[In the following essay, Dimock discusses the various characters' quests for knowledge in Pierre and concludes that, since the self proves to be unknowable in the novel, all the individual quests eventually degenerate into ambiguity.]

“They know him not;—I only know my Pierre;—none else beneath the circuit of yon sun.”

“All's o’er, and ye know him not!”

Lucy's and Isabel's pronouncements about Pierre, appearing near the beginning and at the very end of the book, both dwell on a single—and to them, presumably the most important—activity: “knowing” Pierre. Pierre has often been discussed as the protagonist's quest for knowledge. One tends to overlook the same obsession on the part of the three women, Mrs. Glendinning, Lucy, and Isabel. Their obsession, of course, is with knowledge of a rather special kind—not knowledge in the abstract, but knowledge of Pierre. What does it mean to “know” Pierre, why is this knowledge so crucial, and how do these women's quests for knowledge tally with Pierre's own? Is knowledge a psychological category—as it seems to be in the women's attempt to “know” Pierre—or is it an epistemological category, as it is in Pierre's vow to “know nothing but Truth”?¹ The book's drama, it seems to me, stems precisely from the interplay and interfusion of these two issues—epistemology on the one hand, psychology on the other—“knowledge” being, in both instances, the operative term. And the result, I will try to argue, is a book that undermines both psychology and epistemology.

The universal desire for knowledge in Pierre points to another important fact in the book, what we might call its climate of secrecy. Characters cannot help wanting to know, for they are surrounded by taunting secrets. Just as the desire for knowledge reigns as the natural desire in the book, secrecy reigns as the natural condition. The book's psychodrama consists, in fact, of a succession of secrets as well as a succession of “knowers”—since Pierre allies himself with different partners at different points. Each of the women tries to become Pierre's co-conspirator, for the advantage she enjoys over her rivals is measured precisely by her part in a secret, by the degree to which she is “in the know.”

Lucy is the first to put in her request:

“[C]ould I ever think, that thy heart hath yet one private nook or corner from me;—fatal disenchanting day for me, my Pierre, would that be. I tell thee, Pierre—and ’tis Love's own self that now speaks through me—only in unbounded confidence and interchangings of all subtlest secrets, can Love possibly endure. Love's self is a secret, and so feeds on secrets, Pierre. Did I only know of thee, what the whole common world may know—what then were Pierre to me?—Thou must be wholly a disclosed secret to me; Love is vain and proud; and when I walk the streets, and meet thy friends, I must still be laughing and hugging to myself the thought,—They know him not;—I only know my Pierre;—none else beneath the circuit of yon sun. Then, swear to me, dear Pierre, that thou wilt never keep a secret from me—no, never, never;—swear!” (p. 37)

Lucy's plea fails, but it is not to be lightly dismissed, for it defines not only what Lucy wants but also what each of the women subsequently wants. Lucy has interesting double standards about secrecy. Between Pierre and herself she will have no secrets at all: Pierre “must be wholly a disclosed secret” without “one privated nook or corner.” She is not against secrecy on principle, however, and indeed she demands it, for secrecy alone ensures the value of that “unbounded confidence” between Pierre and herself. Common knowledge is no knowledge, and Lucy has only scorn for “what the whole common world may know.” She takes pleasure not only in saying, “I know my Pierre,” but also in saying, “They know him not.”

To describe the unique privilege of knowing what no one else knows, Lucy chooses the word “confidence”—a word she uses not only in the sense of “confiding” (between lovers), but also in the sense of “confidentiality” (with regard to everyone else). “Confidence,” for most Melville readers, invariably brings to mind The Confidence-Man. The coincidence, I believe, is hardly fortuitous. Lucy does not specifically recommend “conning” as a part of confidence, although we do know, as the plot unfolds, that deception is unavoidable as a means of secrecy. “Confidence,” then, embraces a number of meanings. Primarily it means: to confide (and, at the other end, to receive knowledge, to be confided in), but it can also mean: to keep a secret, to be confident, and, not the least, to con. Unknown to the petitioners and practitioners, “confidence” is already accruing sinister meanings and inscribing strange patterns of its own. Something else is at work in Pierre other than the human characters, and in this regard it is possible to think of Pierre as a prelude to The Confidence-Man, for even in Pierre, Melville is erecting a structure—built on the various senses of the word “confidence”—with a sardonic irony strikingly anticipatory of the later book. I have chosen the phrase “confidence game” to describe the quests for knowledge in the book, for provocative purposes—obviously—but also because the phrase reflects both the structure and the ambiguity I find central to Pierre.

The confidence game begins with the “perfect confidence” between Pierre and Mrs. Glendinning:

In the playfulness of their unclouded love, and with that strange license which a perfect confidence and mutual understanding at all points, had long bred between them, they were wont to call each other brother and sister. Both in public and private this was their usage; nor when thrown among strangers, was this mode of address ever suspected for a sportful assumption; since the amaranthineness of Mrs. Glendinning fully sustained this youthful pretension. (p. 5)

Melville is supposedly talking about the “mutual understanding” between mother and son, and yet the only discernible “understanding” between them—either in this passage or indeed anywhere else in the book—seems to consist solely in the pretense they keep up. For lack of other evidence one must equate their “confidence” with their game of make-believe. This is not much of a confidence game, to be sure, although it does play a trick on innocent “strangers,” to whom this “mode of address [is never] suspected for a sportful assumption.”

Mrs. Glendinning is not destined to remain forever in Pierre's confidence, however, and she loses the privilege of knowing him at precisely the moment when Pierre first sets eyes on Isabel. The mother notices her son's strange transport and questions him directly, but to no avail. Later, when Pierre looks back on the incident, he sees that he has managed to “parry, nay, to evade, and in effect, to return something alarmingly like a fib, to an explicit question put to him by his mother,” and he worries that he has become a “falsifyer—ay, a falsifyer and nothing else—to his own dearly-beloved, and confiding mother” (p. 51). Still, Pierre has no wish to make amends, and indeed, once he has taken his first step, he will never again be able to confide in his mother. No longer his accomplice in secrecy, she is about to become his first rejected confidante. This turn of events is not lost upon Mrs. Glendinning, and her immediate response is a demand for “confidence” from her son:

“I feel, I know, that thou art deceiving me;—perhaps I erred in seeking to wrest thy secret from thee; but believe me, my son, I never thought thou hadst any secret thing from me, except thy first love for Lucy—and that, my own womanhood tells me, was most pardonable and right. But now, what can it be? Pierre, Pierre! consider well before thou determinest upon withholding confidence from me. I am thy mother. It may prove a fatal thing. Can that be good and virtuous, Pierre, which shrinks from a mother's knowledge? Let us not loose hands so, Pierre; thy confidence from me, mine goes from thee. …” (pp. 95-96)

In effect Mrs. Glendinning is making the same plea that Lucy has made earlier: that Pierre should never have “any secret thing from her,” that he should never shrink “from a mother's knowledge.” Ironically, on this occasion Pierre is giving her a species of “confidence”: not the kind that she wants, to be sure, but the kind which makes him a “falsifyer.” At the rupture between mother and son, one kind of confidence replaces another as Pierre withdraws his “perfect confidence” to become a “confidence man,” embarked on what he calls an act of “pious imposture” (p. 173).

Mrs. Glendinning is the necessary casualty in the treacherous ambiguity of “confidence.” The other casualty is, of course, Lucy, but at this point she is oddly invisible. Lucy's absence is worth noting since it gives us some inkling of the governing principle behind the plot. The battle of succession is a battle between two contenders, Mrs. Glendinning and Isabel, and structural purity dictates Lucy's absence. Thus for over a hundred pages, between the arrival of Isabel's letter and Pierre's decision to “marry” her (pp. 61-183), Lucy is neither heard from nor permitted to appear on the scene. With Mrs. Glendinning's defeat, Lucy is left somewhere in limbo, but she is not quite vanquished yet (her non-participation saves her from that). Her future return is virtually guaranteed by the book's configuration of principals, and, like her absence, attests to the centrality of structure in Pierre.

With the ousting of Mrs. Glendinning and the triumph of Isabel, the confidence game moves to a new phase. Once again, several senses of “confidence” come into play. Fond unreserve between the lovers, strict confidentiality toward the outside world, “pious imposture”—all these ingredients go into the making of Pierre's and Isabel's fictitious marriage. This is a more serious confidence game than the previous “sportful assumption” between mother and son. Like its predecessor, it too admits only two people. For the moment Isabel enjoys Pierre's exclusive “continual domestic confidence” (p. 192), but, with some justice, she is already worried about the day, as she tells Pierre, when “thou art minded to play deceivingly with me” (p. 189).

Isabel's fears are quickly realized in the final stage of the confidence game, when her nemesis appears, predictably enough, in the form of Lucy Tartan. Lucy's reemergence (in Book 23) completes Pierre's structural symmetry, and it also puts the reigning confidante instantly on the defensive. When Isabel learns that Lucy is coming to stay, her immediate reaction is: “Either thou hast told thy secret, or she is not worth the commonest love of man! Speak Pierre—which?” To which Pierre replies, quite truthfully, that “the secret is still a secret” (p. 313). True enough, Lucy has no factual knowledge of the secret, but as she seems to have realized by now, there is more than one way of “knowing.” Her new strategy is to disclaim any desire for knowledge. Lucy no longer makes the mistake of demanding confidence, as she once did. On the contrary, she now sweetly assures Pierre that she has no desire to know: “I will ask of thee nothing, Pierre; thou shalt tell me no secret. Very right wert thou, Pierre, when, in that ride to the hills, thou wouldst not swear the fond, foolish oath I demanded. Very right, very right; now I see it. … I solemnly vow, never to seek from thee any slightest thing which thou wouldst not willingly have me know” (p. 309). Lucy is being disingenuous, of course (and indeed, in the same breath, she also admits, “Yet something of thy secret I, as a seer, suspect” [p. 309]). In any case, she has managed to “slid[e] between” Pierre and Isabel, as the latter becomes “alive to some untraceable displacing agency” (pp. 337-38).

For all intents and purposes, Lucy has penetrated Pierre's and Isabel's secret. She must now, in her turn, introduce a new secret, one from which Isabel will be excluded. In this respect she is aided by a peculiar circumstance in the past. Either out of regard for Isabel's feelings, or for reasons considerably less admirable, Pierre has withheld from her one bit of knowledge—the fact that he has been engaged to Lucy. Intuitively Lucy senses this fact and uses it. Isabel is not the only one privileged with a secret, she points out. There is yet another secret, between Lucy herself and Pierre—“for thus far I am sure thou thyself hast never disclosed it to her what I once was to thee” (pp. 309-10). The important point for Lucy, we might notice, is not her former engagement to Pierre, but the fact that this engagement has “never [been] disclosed,” that Isabel is ignorant of it. And Lucy means to keep Isabel ignorant. Her plan is to come to Pierre, but henceforth the two would assume perpetual “disguises”: “Let it seem, as though I were some nun-like cousin immovably vowed to dwell with thee in thy strange exile” (p. 310). Lucy does not say that they will be deceiving Isabel (she settles for the euphemism “let it seem”), but deception clearly lies at the heart of her proposition, as it does in all the other bonds of confidence in the book. Oddly, for this deceitful conduct Lucy envisions the most extravagant celestial reward: “Our mortal lives, oh, my heavenly Pierre, shall henceforth be one mute wooing of each other; with no declaration, no bridal; till we meet in the pure realms of God's final blessedness for us … when, there, thy sweet heart, shall be openly and unreservedly mine” (p. 310). This is a very large claim to make on a married man, but Lucy is confident of it, presumably because the self-denying deception in this life entitles her to an eternity of flaunting conjugality.

The confidence game has run its course as Lucy, the former outsider, now comes to be in the know. And yet this structural completion leaves a great many questions unanswered. How does Lucy come to suspect Pierre's and Isabel's secret? What is it in her that makes her such a shrewd “seer,” as she calls herself? And what are her reasons, anyway, for coming to Pierre? Is she innocent, guileless, angelical, as Pierre thinks, or is she possessive and calculating? We have no answers for these questions—just as we have no answers for similar questions about Lucy's predecessor, Isabel. Why does Isabel write to Pierre and reveal herself to him? What are her motives, and what does she want from him? Why does she acquiesce in the mock marriage? To ask these questions at all is to realize the huge gaps in Melville's domestic drama. Melville seems simply uninterested in the motives—and indeed, in the personalities—of his women characters.² It is only right, then, that we should ask what does interest him. If the women do not function as psychological presences, how do they in fact function? How important are they to the outcome of the confidence game? And furthermore, what gives this game its predictable shape and its particular flavor?

Just as there are strange negligences in the characterization of the women, there are also strange rigidities in the shape of the confidence game. There is no question of degree in the game, no question of texture, and no question of process. Melville seems to have no patience with the nitty-gritty of human attachments. New alliances become accomplished facts almost as soon as we first hear about them. Lucy has no trouble winning Pierre to her secret, just as Isabel, at an earlier stage, has no trouble winning Pierre to hers. In both cases the success is instantaneous and, it would seem, unearned. Why is Mrs. Glendinning defeated in a moment, and why does Isabel cease to intrigue Pierre even before Lucy's appearance on the scene?³ These questions, once again, cannot be adequately answered, for there is something oddly preordained in the succession of confidantes—the logic of the succession being, in a rather chilling way, not a human logic at all.

Within the undeviating structure of the confidence game, the women function as abstract maneuverable parts. Thus, during the period of Isabel's ascendancy, “for the real Lucy [Pierre], in his scheming thoughts, had substituted but a sign—some empty x—and in the ultimate solution of the problem, that empty x still figured; not the real Lucy” (p. 181). Pierre's ability to reduce Lucy to a mathematical integer says something about him, but it also says something about the emotional logic of the book: a logic with the simplicity of a geometric equation. That equation, to put it most crudely, goes something like this: to those who seek, confidence will be given; from those who have, confidence will be taken away. The crucial factor in the confidence game is one's position, of which there are three well-defined ones: the aspirant, the incumbent, and the rejected, forming a clear linear progression.⁴ The movement of any character from one position to another becomes something of a mechanical certainty. Mrs. Glendinning and Isabel are both casualties in the confidence game, not because they resemble each other, but because they both happen to occupy, at different points, the position of the incumbent. Their position alone makes their fate analogous.

One can argue, without too much exaggeration, that Pierre is a story centered, not on human personalities, but on “confidence” and its attendant structure.⁵ Different characters serve as practitioners in confidence at different points, but it is “confidence,” and not they, that dictates the plot and shapes the novel. “Confidence” lies at the heart of Pierre; its trajectory, its mode of operation, the shifting partnerships it engenders—these make up the scaffolding of the book. There are “stirring passions at work,” to be sure, but these passions, too, seem to be exclusively passions for confidence.⁶ The book that results is a book that is very much a skeleton of itself, a book strangely intent and mechanical. It is structure, and not texture, that makes the book what it is, just as it is characters-as-integers, and not characters-as-personalities, that carry on the evolving drama. In short, Pierre is a psychological novel that rejects, for the most part, psychological representation; it is a book of intimate ties that undermines the content of those ties; it is a book that begins with “stirring passions” and ends with a dispassionate structure.

Why is Melville impatient with human attachments? From the internal evidence of the novel, we can say only that he does not believe in them. In this regard he is working directly against the characters, who do believe in intimate ties, and who believe, furthermore, that they can seal these ties with confidence. The characters are mistaken, of course—or, we might say, they are conned—since none of the relations in the book turns out the way they think. To take an example we have already considered, the “perfect confidence” between Mrs. Glendinning and Pierre comes to nothing, as we might expect, but their mode of rupture is especially ironic and seems to reflect Melville's malicious cynicism toward human intimacy.

During that crisis, Mrs. Glendinning asks Pierre a seemingly trivial question—whether she should ring the bell to summon Dates. In effect, of course, she is giving Pierre the last chance to confide in her, and Pierre knows it:

But though he knew all the significance of his mother's attitude, as she stood before him, intently eying him, with one hand upon the bell-cord; and though he felt that the same opening of the door that should now admit Dates, could not but give eternal exit to all confidence between him and his mother; and though he felt, too, that this was his mother's latent thought; nevertheless, he was girded up in his well-considered resolutions.

“Pierre, Pierre! shall I touch the bell?”

“Mother, stay!—yes do, sister.”

The bell was rung. … (p. 96)

The two words—“mother” and “sister”—present in close succession in Pierre's reply, rather heavy-handedly draw attention to the significance in Pierre's mode of address. Mrs. Glendinning remains “mother” as long as Pierre still thinks of confiding in her. Once he has made up his mind to “give eternal exit to all confidence” between them, however, she becomes “sister.” In other words, their former term of endearment now serves as the signal for an irrevocable break. If Pierre once told a fond lie in calling his mother “sister,” now, in reverting to the old habit, he is telling another kind of lie—a lie that repudiates rather than endears. The glaring falseness of the intimacy on this occasion cruelly parodies its former illusoriness. Confidence is, after all, a treacherous ideal; it works deviously and—unfortunately for its adherents—not always in the way they fancy.

Eventually all the bonds of confidence in the book turn out to be illusory. Presumably the women want to know Pierre because they love him, and yet love is hardly an expressible passion in the book. What prevails instead is a passion for knowledge, a passion so insistent and so final that it seems not so much a metaphor for love as a displacement of it. In other words, knowledge becomes, not a means to love, but an end in itself, and as an end it amounts merely to a mechanical compulsion. For if “knowing” can (at least in it biblical sense) mean consummation, in Pierre it is nonconsummation that poisons all the relations. After the deceit and intrigue of the book, none of the relations comes to fruition.⁷ The women are really fighting a losing battle, a battle drained of its meaning from the very beginning and in its very definition of terms. In Pierre then, structure at once dictates the course of passion and usurps its place; for passion, like the human attachments it engenders, has lost its content and ground of being.

This brings us to the other side of “knowing.” If knowledge fails as a means of intimacy, how successful is it as an epistemological exercise? Do any of the women “know” Pierre in this alternate sense of the word? Mrs. Glendinning assuredly does not, and Pierre has a rather shrewd insight into why she fails: “Me she loveth with pride's love; in me she thinks she seeth her own curled and haughty beauty; before my glass she stands,—pride's priestess—and to her mirrored image, not to me, she offers up her offering of kisses (p. 90). Perhaps Pierre exaggerates his mother's egotism, but he is certainly right to suspect that the Pierre she loves is in fact only an “image” of her own making. And her image of him is that of a “fine, proud, loving, docile, vigorous boy” (p. 20), a fitting complement to her own self-image as a proud, loving, idolized mother. This “Pierre” is the only one she knows—or accepts—and when Pierre deviates from that image, she understandably refuses to recognize the strange apparition “who was once Pierre Glendinning” (p. 185).

Image-making is, unfortunately, not confined to Mrs. Glendinning. Lucy and Isabel, too, make images, for each “knows” Pierre in her own way. He is Lucy's “shepherd-king” (p. 36), Isabel's brother-champion, and finally, the “noble and angelical Pierre” Lucy expects to marry in the “pure realms of God's final blessedness” (pp. 309-10). “Knowing” Pierre means creating Pierre in a certain image, and each of the women knows Pierre only to that extent. Her “knowledge” is an epistemological illusion and evaporates as soon as Pierre trades images, as soon as he repudiates one identity to embrace a new one, tendered by another woman.

One side of the confidence game has proved itself completely futile. It is time now to consider the other side, for Pierre, too, has his own quest for knowledge to conduct. It is instructive to see how he fares against the women's poor showings. What does Pierre want to know, and how much does he end up knowing? On the surface of it, Pierre's passion seems no different from the women's. He, too, is driven by a desire to know, and the women appear, at least initially, to be the objects of his inquisitions. In the days of Isabel's ascendancy, for instance, she has seemed “inscrutable” (p. 129) and “unravelable” (p. 141), commanding “all the bewitchingness of the mysterious vault of night” (p. 142). Isabel seems to embody all that is unknown—all that is yet to be known—and Pierre is bewitched by her, although he has no trouble resisting Lucy, at that point too easily fathomable, too “fond, all-understood” (p. 129). By Book 26, however, Isabel's mystery has fallen into that class of “mysticisms and mysteries” of which Pierre has grown “uncompromisingly skeptical” (p. 354). A fresh mystery is called for to whet Pierre's appetite for knowledge, and Lucy supplies it. Her “inconceivable conduct,” “enigmatical” resolve, “inexplicable motive,” and “inscrutable divineness” all attest to her new-found allure for the “amazed” and “confounded” Pierre (pp. 315, 317).

A woman captivates Pierre to the degree that she mystifies him. And yet, Pierre does not primarily want to know her—at least not in the sense that the women want to know him—for the mystery that engrosses him is finally not her own. Beyond Isabel's mystery, even more important to Pierre is the fact that she “begat in him a certain condition of his being” (p. 53), that she “seemest to know somewhat of me, that I know not of myself” (p. 41). From her he hopes to wrest some explanation for his own “strange integral feeling”: “Explain thou this strange integral feeling in me myself, he thought—turning upon the fancied face—and I will then renounce all other wonders, to gaze wonderingly at thee. But thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face!” (pp. 51-52). Similarly, confronted with Lucy's surprising move, Pierre is elated by the thought that “the girl whose rare merits his intuitive soul had once so clearly and passionately discerned” should now acquit herself so well (p. 311). In other words, Lucy, like Isabel before her, fascinates precisely because she awakens Pierre to a new understanding of his own “intuitive soul.” From her “inconceivable conduct” he derives a mystical knowledge: “there is a mysterious, inscrutable divineness in the world—a God—a Being positively present everywhere;—nay, He is now in this room; the air did part when I here sat down. I displaced the Spirit then—condensed it a little off from this spot” (p. 317).

There is something narcissistic in Pierre's attachment to the women, for the mystery that most obsesses him and the knowledge that he most eagerly seeks is the truth about himself. This mystery makes a rather graphic appearance when, upon reading Lucy's letter, Pierre “ran shuddering through hideous galleries of despair, in pursuit of some vague, white shape, and lo! two unfathomable dark eyes met his, and Isabel stood mutely and mournfully, yet all-ravishing before him” (p. 312). The “unfathomable,” “vague, white shape” distinctly recalls the language of Moby-Dick, and indeed Pierre, like Ahab, is pursuing an “ungraspable phantom of life.” This phantom, Henry A. Murray points out, lies—not without—but within Pierre himself.⁸ It is the phantom of his own selfhood and, as the passage seems to suggest, it is compounded of both Lucy and Isabel, the “vague, white shape” of the one fusing into the “unfathomable dark eyes” of the other. Like Yillah and Hautia in Mardi, Lucy and Isabel are opposites, but at some level they too eventually merge and become one.⁹ As vehicles for Pierre's self-realization, the two are analogous rather than antithetical, for both are elusive and eventually delusory.

Pierre's attempts at confidence are invariably attempts at self-confidence, a narcissistic variation on the women's endeavor, but no different, in essence, from theirs. The two versions of the confidence game, in fact, form a rather close parallel. If the women need to fabricate a “Pierre” in order to “know” Pierre, so Pierre, too, needs to fabricate a self in order to “know” himself. Pierre is a “self-made man”—of sorts—and there is something of the Emersonian bravado in his boast: “Henceforth, cast-out Pierre hath no paternity, and no past” (p. 199). And yet, a self that can be endlessly made over is also inescapably artificial. Docile son and solicitous brother, gallant champion and “grand victim” (p. 179), privileged scion and penniless genius—these are some of the indentities Pierre embraces, but they add up to no stable selfhood. There is something fictitious in the identities Pierre assumes, a fictitiousness that might have stemmed, as Melville suggests, from the “conversational conversion of a mother into a sister,” which has long “habituated [Pierre] to a certain fictitiousness in one of the closest domestic relations of life” (p. 177). In any case, fictitiousness is a curse Pierre can rarely shake off. For the rest of the book, he is doomed to play, not just one part at a time, but a part within a part—not only as his mother's son but also as her brother, not only as Isabel's brother but also as her husband, and not only as Lucy's ex-fiancé but also as her cousin—the fake identities over-shadowing and commingling with the “real” ones to such an extent that the latter themselves become all but meaningless.

The final difficulty, then, lies not so much in telling the real identities from the fake ones, but in demonstrating the “realness” of any identity at all. Knowing himself proves to be as much a losing battle for Pierre as knowing Pierre is for the women, because the “self” simply affords no ground for certitude. It is, in fact, nothing but layer upon layer of imposition and supposition, harnessed to no solid core of being. The central image in the book is therefore the image of an appalling and parodic inner void:

Yet now, forsooth, because Pierre began to see through the first superficiality of the world, he fondly weens he has come to the unlayered substance. But, far as any geologist has yet gone down into the world, it is found to consist of nothing but surface stratified on surface. To the 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! (p. 285)

For Melville, the self is unknowable, not because we do not try hard enough, but because there is nothing there to be known. Any attempt to know Pierre, whether by the women or by Pierre himself, is inherently doomed, for there is no “Pierre” to speak of, the only knowable Pierre being one fabricated for the occasion. All attempts to know oneself are vain exercises, and the point comes home to us when Pierre chances upon the imported portrait of a (possible fictitious) stranger, a stranger who might just as easily be Isabel's father. The very objective ground that anchors the self is now swept away. Since Pierre will never know who Isabel is, he will never know who he is. Just as she is “wife or sister, saint or fiend” (p. 360), so Pierre, too, is “husband or brother, hero or fool”—the tragedy residing precisely in that eternal “or.”

Characters in Pierre compute their advantage by measuring what they know against what others know (or do not know). And yet this faith in knowledge, according to Melville, is a misguided faith—a false confidence, we might say. The little that we do know is partial, transient, and perhaps irrelevant. In one of his bitterest invectives against knowledge, Melville observes: “knowing his fatal condition does not one whit enable [Pierre] to change or better his condition. … For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men, well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril;—nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown” (p. 303). Rather than being the key to our experience, knowledge is extraneous, a moot point. And it is not even just useless; it is downright cruel and mocking, for drowning must come all the more painfully to the drowning man because he knows it. One does not attain knowledge, then; one merely succumbs to it as one succumbs—in another striking metaphor of Melville's—to “the irruptions of those barbarous hordes which Truth ever nourishes in the loins of her frozen, yet teeming North” (p. 167). Any human faith in knowledge is a fatuous faith, for knowledge governs one and victimizes one, but rarely puts itself at one's service.

And after all the quests for knowledge, what happens when the reverse happens, when, instead of knowing, one is being known by someone else? Isabel, we have seen, anguishes over what Lucy may know, and even Pierre, for all his initial delight at being known, eventually finds the prospect insufferable. “Being known” is the underside of knowing, and not surprisingly it shadows forth many of its latent horrors. As Pierre progresses, knowledge appears increasingly in this externalized and menacing mode: as a threat rather than as an asset, as an alien imposition rather than as an experiential state of being. The darkening course of knowledge is marked by the sequence of two remarkably haunting faces, one appearing near the beginning, and the other toward the end of the book: “The face!—the face!—… Thou seemest to know somewhat of me, that I know not of myself,—what is it then? If thou hast a secret in thy eyes of mournful mystery, out with it” (p. 41).

the face seemed to leer upon Pierre. And now it said to him—Ass! ass! ass! This expression was insufferable. … What was most terrible was the idea that by some magical means or other the face had got hold of his secret. “Ay,” shuddered Pierre, “the face knows that Isabel is not my wife! And that seems the reason it leers.” (p. 293)

The first face—Isabel's—is plaintive and alluring. It does not threaten, and it seems to promise some invaluable knowledge. Pierre's romantic hopes, however, turn out to be mistaken, for Isabel does not, in fact, know Pierre, and she tells him no hoped-for secrets. The face that is truly knowledgeable turns out to be Plinlimmon's. The trace of intelligence in such a man—a stranger, no kin of Pierre's, and not especially well-disposed toward him—cannot inspire anything but fear and loathing. The striking contrast between Isabel's face and Plinlimmon's marks the growing tyranny of knowledge and its evolution from enticement to terror. Plinlimmon's face revises Isabel's and parodies it. Indeed, there is nothing in common between Isabel's dark features and Plinlimmon's “ivory brow,” his “steady observant blue-eyed countenance” “so clear and so mild” (pp. 291, 293). The only other character in the book that actually looks like Plinlimmon is Lucy, and this is where the true parallel lies. Lucy is to Isabel what Plinlimmon is to Pierre—alien presences with nonbenevolent knowing gaze. Ironically, knowledge can never be grasped as experiential reality; it comes to us only as alienated knowledge, only as encroaching threats from without.

If Pierre is indeed a psychological novel, as several critics have eloquently argued, in the long run it also undermines itself by destroying the premises of psychological inquiry.¹⁰ In the course of the book Melville explodes the myth of selfhood, even as he reduces human relations to a mechanical structure of succession and displacement. Melville's psychology has, after all, much in common with his metaphysics. From Moby-Dick to Pierre, the question has changed from “How do I know the world?” to “How do I know Pierre?”—but the operating term, to “know,” remains unchanged. Melville's psychology and epistemology both require the groundings of a sturdy selfhood, but since the self in Pierre is now “vacant,” all attempts at knowledge—whether the women's attempt to know Pierre, or Pierre's attempt to know himself—degenerate into an empty confidence game, a game in which the trajectory of knowledge seems more important than the human actors, and in which the confidence man and confidence women are their own victims. Isabel's last words, in this context, have an especially poignant ambiguity. “All's o’er, and ye know him not!” she says at the end of the book. Possibly these words are addressed to Fred and Millthorpe, impotent witnesses, or they may be addressed to the reader, just as they may be addressed to Isabel herself—or even to the dying Pierre. “Pierre” is not to be known, not by idle spectators and readers, and not by the women, and most certainly not by Pierre himself, for as Melville seems to have warned us in the title, Pierre is “The Ambiguities.”

Notes

1. Pierre, or, The Ambiguities (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and the Newberry Library, 1971), p. 65. All further references to this edition will be included in the text.

2. For this reason, the women lend themselves especially to generalizations. An obvious generalization, for instance, identifies Lucy and Isabel as the light and dark ladies of the Gothic romance. But even sophisticated generalizations—such as Henry Murray's identifying Isabel with the Jungian Anima—attest to the simplicity of her being.

3. Hershel Parker and Brian Higgins have offered an interesting discussion of the abrupt termination of Isabel's influence. Parker and Higgins see a disjunction between the psychological drama in the first half of the book (of which Pierre's passion for Isabel plays an important part) and that of Pierre as a profound writer in the second half. Parker attributes this change in direction to a business trip Melville made to New York from December 1851 to January 1852. Disappointed over his contract with the Harpers and bitterly aggrieved by several newly-published, damning reviews of Moby-Dick, Melville jumped to his revenge, notably in Books 17 and 18, in which he satirizes Pierre's reading public in the form of “Miss Angelica Amabilia of Ambleside” and “Captain Kidd Monthly.” See Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, “The Flawed Grandeur of Melville's Pierre,” in New Perspectives on Melville, ed. Faith Pullin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 162-96; also see Hershel Parker, “Why Pierre Went Wrong,” Studies in the Novel, 8 (1976), 7-26. Parker and Higgins are right to point to the abrupt collapse of intimacy between Pierre and Isabel. However, as I will try to argue, the collapsibility of intimacy is not limited to Pierre and Isabel alone.

4. My positional analysis is inspired by Jacques Lacan's discussion of the three positions in Poe's “Purloined Letter.” See “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” Yale French Studies, 48 (1976), 38-72.

5. In my sense of an underlying structure in Pierre, I am implicitly arguing against Hershel Parker's contention that Melville changed his course in the middle of the book. I do see Books 17 and 18 as digressions from the rest of Pierre—for the biographical reasons that Parker convincingly demonstrates—but I do not see the entire second half of the novel as being independent of the first half.

6. In a letter to Bentley (April 1852), Melville characterized Pierre as a “regular romance, with a mysterious plot to it, & stirring passions at work.” See The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960), p. 150.

7. It is possible to argue, of course, that Pierre and Isabel did consummate their relations in Book 19. But such a reading seems almost too sanguine to me. Melville plays with the idea of sexual consummation, but I think he makes a darker plot by leaving even that event uncertain.

8. Henry A. Murray, Introd., Pierre (New York: Hendricks House, 1949), p. lxxxiii.

9. For the kinship between Hautia and Yillah, see Mardi (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and the Newberry Library, 1970), p. 643.

10. For discussions of Pierre as a psychological novel, see the aforementioned articles by Hershel Parker and Brian Higgins, as well as Richard Brodhead's chapter on Pierre in Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976).