[In the following essay, Gupta maintains that in writing Pierre Melville felt that the conventions of the novel were inadequate and restrictive, and thus he borrowed specific literary devices from the dramatic and epic genres.]

In his essay “Melville's Search for Form” James E. Miller, Jr., says that Melville “was not content to accept without question the dominant form of his day—the novel. Instead, he adopted the outward shape but constantly pushed beyond the apparent limits. There is hardly a kind of literature he did not sample or assimilate: travel book, sea yarn, sociological study, philosophical tract, allegory, epic, domestic or historical romance, tragedy or comedy.”¹ In Pierre Melville perhaps came closer to the form of the traditional novel than he did in any other work. At the same time, however, he found the conventions of the novel inadequate and unduly restrictive and, therefore, “pushed beyond the apparent limits” of his form and made use of certain specific devices derived from such literary genres as the epic and the drama. In Pierre Melville achieved some important artistic effects through epic and dramatic conventions, and hence my study of the ways in which they are used will, I hope, throw varied lights upon his art and technique.

The three epic devices repeatedly used in Pierre are invocation, apostrophe, and Homeric simile. Melville uses them functionally—to heighten an effect, to clarify a situation, or to illuminate a mental or emotional state. The invocation and the apostrophe are generally used by Pierre himself, and always in some tense, significant situation which they serve to clarify. For example, take his apostrophe to grief:

Grief;—thou art a legend to me. I have known some fiery broils of glorious frenzy; I have oft tasted of revery; whence comes pensiveness; whence comes sadness; whence all delicious poetic presentiments;—but thou, Grief! art still a ghost-story to me. I know thee not,—do half disbelieve in thee. Not that I would be without my too little cherished fits of sadness now and then; but God keep me from thee, thou other shape of far profounder gloom! I shudder at thee!²

This apostrophe, and the one to the mysterious face which immediately follows it, forcefully dramatize the naivete and immaturity of a Pierre to whom grief has been a pleasing fiction (a “ghost-story”) rather than a painful reality. Then comes the invocation in which he calls upon the “sovereign powers” to “lift the veil”:

Tread I on a mine, warn me; advance I on a precipice, hold me back; but abandon me to an unknown misery, that it shall suddenly seize me, and possess me, wholly—that ye will never do; else, Pierre's fond faith in ye—now clean, untouched—may clean depart; and give me up to be a railing atheist. (p. 56)

At the moment of this utterance, Pierre is in an emotionally distraught state, torn between contending thoughts, racked by doubt and despair. This is the first time that evil has intruded into his idyllic world, and the extremely complex, often conflicting, feelings aroused in him are aptly rendered in this soliloquy and highlighted by the use of the epic conventions. The concluding portion of the invocation foreshadows the heretical mood which comes upon him toward the end.

In the most elaborate of all the invocations—the one addressed to the Terror Stone—Pierre's despondency and the various ramifications of the dilemma which confronts him are admirably brought out:

If the miseries of the undisclosable things in me, shall ever unhorse me from my manhood's seat; if to vow myself all Virtue's and all Truth's, be but to make a trembling, distrusted slave of me; if Life is to prove a burden I cannot bear without ignominious cringings; if indeed our actions are all fore-ordained, and we are Russian serfs to Fate; if invisible devils do titter at us when we most nobly strive; if Life be a cheating dream, and virtue as unmeaning and unsequelled with any blessing as the midnight mirth of wine; if by sacrificing myself for Duty's sake, my own mother re-sacrifices me; if Duty's self be but a bugbear, and all things are allowable and unpunishable to man;—then do thou, Mute Massiveness, fall on me! Ages thou hast waited; and if these things be thus, then wait no more; for whom better canst thou crush than him who now lies here invoking thee? (p. 189)

Somewhat like the Joycean epiphanies, the apostrophes and invocations in the novel are flashes of illumination, moments of revelation and insight, bringing out the agony of Pierre's spiritual turmoil with an immediacy and intensity seldom attained in passages of authorial analysis.

Homeric similes also are used in Pierre with complete appropriateness. Not only does their scope for endless expansion and modification enable Melville to bring in considerable tangential detail and thus provide the reader with a kind of poetic relaxation, but they also have subtler implications and satisfy the imagination through implied comparisons relevant to the context. Consider, for example, the passage in which Lucy Tartan's yearning for the countryside is depicted:

It was very strange, but most eloquently significant of her own natural angelhood that, though born among brick and mortar in a sea-port, she still pined for unbaked earth and inland grass. So the sweet linnet, though born inside of wires in a lady's chamber on the ocean coast, and ignorant all its life of any other spot; yet, when spring-time comes, it is seized with flutterings and vague impatiences; it cannot eat or drink for these wild longings. Though unlearned by any experience, still the inspired linnet divinely knows that the inland migrating time has come. And just so with Lucy in her first longings for the verdure. (pp. 33-34)

In these lines Melville, on the most obvious plane, is referring to Lucy's preference for rural life. But the simile goes further than that. Whereas the implied comparison between Lucy and the linnet brings out Lucy's sweetness and gentleness of disposition, words like “inspired” and “divinely” draw attention to her “angelic” qualities which Melville seeks to emphasize in his characterization of her. Again:

Weary with the invariable earth, the restless sailor breaks from every enfolding arm, and puts to sea in height of tempest that blows off shore. But in long night-watches at the antipodes, how heavily that ocean gloom lies in vast bales upon the deck; thinking that that very moment in his deserted hamlet-home the household sun is high, and many a sun-eyed maiden meridian as the sun. He curses Fate; himself he curses; his senseless madness, which is himself. For whoso once has known this sweet knowledge, and then fled it; in absence, to him the avenging dream will come.

Pierre was now this … self-upbraiding sailor: this dreamer of the avenging dream. (pp. 252-253)

This simile occurs immediately after Pierre has resolved to leave Saddle Meadows to befriend and protect Isabel, and it brings out, more suggestively than comments by the author possibly could, the pathos of Pierre's situation and his agonized awareness of all that he has irretrievably lost in rending his family bonds.

The Homeric similes in Pierre,³ then, serve two important functions. On the one hand, by their luxuriance and amplitude they provide the imagination with moments of poetic beauty and contribute volume and variety to the narrative; on the other, they are an important and valuable aid to the analysis of characters.

Pierre is a dramatic novel not only in its structure and characterization but also because Melville employs in it certain techniques (foreshadowing, dramatic irony, soliloquy) which are specifically dramatic.

F. L. Lucas says that in tragedy suspense is a more effective and powerful weapon than surprise. According to him, “it is the power to create the tense, overcharged atmosphere before the storm, to ‘pile the dim outlines of the coming doom,’” that forms a major part of the impressiveness of the great tragic dramatists.⁴ In Pierre Melville prefers suspense to surprise and by a skilful use of foreshadowing creates an atmosphere of restlessness and foreboding. The authorial comments on fate and destiny which figure so prominently in the early sections of the novel are not satirical, as they are sometimes taken to be, but premonitory, a foreshadowing of the evil to come. In order to create a “tense, overcharged atmosphere,” Melville as omniscient narrator inserts, in his portrayal of Pierre's early felicity, premonitory remarks such as the following:

Thus loftily, in the days of his circumscribed youth, did Pierre glance along the background of his race, little recking of that maturer and larger interior development, which should forever deprive these things of their full power of pride in his soul. (p. 5)

But while thus alive to the beauty and poesy of his father's faith, Pierre little foresaw that this world hath a secret deeper than beauty, and Life some burdens heavier than death. (p. 6)

Now Pierre stands on this noble pedestal; we shall see if he keeps that fine footing; we shall see if Fate hath not just a little bit of a small word or two to say in this world. (p. 14)

These anticipatory comments help to create an atmosphere of gloom and suspense which is in harmony with the tragic action of the novel.

In Pierre Melville also uses several devices for creating suspense which are rooted in the action rather than in the narrator's commentary. Some of these—like the paraphernalia of mysterious faces, unearthly shrieks, and prophetic portraits—are Gothic rather than truly dramatic. But when Mrs. Glendinning unwittingly and in unrepressed fury stabs her own portrait (p. 183) and says that she feels as though in Pierre she had “borne the last of a swiftly to be extinguished race” (p. 184), or when Pierre proleptically falls over his threshold as though “jeeringly hurled from beneath his own ancestral roof” (p. 258), or when Lucy in her letter to Pierre expresses her misgiving that he may become involved in “some terrible jeopardy” (p. 433), the effect is essentially that of dramatic foreshadowing without any suggestion of contrivance or artificiality.

The tragic irony in Pierre not only governs the plot but also throws light on the characters. Throughout the novel there are statements in which the reader is made to see an ironic meaning of which the speaker may be wholly unconscious. Two kinds of tragic irony are found in Pierre: one in which the reader immediately grasps the ironic meaning underlying an apparently innocent statement; the other in which this meaning dawns upon him only gradually and retrospectively. The best example of the first kind occurs in the famous breakfast scene, at the moment when Mrs. Glendinning, sitting in judgment on the adulterous Ned and Delly, characterizes Ned's conduct as the “sheerest and most gratuitous profligacy” and remarks that men like him are to her way of thinking “more detestable than murderers”:

… is not the man, who has sinned like that Ned, worse than a murderer? Has he not sacrificed one woman completely, and given infamy to another—to both of them—for their portion. If his own legitimate boy should now hate him, I could hardly blame him. (p. 140)

As she glibly censures the conduct of the guilty lovers, she is unaware of the fact that her own situation is similar, and that her husband, whom she has always deified and idolized, may not have been any better than Ned. The reader, however, is conscious of the subtle overtones of the situation.

Melville's forte in Pierre, however, is the other kind of irony in which the reader does not see the ironic meaning underlying a statement at the time it is made as in Mrs. Glendinning's repeated admonitions to her son to follow the path of his “extremely gentlemanly” father:

Never rave, Pierre; and never rant. Your father never did either; nor is it written of Socrates; and both were very wise men. Your father was profoundly in love—that I know to my certain knowledge—but I never heard him rant about it. He was always extremely gentlemanly: and gentlemen never rant. Milksops and Muggletonians rant, but gentlemen never. (p. 24)

Bless you!—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. 25)

Later, when the reader discovers the details about the father's youth, his mind is thrown back to these early panegyrics and his reaction is intensified. The whole passage in which Mrs. Glendinning expresses her thoughts about Pierre and Lucy is charged with dramatic irony of the finest and subtlest kind:

“A noble boy, and docile”—she murmured—“he has all the frolicsomeness of youth, with little of its giddiness. And he does not grow vain-glorious in sophomorean wisdom. I thank heaven I sent him not to college. A noble boy, and docile. A fine, proud, loving, docile, vigorous boy. Pray God, he never becomes otherwise to me. His little wife, that is to be, will not estrange him from me; for she too is docile—beautiful and reverential, and most docile. Seldom yet have I known such blue eyes as hers, that were not docile, and would not follow a bold black one, as two meek blue-ribboned ewes, follow their martial leader. How glad am I that Pierre loves her so, and not some dark-eyed haughtiness, with whom I could never live in peace; but who would be ever setting her young married state before my elderly widowed one, and claiming all the homage of my dear boy!—the fine, proud, loving, docile, vigorous boy!—the lofty-minded, well-born, noble boy; and with such sweet docilities!” (p. 25)

At the moment this soliloquy is uttered, the reader, of course, does not know any more than Mrs. Glendinning does that some “dark-eyed haughtiness” is soon to come between Pierre and his mother and divide irrevocably the “pure joined current” of their lives into “two unmixing streams” (p. 4). But later, when Pierre breaks his family ties for the sake of Isabel, the reader becomes aware of the deep irony implicit in Mrs. Glendinning's soliloquy, especially in her repeated application of the word “docile” to both Pierre and Lucy. The effect of the reiteration, at the time when Pierre is on the verge of defying her and hurting her in a sore spot, is to intensify the irony of the situation. Subsequently we discover that Lucy also is the very reverse of “docile,” however timid and shrinking she may appear on the surface.

The cumulative effect of the use of dramatic foreshadowing and tragic irony in Pierre is to create a tense and portentous atmosphere which is an important component of that satisfying sense of unity which we find in the novel.

One may also mention at this point Melville's highly skilful use of the dramatic soliloquy in Pierre at crucial moments in the story. The soliloquy is used by several characters—by Pierre (pp. 55-57, 90-91, 189, 259, 273, 445), by Mrs. Glendinning (pp. 25, 26, 183-185, 268-269, 271, 272), by Charlie Millthorpe (pp. 499, 505), even by the innkeeper (pp. 282-283), the jailor (p. 503), and Delly Ulver (p. 447). When uttered by a major character, it gives us insight into his innermost thoughts and feelings. The most notable example is the great soliloquy, too long to be quoted, in Book II (pp. 55-57) in which all the twists of thought and fluctuations of feeling in Pierre are appropriately rendered in broken and tortured language. When used by a minor character like Charlie Millthorpe or the innkeeper, it on the one hand sharpens the pathos and irony of a particular event and, on the other, serves a choric function—presentation of an objective, detached point of view on a specific situation or character. A memorable example is the soliloquy of the landlord of the Black Swan Inn after Pierre's pretended marriage with Isabel and his departure for New York:

I have kept this house, now, three-and-thirty years, and have had plenty of bridal-parties come and go; in their long train of wagons, break-downs, buggies, gigs—a gay and giggling train—Ha!—there’s a pun! popped out like a cork—ay, and once, the merry bride was bedded on a load of sweet-scented new-cut clover. But such a bridal-party as this morning's—why, it’s as sad as funerals. And brave Master Pierre Glendinning is the groom! Well, well, wonders is all the go. I thought I had done with wondering when I passed fifty; but I keep wondering still. Ah, somehow, now, I feel as though I had just come from lowering some old friend beneath the sod, and yet felt the grating cord-marks in my palms.—’Tis early, but I’ll drink. Let’s see; cider,—a mug of cider;—’tis sharp, and pricks like a game-cock's spur,—cider's the drink for grief. Oh, Lord! that fat men should be so thin-skinned, and suffer in pure sympathy on others' account. A thin-skinned, thin man, he don’t suffer so, because there ain’t so much stuff in him for his thin skin to cover. Well, well, well, well, well; of all colics, save me from melloncholics; green melons is the greenest thing!

Both in diction and effect, this soliloquy can be likened to those low-comedy interludes in Shakespeare (the porter scene in Macbeth and the grave-diggers' scene in Hamlet) in which, as Edward Rosenberry says, “a blood-curdling irony is achieved through characters in ignorance of the tragic issue of the business they are being droll about.”⁵ In general, then, the soliloquy is an important part of Melville's technique in Pierre and gives his characters complexity, subtlety, and dramatic immediacy. His use of epic and dramatic conventions renders him vulnerable to the charge of having violated the integrity of the novelistic form. By relying on non-novelistic conventions, however, he succeeded in clarifying his themes and characters, in broadening and diversifying his range of effects, and in giving his work depth of meaning and richness of texture.

Notes

1. In Bucknell Review, VIII (1959), 276.

2. Pierre: or The Ambiguities (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., Evergreen Books, Grove Press Edition, 1957), pp. 55-56. All subsequent references to Pierre will be to this edition and will be parenthetically incorporated in the text.

3. For more examples of the Homeric simile in the novel, see pp. 120, and 252-253.

4. Tragedy (New York, 1928), p. 88.

5. Melville and the Comic Spirit (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), p. 129.