[In the following essay, Rachman explores Pierre in the context of male hysteria, asserting that Pierre's nervous exhaustion both shapes and makes problematic the idea that the novel was written as a romance.]

The author … has succeeded in producing nothing but a powerfully unpleasant caricature of morbid thought and passion … [T]he details of such a mental malady as that which afflicts Pierre are almost as disgusting as those of physical disease itself.

—Review of Pierre, Graham's Magazine 1852¹

So, if thou wouldst go to the gods, leave thy dog of a body behind thee.

—Pierre²

FRETTED WIRES

Near the end of his most vexed novel, Pierre, or The Ambiguities (1852), Herman Melville describes his author/protagonist in the thrall of nervous exhaustion, brought on by literary activity:

Much oftener than before, Pierre laid back in his chair with the deadly feeling of faintness. Much oftener than before, came staggering home from his evening walk, and from sheer bodily exhaustion economized the breath that answered the anxious inquiries as to what might be done for him. And as if all the leagued spiritual inveteracies and malices, combined with his general bodily exhaustion, were not enough, a special corporeal affliction now descended like a sky-hawk upon him. His incessant application told upon his eyes. They became so affected, that some days he wrote with the lids nearly closed, fearful of opening them wide to the light. Through the lashes he peered upon the paper, which so seemed fretted with wires. Sometimes he blindly wrote with his eyes turned away from the paper;—thus unconsciously symbolizing the hostile necessity and distaste, the former whereof made of him this most unwilling states-prisoner of letters. (P, 340)

Pierre was written directly in the wake of Moby-Dick in the summer and winter of 1851 and early 1852, nearly a generation before a New York neurologist, George Miller Beard, popularized the amorphous diagnostic category of neurasthenia as a disease of civilization and thirty years before Jean-Martin Charcot published his studies of male hysteria. Yet Pierre's exhaustion and the extreme language Melville works up to convey it are very much in keeping with these later medical developments.³

In Melville's fictional world, Pierre's exhaustion becomes more than the result of being overworked and overwrought; it obstructs his vision. Because Pierre cannot fully open his eyes, he squints through his own eyelashes, as through a grating, and his writing paper appears “fretted with wires.” Melville suggests that exhaustion distorts not only the author's body but also the perception of his own writing. To Pierre, the page he scribbles on becomes a projection of a “fretful” nervous condition and a cultural grid that holds him captive, a “most unwilling states-prisoner” in a panopticon of letters. The image suggests that exhaustion points simultaneously toward the body of the author and toward the network of social meaning that frames the very medium of literary activity.

It is an image in which disease and literary understanding converge, providing an opportunity for students of literature and disease to gain a purchase on the elusive issue of nervousness and, simultaneously, to approach a text as rich and strange as Melville's Pierre. This essay addresses this image and the key it holds for Pierre, for this particular moment in U.S. literary history, and for literary activity in general. How can Pierre inform our understanding of nineteenth-century nervous disease (or more broadly still, diseases of culture) and its connection to literature? How was it that Melville came to articulate this nervous vision?

The literary value of Pierre has always seemed—to the general public at least—slight at best. Though Melville assured his publisher that this book would be “very much more calculated for popularity,” it never attracted a sizable audience (it sold a whopping 283 copies in its first year), and the few who read it generally loathed it or wondered what to make of it.⁴ In practical terms, Pierre destroyed Melville's career as a novelist. The heading of the 1852 review of Pierre in the New York Day Book ran, “Herman Melville Crazy”; the opinion of the Southern Quarterly Review, “The sooner this author is put in ward the better” (P, 380, 383). Even after the canonization of Melville in this century, critics, sensing its flawed power, have received the book with something like muddled awe. Dr. Henry A. Murray, psychologist and one of the leading figures in recovering Melville from obscurity, remarked that Pierre was a “literary monster, a prodigious by-blow of genius whose appearance is marred by a variety of freakish features and whose organic worth is invalidated by the sickness of despair,” summing up the oddly powerful mixture of attraction and repulsion many readers have felt.⁵

This reaction derives in part from the bizarre, racy, swerving plot of the book. In Pierre, Melville attempted to write a “regular romance,” as he told his publishers, that is, a domestic romance of lovers, unlike the romances he had been writing previously—of Polynesian idylls and obsessed whaling captains.⁶ What he produced was anything but regular. Pierre Glendinning, sole heir to a prominent Berkshire family (descended from Revolutionary War heroes), proud and reverential of his long deceased father, deeply attached to his overweening mother, prepares to make a suitable marriage to the radiant blonde Lucy Tartan when he encounters a strange dark girl named Isabel. In a series of mesmeric interviews, Isabel convinces Pierre that she is his illegitimate half-sister, daughter of his father by a Frenchwoman. His esteem for his father shattered, Pierre tries to rectify his father's sin by bringing Isabel home and introducing her as his wife. In a self-righteous pitch of moral quandary, the couple flees to New York. Expecting help from his wealthy cousin Glendinning Stanly, Pierre is instead rebuffed by him and decides to try his hand at writing. Lucy, recovered from shock, recognizes the noble nature of Pierre's sacrifice and joins the couple in their low-life apartment.

As Pierre's story of decline moves from the country to the city, from pastoral love intrigue to an urban tale of failed authorship and suicide, the reader of Pierre is continually made to understand how social forces become literary and nervous ones. In making Pierre an author who deflects his obsessions away from Isabel and toward his “[m]ature [w]ork,” Melville shifts into an explicitly literary sphere. In their new home in “The Church of the Apostles”—a kind of transcendentalist Grub Street presided over by the elusive author Plotinus Plinlimmon—Pierre, Isabel, and Lucy are visited by squalor, bad dreams, disillusionment, and nervous debility. Eventually, Pierre murders his vengeful cousin and is thrown in prison where he, Lucy, and Isabel meet their end in a triple suicide. Pierre's story (F. O. Matthiessen calls him a Hamlet à rebours) records the transformation of social, filial, sexual, and revolutionary energies (“strongest and fieriest emotions” [P, 67]) into literary ones.⁷ Pierre's family finger-pointing, social bridge-burning, and his outsized will to heroism are left to decode themselves in an arena of, among other things, frustrated writing.

Because of the plot alone, Pierre has encouraged and still encourages readers to find it “symptomatic” of the author's diseased imagination, offering many avenues of speculative diagnosis.⁸ Even critics who have attempted to demonstrate that Pierre actually succeeds in aesthetic terms (“I regard Pierre as a complete, successful, and brilliant work,” writes Patricia Wald), do so by stabilizing its eccentricities, by regarding them as the radically experimental tropes and techniques of a postmodern, subversive deconstruction of narrative.⁹ The recent HarperCollins reissue of Pierre (1995) attempts to streamline the novel by excising the digressions into literary matters (which Melville wrote in the eleventh hour before the manuscript went to press), but this gesture once again confirms how Pierre continues to require a stabilization that no amount of surgical editing or elegant argumentation can finally supply. Other critics negotiate the dilemma of Pierre by reading it as a parody of the sentimental or melodramatic novel.¹⁰

And yet, despite a general validity in these assertions, there remains a sincerity, however incongruous, in Melville's novel, an investment in unconventional language, and an element of self-criticism that resists the parodic. While parody, satire, and melodrama are three of its many modes, Pierre is odder and perhaps more grotesque than these terms would indicate. Many funny passages in Pierre never wholly divest themselves of earnestness. For example, when Pierre is magnetically drawn to Isabel, the image is distortedly literal: she “seemed to swim in an electric fluid; the vivid buckler of her brow seemed as a magnetic plate” (P, 151). When the narrator describes the armless Titan “without one serviceable ball-and-socket above the thigh,” our amusement at the perverse literalism of the amputated body is tempered by an awareness that Melville wishes us to understand this image as part of Pierre's ideal horror and the key to his actual grief (P, 346). If Pierre partakes of the burlesque, it does not ultimately ridicule its subject; it contains too many sermons.

Pierre acts out Melville's chief insight that the failure of the body is mysteriously linked to literary and cultural failure, inviting the reader, as it were, to share in Pierre's latticed vision, to see through the distorted template of nervous exhaustion. Many of Pierre's terms become, in little flights of whimsy, oddly translatable into bodily ailment; colics become “melloncolics” (P, 203), “Chronometrics” become “the chronic-rheumatics” (P, 292), and, as Pierre says to his mother, “It is not well, well, well; but ill, ill, ill” (P, 56). Because Melville continually links the humor, parody, and satire in Pierre with disease (or at least the aura of disease) much of the book's satire appears evocatively morbid and his parody alloyed with utter gravity. I suggest that Pierre's unruly properties, while not necessarily symptomatic of anything, are more accurately captured in the review of Pierre from Graham's Magazine of 1852 (quoted as an epigraph to this essay) than one might ordinarily assume. The remark forcefully conveys the idea that Melville created the literary effect of disease, in particular a combination of physical and psychological ailments that came in time to be regularly associated with neurasthenic disease.

NERVOUS EXHAUSTION, LITERATURE, AND STIMULATION

The “morbidity” of Pierre situates the novel in its broad cultural context, an antebellum United States in which significant affinities between nerves and literature were readily recognized by all writers and readers. Nervous exhaustion, breakdown, debility, and, after 1870, neurasthenia were terms that doctors often applied to conditions as wide-ranging as depression, anxiety, stress, alcoholism, and what was known as the solitary vice of masturbation. These terms were also used to indicate a host of vague physical ailments that were related—as either cause or effect—to an individual's failure to cope with life's pressures. Culturally, exhaustion was the negative counterpart to the varieties of individualism that gained currency in the U.S. during the nineteenth century, from Emersonian self-reliance of the 1840s to Rooseveltian rugged individualism of the 1890s. Exhaustion appeared as a failure of self-reliance, a pathology of the strenuous life. If the Yankee was “individualism incarnate” in the eyes of one French observer of life in the U.S. in the 1830s, he was, for Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in the 1850s the “Americanized European” of New England who suffered from sallow nervousness.¹¹ Nervous debility appeared to many contemporary observers as a cost of living in, as Henry David Thoreau described it, the “restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century.”¹²

By coining the term neurasthenia after the Civil War, Dr. Beard and his associates consolidated this wide array of physical and psychic complaints under the rubric of a new diagnostic category.¹³ The cultural power of neurasthenia lay, as Charles Rosenberg has argued, in the ability to divorce nervous exhaustion from the moral and social stigma associated with older terms such as or including madness, hypochondria, melancholia, mania, and debility.¹⁴ According to Beard, the causes of neurasthenia lay not so much in the weakness of the flesh but in the stress and pressure peculiar to modern nineteenth-century culture: the “railway, telegraph, telephone, and periodical press intensifying in ten thousand ways cerebral activity and worry.”¹⁵ Beard successfully linked the disorder to the technology of the managerial classes, giving neurasthenia the cultural cachet of modern complaint.

While artisans and factory operatives in Sylvester Graham's boardinghouses frequently suffered from excessive nervousness in the 1830s, by the 1880s neurasthenia had become a quintessentially bourgeois diagnosis, helping to mark the growing class divisions after the Civil War.¹⁶ In trifling cases, it could be little more than a fashionable illness for melancholic, bon-bon-eating matrons, bookish lads, and dateless society debutantes (“[w]e become sad in the first place by having nothing stirring to do,” Melville writes in Pierre, “we continue in it, because we have found a snug sofa at last” [P, 258-59]). In serious cases, it could be as baffling, obstinate, and tragic as anorexia nervosa is today. But in all cases, it was a disorder of culture and metaphor, inflected as much with class and gender (both masculine and feminine) as it was with neurological weakness.

Throughout the nineteenth century, nervousness and nervous stimulation were tokens of genteel literary culture. W. S. Gilbert's “greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery, foot-in-the-grave young man” fixed fragile nervousness in the popular imagination as the badge of the aspiring literary aesthete.¹⁷ The meteoric but jittery careers of the Romantic authors prominent in the early decades of the century had become regularly associated with literary aspiration well before its last decades. The neuro-literary connection was pervasive enough in 1807 that Thomas Trotter, a retired naval physician, in A View of the Nervous Temperment (sic), could observe, in a more positive light, of men of letters, “that all men who possess genius … are endued by nature with more than usual sensibility of nervous system.”¹⁸ In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth explains how the “Poet” differs from other men by invoking the terms of nervous sensibility: “Among the qualities. … enumerated as principally conducing to form a Poet, is implied nothing differing in kind from other men, but only in degree. … The Poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement.”¹⁹ The same sensibility is repeated in the art-for-art's-sake prescriptions of the Pre-Raphaelites and new aesthetics of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and James McNeill Whistler.²⁰

One explanation for this linkage, as Raymond Williams has suggested, is that nervous sensibility helped to distinguish literary figures from society at large at a time when literary culture was engaged in a more general dissociation of itself from society.²¹ Of the many ways that cultures prescribe the artistic temperament, nervousness was either a prerequisite or hazard of literary genius. It was seen as both an indicator of a literary disposition (as in Wordsworth) and a consequence of imaginative work (as in Pierre). Indeed, while one can point to many celebrated literary figures who were also nervous sufferers (members of the James family and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for example), it is hard to distinguish cause from effect, to distinguish between suffering for one's art and suffering from one's nerves.

Given that susceptibility to nervous stimulation was routinely assigned to authors, it is not surprising to find literature being assigned similar nervous (and enervating) characteristics. The commonsense orthodoxy that inveighed against romancers and their readers assailed novels as harmful stimulants to the imagination.²² “When this poison [novel-reading] infects the mind,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “it destroys its tone and revolts it against wholesome reading. … Nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy, and nothing so bedecked comes amiss. The result is a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the real business of life.”²³

In a pivotal moment in his career as a Romantic author and an advocate of Romantic authorship, Melville embraced this cultural prescription obliquely but powerfully when he declared in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850) that “genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.”²⁴ In this literary manifesto, Melville makes an argument for Hawthorne's genius and the U.S.'s national literature by suggesting that genius completes a global circuit of electrical recognition. “Brac[ing] the whole brotherhood,” the current that passes through literary genius is joltingly powerful (HHM, 249). Hand in hand, genius mutually confers recognition on its brethren. The image suggests not only telegraphic but bodily communion while implying that genius itself relies on a network of confirmation. At a time when the discoveries of Luigi Galvani (“On the Force of Electricity in Muscular Movement”), Count Allessandro Volta, Michael Faraday, and Samuel Morse made the general public aware of electrical phenomena, writers did not hesitate to apply electrical metaphors to nineteenth-century culture, as Melville championed Hawthorne in terms of electro-nervous literary power. Just as Beard likened electrical transmission with neurological activity (“railway, telegraph, telephone, and periodical press intensifying in ten thousand ways cerebral activity and worry”), Melville's “shock of recognition” metaphorically connects nerves and literature as forms of electrical communication, as powerful networks of transmission, as senders and receivers of signals, as media through which authors make contact with the world around them. Hawthorne's genius resided, for Melville, in a kind of corporeal authenticity registered in his prose, the way each of the “few thoughts” that Hawthorne puts “into circulation” are “arterialized at his large warm lungs, and expanded in his honest heart” (HHM, 245).

By the time of Pierre's composition, however, Melville raised the specter of the writers of genius who become “victims to headache, and pain in the back,” whose literary productions are “born of unwillingness and the bill of the baker[;] the rickety offspring of a parent, careless of life herself, and reckless of the germ-life she contains,” or works “privately published in their own brains, and suppressed there as quickly” (P, 258-59). Hawthorne's arterialization becomes Pierre's liability. “Builds Pierre the noble world of a new book? or does the Pale Haggardness unbuild the lungs and life in him?” (P, 304). In Pierre, Melville voices his skepticism about the cultural claims of authorship based on Wordsworthian excitability and stereotypical assumptions regarding bodies and literature. “Know this,” the narrator explains in one of his authorial asides, “while many a consumptive dietarian has but produced the merest literary flatulencies to the world; convivial authors have alike given utterance to the sublimest wisdom, and created the least gross and most ethereal forms” (P, 299).

Pierre allows Melville to reorient the issue of nerves and literature: a nervous disposition reflects not the creative mark of an author but the deleterious mark of civilization on the author. While Pierre ends up depleted and deranged, he is not constitutionally frail or delicate and spends much of the novel reveling in his excesses. Similarly, Melville strains his language to equal that excess. Not only is nervous exhaustion a hazard for delicate authors, it is endemic to the modern conditions of authorship and the labor of writing. Illness does not automatically predispose one to literary activity, but literary activity may dispose one to illness. Civilization and the material realities of authorship are the sources of Pierre's nervous symptoms. “Pierre is young,” the narrator argues,

[H]eaven gave him the divinest, freshest form of a man; put light into his eye, and fire into his blood, and brawn into his arm, and a joyous, jubilant, overflowing, upbubbling, universal life in him everywhere. Now look around in that most miserable room, and at that most miserable of all the pursuits of a man, and say if here be the place, and this be the trade, that God intended him for. A rickety chair, two hollow barrels, a plank, paper, pens, and infernally black ink, four leprously dingy white walls, no carpet, a cup of water, and a dry biscuit or two. Oh, I hear the leap of the Texan Camanche, as at this moment he goes crashing like a wild deer through the green underbrush; I hear his glorious whoop of savage untameable health; and then I look in at Pierre. If physical, practical unreason make the savage, which is he? Civilization, Philosophy, Ideal Virtue! behold your victim! (P, 302)

Civilization both fosters and constrains authorship. Nervousness and exhaustion are not simply symptoms of a creative illness in a positive sense but a pathology of culture. An alleged physical token of an artistic sensibility that actively sought a privileged autonomy from society, nervous exhaustion in fact embodied internalized societal pressures. As Pierre struggles vainly “against all the dismal lassitude, and deathful faintness and sleeplessness, and whirlingness, and craziness” (P, 339), his will loses out to cultural forces, and an heroic model of authorship yields to social and historical determinism. “Sucked within the maelstrom, man must go round,” the narrator explains. “Pierre was not arguing Fixed Fate and Free Will, now; Fixed Fate and Free Will were arguing him, and Fixed Fate got the better in the debate” (P, 182). Pierre is the most determined and determined of characters, and exhaustion reveals the points at which his actions are both autonomous and constrained by cultural limitations.

While Melville contests the essentialist notion of a neuro-literary disposition (intemperate authors write temperate books and vice-versa), his novel ultimately turns on the medical principle very much current in Jacksonian reform thought (through the works of Sylvester Graham borrowing from Benjamin Rush), that stimulation and excess lead to debility.²⁵ Dipsomania and onanism, routinely considered diseases of the nervous system through the 1870s, were seen to cause debility through stimulation, hence the concept of morbid excitement; similarly, Melville considered professional writing disease-like, subjecting the practitioner to morbid stimulation.²⁶ Only an internal, renunciative discipline can save the author from himself. “Elect!” Melville warns his reader (equating writing for money with the joint labor of body and soul). “Yoke the body to the soul, and put both to the plow, and the one or the other must in the end assuredly drop in the furrow. Keep, then, thy body effeminate for labor, and thy soul laboriously robust; or else thy soul effeminate for labor and thy body laboriously robust” (P, 261). Without restraint, without resolute effeminacy, there is only so much health a writer can have: “over the most vigorous and soaring conceits,” Melville writes, “doth the cloud of Truth come stealing” (P, 261). The metaphors themselves experience a kind of exhaustion. Modern authorship, Melville suggests, necessitates what doctors later in the century referred to as an impelling volition, a will to preserve the self from the writing self through a kind of rest cure (with a striking association of labor with masculine and leisure with feminine) for either the literary body or soul. Pierre's downfall results from his weakness of will, his inability to “elect,” to keep his body or soul effeminate for labor.

AN ILLNESS OF METAPHOR

Considered in the context of nineteenth-century theories of nervous debility and neurasthenia, Pierre's engagement with exhaustion becomes not merely a problem of culture but a problem of the work that metaphors perform within culture. When Beard asserted that “there can be no doubt whatever, namely, that nervous disease scarcely exists among savages or barbarians, or semi-barbarians, or partially civilized people,” he echoes the narrator's sentiments about the nature of Pierre's disease (“If physical, practical unreason make the savage, which is he? Civilization, Philosophy, Ideal Virtue! behold your victim!”), but reduces those generalized causes to specific agents.²⁷ Nervous exhaustion was used in a dual sense as both a distinct symptom and a name for the disorder at large, as both a part and the whole. The confusing symptomatology of exhaustion performed the cultural work of connecting the civilized body to the technological and material forces of production. In order to distinguish fatigue (a necessary condition in which, after a normal period of recuperation, one can resume activity) from exhaustion (a disorder from which recuperation does not directly or even inevitably follow), doctors attempted to account for an irrecuperable drain of energy through ambiguous medical terms that transformed diagnosis into cultural analogy.

Nervous exhaustion manifests itself as an illness of metaphor in which the terms civilization and the body may be either the tenor or vehicle. In Pierre, nervous debility and its hold on Melville's imagination rely on the analogical impulses that hold together such a miscellaneous congeries of symptoms. As the language of nineteenth-century medical authority veers toward the metaphoric for its explanations of exhaustion, Melville's deeply metaphoric language veers toward the symptomatic. Neurasthenia took its diagnostic imprimatur from metaphor: it disclosed the body's analogical power and engaged the body's symbolic life. Melville exploited the startling diversity of ways in which the body was capable of metaphorizing the world. Pierre presents the body as an alembic for culture, as self-consumption, perverse in that the forces of vitality and power appear as the culpable agents of decay. “Death's second self,” William Shakespeare calls it, “Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.”²⁸ In Pierre, Melville renders the disease as “a general and nameless torpor—some horrible foretaste of death itself” (P, 342). “Pierre went forth all redolent,” he writes, “but alas! his body only the embalming cerements of his buried dead within” (P, 94).

In order to convey the analogical potential of exhausted states, Melville exhibits one of Pierre's more unruly contrivances, a highly idiosyncratic atmospheric vocabulary. Melville uses extraordinary coinages that venture to communicate extreme conditions of abstraction and sensory quiddity. For example, Pierre's excitement at Lucy Tartan's touch is rendered as “feeling, softly feeling of its soft tinglingness”; the evening is described as “‘an infinite starry nebulousness … some spangled vail of mystery’” (P, 36); and the after-effects of his encounter with Isabel as “‘the stupor, and the torpor … the vacant whirlingness of the bewilderingness’” (P, 122). In their review of Pierre in The Literary World, the Duyckinck brothers complained of

such infelicities of expression, such unknown words as … “humanness, “heroicness,” “patriarchalness,” “descendedness,” “flushfulness,” “amaranthiness,” “instantaneousness,” “leapingly acknowledging,” “fateful frame of mind,” “protectingness,” “youngness,” “infantileness,” “visibleness.”²⁹

Mimicking this language, Godey's reviewer called the work “an infinite, unbounded, inexpressible mysteriousness of nothingness.”³⁰ Critics responded tetchily to Melville's implicit reproach of the power of English and classic English prosody to describe modern civilization. Melville's quasi-Germanic constructions, such as “the vacant whirlingness of the bewilderingness,” raised hackles. One reviewer suggested that any writer operating in the “plain, honest, Saxon style” ought to eschew the German style with its spurious mysticism and baroque prose and suggested Melville re-read Joseph Addison.³¹

Why does Melville resort to such a lexicon of supercharged neologisms, to making fey nouns out of household adjectives? Why, for example, heroicness rather than heroism? The use of the substantive -ness attempts to convey a categorical quality like those of nervous symptoms. Melville applies the suffix to conditions associated with exhaustion (flushfulness, whirlingness, bewilderingness), implying a more-than-local property to these states, suggesting a condition or a field rather than an instance of meaning. “‘Say, Pierre,’” Isabel asks at one point, “‘doth not a funerealness invest me?’” (P, 314). Literally Isabel refers to her dark features (especially her flowing, jet-black hair), but her language refers to her features as if they were outward symptoms of a morbid condition.

In Pierre, -ness puts into words not only the sensation of exhaustion but the structure of exhausted experience. As a suffix it implies that any word can become a condition, and thus part of a complex of stimulation (tinglingness) and depletion (deathful faintness, whirlingness). Through this linguistic maneuver, Pierre's fatigue and the combination of overstimulation and debility that pervades the novel are depicted not merely as part of an individual experience (something that only he feels). Instead, symptoms of fatigue are caught up in a transpersonal cultural dynamic in which feelings are connected to categories of feeling, in part culturally constructed and in part culturally determined. In Pierre, -ness imparts to ordinary language what Raymond Williams described as “structure of feeling,” or a “structured formation which, because it is at the very edge of semantic availability, has many of the characteristics of a pre-formation, until specific articulations—new semantic figures—are discovered in material practice.”³² Williams argues that certain social experiences take place “in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and immediately available.” Paradigmatic shifts caused by great upheavals, generational shifts, landmark cultural or literary performances in some measure bring what was at the edge of articulation, the edge of “semantic availability,” into full-throated voice.³³

Williams's metaphor is particularly clarifying, for if culture functions like a chemical solution in which, at any given moment, some ideas are semantically precipitated and other ideas remain in solution, writing, performing, painting—any artistic or expressive activity—would then contribute to the equilibrium or disequilibrium of that solution. For example, the terms whirlingness and bewilderingness suggest that there is also a component of a character's experience that is latent or in solution; that is to say, it is either not wholly the property of a character or is recognized by Melville's terminology as an internalization of a cultural construct. By describing nervous and literary exhaustion in this way, by turning adjectives and adverbs into force fields, Melville suggests the internalizing process by which stimulation becomes debility.

This effect is most prominent in the bizarre scene where Pierre interviews Isabel, with its weird guitar music intoning “Mystery! Mystery! Mystery of Isabel!” for it seems to have taken place in Faraday's laboratory:

To Pierre's dilated senses Isabel seemed to swim in an electric fluid; the vivid buckler of her brow seemed as a magnetic plate. … For over all these things, and inter-fusing itself with the sparkling electricity in which she seemed to swim, was an ever-creeping and condensing haze of ambiguities. Often, in after-times with her, did he recall this first magnetic night, and would seem to see that she then had bound him to her by an extraordinary atmospheric spell—both physical and spiritual. … This spell … which eternally locks in mystery and in muteness the universal subject world, and the physical electricalness of Isabel seemed reciprocal with the heat-lightnings and the ground-lightnings nigh to which it had first become revealed to Pierre. She seemed molded from fire and air, and vivified at some Voltaic pile of August thunder-clouds heaped against the sunset. (P, 151-52)

At this moment in Pierre, nervous stimulation becomes incipient nervous exhaustion, the oddity of the scene reinforced by its extremely literal character. Pierre's culture is figured quite literally as a solution in which sensations are equated with structures of exhausted experience. In his study of melancholia and depression, Stanley W. Jackson observed that the “late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century saw the active introduction of metaphors from the dynamics and energetics of physical science, often with a rapid loss of the sense of using a metaphor.”³⁴ This loss of metaphoric sense seems to be endemic to nervous complaint (depression, we need to remind ourselves, is a very ancient metaphor) as well as to Melville's style and unusual diction. To look through the distorted template of nervous exhaustion and share Pierre's (and Pierre's) exhausted vision, is to lose one's metaphoric senses. It is to see metaphoric states as physical conditions and to see in physical conditions metaphoric states. If Pierre believes his own droopy eyelashes to be the fretted wires of culture, this is what it means to be exhausted and to see exhaustedly.

TRANCE STATES AND THE BODY OF THE AUTHOR

Melville's opinion that civilization is a debilitating stimulus was informed by the experience of trying to support himself and his family by his pen. Biographers and critics agree that the inspiration for many elements of Pierre derive from the author's life, family history, and struggling career as a novelist. Biography offers us the astonishing figure of Melville, at the time of Pierre's composition, suffering to some extent along with Pierre. During this period, his wife noted that he would “sit at his desk all day not eating any thing till four or five oclock—then ride to the village after dark.”³⁵ In March 1852 Dr. Amos Nourse expressed the fear that Melville was “‘devoting himself to writing with an assiduity that will cost him dear by & by.’” A neighbor and friend Sarah Morewood remarked that Melville was working “‘under a state of morbid excitement which will soon injure his health,’” and “‘told him that the recluse life he was leading made his city friends think that he was slightly insane.’”³⁶ Melville also suffered from sciatica, rheumatism, and eye trouble (“I steal abroad by twilight, owing to the twilight of my eyes,” explained Melville to Evert Duyckinck, friend and editor of The Literary World, in the spring of 1851), and his health remained poor for three or four years after the writing of Pierre.³⁷

The sections of the novel dealing with “Young America in Literature,” “Pierre as Juvenile Author,” and “The Church of the Apostles” were part of Melville's reaction to negative or indifferent reviews of Moby-Dick, rebuffs from his publishers, and a disenchantment with the New York literary establishment.³⁸ In a literary market that discouraged experimentation, Melville reacted by producing radically experimental and challenging works that frequently puzzled a readership that assumed he would repeat the charming formulae of Typee and Omoo.³⁹ In the late 1840s he envisioned for himself an authorship of defied expectation that might actively destabilize his public persona. “Not long ago, having published two narratives of voyages in the Pacific,” the preface to Mardi (1849) begins, “which, in many quarters, were received with incredulity, the thought occurred to me, of indeed writing a romance of Polynesian adventure, and publishing it as such; to see whether, the fiction might not, possibly, be received for a verity: in some degree the reverse of my previous experience.”⁴⁰ Encouraged by the example of Hawthorne's indirection “directly calculated to deceive—egregiously deceive” (HHM, 251), Melville raised the cagey antagonism of Mardi to the fever pitch of Pierre. Pierre rebels against the literary market of “Biographico-Solicito Circulars” that desired “a neat draft of his life,” and “he had not failed to clutch with peculiar nervous detestation and contempt that ample parcel, containing the letters of his Biographico” before he destroys them (P, 255). This attitude, Hershel Parker has demonstrated, corresponds more or less directly to Melville's own, and is another of the many ways Melville sets the psychodrama of Pierre against the backdrop of his own situation.⁴¹

If at the time of Mardi's composition Melville felt misunderstood, by the time of Pierre he had come to understand how his writing career had been radically altering his own identity. “From my twenty-fifth year I date my life,” he explained to Hawthorne. “Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.”⁴² Just entering his thirties, Melville sensed—with some justice—that he had exhausted a fundamental source of creativity. While he would go on to write many extraordinary works of intellect, imagination, and beauty, he would not do so with the extravagance of Moby-Dick and Pierre. In a very real way, the exhaustion of this phase revealed to Melville the caducous sequence of his literary career up to that moment: a series of unfoldings of a reality present all along. He also told Hawthorne, “Possibly, if you … direct [a letter] to Herman Melville, you will missend it—for the very fingers that now guide this pen are not precisely the same that just took it up and put it on this paper. Lord, when shall we be done changing?”⁴³ He reads his own development as a spectacle of Ovidian transformation as radical as that of any character he might invent, and Pierre, if nothing else, insists upon a similar flux of its authorial persona.

At this point in his career, Melville was particularly concerned with writing as a bodily process, as the creation of an embodied creature. His insights into nervous exhaustion and his sense of the inadequacy of nineteenth-century stereotypes about nerves and literature proceed from an awareness of how the multiple cares of writing and running his farm and household were affecting his body. Not a constitutionally frail or delicate man, Melville was certainly disturbed by his setbacks. This preoccupation percolates through Pierre and offers a suggestive motive for the author's strategy of having the reader share in Pierre's exhausted vision. Perhaps miserable authors love too well their readerly company. In the novel, exhaustion finds its culmination in Pierre's terrifying vision of himself as Enceladus, the Titan. Before murder and suicide bring Pierre to its frenzied conclusion, Pierre falls into a hallucinatory trance-state in which he envisions himself as the mythological giant who was confined in his fury by the Olympian gods beneath Mount Etna (P, 342). Pierre becomes the “doubly incestuous” Titan “writhing from out the imprisoning earth … though armless, resisting with his whole striving trunk,” the mountains that the gods heaped upon him in retribution for his attack (P, 345). In his austere writer's garret he convulses, turning his “vast trunk into a battering-ram,” hurling his “arched-out ribs again and yet again against the invulnerable steep” (P, 346):

Recovered somewhat from the after-spell of this wild vision folded in his trance, Pierre composed his front as best he might, and straightway left his fatal closet. Concentrating all the remaining stuff in him, he resolved by entire and violent change, and by a willful act against his own most habitual inclinations, to wrestle with the strange malady of his eyes, this new death-fiend of the trance, and this Inferno of his Titanic vision. (P, 347)

As the Titan wrestles in the earth, Pierre wrestles with his breakdown. In the aftermath of the episode Pierre “writhingly strove” (P, 347) to gain control over his facial expression, and in Pierre's symptoms—the contortions, the chronic fatigue and the “strange malady” of the eyes—Melville finds a general criticism of culture and an epiphany of literary destiny. “‘Enceladus! it is Enceladus!’—Pierre cried out in his sleep. … on the Titan's armless trunk, his own duplicate face and features magnifiedly gleamed upon him with prophetic discomfiture and woe” (P, 346).

With all its writhing neurotic content, the trance of Enceladus brings into clear relief the futility and the ineluctability of the author's embodiment. The squirming trunk of the author finds itself, like Enceladus, imprisoned by the mountain it sought to move. In the myth, Enceladus and the other giants rebelled against the new world order of the Olympian gods and were imprisoned under Mount Etna. The trance gives the physical struggle a mythic context in which physiological determinism coincides with cultural determinism.⁴⁴ “So, if thou wouldst go to the gods, leave thy dog of a body behind thee,” Melville writes in Pierre but Enceladus and Pierre cannot go to the gods precisely because they cannot leave their bodies behind. The fragmentation of the author's identity occurs at a point where that identity and the cultural forces that police it collapse into one another. The division between the consciousness of the author and the constraints of his culture is eroded by an ambiguous set of altered states. The prison-house of letters becomes the prison-house of the body.

The “confusions and confoundings” of Pierre's “combining consciousness” are so extreme that “[h]e would fain have disowned the very memory and the mind which produced to him such an immense scandal upon his common sanity. … The cheeks of his soul collapsed in him: he dashed himself in blind fury … and fell dabbling in the vomit of his loathed identity” (P, 171). Through the struggle for “muscular sanity” and the verbal contortions of Pierre, the narrator describes exhausted writing as an attempt to counter physical and emotional torment. Out of a “profound willfulness” Pierre composes his book

against all the dismal lassitude, and deathful faintness and sleeplessness, and whirlingness and craziness.… he gave jeer for jeer, and taunted the apes that jibed him. … [W]ith the feeling of misery and death in him, he created forms of gladness and life. For the pangs in his heart, he put down hoots on the paper. And every thing else he disguised under the so conveniently adjustable drapery of all-stretchable Philosophy. (P, 339)

Melville offers a fantasy of forging literary virtue out of a lack of composure. Corporeal craziness and whirlingness become textual gladness and life; bodily pangs become paper hoots. Expressing a need to free himself from the constraints of historical narration, of cause and effect, of relevant detail, Melville abandons, in one critic's words, a “commitment to the premise that the kind of world he wants to create can be articulated through a temporal narration, through an account of the progressive unfolding of sequential experience.”⁴⁵

In other words, the trance dramatizes a crisis of agency implicit in Melville's literary exhaustion. Pierre's “state of semi-unconsciousness” (P, 342) returns him with smothering déjà vu to the Berkshires and Saddle Meadows, connecting the end of the novel to the beginning of the novel, allowing Pierre's scene of writing (his New York garret) to communicate with his past in Saddle Meadows, and linking Pierre's crisis of authorship with Melville's scene of writing:

The actual artificial objects around him slid from him, and were replaced by a baseless yet most imposing spectacle of natural scenery. But though a baseless vision in itself, this airy spectacle assumed very familiar features to Pierre. It was the phantasmagoria of the Mount of the Titans, a singular height standing quite detached in a wide solitude not far from the grand range of dark blue hills encircling his ancestral manor. (P, 342)

Here the novel most explicitly interposes into Pierre's world a universe parallel to Melville's own writing environment in Pittsfield of 1851-1852. Pierre's abandonment removes him from his own scene of composition only to cast him perilously close to Melville's scene of composition (he wrote portions of Moby-Dick and Pierre at his farm in Pittsfield and a garret in New York). Pierre's piazza at Saddle Meadows corresponds to Melville's piazza “on the north side” of Arrowhead looking on Mount Greylock (also known as Saddleback Mountain) “some fifteen miles distant” (P, 342). In Pierre's trance, the mountain “presented a long and beautiful, but not entirely inaccessible-looking purple precipice, some two-thousand feet in air” (P, 342) replicating Melville's “little embrasure of a window, [near his writing desk]” as he wrote to Evert Duyckinck in 1850, “which commands so noble a view of Saddleback.”⁴⁶ While the plot of Pierre is diverted for many pages with “the act of attempting that book” (P, 304), the trance brings disparate scenes of writing into momentary focus.

Pierre's “seizure” not only transports him back to the world of Saddle Meadows; it points to another portal—the origin of Pierre itself, the threshold between its invocation and its opening phrases:

To Greylock's Most Excellent Majesty

In old times authors were proud of the privilege of dedicating their works to Majesty. A right noble custom, which we of Berkshire must revive. For whether we will or no, Majesty is all around us here in Berkshire. …

But since the majestic mountain, Greylock—my own more immediate sovereign lord and king—hath now … been the one grand dedicatee of the earliest rays of all the Berkshire mornings, I know not how his Imperial Purple Majesty (royal-born: Porphyrogenitus) will receive the dedication of my own poor solitary ray.

Nevertheless, forasmuch as I, dwelling with my loyal neighbors … in the amphitheater over which his central majesty presides, have received his most bounteous and unstinted fertilizations, it is but meet, that I here devoutly kneel, and render up my gratitude, whether, thereto, The Most Excellent Purple Majesty of Greylock benignantly incline his hoary crown or no.

Pierre Just Emerging From His Teens

There are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner from the city shall early walk forth into 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; the grass itself seems to have ceased to grow; 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. … The verdant trance lay far and wide; and through it nothing came but the brindled kine, dreamily wandering to their pastures followed, not driven, by ruddy-cheeked, white-footed boys. As touched and bewitched by the loveliness of this silence Pierre neared the cottage, and lifted his eyes. (P, 3)

Melville's world of novelistic inspiration is set beside the trance-world of the novel proper. Pierre's opening, as odd as it is by itself, grows even stranger beside the not-quite-mock-heroic dedication. Together they reveal how Melville has, at the very outset, separated—like yolk and albumen—the main components of Pierre's Enceladus-trance into a quixotic pledge of fealty to Mount Greylock on one hand and an eerie scene of bucolic quiescence on the other. The Enceladus sequence, coming near Pierre's conclusion, belatedly conflates the opening passage's dreamy “verdant trance” with the dedication's indifferent mountainous muse in order to give the opening retrospective meaning. A key to Pierre's enigmatic, latent meanings, Enceladus invites the reader to see the whole novel through the lens of Pierre's exhausted vision. In effect, it asks the reader to reconsider the sly relation between Pierre and his book and Melville and his book heralded by the opening passages.⁴⁷

In Enceladus's shadow, the opening can be reread as an attempt to put the reader in Pierre's position and also within the book's exhausting discourse. The retroflex movement of Pierre's trance from the urban to the rural appears at the outset as the reader's general point of view. “The trance-like aspect of the green and golden world” is displayed from the general point of view of “he who is but a sojourner from the city.” The entrance to Pierre is literally calculated to entrance. We are meant to feel as if we are walking in a bucolic scene inside a paperweight, a paperweight, no doubt, resting on the author's desk. “[A] fine book is a sort of revery to us,” Melville wrote at the time of Pierre's composition.⁴⁸ Enceladus reorients the opening passage as a site where the reader is invited to enter the author's trance.

Pierre's vision clarifies what it might really mean to dedicate a book to a mountain. Michael Rogin has suggested that Melville's “aim was … to underline [the mountain's] inaccessibility.”⁴⁹ Melville was also interested in how authors, readers, and texts gain access to the seemingly inaccessible. Melville allegorizes the idea that readers, authors, and texts (Pierre, finally, is all three) “have carried about with [them] in [their] mind[s] the thorough understanding of the book, and yet not be aware that [they] so understood it” (P, 294). The Enceladus-inspired trance represents a privileged moment of access to a knowledge that has been hitherto latent. Thus, the dedication connects the “unstinted fertilizations” of the mountain muse with repressed understanding. The inaccessible mountain is made accessible through nervous access, for, as he says, “Whether we will or no, Majesty is all around us.”

The mountain represents the forces that constrain (and—ironically—sponsor) authorship, and the neurasthenic trance reveals this relation. By looking towards Mount Greylock, Melville is literally and figuratively looking away from his home and family and, at a further remove, away from New York where his literary fortunes reside. By making the mountain his patron, Melville obliquely names the real sources of patronage that rule his world, the powerful constraints of the literary marketplace. Pierre is a novel girded by mountains. From Greylock in the dedication to the Mount of the Titans at the end, the mountain is the site and symbol of profound literary activity and the catalyst of the most extreme literary crisis.

At the beginning of the Enceladus section Melville slips into the second person. “You stood transfixed,” he writes as narrative personality dissolves into dread:

[A] terrific towering palisade of dark mossy massiness confronted you; and trickling with unevaporable moisture, distilled upon you from its beetling brow slow thunder-showers of water-drops, chill as the last dews of death. Now you stood and shivered in that twilight, though it were high noon and burning August down the meads. All round and round, the grim scarred rocks rallied and re-rallied themselves; shot up, protruded, stretched, swelled, and eagerly reached forth; on every side bristlingly radiating with a hideous repellingness. (P, 344)

“Dark mossy massiness confronted you,” as if Melville were addressing his protagonist, himself, and the reader at once. The second-person refuses to be either the autobiographical I or the objective he. It embraces an overwhelming sense of the traumatic present—an aura of sheer presentness, a disproportionate ontological sense of the here and now. Thus Melville's neologisms of -ness—“repellingness” and “massiness”—through their “primitive elementizing of the strange stuff” (P, 304) achieve the immediacy of trauma by conflating attributes with categorical forces. First-person and third-person exist in unresolved relation. Pierre becomes what Melville has been flirting with from the opening, you (himself) and you (the reader). In this light, Pierre's trance calls into question the autonomy of the novel's world from the world of its author.

The idea that exhaustion disrupts the autonomy of the author gives another indication of how unstable Pierre is, but it gives by no means a complete one. Nevertheless, in this essay I have tried to suggest some central ways that Pierre makes a kind of “nervous” sense. If critics have read the novel as a parody of the conventional romantic novel, the crisis of agency and autonomy built into the novel suggests a more direct challenge to the autonomy of the romantic author, and the nervous health of the author is a key element in that challenge. Pierre is perhaps better considered as a romance written against the idea of romantic authorship. If it is valuable for readers to see through Pierre's fretted wires and share in his “morbid” excitement and exhaustion, then Melville's unruly text may continue to prove a useful and instructive means to further our inquiries into the body of the author as well as his mind. Pierre's challenge to the notion of creative malady certainly deepens our awareness of nineteenth-century assumptions about nerves and literature, challenging literary stereotypes while reinforcing connections between stimulation and debility. Melville's underlying suspicion of romantic nervousness as a mark of artistic autonomy positions Pierre to look forward to the neurasthenic world of the Gilded Age and back to the era of Jacksonian health reform. It is worthwhile to consider the challenge to that autonomy that Pierre presents. Pierre reminds us of the Freudian truism that novelists and imaginative literature are made against terrible resistance, but it also reminds us that novelists and literature are made in the failure of resistance. Finally, Pierre reminds us that exhaustion contains the potential for the loss of metaphoric sense, but in sharing in that loss we may come, once more, to our metaphoric senses.

Notes

1. Quoted in Jay Leyda, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville 1819-1891, 2 vols. (New York: Gordian Press, 1969), I:462.

2. Herman Melville, Pierre, or The Ambiguities (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press and The Newberry Library, 1971), 299. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text with the abbreviation P.

3. George Miller Beard wrote several pamphlets outlining his theories, such as “Neurasthenia, or Nervous Exhaustion,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 80 (1869): 245-59; and American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1881). On the history of neurasthenia see Charles Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), 98-108; and F. G. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870-1910 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1987). On male hysteria and Charcot see Mark S. Micale, “Diagnostic Discriminations: Jean-Martin Charcot and the Nineteenth-Century Idea of Masculine Hysterical Neurosis” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1987); and Jan Goldstein, “The Uses of Male Hysteria: Medical and Literary Discourse in Nineteenth-Century France,” Representations 34 (spring 1991): 134-65.

4. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, The Letters of Herman Melville (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1960), 150.

5. Henry A. Murray, introduction to Herman Melville, Pierre, or The Ambiguities, (New York: Hendricks House, Inc., 1949), xciii.

6. Davis and Gilman, 150.

7. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), 468.

8. For a discussion of symptomatic reading in Melville see Wai-chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989), 174.

9. Patricia Wald, “Hearing Narrative Voices in Melville's Pierre,” boundary 2 17, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 132 n. 34; and Sacvan Bercovitch, “How to Read Melville's Pierre,” Amerikastudien 31 (1986): 31-49.

10. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), 93; Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 160; and Eric J. Sundquist, Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), 175.

11. J. R. Pole, “Individualism and Conformity,” in Jack P. Greene, ed., Encyclopedia of American Political History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1984), II:623; and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., “The Americanized European,” in Lectures, Memoirs, Prefaces, and Miscellaneous Manuscripts, Holmes Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, 13-75.

12. Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 220.

13. S. Weir Mitchell, Doctor and Patient (Philadelphia, Pa.: J. B. Lippincott, 1887). On Weir Mitchell see Richard Walker, S. Weir Mitchell, M.D.—Neurologist: A Medical Biography (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1970).

14. Rosenberg, 98.

15. Gosling, 13.

16. On Grahamite reform see Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 143-57. On class and neurasthenia in the closing decades of the nineteenth century see F. G. Gosling and Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991).

17. W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, “Patience, or Bunthorne's Bride,” Act II, in W. S. Gilbert, The Savoy Operas: The Complete Gilbert and Sullivan Operas Originally Produced in the Years 1875-1896 (1926; rpt. London: Macmillan, 1983), 196.

18. Thomas Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperment (Newcastle: Edward Walker, 1807), 39.

19. Quoted in Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 46.

20. Ibid., 166-67.

21. Ibid., 30-48.

22. “Without the poison instilled [by novels] into the blood, females in ordinary life would never have been so much the slaves of vice” (from “Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity,” New England Quarterly 1 [1802]: 172-74, quoted in Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986], 38-79, quotation p. 45.)

23. Quoted in Michael Davitt Bell, The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), 11.

24. Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839-1860 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press and Newberry Library, 1987), 249. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text with the abbreviation HHM.

25. Nissenbaum, 20, 54-56, 67. See also Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations, 5 vols. (Philadelphia, Pa.: 1794-1798).

26. See, for example, the nomenclature of diseases used by J. H. Baxter in Statistics, Medical and Anthropological of the Provost-Marshal-General's Bureau, Derived from the Records of Examination for Military Service in the Armies of the United States During the Late War of Rebellion, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1875), I:6.

27. George Miller Beard, American Nervousness: Its Philosophy and Treatment (Richmond, Va.: J. W. Fergusson and Son, 1879), 6.

28. William Shakespeare, Sonnet LXXIII.

29. See “Historical Note” to Pierre, 388. See also Hershel Parker, The Recognition of Herman Melville (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1967), 51-56.

30. “Historical Note” to Pierre, 388.

31. Ibid., 384. See also Jonathan Arac, Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1979), 140-41.

32. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 134.

33. Ibid.

34. Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), 399.

35. Leyda, I:412. Upon Melville's working habits during the writing of Mardi his wife commented, “Sat in a room without fire—wrapped up” (I:283).

36. Ibid., I:441. See also Hershel Parker, “Why Pierre Went Wrong,” Studies in the Novel 8 (spring 1976): 9 n. 21.

37. Melville to Evert A. Duyckinck, 26 March 1851, in Davis and Gilman, 123. Melville's eye problems of the early 1850s are well-known to his biographers, but what has been less emphasized is their relative disappearance in later years. Intrigued by this recovery, I consulted a glaucoma specialist, an expert in diseases that lead to the contraction of the visual field, who assured me of the extreme rarity of the reversal of this process in patients whose affliction has an organic basis.

38. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, “The Flawed Grandeur of Melville's Pierre,” in Myra Jehlen, ed., Herman Melville: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1994), 126-38.

39. William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America, 1790-1850 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), 36; and Michael T. Gilmore, American Romaticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), 113-45.

40. Melville, Mardi, and a Voyage Thither (1849; rpt. New York: Library of America, 1982), 661.

41. Parker, 7-23; and Richard H. Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), 40.

42. Davis and Gilman, 130.

43. Ibid., 143.

44. Part of this mythic context is, of course, the taboo of incest. Enceladus and Pierre suffer their fates in part because of their incestuous lineage and their inability to remove the tainted alloy of incest from their most noble impulses. While the issue of incest is much broader than the scope of this essay, it is important to bear in mind that Melville's point about incest parallels his sense of the inevitability of the body.

45. Brodhead, 10.

46. Davis and Gilman, 111.

47. Not only does Pierre contain a chapter titled “Retrospective” as well as many scenes of retrospection, of intense looking backward, it can be fairly said that Melville was operating in a retrospective mode of writing after Pierre, especially in “Benito Cereno,” “Bartleby,” and The Confidence-Man. They are stories that practically compel the reader back to their beginnings, or, as R. W. B. Lewis said of The Confidence-Man, it is “more rereadable than readable” (“Afterward to The Confidence-Man” [New York: Signet Edition, 1964], 262).

48. Davis and Gilman, 138.

49. Rogin, 156.