This article is intended as a differential contribution to the study of Melville, still the central novelist of American literature in his complex, meditative negotiations of the various and often contradictory strands of the history of ideas that have impacted the United States since its founding generations: Calvinism, democratic ethics, Emersonian self-reliance, and even the skeptical mode of vision of American modernism(as characterized by writers of immigrant or Southern provenance such as O’Neill, or Faulkner), yet which Melville tellingly associates with Shakespeare and Hawthorne. Indeed, I take as a starting point Deleuze’s assertion that Melville stands as the precursor to a crucial line of nihilistic thinking continuing in Nietzsche and culminating in literary modernism, and I explore the ramifications of this claim with reference to Melville’s disastrous and often derided novel Pierre(1852), a bitter and digressive rumination on American life and letters following the critical and commercial failure of Moby Dick. A still controversial semi-narrative account of disavowed incest and class intolerance in the privileged, Northeastern milieu of Melville’s early years, Pierre is also his most philosophical work up to that point, abundant in stylistic and structural experiment, most particularly in regard to what might connect fiction and literary language to contemporary philosophical discourses of idealism, metaphysics, and democratic ethics. Melville ultimately finds the crux of this connection in metaphor as that which links sensual, aesthetic, and cognitive experience to the abstract ideological commitments that govern our moral choices. Crucially, that link is neither simplistically causal nor necessarily positive.I argue that Melville slyly associates the incongruent literary styles that he deploys in Pierre with the differing, contesting philosophical world-views that the novel explicitly evokes(most notably the so-called "Transcendentalism" of Emerson). The vehicle for this experiment appears to be a rather surface-oriented view of literary style characterized by an extravagance of metaphoric density. It is this quality that, I argue, seems to divide Pierre into two distinct conceptual and stylistic parts: the fi rst is characterized by an exalted, ecstatic literary rhetoricrepresenting the confidence and self-reliance of the young hero, characterized by a rather Emersonian ‘organic unity’ of nature and the mind’s creative and poetic faculties that is meant to transcend all questions of literary taste. The style here is ‘enthusiastic,’ as Melville characterizes his eponymous protagonist, thus relating Pierre to what cultural historians have noted as the chief quality of democratic optimism, Emersonian philosophy, and what Harold Bloom calls "The American Religion." The second, conveyed through what could be called a series of styles and variations whose only commonality is the critical reduction of and skepticism towards our "symbol-making capacity"(Sacvan Bercovitch), is associated with the novels’ dark heroine Isabel, a spiritual seductress represented by uncanny, sensual imagery, and a lack of causal, narrative, temporal, or descriptive coherence. She represents all that is unutterable in human experience, up against which Pierre’s impulsive self-reliance and selfdefi ned moral absolutism crashes. This second half of the book is fi tted with astonishing(and subsequently condemned) negativity towards received ethical and literary discourses of midcentury America: including a cryptic pseudo-philosophical tract on the incompatibility of time and(Christian) truth that parallels Deleuze’s claims.In view of this contrast, metaphor in Pierre acts as a kind of smokescreen, calling attention to its own palpable richness as a desirable, aesthetic mode of experience, and yet concealing much more than it reveals, essentially misdirecting all communicants of language from actuality, including that which our socially determined and hierarchical language does not wish us to acknowledge, from the social abject(Isabel and the prurient discipline of working class sexuality) to the Freudian abject—away from what we might generally call knowledge of the world(which for Melville is invariably negative and tragic) but also, more ambiguously, from practical wisdom. Philosophically, the result is a sort of tragic reinterpretation(rather than rejection) of Emerson in a Shakespearean mode: for if a leisurely mode of satisfaction in reference to the spiritual authority of nature is initially satirized as the privilege of a landed gentry who neither know the world(in its material and social forces) nor themselves, nevertheless, the ultimate fruitlessness and irrelevancy of human endeavor in a fated and indifferent cosmos necessitates a tragic self-knowing, or emptying out of personal illusions, that paradoxically liberates the decisive individual action that Emerson prizes, even as such action(in Melville’s novel) condemns the doer to social ostracism and extinction.
