Herman Melville completed his sixth and greatest novel, Moby-Dick, in the summer of 1851. The book must have cost him an enormous amount in terms of imaginative energy, moral effort, and sheer physical strain: and yet, within a few weeks of completing it, he was already at work again preparing his seventh novel, which was eventually to be called Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities. In many ways, Pierre represented something of a new departure for Melville. For, in the first place, it was set on land rather than at sea; and, in the second, with its aristocratic hero, its dark and fair ladies, its concern with the issues of love and money, and its use of secret letters and hidden portraits to propel or complicate the plot, it seemed to belong in a tradition of domestic romance that was immensely popular at the time. Melville, whose five books prior to Moby-Dick had produced an annual income of less than $1,600, clearly felt himself under some pressure to produce something that would, as he put it, pay ‘the bill of the baker’,¹ and in the early stages at least he appears to have been convinced that his new novel would do exactly that. At the beginning of 1852, for example, he wrote to Sophia Hawthorne to assure her that his next book would be, not ‘a bowl of salt water’ like his whaling story but ‘a rural bowl of milk’—more suited, the implication was, not only to the delicate sensibilities of Sophia herself but to a larger, novel-reading public that was predominantly female. While only a few weeks later, in a letter to his English publisher, he was even more openly confident. Pierre, he insisted, was ‘very much more calculated for popularity … being a regular romance, with a mysterious plot to it, stirring passions at work, and withall, representing a new and elevated aspect of American life’.²

Such declarations of confidence can hardly be read without a sense of irony now. For, far from improving Melville's standing as a professional writer, Pierre served to worsen it radically. Reviewers received his new, domestic romance with greater and more concerted hostility than any of his previous efforts: ‘a gigantic blunder’, declared one, ‘an objectionable tale, clumsily told’, insisted another, while a third simply dismissed it as ‘the craziest fiction extant’.³ And any hopes Melville might have had concerning its appeal with a wider reading public were soon to be disappointed: only 283 copies were sold within the first eight months of publication and over the next few years it proved considerably less popular than even Moby-Dick or Mardi. The sense of irony does not spring entirely from this, however. It stems also from the fact that any reader of the book is likely to be struck by the discrepancy, the sheer size of the gap, between what Melville apparently intended to do and what in fact he did. Pierre is most emphatically not ‘a rural bowl of milk’: on the contrary, it is one of the darkest, bleakest, and bitterest of Melville's narratives, a story that follows ‘the endless, winding way’ of its hero's life and its narrator's thoughts to a conclusion that is little short of nihilistic. Melville may have set out to write something that would appeal to the contemporary taste for domestic melodrama and genteel sentiment. What he ended up with, however, was something quite different: a book so thoroughgoing in its scepticism that it examines its own raison d’être, its own claims and assumptions and, in this respect as well as in the subversive nature of its techniques, the self-reflexive character of its idiom, seems to anticipate the post-modernist novel.

The self-reflexive, self-referential nature of Pierre is perhaps less surprising when one remembers the autobiographical basis of much of the book. One critic has suggested that Pierre represents an act of psychic withdrawal after the great, creative venture of Moby-Dick, another has described it as ‘a Freudian exercise in psychic recovery’⁴; and, however much one may quarrel with the further implications of these remarks—the way they tend to confuse the psychological origins of the story with the story itself—they do point to certain things that are worth emphasizing and examining. First, and most obviously, they point to the fact that just as Pierre we are told, ‘dropped his angle into the well of childhood, to find what fish might be there’,⁵ so Melville, his creator, has done exactly the same: as Henry Murray has shown, there are ‘highly probable originals’⁶ in Melville's life for most of the incidents, places, and people that appear in Pierre's story. The biographical detail is transposed in some cases and embellished in others; nevertheless, while writing about Pierre, Melville must have had the sense of looking at himself as if through a glass darkly—or rather, to use an image that recurs throughout the book, as though in a slightly distorting mirror. Beyond that, they also point to, or to be more accurate hint at, the centripetal structure, the inwardness of the story. Melville makes his hero a writer, writing a book that sounds very much like—and sometimes even echoes—the one in which he appears; a writer, moreover, who sets out to write something popular, using as his vehicle a thinly fictionalized version of his life, and then discovers that he cannot or will not do so. ‘Who shall tell all the thoughts and feelings of Pierre’, Melville asks,

when at last the idea obtruded, that the wiser and profounder he should grow, the more and the more he lessened his chances for bread. …⁷

The question occurs towards the end of the narrative, by which time Melville must have recognized that his own chances for bread had radically diminished. And in reading it the reader is likely to feel, not for the first time, that he has been caught in a Chinese box of fictions, a book in which everything comments on its own origins, making, and development.

This Chinese box aspect, this sense of an artifice that calls attention to its own artificiality is perhaps most obvious at the beginning of Pierre. It can hardly escape the notice of even the most inattentive reader that, when we first encounter the protagonist, he is living in a world of fiction. The opening paragraph, for example, offers us what is effectively a parody of the language of conventional, pastoral romance.

There are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner from the city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect of the green and golden world. Not a flower stirs; the trees forget to wave; and all Nature, as if suddenly become conscious of her own profound mystery, and feeling no refuge from it but silence, sinks into this wonderful and indescribable repose.⁸

That ‘indescribable’ might just be a touch of Melvillean irony, and the reference to silence may perhaps anticipate the narrator's later claim that Silence is the only Voice of our God: but, on the whole, this passage, with its references to the ‘sojourner from the city’, its clichés of thought and expression (‘wonder-smitten’, ‘green and golden world’), its histrionic rhythms (‘Not a flower stirs; the trees forget to wave …’), and its utter self-consciousness (a self-consciousness which is then, interestingly enough, projected on to the subject)—in all this, the passage seems to be insisting on its status as a conventional pattern, an invented object. This, we infer, is a world of appearances, masks and mirrors: an inference justified not only by the frequent references to masquerades and reflections in subsequent pages but, more simply, by the narrator's preference for the word ‘seems’.

The sense that we are being introduced to a sort of pseudoreality, a counterfeit realm, is nurtured in a variety of ways, and not least by the characters' taste for theatricality. It is not just that Pierre and his mother, and Pierre and his beloved Lucy Tartan, address each other in heightened terms, although they certainly do this—terms borrowed from Romeo and Juliet, say, or some other familiar text. Nor is it just that Pierre tends to see ‘the illuminated scroll of his life’ through the spectacles of the books he has read. It is that both the protagonist and those around him actually call attention to the artificial nature of their conversations (Pierre, for instance, concludes one flight of wit with his beloved by declaring, ‘Very prettily conceited, Lucy’) and seem intent on turning most of their actions and relationships into a kind of sport, a game: ‘playful’, for instance, is another word that recurs throughout those opening pages, most notably in the sections dealing with Pierre and his mother—who in their ‘playfulness’, we are told, introduced ‘a certain fictitiousness’ into ‘one of the closest domestic relations of life’ by referring to each other as ‘brother’ and ‘sister’. Nor is the narrator himself immune from this tendency. For not only does he, like the characters, use an elaborately foregrounded, ‘high profile’ language, full of awkward neologisms (‘amaranthiness’, ‘tinglingness’, and ‘preambilically’ are just three random examples) and elaborate conceits (‘the striped tigers of his chestnut eyes leaped in their lashed cages’); he is also inclined to remind us, in case we have forgotten, that he is the narrator, bound to go backward and forward in time ‘as occasion calls’ and compelled ‘by immemorial usage’ to do such things as provide a scrupulously conventional ‘inventory’ of Lucy's charms when she first appears. ‘Is human life in its most human dimension a work of fiction?’ asks Ortega y Gasset in History as a System; ‘Is man a sort of novelist of himself who conceives the fanciful figure of a personage with its unreal occupations and then, for the sake of converting it into a reality, does all the things he does … ?’⁹ A similar question seems to be asked by Melville at the beginning of the novel, via both the characters and the narrator; and the answer, for the moment at least, appears to be ‘yes’.

Then into this dream kingdom comes another apparition: the ‘mysterious, haunting face’ of Isabel. To some extent, Isabel is like a figure out of Poe: associated with another realm of ghosts and the sea, endowed with ‘a death-like beauty’ principally focussed in her large eyes, her musical voice, and the ‘flowing glossiness of her long and unimprisoned hair’, she is a mixture of the Madonna and La Belle Dame Sans Merci. More relevant to the present context, however, is the opportunity she clearly offers Pierre of moral and imaginative liberation: for she is, as one critic has put it, ‘the eternally baffling object of human speculation, and … also speculation itself’¹⁰—or, to put it another way, she suggests at once Otherness, the world beyond the mask and the mirror, and the Muse, that creative force that might just make a glimpse of Otherness possible. Certainly, it is in these large terms that Pierre sees her. After receiving her letter, for example, he believes that now at last he will be able to ‘tear all veils’, ‘strike through’ masks, ‘see … hidden things’, and leave his father's house (which is, surely, at once a fictive house and the house of fiction) for ‘boundless expansion’ and the ‘infinite air’. And shortly after this—in a passage which curiously anticipates Camus's description of the moment when ‘the stage sets collapse’ and the feeling of the absurd rushes in on an individual—Pierre, we are told, felt ‘on all sides, the physical world of solid objects now slidingly displaced … from around him, and … floated into an ether of visions’.¹¹

But, and it is a large but, there are things that Pierre does not see or, if he does see, chooses not to acknowledge. Isabel, in so far as she appears to open the door to another realm of experience and indeed to suggest that realm, does not belong to the world of words, articulate speech and intelligible action. The first thing we hear from her is a primal scream, a shriek to ‘split its way clear through [Pierre's] heart, and leave a yawning gap there’; and most of her life, we discover later, has apparently been spent in mysterious, anonymous places that she either cannot or will not name, places where she felt ‘all visible sights and audible sounds growing stranger and stranger’ to her. Of course, she has been drawn into contact of a kind with people—compelled, she reveals, by the desire to understand what words like ‘father’ and ‘dead’ signify; of course, too, she learns to read and communicate—specifically, so as to decipher ‘the talismanic word’ inscribed on a handkerchief that once belonged to her (and Pierre's) father; and, of course, finally she tells her story, her ‘vague tale of terribleness’—or, as she puts it, enables her brother to read ‘in the one poor book of Isabel’. To say all this, however, is to leave certain quite crucial things out of account. Isabel tells her story, admittedly, but sensing that it is full of ‘wonders that are unimaginable and unspeakable’, she relies for much of the telling on ‘the utter unintelligibleness, but the infinite significancies of the sounds of the guitar’ that is her constant companion. She lives in the world now, certainly, but she longs for nothing so much as to leave it, to withdraw into non-being: ‘I pray for peace’, she declares,

for motionlessness—for the feeling of myself as of some plant, absorbing life without seeking it, and existing without individual sensation. I feel that there can be no perfect peace in individualness … I feel I am in exile here.¹²

And Pierre responds to her, it may be, but what he responds to is her image: at first, ‘the vague impression that somewhere he had seen traits of the likeness of [her] face before’ and then, later, the conviction that in her he can discern a reflection of his father as depicted in the chair portrait. The cruel paradox is that Isabel's value lies precisely in her qualities of motionlessness and worldlessness, those aspects of her that lie beyond conceptualization and verbalization, and that she cannot explain herself, or indeed be explained by others, in anything other than a fiction—or, to use the stronger terms favoured by Melville, without jugglery or imposture. At one point in the novel, when he is trying to decide what to do about Lucy now that he has committed himself to Isabel, Pierre is compared by the narrator to ‘an algebraist’: ‘for the real Lucy’, we are told.

he, in his scheming thoughts, had substituted but a sign—some empty x—and in the ultimate solution of the problem, that empty x still figures; not the real Lucy.¹³

In a bitterly ironic way this, as it turns out, sums up what happens to Isabel as she tries to describe herself, to Pierre as he charts the rest of his course, and to Melville himself as—becoming more and more convinced that ‘this world is a lie’ and that even ‘the truest book in the world is a lie’—he attempts to tell their tale.

‘I am a nothing. It is all a dream—we dream that we dreamed we dream.’¹⁴ Pierre makes this declaration of unbelief, couched in what are for him characteristically Romantic terms, towards the end of the novel. Long before this, however, it is clear that in committing himself to Isabel Pierre is not, as he purports to believe, committing himself to Truth but to a further if different level of illusion. Quite apart from his tendency to respond to Isabel's image, the shadowy reflections that he catches from her, there is the fact that he continues to judge people and make decisions in the most obviously fictive terms. It was not, after all, a critic or even the narrator of the book who first directed attention to the parallel between Pierre and Hamlet; Pierre himself invites this comparison and then, spurred on by what he sees as the negative example of Hamlet's indecision, decides to act at once. The sense of artifice continues, fed by references not only to Shakespeare but to Dante, and perhaps most effectively underlined by Pierre's unwillingness to acknowledge the true nature or at least the full scope of his motives, and by his continued reliance on false—which is to say, at once deceiving and self-deceiving—names. Isabel is his sister; and yet the fact that they have only known each other as adults makes her seem something other than a sister. She is also mysterious and powerfully attractive, prompting feelings that are rather more than simply fraternal. ‘Now Pierre’, we are told,

began to see mysteries interpierced with mysteries and mysteries eluding mysteries; and began to seem to see the mere imaginariness of the so supposed solidest principle of human association.¹⁵

The brother-sister relationship has been rendered purely fictive, a matter of names and shadows; and Pierre responds to this, not by asserting a truth, but by elaborating an alternative fiction, the pretence that he and Isabel have been secretly married. Perhaps, the narrative suggests, Pierre is prompted to adopt this course, ‘the nominal conversion of a sister into a wife’, by his ‘previous conversational conversion of a mother into a sister’. The point is well taken: here as before, the implication is, Pierre is playing with words, constructing an artifice that enables him both to conceal and to express incestuous feelings. He has devised a new set of signs, another opaque vocabulary, with which to misinterpret things.

It is worth stressing the fact that at the very moment when Pierre, inspired by his devotion to Isabel, commits himself openly and wholeheartedly to what he calls ‘the inflexible rule of holy right’, the narrator does the same. ‘I shall follow the endless, winding way’, the narrator tells us, ‘the flowing river in the cave of man’¹⁶: this, only two paragraphs after Pierre has declared that he will pursue the ‘path’ of Truth. The parallel is useful, I believe, in the sense that it highlights at least two things. In the first place, it helps to emphasize the fact that Pierre—unlike, say, Ishmael in Moby-Dick—is not the narrator of his own story. He writes a book eventually, but the book he writes is not the one we read: on the contrary, it is the book we read about—within the book that an anonymous, third-person narrator writes. The distinction is significant; for it means that whereas Ishmael (along with all Melville's other, earlier, first-person narrators) can be said in the end to stand outside his experience, discover some at least of its objective truth, and be liberated by that discovery, Pierre remains trapped like a fly in amber within the fiction that bears his name. And, in the second place, it anticipates the discovery, made eventually by author, narrator, and reader alike that the quest for Truth that Pierre the book embodies is just as abortive as the one upon which Pierre the character embarks. In this respect, something that Mary McCarthy said once about Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire seems relevant: when we read Pale Fire, she explained,

a novel on several levels is revealed, and those ‘levels’ are not the customary ‘levels of meaning’ of modernist criticism but planes in fictive space.… Each plane or level in its shadow box proves to be a false bottom; there is an infinite regression, for the book is a book of mirrors.¹⁷

Part of this sense that Pierre is, to use McCarthy's phrase, ‘a book of mirrors’ is due to something I have mentioned in passing already: which is the sheer obtrusiveness of the narrator, the feeling that he is always there mediating, shaping, and in the process distorting experience. Sometimes, as in the example quoted earlier, he insists on reminding us of the rules he feels compelled to obey, the conventional forms through which he and other storytellers have habitually filtered experience. At others, he emphasizes the opposite: the sheer arbitrariness of the structures he has adopted, the random nature of his fictional devices. Book XVII, for example, begins in this fashion:

Among the various conflicting modes of writing history, there would seem to be two grand practical distinctions, under which all the rest must subordinately range. By the one mode, all contemporaneous circumstances, facts, and events must be set down contemporaneously; by the other, they are only to be set down as the general stream of the narrative shall dictate; for matters which are kindred in time, may be very irrelative in themselves. I elect neither of these; I am careless of either; both are well enough in their way; I write precisely as I please.¹⁸

Elsewhere, in the same vein, the reader is advised that he can ‘skip’ certain chapters if he prefers to, and that he must not expect a consistent portrait of Pierre but catch ‘his phases as he revolves’. Whether the emphasis is on the conventional or the arbitrary, however, the effect remains the same: to focus attention on the making of the text and, by extension, on the conversion of objective experience into (to adopt Borges's useful phrase) ‘a mere labyrinth of letters’.¹⁹

But it is not just that the narrator is conspicuously there, reminding us of his presence; he is reminding us too, and continually, of the sheer hopelessness of his task. It is idle, he admits to us, to attempt to penetrate into the heart and ‘inmost life’ of Pierre or indeed anyone since ‘in their precise tracings-out and subtile causations, the strongest and fiercest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.’ Equally, it is pointless to try to tell anyone anything,

for—absurd as it may seem—men are only made to comprehend things which they comprehended before (though but in embryo, as it were). Things new it is impossible to make them comprehend, by merely talking to them about it.²⁰

In effect, the lines of communication between author and subject and those between author and reader are all irremediably blocked: things remain resistant to explanation and there is a ‘universal lurking insincerity’ in ‘even the greatest and purest written thoughts’. And because of this one measure of a book's authenticity, or rather its relative lack of inauthenticity, becomes the extent to which it does not even attempt to explain, does not try to contain, does not pretend that it has rendered a coherent and conclusive vision of life. As the narrator puts it:

while the countless tribes of common novels laboriously spin veils of mystery, only to complacently clear them up at last … yet the profounder emanations of the human mind … never unravel their own intricacies, and have no proper endings: but in imperfect, unanticipated, and disappointing sequels (as mutilated stumps), hurry to abrupt intermergings with the eternal tides of time and fate.²¹

The implication of what Melville was getting his narrator to say, in passages like the one I have just quoted, were (as Melville was well aware) at once dispiriting and slightly terrifying. There is, it gradually emerges from the story of Pierre, a vacuum at the heart of things, a central emptiness, a hollowness, a silence—and ‘how can a man get a Voice out of Silence?’ Self-evidently, he cannot. There are, in fact, only two responsible courses of action open to him. Either he can pursue a state of non-being: that condition of quietness, apartness, and passivity that Isabel sometimes desires—and that, as Pierre observes him, the inscrutable ‘mystic-mild’ Plotinus Plinlimmon seems to have achieved.²² Or, alternatively, he can choose to join the ‘guild of self-imposters’, comforting himself with the knowledge that, while his forgeries and impostures do little real good, they will, if performed in the right spirit—which is to say, a self-reflexive, self-conscious one—do little significant harm either. ‘There is infinite nonsense in the world on all … matters’, proclaims the narrator,

hence blame me not if I contribute my mite. It is impossible to talk or to write without throwing oneself hopelessly open; the Invulnerable Knight wears his visor down. Still, it is pleasant to chat ere we go to our beds; and speech is further incited, when like strolling improvisatores of Italy, we are paid for our breath.²³

The casual, jokily resigned attitude that the narrator adopts here is by no means sustained throughout the book: as any reader of Pierre will verify, the tone fluctuates violently between irony and anger (‘Oh what a vile cheat and juggler man is!’), exhausted acceptance and pure, blind rage (God is referred to at one point as ‘the eminent Juggularius’), absurd humour and apocalyptic nihilism. Throughout the changes of tone, however, the essential thrust remains the same: what we are reading, the narrator reminds us, is a ‘knavish pack of cards’,²⁴ a game, a fabrication. Nor does he depend simply on telling us this; the form of the narrative, which is parodic and discontinuous, serves to remind us of it on almost every page. The literary allusions and references, for example, are quite startling in their number, breadth, and complexity, including in the opening pages not only the Shakespeare mentioned earlier but Sir Thomas Browne, De Quincey, Disraeli, Milton, and the English Romantic poets. There are deeper, more sustained parallels not only with the novel of romantic sensibility but also with Gothic romance and Jacobean drama; the style offers pastiches of a number of writers—Carlyleian twists of syntax, for instance, mingle with Biblical rhythms, while passages that recall Emerson collide with others reminiscent of Shelley; and the characters issue as much out of literature as life—with, at one end of the spectrum, Pierre reminding us of the traditional Byronic hero and, at the other, numerous minor characters recalling the porters, tinkers, and constables of Shakespeare. Given the sheer abundance and consistency of such allusiveness, and setting aside the obvious point that Melville was hardly a crowd-follower, it is difficult to see how all this can be dismissed (as it has been by some critics²⁵) as an example of an author being lamely derivative. Melville knew what he was doing. Pastiche, as he was neither the first nor the last to realize, can be a useful tool in the hands of someone bent on creating a realm of surfaces, an insistently figurative, self-evidently artificial world in which books, whether by choice (as in earlier examples of this genre) or by necessity (as in Pierre and later examples) refer to nothing except themselves.

So, even after swearing themselves to the cause of Truth, both Pierre and his narrator remain trapped in a spider's web of words. As the narrative edges forward—one, brief section rapidly replacing another, reaching nervously in various directions and towards different points in time—the sense of inwardness, of being imprisoned in a labyrinth, grows stronger and ever more inescapable. Pierre begins writing a book in which, the narrator tells us, ‘he seems to have directly plagiarized from his own experiences, to fill out the mood of his apparent author-hero’.²⁶ The parallel with Melville, borrowing from his own experiences to fill out the mood of his author-hero, is so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning; and perhaps more interesting here is the fact that the use of the word ‘plagiarized’ alerts us to the fictional nature of Pierre's raw material. Pierre's life is fictive, not just because Melville has invented it, but also to the extent that (as we have seen) there is ‘a certain fictitiousness’ in all Pierre's relationships—and, in addition, in the sense that his entire story, from its sentimental beginnings to its Gothic conclusion, offers us a series of parodic masks; the book that he writes could consequently be described as a fiction of a fiction compounded of fictions. Not content with such dizzying involutions, our storyteller at this point takes us within the story he tells too. ‘Let us peep over the shoulder of Pierre, he suggests, and see what he is writing there … Here … is the last sheet from his hand, the frenzied ink not yet entirely dry.’²⁷ At such moments, narrator and reader exist within the interior of the narrative as minor, choric characters; as a corollary of this, they, or rather we, share in the prevalent mood of narcissism—as we watch ourselves watching Melville/Pierre watching himself.

In this connection, it is worth mentioning the shadowy references to incest and incestuous feelings that run through the book and that reach their climax in the story of Pierre's ‘marriage’ to Isabel. It is not enough, I think, to explain these in terms of the book's parodic framework. Certainly, the tradition of the sentimental novel permitted veiled hints at such deliciously shocking matters, and the motif of incest fits in well with Melville's tendency, towards the end of the book, to present Pierre as a reflection of the Promethean Christ figure of Romantic myth. The fact that this is so, however, does not exclude the further possibility that, in playing upon the idea of incest, Melville was hoping to remind the reader of his young author-hero's narcissism and the solipsistic thrust of the narrative. Like many a young American hero, Pierre discovers that his father has failed him, that the ‘niched pillar … which supported the entire … temple of his moral life’²⁸ has been broken; he therefore sets out to rebuild the temple by accepting the moral responsibilities which, he feels, his father has abrogated—to assume the place vacated by Mr. Glendinning and so, in effect, become his own father. All he ends by doing, however, is embracing his own image, a projection of infantile obsessions. As far as the later course of his life goes, in fact, the young American hero he most resembles—or, to be more accurate, anticipates—is Quentin Compson in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. For both Pierre and Quentin end by retreating from the sound and the fury of things into a preoccupation with a ‘lost sister’ that at once encapsulates and exacerbates their narcissism. In both cases, it hardly matters whether or not the physical act of incest occurs since the main point is the simple fact of the attraction and its sources²⁹; and in both cases, of course, a further retreat is made into suicide—self-absorption and self-enclosure leading inevitably, it seems, to self-destruction. Even this particular parallel should not be pushed too far, however. For whatever the darkness of the first three sections of The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner does try to locate an alternative vision in the fourth; Quentin's way is not, apparently, the only one. By contrast, as I have tried to suggest, Pierre's psychological and sexual inversion is a mocking reflection of Melville's own sense (by turns bitter, ironic, and desperate) that he has been caught in a hall of mirrors: in this respect, the book is as much of a prison for the author as it is for the hero.

By the end of the book, of course, Pierre is (if one can use the phrase in this context) quite literally in prison, in ‘a low dungeon’ where ‘the long tiers of massive cell-galleries above [seem] partly piled on him’. The sense of being trapped in a fiction continues: ‘Here then, is the untimely, timely end’, Pierre declares to himself,

—Life's last chapter well stitched into the middle; Nor book, nor author of the book, hath any sequel, though each hath its last lettering!³⁰

More important for our present purposes, however, Pierre feels oppressed at this juncture, not so much by laws or by people, as by ‘the stone cheeks of the walls’ in his ‘granite hell’. As several critics have observed, references to rocks, stones, and stony structures run throughout Pierre.³¹ The book is, after all, dedicated to ‘Greylock's Most Excellent Majesty’, the highest mountain in Massachusetts, which Melville could see from his writing desk; the Mount of Titans (based on Mount Greylock) and the Memnon Stone (modelled on Balance Rock, near Pittsfield) perform important functions within the narrative; and both the rural and the urban environments the characters inhabit are described principally in terms of their stoniness. It is not difficult, I think, to see the purpose of all this: rock, in this novel, becomes the central image of the material, it replaces the whale as an emblem of being—all that Wallace Stevens would later term ‘things as they are’. Nor is it difficult to see what the crucial property of rock in Pierre (the pun on ‘pierre’, the French word for ‘stone’, may or may not be intentional) is; rock, Melville insists, is utterly impenetrable and uninterpretable, offering nothing more than a series of blank surfaces. Admittedly, attempts may be made from time to time to name an especially noticeable configuration of rocks; we are told, for instance, that ‘a singular height’ not far from Pierre's ancestral home has been variously (and somewhat confusingly) termed The Delectable Mountain and the Mount of the Titans—and that the Memnon Stone was thus ‘fancifully christened’ by Pierre himself (although very few people, the narrator adds, would either know it by this name or indeed consider it worth naming). Admittedly, too, something, some hieroglyphic or message may be inscribed on a particular rock: like the ‘half-obliterate initials—“S. ye W”’ that Pierre finds ‘rudely hammered’ on the Memnon Stone and never satisfactorily deciphers. Such things, however, remain no more than surface scratchings, doomed efforts to name the unnameable and know the unknowable. For,

Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood.³²

Which brings us back to Pierre, in his ‘granite hell’. By the end of the novel, Pierre's attempts to name and to know the world have ceased—just as, indeed, those of Melville are about to—and he finds himself at once overpowered and mocked by the brute materiality of the world. The rocks and mountains which he christened and on which he tried to scratch some messages have now narrowed to a set of prison walls; and while he may feel like Ahab, that he would like to thrust through those walls he clearly believes that he cannot. The final paragraph, describing the tableau of Pierre and Isabel dead in one another's arms, is worth quoting here:

‘All's o’er, and ye know him not!’ came gasping from the wall; and from the fingers of Isabel dropped an empty vial—as it had been a run-out sand-glass—and shivered upon the floor; and her whole form sloped sideways, and she fell upon Pierre's heart, and her long hair ran over him, and arbored him in ebon vines.³³

The ambiguity of those first words is surely intentional. For while most readers will assume, quite reasonably, that it is Isabel who speaks here, addressing her words to Frederic Tartan and Charlie Millthorpe, the very strangeness of the phrase ‘came gasping from the wall’ (combined, perhaps, with the feeling that it was never incumbent on Tartan or even Millthorpe really to know Pierre) suggests other, admittedly tentative possibilities. It could be Pierre himself, talking to the other characters, or indeed to the narrator and the reader; it would not, after all, be the first time he had referred to himself in the third person. Or, for that matter, bearing in mind the references to rocks, stones, and walls that run through the novel, it could be the visible objects of the world, addressing themselves mockingly to Melville, reminding him that for all his attempts at naming them they remain unidentified and anonymous.

‘“All's o’er, and ye know him not!”’: by the time Melville finished Pierre, there was really only one major distinction to be made between him and his young author-hero. Locked in a fictional jailhouse just as Pierre was, mocked in just the same way by the blankness of its walls, Melville at least knew, to his own profound dissatisfaction, what the alternatives were: either silence or artifice, stillness or imposture. One could either sit staring at those walls and, in a gesture of total passivity, try to assume something of their blankness and impenetrability. Or one could attempt to break through them, in the certain knowledge that all one would find beneath their immediate surface would be another surface—and then, after that, another.³⁴ ‘Far as any geologist has yet gone down in the world’, declares Melville in Book XXI of Pierre,

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 a man!³⁵

To anyone familiar with postmodernist literature, this description of superinduced superficies will probably recall not only the writers I mentioned earlier—that is, Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges—but also such things as, say, Roland Barthes's claim that texts can be seen

as constructions of layers (or levels, or systems) whose body contains finally no heart, no kernel, no secret, no irreducible principle, nothing except the infinity of their own envelopes—which envelop nothing other than the unity of their own surfaces.³⁶

The parallel is there, certainly: but there is a difference, and it is a crucial one. For there is no escaping the intense bitterness, the sheer rage and sense of betrayal, that runs through the passage from Pierre that I have just quoted (and, indeed, through the entire book): feelings which, it need hardly be said, are conspicuous only by their absence from Barthes's remarks and from most of the fiction of Nabokov and Borges. Part of Melville, it is clear (and a significant part of him at that), wanted to utter a thunderous ‘no’ to the idea of ‘surface stratified on surface’; to that extent, at least, he was rather more than just a progenitor of postmodernist writing, and Pierre itself is something other than just a distant anticipation of books like Ficciones and Pale Fire. In his seventh novel, as in so much of his work, Melville's heart tried desperately to reject what his head told him. Which accounts not only for the book's anger, occasional awkwardness, and acidity, but also for its power as an expression of that impulse most of us feel at one time or another: the impulse to believe, that is, even if only in the possibility of belief, however perversely and despite all the evidence.

Notes

1. Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities (1852), p. 294. All references are to the New American Library, New York, 1964 edition.

2. The Letters of Herman Melville edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven, 1960), pp. 146, 150.

3. Melville: The Critical Heritage edited by Watson G. Branch (London, 1974), pp. 294, 298, 303.

4. Edward H. Rosenberry, Melville (London, 1979), p. 90. See also, Richard Chase, Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York, 1949), p. 103.

5. P. 322.

6. ‘Introduction’ to Pierre, New York, 1949 edition, p. xxi. See also, Ronald Mason, The Spirit Above the Dust: A Study of Herman Melville (London, 1951), pp. 169-71.

7. P. 344.

8. P. 23. The other quotation in this paragraph is from p. 237.

9. New York, 1962. Quotations from Pierre in this paragraph are from pp. 25, 27, 44, 47, 58, 59, 79, 208, 297.

10. William Ellery Sedgwick, Herman Melville: The Tragedy of the Mind (New York, 1962), p. 153. See also, Murray, ‘Introduction’, pp. l-lxv.

11. P. 111. Cf. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus translated by Justin O’Brien (New York, 1959), p. 10. Other quotations from Pierre in this paragraph are from pp. 60, 91, 139.

12. P. 146. Other quotations from pp. 69, 144, 149, 152, 154, 176, 186.

13. Pp. 212-13. Other quotations from pp. 74, 241, 298.

14. P. 311.

15. P. 121. Other quotations from p. 208.

16. P. 135. Other quotations from p. 134.

17. Cited in Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970 (London, 1971), p. 34.

18. P. 280. Other quotations from pp. 243, 378.

19. Cited in Tanner, City of Words, p. 41.

20. Pp. 242-43. Other quotations from p. 92.

21. P. 170. Other quotations from p. 380.

22. There is ‘something passive’ about Plinlimmon, we are told; his face has ‘a repose separate and apart—a repose of a face by itself’; and his features appear to express the belief that ‘to respond is a suspension of isolation’. Pp. 328, 330.

23. P. 295. Other quotations from pp. 241, 242.

24. P. 380. Other quotations from pp. 298, 309.

25. See, e.g., Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (London, 1950), p. 227.

26. P. 342.

27. Pp. 341-42.

28. P. 94.

29. In Pierre the implication is that an act of incest has occurred; in The Sound and the Fury the implication is that it has not. A further ambiguity is introduced into Pierre by the fact that we never knew for certain whether or not Pierre and Isabel do have the same father.

30. P. 402. Other quotations from pp. 402, 404.

31. See, e.g., H. Bruce Franklin, The Wake of the Gods: Melville's Mythology (Stanford, 1963), pp. 101ff. Edgar A. Dryden, Melville's Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth (Baltimore, 1968), pp. 118ff.

32. Pp. 383-84. Other quotations from pp. 160, 161, 383.

33. P. 405.

34. See ‘Bartleby’ and The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade for later explorations of these two alternatives.

35. P. 323.

36. ‘Style and its Image’, in Literary Style: A Symposium (London, 1971). I am indebted to Harold Beaver for drawing attention to the parallel noted here.