century existentialist; the vacancy in Melville's pyramid is the consequence of specific historical acts of social labor made to serve perverse gods.

Melville distinguishes Pierre's labor from that of farmer Millthorpe and even that of Isabel:

The mechanic, the day-laborer, has but one way to live; his body must provide for his body. But not only could Pierre in some sort, do that; he could do the other; and letting his body stay lazily at home, send off his soul to labor, and his soul would come faithfully back and pay his body her wages. So, some unprofessional gentlemen of the aristocratic South, who happen to own slaves, give those slaves liberty to go and seek work, and every night return with their wages, which constitute those idle gentlemen's income. Both ambidexter and quadruple-armed is that man, who in a day-laborer's body, possesses a day-laboring soul. (261)

The spiritual slavery that Melville describes here connects Pierre's life-denying artistic idealism with the institutions of southern slavery, just as the feudalism of the Dutch patroons is associated with oriental despotism. The passage suggests that the “division of labor” in modern bourgeois culture more subtly replicates the explicit exploitation of labor in slave-holding societies. Porter considers the mythic oppositions of country and city, pastoralism and industrialism, to be characteristically American means of forgetting capitalism's deep roots in the feudalism of aristocratic class structures: “Perhaps it is partly due to a long-standing confusion in the minds of Americans over the difference between capitalist and aristocrat that they have never really been able to resist altogether the plantation myth's attractions.”²⁶ In particular, the Transcendentalist's rejection of economic materialism often results in the substitution of an ideal economy of the self that comes dangerously close to the values and customs of the landed gentry. By explicitly feminizing Pierre's “soul” (“pay his body her wages”), Melville also returns this reflection on art and everyday labor to the psychosexual themes centering on Pierre's incestuous relation with Isabel, whose guitar plays as he writes. The “mystical” communion of Isabel and Pierre, like the spiritual “friendship” so prized by Emerson and Thoreau, is for Melville an inadequate substitute for the social product that ought to result from the coordinated labor of politically committed citizens.

Melville's association of Pierre's labor as a writer with the master-slave relation of southern slavery begins with the Emersonian cliché that writing transcends ordinary labor by coordinating physical and spiritual functions. But Melville then suggests that the function of writing may be precisely to protect its “author” from the physical depletion of ordinary labor. In this regard, authorship is explicitly related to the ownership of slaves and the idleness of the aristocrat, but with the interesting qualification that this relation between master and slave gives the slave the illusion of “liberty to go and seek work.” That this exploitation of the slave's desire for freedom also involves the slave's desire to do his/her “own” labor is important for Melville's parable of writing. The illusion that the soul can work independently (“freely”) from the body, which stays “lazily at home,” is fundamental to Emersonian idealism: “Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. … Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated.”²⁷ Melville effectively reverses the terms of Emerson's triumphant transcendentalist vision, transforming the essentially free mind into a slave to the physical master, who after all still speaks to, or governs, this presumptively “free” spirit.

The separation of the “self” from its “labor,” and the separation of physical from spiritual production, is the fundamental alienation operating in aristocratic families and in the romantic “arts” designed to “naturalize” such aristocracy. Insofar as the family does nothing but project the concept of a remote, external “law” of authority, which cannot be internalized but merely reproduced as alien and external, the family produces nothing other than alienation itself, that pure negation (Verneinung) that Hegel himself equated with the death of the Spirit. The move from family to society, from the Law of the Father to the internal law of self-governance, is the negation of negation, the transformation of stony externality into the self-moving principle of Geist as its historical movement: the Bildungsweg of Hegel's social theory that Marx could appropriate from an otherwise bourgeois apologist.

Pierre's “labor” in writing his “infernal book,” his new gospel, is designed to reproduce this portrait of the stony self, of the Self as distinct from man's social dependency and the labor required to maintain the historical relation of self and society. We read little directly of Pierre's grand work, except those quotes from “the last sheet from his hand” and the slips he has cast to the floor. Still, we learn enough of “his apparent author-hero, Vivia,” to recognize that Pierre has “directly plagiarized from his own experiences” (302). These fragments do not speak of self-consciousness as self-knowledge, as we would expect from this romantic author. Instead, Vivia speaks only of his contradiction and despair, of his hatred of life and his impotence—what Nietzsche would term his ressentiment: “Yet that knowing his fatal condition does not one whit enable him to change or better his condition. Conclusive proof that he has no power over his condition” (303). What Pierre/Vivia cannot know is that he has merely given objective form to a “soul,” a suffering “self,” produced by those contradictions in his family history that are also the disabling contradictions of a promised social democracy based upon radical individualism, whether such individualism assumes the form of the father, the military leader, the mythic hero, the Dutch patroon, the capitalist, or the visionary author.

In this regard, then, Pierre/Pierre reproduces the aristocratic law of the Father by means of one of those “arts” that capitalism employs for similar purposes of naturalizing and legitimating its own founding contradictions: between “self” and “society,” “owner” and “laborer,” “ideal” and “historical,” chronometrical and horological. The art of the novel gives us a “labor” that we as readers perform only to use up our bodies (and our time) in the service of reproducing the “genius” of the author: Herman Melville or Pierre Glendinning. That always-absent “author” governs and controls our labors in order to take the place of the social and communal relations our work of reading ought to yield.

In Capital, Marx argues that it is the identity of the capitalist that is the true fetish, an alienated metonymy for the “labor-power” stolen from his workers in the form of “surplus value.” Indeed, the growth of surplus value, the incessant drive for accumulation, seems some desperate desire on the part of the capitalist to disguise what he recognizes to be the inauthenticity of his identity: that which represents “him” is never “he himself.” In a similar sense, Pierre's book is “filched” from those “vile atheists,” Lucan and Voltaire, among others, who ought to remind Pierre of the impossibility of “authoring” anything outside the complex genealogy of literary and social forces. The infinite regress of literature and the infinite regress of descendedness that Melville uses to subvert aristocratic pretensions are both the preconditions for negating myths of self-reliant man and aristocratic authority in favor of that more enduring and integrated product: a social collective sustained by the labors of men and women.

Neither the aristocratic ruler nor the American capitalist wants that dispersed, displaced, collective authority. In Pierre, Melville attempted to kill romance, to take it to its ultimate extreme as a formalist prop for the ideology of America's secret aristocracy of the Spirit: economic capitalism and philosophical transcendentalism. Rogin concludes that the “self-referentiality that takes over Pierre brings the book's narrative to a halt” and “explains its own failure, for it is the appropriate literary form for the claustrophobic family. Pierre is the victim of the domestic relationship which brings both storytelling and therefore life itself to an end.”²⁸ In this regard, we can judge Pierre's swerve back into the chivalric action of the duel and the melodrama it stages to be merely the “proper” ending for the “novel” he has written, the “infernal” new gospel of capitalist individuation as sustained by the rhetoric of literary authority. It is altogether fitting that melodrama should be Pierre's choice in the face of his literary “failure.” Pierre's final “actions,” however, by no means compromise his own conception of literature; such action is perfectly consistent with Pierre's literary project: the realization of romance in experience, the substitution of the author's self for the worker's active labor. Such realization—life imitating art at last—merely enables Pierre to succumb to the “romance of the real” that is told by the authors of capitalism and enacted by their “characters,” whether intellectual or manual laborers.

Yet just as the chair-portrait of Pierre's father reveals his kinship with Isabel and thus the very secret the portrait artist attempted to conceal with the conventional “nobility” of his subject (and the conventions of the portrait genre), so Pierre represents its own unconscious and thus escapes fleetingly its identification with Pierre and his fragmentary monument, his unfinished colossus. By so ruthlessly connecting his own craft of fiction and his own will to literary authority with the political wills of despots, aristocrats, and capitalists, Melville completes his book by undoing his own claim to legitimacy and by characterizing himself in his parody of an author, Pierre. Insofar as Melville accepts the social anarchy he finds at the heart of the Glendinnings' and the Gansevoorts' conceptions of “democracy,” he must be “humiliated” by a literary vocation that merely serves that ideology's effort to rationalize its contradictions. Melville does not accept these conditions for labor; his rebellion is exemplified by his refusal of the customary alternatives of philosophical idealism or the “world elsewhere” of art. The “unconscious” of Pierre is, like the unconscious of the chair-portrait, no mystical effect of artistic intuition; it is the ideological analysis that results from deconstructing those apparently self-evident distinctions we assume govern our everyday reality: ideal and material, self and other, author and reader, owner and worker, master and servant, state and family. That Melville understands these distinctions to have special roles to play in reconciling social democracy with radical individualism makes his labor in Pierre especially pertinent to Jacksonian America.

Rogin and others have judged Pierre to be work symptomatic of Melville's ultimate self-referentiality as an author, his resignation to the delusions that later would define twentieth-century modernism. Melville deconstructs in Pierre the “democratic” pretensions of American capitalism by exposing the relation of radical individualism to the incestuous and claustrophobic closure of the aristocratic family. And Melville further deconstructs the new “authority” of Emerson's expressive self, both subject and object of its own labor, by revealing how literary authority participates in the naturalization of capitalist contradictions. Given his own complicity with the principal subjects of his critique, Melville can hardly be said to have mastered the problems his narrative uncovers. Parody, irony, and satire—mere literary terms, after all—hardly begin to address the force of Melville's critique in Pierre. In one sense, Pierre is Melville's farewell to the romance and the novel—to “literature” as he had attempted to practice it in his previous works. Yet Pierre is by no means the expression of incipient madness, despair, or nihilism. Quite the contrary, the book raises those questions about the ideological consequences of literary production that motivate the more socially and politically focused work of The Confidence-Man. Melville's critique of literary production may have devastating consequences for his own sense of vocation, but it also makes possible the active study of the genealogy of social values that Melville's Ishmael futilely attempts to “understand” from his detached vantage and by means of his romantic “negative capability” in Moby-Dick. By means of the deconstructive “failure” of Pierre as literature, Melville could make the leap from Ishmael to the confidence men, whose agitations and subversions enter the social drama, provoking the “labor” of their interlocutors, of their readers, either to reproduce the Wall Street World—America as the “tomb” of its past—or produce the carnival of an authentically democratic society. In Pierre and The Confidence-Man, Melville developed a mode of writing that left “literature” behind and anticipated the cultural criticism of our own present moment.

Notes

1. Henry A. Murray, Introduction to Pierre, or The Ambiguities, by Herman Melville (New York, 1949), xcvi.

2. Mark Poster, Critical Theory of the Family (London, 1978), 144.

3. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. R. Baldick (New York, 1965); Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1979).

4. Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York, 1983), 165; Eric Sundquist, Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Baltimore, 1979).

5. Louis Althusser's “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation),” in Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York, 1971), provides the most extended discussion of interpellation. Antonio Gramsci develops the notion of hegemonic discourse in The Prison Notebooks. See Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, 1971).

6. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New York, 1942); Poster, Critical Theory of the Family, 43.

7. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (3 vols.; New York, 1977), I, 471n26.

8. Ibid., 472; Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Rev. ed.; New York, 1983), 133.

9. Carolyn Porter, Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner (Middletown, Conn., 1981), 65.

10. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York, 1967), 477.

11. Rogin, Subversive Genealogy, 164.

12. Williams, Keywords, 132, explains that the precapitalist family was often understood as “the household,” rather than in terms of specific kinship relations. There is much disagreement among scholars concerning Williams' assumption that the nuclear family and the rise of the bourgeoisie are historically contemporary developments. I am not qualified to resolve these disputes, but I am struck with the central concern in the modern novel with adultery, illegitimacy, and thus the definition of “proper” family relations. Capitalism's judgment of ethical questions often involves the settlement of property rights. Kinship relations in the novel are almost always a function of property rights and the orderly transmission of those rights, rather than the other way around.

13. Hegel, Phenomenology, 479.

14. Herman Melville, Pierre, or The Ambiguities (Evanston, Ill., 1971), 122, hereinafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number.

15. Carolyn L. Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville's America (Baton Rouge, 1980), 94.

16. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (1899; rpr. New York, 1956), 161.

17. Ibid., 165.

18. Marx, Capital, I, 451, 452.

19. Ibid., 452.

20. In Pierre, Melville makes a number of puns on Kant's surname as part of his more general critique of transcendental idealism. Speaking of the idealists of various sorts—painters, sculptors, students, German philosophers—inhabiting the upper floors of the tower in the Church of the Apostles, Melville jibes: “While the abundance of leisure in their attics (physical and figurative), unites with the leisure of their stomachs, to fit them in an eminent degree for that undivided attention indispensable to the proper digesting of the sublimated Categories of Kant; especially as Kant (can’t) is the one great palpable fact in their pervadingly impalpable lives” (267). Yet the purely negative palpability of Kantian idealism—its cant is its can’t—finds its habitation in the “Titanic” tower that rises out of the stores and law offices into which the old church has been divided. Elsewhere, Melville judges these “theoretic and inactive” transcendentalists to be “therefore harmless,” but as neighbors with the commercial and legal powers of the modern city these transcendentals must be said to serve some more active and dangerous ideological purpose, even if such a purpose depends on their apparent ineffectualness (262).

21. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Emerson, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 62, Vol. I of Joseph Slater and Douglas Emory Wilson, eds., The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 4 vols. to date.

22. Emerson, “Man the Reformer,” ibid., 152, 153.

23. Many critics agree that Plotinus Plinlimmon and his lecture on “chronometricals and horologicals” is Melville's intended “satire on all shallow and amiable transcendental ‘reconcilers’ of the ‘Optimist’ or ‘Compensation’ school,” as Willard Thorp put the matter in his Introduction to Herman Melville: Representative Selections (New York, 1938), lxxxii. Extracted as Plinlimmon's lecture is from a series of “Three Hundred and Thirty-three Lectures” and qualified as “not so much the Portal, as part of the temporary Scaffold to the Portal of this new Philosophy,” Plinlimmon's very form parodies the Emersonian lecture. The title itself, “‘EI,’” is paronomastic of Emerson's identification of the “eye” and the “I,” as well as the spiritually generative qualities Emerson attributes to the crossing of the “eye” and the “I,” which involves the third paronomasia: “das Ei” or “egg,” as in ab ovo. Connecting all of these puns is, of course, their mutual philological source, the Greek philosophical term eídos, which variously links appearance, constitutive nature, form, type, species, and idea. I cannot recount here the complicated history of eide in even the restricted classical tradition from Plato to Aristotle and Plotinus, but I will simply remind the reader that classical philosophical debates concerning the relation of immanence to transcendence often focused on the particular status of eide. F. E. Peters in Greek Philosophical Terms (New York, 1967), 50, notes that by Aristotle's postulation of “the eide as the thoughts of God, a position that continues down through Plotinus … into Christianity, and at the same time … as immanent formal causes with an orientation toward matter, … an at least partial solution to the dilemma of immanence vs. transcendence was reached. But the problem continued as a serious one in Platonism, discussed at length by both Plotinus … and Proclus.”

24. Wordsworth's lines are from “Tintern Abbey,” ll. 17-18. T. E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” in Critical Theory since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York, 1971), 769.

25. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Elizabeth S. Foster (New York, 1954), 271.

26. Porter, Seeing and Being, 228-29.

27. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Emerson, Essays: Second Series, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 113, Vol. III of Slater and Wilson, eds., Works.

28. Rogin, Subversive Genealogy, 179-80.