[In the following essay, Lewis explores Pierre in terms of the various characters' responses to the incongruous, suggesting that this theme contributes to the overall ambiguity of the work.]

That sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke.

Melville, Moby-Dick

All of us are confronted with conflicts or problems that must be dealt with. By occasionally stepping back from the seriousness of the situation and approaching it with a sense of humor (sometimes called “looking on the light side”), we are presumably better able to deal with the source of the problem. If laughter does serve the tension-relief and impulse-control functions discussed, a person must be in a better position to cope with conflict after humor than before it.

Paul E. McGhee, Humor: Its Origin and Development

Insights developed through research into the psychology of incongruity can be useful in understanding both Herman Melville's Pierre; or, the Ambiguities (1852) and the history of extreme responses to the novel. Although it has been widely regarded as a flawed, uncontrolled, and incongruous work, it is now possible to see Pierre as a valid analysis of the challenges and dangers of incongruity. The irony of Pierre criticism is that readers have often failed to understand the novel because they brought to the work the very ineptitude in dealing creatively with the incongruous that Melville's unamused hero brings to his life, in this way illustrating the importance of Melville's novel by reviling it.

In the past decade empirical psychologists have come to see the role of incongruity as a starting point for experiences of humor, fear, and creativity. An incongruous event (that is, one that contradicts our sense of the normal) can seem threatening, or amusing, or confusing, or all three in various sequences depending on the context in which it occurs, the nature of the event, and our ability to cope with its unexpected significance.¹ Such occurrences inevitably stimulate a higher level of arousal or tension, as the person affected attempts to deal with what is happening. If the occurrence seems threatening, fearful and defensive reactions may result. If the occurrence seems playful, smiling and laughing may result. And if the occurrence seems primarily puzzling, problem solving will be initiated.

The complexity of our response to the incongruous is easiest to see in the behavior of children, perhaps because they are most actively involved in the work of forming a world view.² Consider a two-year-old girl trying to figure out a Jack-in-the-box for the first time. Like other toys it is brightly colored, so she approaches it in a playful spirit. As she turns the crank and music surrounds her, she smiles in delight. But when Jack springs up the child's muscles tense, she lurches back, and starts to tremble. Between fear and humor, this is the crucial moment of incongruity. Because the child is startled, because nothing like this has ever happened to her, she may run away in terror, instinctively hoping to drive Jack's dreadful pop from her mind. Because the child is intrigued, she may stay to experiment with the toy, bobbing her own head in imitation of Jack's, laughing, and continuing to turn the crank as before. In the end, through this process of reality-assimilation, she may come to understand the toy, removing it from the category of the incongruous to that of the familiar.

As this example suggests, incongruous moments are important because, if richly experienced, they can challenge and expand our sense of the normal. If making a world out of fragments of perception is the business of consciousness, the incongruous is what keeps this process alive and growing. Only through an awareness of our inability to understand something are we motivated to stop and question ourselves. A seemingly odd but actually healthy combination of emotions can open us to the unknown. If we only laugh at the incongruous, we may dismiss it too lightly. If we only fear the incongruous, we may avoid or deny it. But if we can combine the relaxation of humor with the concentration of fear, we may be able to absorb and digest what we were not expecting and cannot easily assimilate. Opposing this rich and complex response to incongruity is a counterforce of denial, the measure of a person's inflexibility. We like to believe that we are at the center of a coherent world, that our experiences form a consistent whole. Because the incongruous presents an opportunity for self-expansion, it can threaten this sense of identity and control. But when we resist the incongruous, when we deny it, we remain locked into inappropriate and inadequate ideas and emotions.

As a stimulus, then, the incongruous is rich in potential especially when it seems most threatening or absurd. Appropriately, as the controlling force of a literary text, the incongruous can frustrate aesthetic and moral norms and all too often inspire a harsh or limited critical response. Just as we resist the recognition of ideas and events that contradict our sense of the normal or possible, so works that uncompromisingly present us with incongruities are often greeted with the contempt of readers who are unwilling or unable to open themselves to the unexpected or the inexplicable. This can be a problem for almost any narrative, insofar as all narratives originate in some form of action-generating conflict, difficulty, or incongruity. But this is especially true of initial responses to texts that not only begin in incongruity but also wallow in it, using and abusing literary conventions to expose the limitations of accepted ideas.³ The ridicule and mockery such texts often receive is too complacent not to be an instrument of self-satisfied repression.

Infamous in the history of such limited critical responses to incongruous texts is the case of Herman Melville's Pierre, a masterpiece of frustration. One need hardly demonstrate the presence of incongruities in Pierre, as this has been the universally accepted starting point for critics, various interpretations focusing on different patterns or groups of incongruities. It is impossible not to see ideational and emotional worlds colliding in this tale of sinful idealism, pastoral corruption, and expedient virtue. Ideas and relationships, even individual human identities, are protean in Pierre, as mothers become sisters, brothers husbands, madmen writers, and philosophers fools. In Pierre, Melville brings his white whale into drawing rooms and onto city streets, takes Moby Dick for country rides and to elegant breakfasts. Just as Ishmael is baffled by an unknowable monster/deity, so, in Pierre it is impossible to arrive at any single view of the events and characters. Through a confusing world Melville follows a protagonist hell-bent on quickly labeling and understanding everything he sees. But Pierre is not simply a novel of incongruities; it is a novel about the psychology of the incongruous.

It is ironic that Pierre, a work about a person destroyed by his inability to accept the incongruous as a life principle, has often been misread or abused by critics unable to accept incongruity as a principle in art. This critical failure is seen most clearly in contemporary reviews of the novel, although the nineteenth-century emphasis on the formal and philosophic confusion of the work, as I will show later, continues to color modern readings. From the start critics have concentrated on why Pierre the novel fails, themselves failing to see that a far more interesting and valid question is why Pierre the character fails.

The defensive, almost knee-jerk nature of the initial responses of Melville's contemporaries to Pierre is obvious in their moral outrage, in their repudiation of thematic complexity, and in their failure to see anything funny about this hilariously painful book. Any novel published in 1852 that allowed its hero to contemplate incest would have earned the violent condemnation of most book reviewers. It is not surprising, then, in retrospect, to find Pierre reviled within months of its publication for its “exceeding sinfulness.”⁴ What is revealing is the obvious nausea of Melville's contemporaries, a nausea based on their unwillingness to ponder the questions raised by the book's incongruities. The tone of the reviewer for the Athenaeum is typical: “We take up novels to be amused—not bewildered—in search of pleasure for the mind—not in pursuit of cloudy metaphysics.” Typical also is the reviewer writing in the Literary World who snarled that “Mother and son, brother and sister are sacred facts not to be disturbed by any sacrilegious speculations” and asked rhetorically why Melville allowed his mind to “run riot amid remote analogies, where the chain of associations is invisible to mortal minds?” Most revealing, perhaps, is the self-limiting response of George Washington Peck writing in the American Whig Review, who concluded his long and vicious attack as follows: “We have dwelt long enough upon these ‘Ambiguities.’ We fear that if we were to continue much longer, we should become ambiguous ourselves. … Mr. Melville is a man wholly unfitted for the task of writing wholesome fictions.” What Melville clearly perceived is that such wholesomeness is a veil for self-righteous hypocrisy and that accepted intellectual “chains of association” are mind-forged manacles of convention.

The same critics who regarded Pierre with nausea and contempt and who scorned Melville's moral and metaphysical questioning often failed to appreciate the cruel humor of the book. Those who were aware of this comic line often saw it as a product of the author's insanity or lack of control. One reviewer who noted Melville's parodic intention in the opening chapters absurdly burlesqued Melville's already satirical style:

We have listened to its outbreathing of sweet-swarming sounds, and their melodious, mournful, wonderful, and unintelligible melodiousness has “dropped like pendulous, glittering icicles,” with soft-ringing silveriness, upon our never-to-be-delighted-sufficiently organs of hearing; and, in the insignificant significancies of that deftly-stealing and wonderfully-serpentining melodiousness, we have found an infinite, unbounded, inexpressible mysteriousness of nothingness.

This attempt to hoist Melville on his own petard ends by hoisting the hoister, a critic too comfortable in his world view to laugh at it. Like the toddler fleeing from the Jack-in-the-box, Melville's contemporaries turned the crank of Pierre until its incongruities popped up; and then, unable to laugh at and ponder them, they fled in righteous horror.

The irony is that what Melville's contemporaries did with Pierre the novel, Pierre the character does with life itself. Repeatedly Melville's adolescent hero reveals his immaturity by failing to accommodate startling experiences, failing to learn from them. An anti-Bildungsroman, Pierre defines maturity inversely by showing us a character's inability to grow. With unsettling precision Melville traces this inability to its elements: a lack of humor and, in spite of Pierre's obvious intellectual depth, an unwillingness to entertain profound questions for long. The tension between our sense of how Pierre ought to respond to his experiences and how he actually does respond creates an unbearable fascination.

Pierre's reluctance to acknowledge the incongruous and his inability to see humor in those incongruities that briefly penetrate his defenses reduce him to what might be called an anti-comedic pattern of response. In a fascinating study Seymour Fisher and Rhoda L. Fisher demonstrate that a common personality trait of professional comedians is a lack of faith in conventional answers and ideals:

The comic, in opening wide the door to surprise, intimates that anything is possible. He dramatizes the likelihood of the unpredictable. He conveys the view that we are surrounded by forces that are bound to lead us into unexpected trajectories. … He knows that inevitably the individual will be starkly surprised by the course of events. Comedy prepares the audience for novel intrusion by showing that customary and usually dependable rules are illusory. … In effect, the comic prepares his audience for chaos and half convinces it that the chaos can be fun.⁵

In Pierre, Melville follows the circular doom of a man who is unwilling or unable to cope with facts, ideas, or emotions that challenge his sense of reality. Unlike the comedians the Fishers studied who expect and celebrate the incongruous, Pierre recoils in horror from the unknown, the surprising, the mysterious.

Pierre's development is characterized by its dynamic stagnation, its psychic plus ça change. Buffeted by the incongruous way in which his ideals fail repeatedly to apply to his experiences, and unable to question the value of such ideals, Pierre moves from one useless absolute to another. His substitution of ideal Christianity for family pride and secular love, of absolute truth for ideal Christianity, and later of Satanic defiance for absolute truth is an evasion of any serious consideration of the confusion around him and the conflicts within, a way of remaining unchanged in the face of the incongruous. “I am Pierre and here I stand,” he seems to shriek, unaware of the complexity of his identity and the quicksand into which he is sinking.

We first see Pierre as the chivalric, late adolescent suitor of the virginal Lucy Tartan. Projecting his passion onto the landscape, Pierre regards the whole earth as a “love-token”⁶ and his Lucy as an angel belonging to “the regions of an infinite day” (p. 4). The problem with this rarefied view of love is that it cannot be reconciled with what Melville calls “uncelestial traits,” our liability to the demands of the flesh. The fool of love, Pierre is the victim of a world view which defines his projected marriage with Lucy as an act of blasphemy: “I to wed this heavenly fleece? … I am of heavy earth, and she of airy light. By heaven, but marriage is an impious thing!” (p. 58).

Until circumstances force Pierre to abandon Lucy and his first notions about love, he refuses to allow his awareness of the incompatibility of heavenly and earthly love to alter his idealism. Unlike the narrator, who has his tongue planted in his cheek throughout the early chapters,⁷ Pierre fails to see how funny the angelic view of love is. When Pierre gazes into Lucy's eyes, he sees “waves of infinite glee” (p. 35). But when the narrator discusses this experience, grotesque imagery and exaggerated assertions explode the ideal in laughter:

There are not so many fishes in the sea, as there are sweet images in lovers' eyes. In those miraculous translucencies swim the strange eye-fish with wings, that sometimes leap out, instinct with joy; moist fish-wings wet the lover's cheek. (p. 33)

All things that are sweet to see, or taste, or feel, or hear, all these things were made by Love; and none other things were made by Love. Love made not the Arctic zones, but Love is ever reclaiming them. Say, are not the fierce things of this earth daily, hourly going out? … Oh, Love is busy everywhere. (p. 34)

As the tone of these passages suggests, the problem with elevating a single principle or emotion to the level of supreme importance is that it will not be able to explain the many quirks and irregularities of life.

Pierre's addiction to the absolute (i.e., to undiluted emotions, pure morality, and clear abstractions) is a consequence of his aristocratic but unfortunate upbringing as a Glendinning male. The family fiction, inherited by virtue of a perverse psychic primogeniture, is that all of the Glendinning males have been perfect. His majestic grandfather, a hero of the Revolutionary War, lives in Pierre's mind as a “pure, cheerful, childlike, blue-eyed, divine old man; in whose meek, majestic soul, the lion and the lamb embraced—fit image of his God” (p. 30). His father, who died when Pierre was a toddler, is always spoken of as a gentleman and a Christian. Pierre's mother's remark early in the novel illustrates this paternal adulation: “God bless you, my dear son!—always think of him and you can never err; yes, always think of your dear perfect Father, Pierre” (p. 19). It is no wonder that when this son and grandson of supposed saints falls in love he should regard his relationship as a seraphic encounter.

Melville uses Pierre's relationship with his mother to separate the reader at the outset from Pierre's point of view. The first description of Mrs. Glendinning reveals both her attractions and her faults:

Pierre was the only son of an affluent, and haughty widow; a lady who externally furnished a singular example of the preservative and beautifying influences of unfluctuating rank, health, and wealth, when joined to a fine mind of medium culture, uncankered by any inconsolable grief, and never worn by sordid cares. (p. 4)

Alluring as she is, Mrs. Glendinning is also vain, proud, conventional, and controlling, a “widow Bloom” (p. 5) with moral cankers. Pierre, however, at this point sees only her blossom, as eventually he will see only her pride and rigidity. Calling her “Sister Mary,” he wallows unaware in an ambiguously “romantic filial love” (p. 5). She is his first angel for whom he feels (or thinks he feels) only a sweet and religious respect. But Melville explodes this simplistic domesticity by contrasting cloyingly incestuous scenes at the dressing mirror and dining table with inappropriate idealizations:

In a detached and individual way, it [Pierre's relationship with his mother] seemed almost to realize here below the sweet dreams of those religious enthusiasts, who paint to us a Paradise to come, when etherialized from all drosses and stains, the holiest passion of man shall unite all kindreds and climes in one circle of pure and unimpairable delight. (p. 16)

If these are angels, Melville implies, God keep us from heaven.

Pierre's downfall can be seen as illustrating the necessity of coming to accept the fallibility of parents, their capacity for good and evil, inspiration and corruption.⁸ It is certainly true that Pierre is eventually tormented by the realizations that his father was immoral and his mother cruel and inflexible. But the thematic unity of the novel becomes clearer if we think of Pierre's response to this unavoidable adolescent hurdle as one among several instances of his inability to cope with the incongruous. From this vantage point, Pierre's reactions to the “mystery of Isabel” is only the most fully developed episode in his repetitive emotional and intellectual collapse.

Pierre's response to Isabel's unexpected appearance in Saddle Meadows and to her claim that she is his illegitimate half sister reveals his unusual lack of preparation for such a shock. Although this response is divided into three stages (his response to her face, letter, and finally to her life story) and occupies about one-eighth of the book, it is distressingly circular, reflecting Melville's intuitive sense that being neurotic means doing the same things over and over again. Up to the moment of his first glance of Isabel, his life seemed to him a “perfect … scroll,” a “sweetly-writ manuscript” (p. 7), but the shock of her sexuality and anguish unnerves him. Even before he receives her letter of appeal he is terrified and saddened by the mysterious sorrow of Isabel's face. Prior to this time Pierre's pensive interludes were always superficial, mixed with reverie, sweet sadness, and “delicious poetic presentiments” (p. 41). Now he is confronted with a mystery that threatens to overwhelm him largely because he refuses to fully engage it: “What, who art thou? Oh! wretched vagueness—too familiar to me, a yet inexplicable,—unknown, utterly unknown! I seem to founder in this perplexity” (p. 41). What Pierre most dreads, foundering in perplexity, is the stuff of human progress and development.⁹

Unable to laugh at Isabel and at himself—at the absurd collision of his inflated ideals and deflating counterappearances—Pierre is unwilling to think about what is happening. Afraid that he will become a “railing atheist,” he withdraws from the incongruous and feverishly represses his memory of Isabel's face: “But ’tis gone—gone—entirely gone; and I thank God, and I feel joy again; joy, which I also feel to be my right as man; deprived of joy, I feel I should find cause for deadly feuds with things invisible” (p. 41). What Pierre does not realize, what he will never realize, is that simply deciding that you are happy or that you have understood your situation is inadequate. Such denial is a sign of desperation; the incongruous requires much more.

All of this emotional upheaval serves as a dress rehearsal for Pierre's full-blown reaction to Isabel's repulsive allure. When Isabel's letter reaches Pierre, we see his fatal addiction to moral absolutism at work. His “good angel” urges him to ignore self-interest and read the letter. His “bad angel” urges him to destroy the letter and be happy. But the contest is short and as he opens the envelope he feels “every vein in him pulsed to some heavenly swell” (p. 63). In spite of his conflicting feelings and in the face of Isabel's odd behavior, Pierre is already fitting the dark beauty into his ideal-mad world view as yet another angel—this one of pain and passion. His unwillingness to accept the fact that he is bewildered, or even confused, forces him to reach a familiar set of conclusions, conclusions that are both dubious and deadly.

The letter itself is rich enough and contradictory enough to inspire a wide range of emotions and ideas, a range of responses that Pierre is conspicuously incapable of achieving. Although it is bereft of factual evidence, the letter appeals to Pierre's moral sense, to his sense of guilt, and to his sense of familial pride. Like all of Isabel's acts, the letter is innocent but manipulative, childlike but passionate, self-sacrificing but self-absorbed. Her message is divided against itself, as the following passage shows: “No, I shall not, I will not implore thee.—Oh, my brother, my dear, dear Pierre,—help me, fly to me; see, I perish without thee;—pity, pity,—here I freeze in the wide, wide world;—no father, no mother, no sister, no brother, no living thing in the fair form of humanity, that holds me dear” (p. 64). What is extraordinary but also revealing is that for Pierre this melodramatic effusion is an emotional and intellectual dagger; it leaves him bleeding internally from a wound that never quite heals. His fear is understandable; he can feel his old world of parental respect careening out of its orbit. Humor would help him relax and reconsider, but he has no access to such profound laughter. He cannot, for instance, think to himself, following the passage just quoted, “I’m so glad she decided not to implore me!”

Pierre's inability to laugh here leaves him unable to speculate about what is, to say the least, a complex revelation, if it is a revelation at all. The amazing thing about Pierre's response to the letter is that, although it is the single most important event in his long and tortured decline, it occurs in just one paragraph. Struggling “to escape the recoil of anguish” (p. 65), Pierre vows to embrace “nothing but Truth … and do what my deepest angel dictates” (p. 65). Very briefly Pierre considers alternative explanations of Isabel's letter, that the whole episode is “some accursed dream” or that the letter itself is “a base and malicious forgery” (p. 65). However valid these conjectures may be (remember that Pierre has been in a walking dream since first seeing Isabel and that the letter offers no evidence whatsoever), Pierre finds it impossible to investigate them. As soon as these possibilities occur to him, he rejects them, preferring to curse his fate and to conclude that “This letter is not a forgery” (p. 66). With the logic of a child he babbles to himself: “Nothing but Truth can move me so” (p. 66). Fearing most of all the loss of a coherent identity, a position from which he can think, act, and emote, Pierre, by the end of the paragraph, is labelling himself Isabel's “Leapingly-acknowledging brother” (p. 66).

This leaping acknowledgment is an evasion of the problem solving and creativity called for by the incongruous. Pierre is devastated by the allegation that his father had an illegitimate child, devastated because this contradicts the view that his father was a saint on earth. The incongruity here has to do with the apparently irreconcilable belief in human perfection and the suggestion (accepted as a fact) that even the seemingly best of men are corrupt. Though disconcerting, this knot of ideas might lead in any number of interesting philosophic, psychological, and practical directions. Pierre has every reason to reject or at least defer accepting the view of his father suggested by the letter. But even after he accepts this revised family history, he might delay projecting it onto the world. Pierre immediately concludes that if his father was an imperfect Christian, Christianity as practiced by most people is a system of hypocritical vice. The implication for Pierre is that he must now become the perfect Christian. Although Pierre ignores them, there are many more open or speculative responses to this new “fact.”

Pierre might reason that if his parents were not angels, angelic natures are not possible for human beings. Therefore, Isabel is no angel, Lucy is no angel, and even Pierre is flawed. Or he might suspect that it is impossible to understand human experience, that ultimate questions are a waste of time. Or he might simply decide to keep living and thinking until a coherent position evolves. But you cannot leap to action and assertion if you pause to think. And if such a pause terrifies you because it leaves your sense of who you are in suspension, then any conclusion, however poorly it fits all the discrepant pieces together, will be better than none.

Just as Pierre's sense of mystery should be expanding to allow him to cope with these new ideas and facts, it shrivels. Throughout his childhood Pierre's ideal image of his father had been poetically tinged by the mysteries of a portrait of Pierre Sr. smiling in an arch and unsettling way. This portrait, Pierre learned as a young boy, was painted at a time when Pierre's father was thought to be involved with a French woman. Also, Pierre has always wondered about his father's death, about the way the dying man called out for a daughter to hold his hand. These details, combined with Isabel's resemblance to the roguish portrait, destroy even the pleasant sense of doubt Pierre had allowed himself to feel: “Pierre saw all preceding ambiguities, all mysteries ripped open as if with a keen sword” (p. 85). Refusing the “sordid scrutiny of small pros and cons” (p. 88), Pierre rejects his father and determines to fly to Isabel's side.

Like his earlier responses to the face and the letter and his later responses to other murky situations, Pierre's response to Isabel's story is a desperate denial and reduction of the incongruous. The tale of Isabel's youth is a Gothic set piece full of the heart-rending treatment she received at the hands of cruel or indifferent caretakers and from the inmates of an insane asylum. It is a tale of desperation and neglect, a Dickensian childhood without affection or belonging. Whether or not she is actually Pierre's half sister, what this bewildered and lonely young woman needs is protection and warmth, an effective helper and friend. What she gets is the ruin that results from Pierre's inability to treat her mysterious past as a mystery.

Melville divides Isabel's story into two parts, not because it is too long to tell in one sitting, but because he wants to concentrate on Pierre's reactions to the tale, not on the stimulus but the response. Book VII, “Intermediate between Pierre's Two Interviews with Isabel at the Farmhouse,” shows us that Pierre reacts to Isabel's “enigmatical story” by beating “away all thoughts” (p. 129). After a sleepless night, Pierre plunges deep into a nearby wood, suggestive of the impending pathlessness of his life. Although Pierre has already resolved to follow “the inflexible rule of holy right” (p. 106), the narrator reminds us that the moral values of Pierre's new loyalty to Isabel are complex. Isabel is beautiful, but “How, if accosted in some squalid lane, a humped, and crippled, hideous girl should have snatched his garment's hem, with—‘Save me, Pierre—love me, own me, brother; I am thy sister!’” (p. 107). It is just this sense of the mixed and mangled nature of man, of his own self, that Pierre finds it impossible to laugh at or accept. In the woods on the morning after the first part of Isabel's story, Pierre creeps under an enormous boulder and calls for his own death if he cannot live a morally perfect life. But the universe ignores his outcry; the boulder remains in place as only a bird lands on the rock and chirps down at the posturing youth.¹⁰

The seeds of Pierre's doom, germinating from the opening pages, take root in the interval between Isabel's narratives. The more Pierre resists the incongruous, the more it will torment and terrify him. Thus, at the very moment when he concludes that he is Isabel's brother, he senses unconsciously, disturbingly, that this may not be true, that her tale is incomplete, and that he is attracted to her with more than a brotherly love. Determined not to see his life as a set of “mysteries interpierced with mysteries” (p. 142), he reaffirms his habitual but by now idiotic belief in “uncorrupted Love” (p. 142). A smirking angel, Pierre hovers at the brink of yet another incestuous relationship.

Over this brink and into confusion Pierre tumbles when he arrives at the unprecedented idea of protecting his mother's pride, his family's honor, and Isabel by pretending to marry the girl and by actually eloping with her to a nearby city. On the practical level this plan is reckless: a penniless outcast, Pierre will not be able to keep Isabel from the poverty that has oppressed her. Apparently guilty of deceit and disloyalty himself (for abandoning Lucy and lying to his mother), Pierre cannot leave his family honor unbesmirched. But on the emotional level this plan is even worse because it leaves Pierre adrift. What more exquisite torture could a young man embrace than to live with a voluptuous and yielding woman whom it might or might not be a sin to touch? Pierre acts as though it would be worse to admit that he simply does not know what to make of Isabel, but the more he insists on maintaining a clear position, a coherent identity, the more he is endangered by the mysteries he denies.

The rest of Pierre's experiences extend and repeat the pattern we have been following, a circular process that begins with the disruption of Pierre's tenuous sense of absolute order and then moves too quickly to Pierre's reimposition of another set of inappropriate ideals. Attempts to define or deny the presence of thematic unity in Pierre often begin by asking whether Melville is writing to endorse either the absolutist (chronometrical) morality of Christ or the relative (horological) virtue of Plotinus Plinlimmon, the author of a pamphlet Pierre finds but then loses, as he always loses sight of ideas that challenge his world view. At times Melville seems to propose a synthesis of these competing value systems; at other times he seems to imply that man's divided nature (the supreme human incongruity of our middle state) makes such a synthesis a tragic impossibility.¹¹ In Pierre, however, Melville is far less interested in the answer to this question than in the psychology of questioning. When Melville's critics ask whether Melville is loyal to Christ or to Plinlimmon, they are asking in a calm way the same question that Pierre, “dabbling in the vomit of his loathed identity” (p. 171), asks about his decision to abandon his fiancée and elope with Isabel: “Then, for the time, all minor things were whelmed in him; his mother, Isabel, the whole wide world; and only one thing remained to him;—this all-including query—Lucy or God?” (p. 181).

What gives Pierre its thematic unity is not the advocacy of a coherent and universal morality but the intensity of its concentration on a single human experience: the incongruous moment. The critics who have seen a great rift in the novel at the point at which Pierre moves away from Saddle Meadows and becomes a writer have followed not Pierre's psychological development, the center of the work, but shifts in such things as plot, setting, and narrative tone.¹² But Pierre the writer is not very different from Pierre the son, Pierre the lover, or Pierre the brother. For Pierre, writing is just another way to take a stand, to broadcast the purity of his identity, or, as he puts it, “to gospelize the world anew” (p. 273). Those who argue that Melville's despair as a writer around the time when he was working on Pierre forced him to confuse his own dilemma with that of his protagonist mistake inspiration for obsession, Melville's use of his own experiences for a surrender to them. It is true, as Hershel Parker demonstrates, that Melville draws on his own frustrations as a writer in the chapters dealing with Pierre's ill-fated literary career.¹³ With some exceptions, however, this use of autobiographical materials is blended into the pattern, not of earlier references to Pierre as a writer, but of Pierre's general mind set. The inserted prose essays on an American literary scene divided between absolute integrity and expedient Philistinism provide an external parallel to Pierre's situation, and his uncompromising way of dealing with this scene recreates his earlier responses to other social conventions.

It is true, as several critics have noted, that there are many similarities between the book Pierre attempts to write and the one Melville succeeded in writing in Pierre.¹⁴ Both are about young writers. Both deal with moral issues, examining the validity of the distinction between virtue and vice, the nature of Christian worship as a guide to action, and the possibility of achieving moral perfection. The differences between the two works, however, as seen in Melville's descriptions of Pierre as a writer and in the passages quoted from Pierre's book, are more significant. According to Melville, Pierre is attempting to write a mature book in an immature way. A “life amateur,” Pierre allows his rage to warp his prose into a cry of despair and anger. The crucial difference is one of tone and distance. Like Pierre, Melville is enraged at the social hypocrisy of little sinners, but, unlike Pierre, Melville does not see himself as the apostle of absolute truth. To put it another way, the differences between Melville and Pierre are similar to the differences between Ishmael and Ahab, as is clear in the following passage describing Pierre as a writer:

Ten million things were as yet uncovered to Pierre. 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. (pp. 284-85)

For Melville, the awareness of the limits of human intelligence is both a curse and a salvation; for Pierre, the repression of this awareness is fatal.

The scraps from Pierre's manuscript that we are shown support the narrator's assertion that Pierre has plagiarized “from his own experiences to fill out the mood of his” author-hero, Vivia. Like Pierre, Vivia embraces a deep mournfulness and eschews all “humorous or indifferent disguises” (p. 302), that is, he decides to be always serious, always engaged by the injustice of the human condition. In all earnestness, Vivia, speaking for Pierre, scorns philosophy, acknowledges the reality of pain, denounces the body as a kind of jail, and reviles humor: “oh God, that men that call themselves men should still insist on a laugh! I hate the world, and could trample all lungs of mankind as grapes … to think of the woe and the cant,—to think of the Truth and the Lie! Oh! blessed be the twenty-first day of December, and cursed the twenty-first day of June!” (p. 303). What makes Pierre a more mature work than Vivia would have been is Melville's conviction that if you reject humor and embrace a single position, your caricatured self-reduction makes you a joke. So, when the vileness of the human body arises as a topic in Pierre, it is treated with the bantering seriousness that runs through the novel, not with Pierre's, or Vivia's deadpan rage:

Love me, love my dog, is only an adage for the old country-women who affectionately kiss their cows. The gods love the soul of a man; often, they will frankly accost it; but they abominate his body; and will forever cut it dead, both here and hereafter. So, if thou wouldst go to the gods, leave thy dog of a body behind thee. And most impotently thou strivest with thy purifying cold baths … to prepare it as a meet offering for their altar. (p. 299)

Even without the final pun that implies that human meat will never please the gods, this passage approaches Melville's obviously intense unease over the mind/body problem with a smile. In this way, it is possible to find darkly comic passages that comment on each of the problems that Pierre finds it impossible to laugh at or think about: God's silence (p. 204) and indifference (p. 139), the pain of poverty (pp. 267-68), and the comparative evil of great and small sinners (Satan and “yonder habadasher,” pp. 177-78). And, of course, all of Pierre's rhetorically charged utterances (for instance, his “Guide me, gird me, guard me” speech on page 106) are at least in part jokes Melville enjoys at the expense of a character whose life and death are laughably sad.

A funny thing happens to Pierre on the way to his suicide: he has yet another humorless and ineffective revelation, this one teaching him that he has been a fool. Desperately pursuing clarity, Pierre has been tormented by the incongruities he has denied. The family he sought to protect is blasted when his mother dies in despair, leaving the Glendinning estate to a detested cousin. His efforts to live purely have been polluted by his lust for Isabel, and the moral significance of this lust keeps seeming to shift: is she his sister or not? Some occurrences support her story; some raise doubts—it is impossible to know for sure. And in the middle of all this and of Pierre's failing literary work, Lucy shows up at Pierre and Isabel's slum apartment. Another sordid angel, she comes ostensibly to help the perfect Pierre but in reality to compete for his love. The domestic scene is hilariously unpleasant. When Lucy volunteers to earn money by painting portraits, Isabel volunteers to sell her hair and teeth. And so it goes.

Finally rejecting both of his love-starved women, Pierre races toward his own annihilation:

“For ye two, my most undiluted prayer is now, that from your here unseen and frozen chairs ye may never stir alive;—the fool of Truth, the fool of Virtue, the fool of Fate, now quits ye forever!” (p. 358)

The situation leading directly up to this speech is complex. Building toward an eruption, Pierre's misfortunes have just belched up two farcical letters of denunciation. The first letter, from Steel, Flint, and Asbestos, the outraged publishers of Pierre's aborted romance, lambastes Pierre as a swindler and vile atheist, bemoaning his substitution of a “blasphemous rhapsody” for the contracted “popular novel” (p. 356). The second letter, from the outraged Glen Stanley and Fred Tartan (Lucy's new suitor and brother) is so puffed up as to be comic: “Separately, and together, we brand thee, in thy every lung-cell, a liar;—liar, because that is the scornfullest and loathsomest title for a man; which in itself is the compend of all infamous things” (p. 357). Of course these letters remind us and Pierre of his complete failure as a social and economic being, but Melville has the contemptuous letter writers exaggerate to the point of foaming absurdity. Pierre should be laughing as he cries. Instead, true to his addiction to the absolute, he sees these rejections as yet two more “indices to all immensities,” that is, as yet additional signs of the injustice of the universe.

On the morning of his final rejection of Lucy and Isabel, on his way to face his enemies, Pierre passes first Isabel, who shrieks and sits petrified, “glazed with an icy varnish” and then Lucy, who is sitting at her easel putting the finishing touches to a portrait. When Pierre stops to look at her work, he sees that it is a representation of himself as a skeleton. At this point—with the ludicrous percolating about him—Pierre has many emotional options. He might stop and say something like, “Oh, so that’s what she thinks of me—hardly flattering,” or “perhaps I have been losing too much weight lately,” or “Well, boney hands do the devil's work.” Instead of laughing, he gives the “fool of Truth” speech and rushes out to his doom.

What makes this speech so unsettling is that Pierre is foolish even in what he believes to be his moment of self-knowledge. There are more ways to be a fool than Pierre can see even now. As he insists, he has been destroyed by his foolish allegiance to absolute Truth and absolute Virtue in a world of subjective views and relative norms. What Pierre does not see is that he has also been destroyed by his failure to be either a low fool or a high fool. A low fool, that is someone who can see only the humorous side of experience, would never have been gripped by the tragic compulsion to identify evil and resist it. If the “whole world's a trick,” as Charlie Millthorpe, the low fool in Pierre insists, then all we need to do is play along. As Charlie says, “Know the trick of it, all's right; don’t know, all's wrong. Ha! Ha!” (p. 319). There is a higher folly as well, achieved by the narrator of Pierre but by none of the characters. This is the folly of Lear's fool and Beckett's tramps, of William Beckford and Edgar Allan Poe, of Charlie Chaplin and W. C. Fields, of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, of Kurt Vonnegut and Nathanael West, of Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen, a folly that embraces the incongruous, allowing the mind to deal with it.

Readers have often observed that the narrator of Pierre is conspicuous for not providing an objective and consistent view. Instead, the perspective shifts abruptly from hysterical hyperbole to mock-tragic rage, from bitter condemnation to apparent support. Frequently the narrator attacks Pierre as an “infatuate”: “Well may’st thou distrust thyself, and curse thyself … Oh! fool, blind fool, and a million times an ass! Go, go, thou poor and feeble one! High deeds are not for such blind grubs as thou” (p. 171). But just as often the narrator praises Pierre's nobility, as in the comparison between Pierre and the valiant if impotent Enceladus: “Wherefore whoso storms the sky gives best proof he came from thither! But whatso crawls contented in the moat before the crystal fort, shows it was born within that slime, and there forever will abide” (p. 347). It is not necessary (or possible) to demonstrate that every shift in narrative tone in this sprawling work develops a meaningful incongruity to see that this narrator is appropriately no more contradictory than the characters and ideas he discusses.

Pierre would be a far less unresolved novel if Melville, in exposing his protagonist's way of responding to life's oddities, contrasted Pierre's failure with a successful pattern of response. Such an alternative—embodied in a character or group of characters—would, however, undermine Melville's focus on the destructive consequences of arriving too quickly at intellectual and emotional conviction. Indeed, part of what can make Pierre unpleasant to read is that everyone in the book, the absolutists and the relativists, is unappealing. If Pierre, Lucy, and Isabel are constantly assuming ludicrously ideal postures of selfish sacrifice and beastly divinity, Mrs. Glendinning, the Rev. Mr. Falsgrave, Charlie Millthorpe, and Plotinus Plinlimmon are cold, evasive, superficial, or uncaring. True to his incongruous vision, Melville provides us with no resting place, no conclusion, only with a sense that all is not what we would have expected or can easily explain.¹⁵

Melville's interest in incongruity might be traced to any number of tensions in his personal or professional life, but one intellectual context seems preeminent.¹⁶ If one impulse of romanticism is the yearning for an imaginative recovery of the numinous, another impulse, the basis of what has been called dark romanticism, insists on the impossibility of achieving satisfaction in this quest.¹⁷ In the United States, where transcendentalists affirmed the congruence (Emerson's word was correspondence) between God, nature, and man at his best, serious writers of fiction before the Civil War often seem to be offering examples aimed at refuting this picture of the universe as a plant with God as root and man's mind and nature as corresponding offshoots. By focusing on the demonic, on the obsessive, and on the corrupt, Melville's contemporaries and immediate forebears—Hawthorne, Poe, and Brown—point to the thorns on Emerson's universal plant, to the diseases and imperfections that block correspondence. In both Moby-Dick and Pierre, Melville exposes the folly of trying to get at the root of things. Ahab and Ishmael are failing transcendentalists: Ahab, who controls his world but brings it to ruin, is a savage portrait of the Emersonian great man; Ishmael, after seemingly endless meditation and study, settles for “attainable felicity.”

It is possible to see Pierre as an anti-Walden, a work in which transcendental yearning is the cause and not the cure of desperation.¹⁸ Thoreau, seeking connections between the mundane and the ideal, casts his fishing lines down to earth and up toward heaven and, leaping in meditative reverie, catches two fish at once. Melville, who presented his own view of such a fishing expedition in Moby-Dick, allows Pierre to place the details of his life within various higher frameworks only to discover the lack of any but the most illusory alignment. For Melville the quest for ultimate meaning is doomed from the outset by the threefold evils of man's imperfection, God's silence, and nature's mystery. Emerson and Thoreau argue that an awareness of meaning blossoms in a life of careful observation and detailed thought, inspiration coming as the product of discipline. Using Pierre as a counterexample, Melville insists that the belief in such meaning can be sustained only by someone who is incapable of effective observation and thought. The less we think and see, Melville jeers, the easier it is to believe in absolute truths. For Emerson and Thoreau the undeveloped man has a mind cluttered with unconnected (that is, incongruous) ideas. For Melville, man is an incongruity in an incongruous world.

We often compare novel reading with the experience of entering another world, a world that may be more or less like our own but which has a clear set of operative norms. One of the joys of reading novels is this comfortable illusion that we are participating in the novelist's vision, that we are, to use a current phrase, entering the world according to Jane Austen, or Thomas Hardy, or, for that matter, John Irving. Novelists seeking to support this participation are careful to introduce us quickly to the rules and values that shape their fictions and that remain operative in the confrontation with, indeed are defined by how well they contain, the unexpected and the deviant. We are brought to an awareness of these controlling limits through the guidance of sympathetic characters, a clear narrative tone, and a sequence of meaningful events and emotions. Melville was one of the first novelists to realize that, in this sense, life is rarely like a good book. The easy-chair contentment that accompanies much novel reading, the sense of temporary absorption in another view of life, is exactly what Melville not only avoids but savagely frustrates in Pierre. In the absence of a consistent narrative perspective, of sympathetic characters, of meaningful events, the reader of Pierre is set adrift, like Pierre himself, in search of guiding principles.

Pierre's failure to achieve the balance, or sanity, or distance that humor can provide sours the novel, making its greatest joys bittersweet frustrations. All of the humor in the book is depressing, but, then, so is much of the humor that is most useful in life.¹⁹ Because it is uncompromisingly true to the chaos of incongruous moments, Pierre has been attacked for what is seen as a lack of novelistic order and a distorted depiction of humanity. For Melville, such moments are not fleeting or aberrant; they express the undesirable truth that we will never understand the world in which we live. Offensive to all forms of piety and philosophic contentment, Pierre is heroic in its unflinching portrayal of the mind-boggling disorder of life.

Notes

1. For an overview of contemporary humor theory, see Anthony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot, eds., Humour and Laughter: Theory Research and Application (London: J. Wiley & Sons, 1976) and It’s A Funny Thing, Humour: International Conference on Humour and Laughter (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1977). I am drawing on Mary K. Rothbart's essay in Humour and Laughter, “Incongruity, Problem-Solving and Laughter,” rather heavily in this paragraph.

2. For an extended discussion of humor in childhood, see Paul E. McGhee, Humor: Its Origin and Development (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1979).

3. Literary texts that inspire both humor and fear are frequently discussed as examples of the grotesque, and defensive reader responses to such works have been probed by such critics of the grotesque as Wolfgang Kayser, Philip Thomson, and Michael Steig. In spite of some unavoidable overlapping, I am using the term “incongruous text” to emphasize the element of problem solving and to escape the element of physical abnormality that is a definitive characteristic of the grotesque.

4. This review and the succeeding ones quoted are included in Watson G. Branch, ed., Melville: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 292-322. For a review of criticism on Pierre, see Hugh W. Hetherington, Melville's Reviewers, British and American: 1846-1891 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1961), pp. 227-46.

5. Pretend the World is Funny and Forever: A Psychological Analysis of Comedians, Clowns, and Actors (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1981), p. 89.

6. Herman Melville, Pierre, or the Ambiguities (Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1971), p. 8. All references to Pierre are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

7. There are three book-length studies of Melville's use of humor: Jane Mushabac, Melville's Humor (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1981); Joseph Flibbert, Melville and the Art of the Burlesque (Amsterdam: Rodopi N.V., 1974); Edward H. Rosenberry, Melville and the Comic Spirit (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1955). For a discussion of humor in the early chapters of Pierre, see William Braswell, “The Satirical Temper of Melville's Pierre,” American Literature, 7 (1935), 424-38. An interesting overview of Melville's sense of the grotesque can be found in Richard M. Cook, “Evolving the Inscrutable: The Grotesque in Melville's Fiction,” American Literature, 49 (1978), 544-49.

8. Arguing that Pierre's decline “squares with the demands of psychological realism,” William Ellery Sedgwick, in Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1944), p. 142, notes that when Pierre throws his “lot in with Isabel, he spurns the props which surrounded him in adolescence.” Sedgwick does not, however, see Pierre's behavior here as a part of a general pattern of response.

9. On the relation between incongruity, problem solving, and creativity, see Arthur Koestler's fascinating study, The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1964). For a summary of earlier theories of humor and their relation to modern insights, see the first section of this study, “The Jester,” pp. 27-97.

10. Pierre's experience in the Terror Stone scene illustrates several of the most important differences between Pierre and Moby-Dick. Like Ahab, Pierre is constantly calling on God or the universe to appear before him and account for the nature of man's life. But whereas Ahab actually does fight his monstrous whale, Pierre is left waiting endlessly. Because there is no opponent worthy of Pierre's rage, because he refuses to see that he is his own worst enemy, Pierre reduces Ahab's heroic struggle to the level of ranting. By moving from external to internal conflict, Melville uses Moby-Dick to develop a metaphysics of the incongruous and Pierre to develop a psychology of incongruity.

11. In “Coherence and Ambivalence in Melville's Pierre,” American Literature, 48 (1976), 302-11, Carol Colclough Strickland discusses the lack of a clear morality in Pierre. Finding the novel unfortunately pathetic rather than satiric, Strickland concludes that Pierre “portrays the catastrophe of perpetual vacillation between resistance and resignation while never resolving its own vacillations” (p. 311).

12. A representative version of what has become a commonplace of Pierre criticism is offered by F. O. Matthiessen in American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 480-81: “Melville insisted on that universality also in Pierre. … Yet he encountered great difficulty in objectifying his own sufferings. Especially when Pierre started to be an author, Melville could not keep the boy of nineteen separate from himself at thirty-two, from the man who, to judge from the texture of its thought and writing, was not only discouraged but nearly exhausted. … What Eliot has remarked about Hamlet might be applied to Pierre, that it gives the impression of being full of some ‘intractable’ stuff which its writer could not ‘manipulate into art.’”

13. “Why Pierre Went Wrong,” Studies in the Novel, 8 (1976), 7-23. See also Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, “The Flawed Grandeur of Melville's Pierre” in New Perspectives on Melville, ed. Faith Pullin (Kent: Kent State Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 162-96, and Robert Milder, “Melville's ‘Intentions’ in Pierre,” Studies in the Novel, 6 (1974), 186-99.

14. See, for instance, Edward H. Rosenberry's comment in Melville and the Comic Spirit (p. 149), that “Pierre is a Chinese puzzle about a man writing a bitter book about a man writing a bitter book. In the resultant mirror image the mood of Hamlet becomes the mood of Pierre the book as well as Pierre the man. The final effect is self-mockery, a spectacle that must embarrass any but the most morbid reader.”

    In “The Art of Herman Melville: The Author of Pierre,” Yale Review, 59 (Winter 1970), 197-214, Raymond J. Nelson defends Pierre from the familiar criticisms by arguing that Pierre is meant to be read as the actual book Pierre is trying to write at the Apostles. By way of this assumption, Nelson is able to explain many oddities of style and characterization, but this reading does not explain how Pierre could write a satire about himself. Even in his final self-hatred, Pierre lacks both the distance and humor that are preconditions of self-parody.

15. See Melville's extended treatment of “common” and “profound” novels in Pierre (pp. 141-42).

16. Psychoanalytic explanations of Melville's unconscious motivations have been offered by Dr. Henry A. Murray in his introduction to the Hendricks House edition of Pierre (New York, 1962) and by Charles J. Haberstroh, Jr. in Melville and Male Identity (Rutherford, N.J.: Associated Univ. Presses, 1980). Underestimating Melville's criticism of Pierre, Murray sees “the incongruities and failure of integration of Pierre” resulting from Melville's “inability to draw autobiographical materials together” (pp. xxiv-xxv). For Haberstroh, the novel is divided by “the tension between his [Melville's] hopeless and introverted sense of himself as a lost boy, and the desire to fulfill the extroverted traditions of male status, success, and assertiveness with which he grew up” (p. 29). See pages 108-11 for Haberstroh's fascinating discussion of the relation between Pierre, the narrator, and Melville.

    A more fruitful psychological explanation of the apparent contradictions in Pierre might emerge from a comparative analysis of Melville, Pierre (the character), and the typical comedian described by the Fishers in Pretend the World is Funny and Forever. According to the Fishers, the professional comic is often someone whose sense of the incongruous nature of life originates in childhood when the not-yet-mature boy or girl is forced to assume inappropriate responsibilities. The resulting confusion about the parent/child or the adult/child distinction can engender a feeling that life is unpredictable, quirky, odd. It is possible to speculate that Melville's sometimes humorous sense of the “ungraspable phantom of life” originated in the burdens placed upon him by the untimely death of his father, and that in the pampered Pierre, whose mother's wealth and pride are both sheltering and infantalizing, Melville set out to create a foil for himself, a character so unprepared for life that he confuses lust with love, self-serving with idealism, and confusion with self-dissolution.

17. For a general treatment of Melville and American transcendentalism, see Matthiessen, American Renaissance, pp. 184-86, and Hershel Parker, “Melville's Satire of Emerson and Thoreau: An Evaluation of the Evidence” in Studies in the Minor and Later Works of Melville, ed. Ramona E. Hull (Hartford, Conn.: Transcendental Books, 1970), pp. 61-67. For a discussion of Melville's relation to dark romanticism, see Robert D. Hume, “Exuberant Gloom, Existential Agony, and Heroic Despair: Three Varieties of Negative Romanticism,” in The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism, ed. G. R. Thompson (Pullman: Washington State Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 109-27.

18. No possibility of direct influence exists here. Walden was published two years after Pierre appeared, and Thoreau was not interested in contemporary fiction. But it is impossible not to see these two works as opposing extremes on the same cultural continuum.

19. Melville's characteristic mingling of humor and fear is similar to Shakespeare's use of comic conventions within the great tragedies, although Shakespeare typically subverts comic expectations to intensify tragic effects while Melville holds comedy and tragedy in unresolved suspension. Fascinating discussions of this generic cross-fertilization can be found in G. Wilson Knight, “King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque,” in The Wheel of Fire, 4th ed. (London: Methuen, 1949), pp. 160-76, and Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979).