The Baltimore Online Book Club: " Pierre; or, The Ambiguities," by Herman Melville

Pierre; or, The Ambiguities
by Herman Melville
Penguin Books, 1966
362 pages

"Let the ambiguous procession of events reveal their own ambiguousness."  --page 181

The book we discussed in the March, 2017 meeting of the Baltimore Online Book Club is Herman Melville's seventh novel, published in 1852, "Pierre; or, The Ambiguities." I found the novel to be uneven, yet fascinating.

                              Herman Melville,  1819-1891

I chose the last two books we read, the first being "The Insulted and the Injured," by Dostoevsky.  I selected these because I read both of them about fifty years ago, and wondered if I would consider both to be as interesting to me now as they were then.  In the case of the Russian novel, it is indeed a good read, but far from Dostoevsky's best.  Regarding Melville's novel, few of the novels we've read affected me as deeply as Pierre.  I suppose I have a lot of explaining to do, since the novel was a failure then and is rarely read now.  The opportunity to do just that pleases me.

I will discuss four reasons why I think that the novel is significant: 1) It is perhaps the first modern novel, with a content that provides a biting criticism of all those who believe life's ambiguities can be neatly resolved; 2) the quality of the language and style; 3) This one is the most important--Melville's beautiful and profound commentaries on life scattered throughout the text, and finally, 4) Melville's dark religious stance, followed by a brief discussion of what I consider to be its pertinence today.

1. Its Modernity

If a book is to be judged by the number of copies sold, this novel was a financial and critical disaster. Contemporary reviewers wondered if Melville had gone mad.   Here is a quote from the review of the book in the New York Herald as reprinted on the back cover of the Penguin Classics edition:  "Ambiguities indeed!...the dream of a distempered stomach, disordered by a hasty supper on half-cooked pork chops." Although modern critics have been a lot kinder, it has never been a success with the general public, and probably never will be.

One of the reasons for its initial failure is its caustic criticism of the Gothic novel, an exceedingly popular genre at the time.  In such novels, the hero might have faced chapters of suffering and tribulations, which at the novel's end are invariably and happily resolved.  (Dickens's David Copperfield, undoubtedly a work of genius, is a prime example.) In Pierre, many of the cliches of the Gothic novel are satirized; no one lives happily ever after--in fact, not one of the main characters survives the last page.

In music there is what musicians call a 5-1 cadence, such as Beethoven used in the opening section of his third piano concerto--ba-Bom, ba-Bom, ba-Bom.  This chord progression is eschewed in jazz, which has, regarding this cadence, a "been there, done that" attitude.  The Gothic novel is like a 5-1 cadence in literature; great works of art in the past  have used all-must-end-well plots, but they appear very old fashioned now.  Melville was perhaps the first to indicate the approaching death of the Gothic novel, although no one realized it at the time

Another aspect of modernity in Pierre is its deliberately absurd, non-linear plot.  Pierre gives up his future as gentleman as well as husband to hide the fact that his father had a daughter out of wedlock.  Oh, come on.  His abandoned fiance, Lucy, ignored for many, many pages while Pierre lives with his supposed half-sister Isabel, is being courted by Glendinning Stanley, the callous cousin of the disinherited Pierre. Instead of accepting his advances, she decides to live in poverty with Pierre and Isabel, without making any demands.  Oh, come on.  Isabel believes that the guitar in her possession was her mother's, although there is absolutely no proof that this is the case.  Why is Isabel convinced?  When she whispers "Mother, Mother" to the guitar, it responds with a musical echo.  Oh, come on.  Toward the end of the book, Pierre, while living in poverty, suddenly becomes a well-known author, with absolutely no indication of an ability or even desire to write in the many preceding pages of the book,  Oh, come on.

There are so many "Oh, come ons" in the book that we can only conclude that Mellville did not take the plot seriously, in the usual way at that time; he in no way intended to write a "typical" novel. What he did write was perhaps the first modern novel ever.

Three hundred plus pages of satire would prove to be boring, and this book is anything but.  We will explore the glories of the novel in the next two sections.

2. Melville’s Use of Language

The scholar Henry A. Murray described the writing style of Pierre as being a “miscellany of grammatical eccentricities, convoluted sentences, neologisms, and verbal fetishisms.”  When I read that, I said to myself, “This man has a prose, if not prosaic, mind.  While I was reading the book, before I read Murray’s opinion, I said to myself, with joy, “This man (Mellville) was a poet!”

If you love poetry, you will see Melville’s writing style differently.  You will fall in love with the verbal invention, the rhythms, and the imagery. 

An example:

No Cornwall miner ever sunk so deep a shaft beneath the sea, as Love will sink beneath the floating of the eyes.  Love sees ten million fathoms down, till dazzled by the floor of pearls.  The eye is Love’s own magic glass, where all things that are not of earth, glide in supernatural light.  There are not so many fishes in the sea, as there are sweet images in lovers’ eyes.  In those miraculous translucencies swim the strange eye-fish with wings, that sometimes leap out, instinct with joy; moist fish-wings wet the lover’s cheek.  Love’s eyes are holy, lovers see the ultimate secret of the worlds; and with thrills eternally untranslatable, feel that Love is god of all.  Man or woman who has never loved, nor once looked deep down into their own lover’s eyes, they know not the sweetest and the loftiest religion of this earth.  Love is both Creator’s and Saviour’s gospel to mankind, a volume bound in rose-leaves, clasped with violets, and by the beaks of humming-birds printed with peach-juice on the leaves of lilies.     

                                                                             pages 33-34

Only a poet could write like this.  Notice the rhythm of the sentence that begins with “The eye of Love”.  Any lover of poetry will read this line metrically.  It begins with four iambs, followed by the spondee, “All things”; then--the unaccented “where” should be swallowed, that is, not counted--the line proceeds with an anapest and an iamb.  Then the rhythm is broken again just where you want it: on “glide”, which is followed by three dactyls ending with an emphasis—again, just where you’d want it, on “light.”  There are many such examples of an impressive rhythmic musicality, which is characteristic of poets, throughout the book. 

I don’t doubt that Melville’s description of love as sometimes leaping out of the organs of sight like “eye-fish with wings” would have been classified by Murray under the rubric of “convoluted sentences and verbal fetishisms,” but to those who love poetry, the image, not to mention the rhythms of the sentences, works.

Examples like this one abound in Pierre.  This one is by no means the best of them. (There are, admittedly, obscure and convoluted passages as well.)

Another important concept to mention here is found in the subtitle of the book, “The Ambiguities.” For Melville, perhaps the first major modern writer, there are no longer any certainties.  Melville doubts everything, including his own worth.  The above passage demonstrates another achievement of Melville’s: deep down there, he believes in the transcendence of love, but can only permit himself to state and negate his faith at the same time.  The passage is both serious and ironic; it mocks all overblown paeans to love while confirming them at the same time. A strange combination of irony and conviction—a poetic ambiguous hymn to Love. Simultaneous praise and disdain which succeed on both levels is characteristic of Melville's mature style. 

I must note here that the language of the dialogues is very stilted.  Nobody says such things as “Yes! Yes!—Dead! Dead! Dead!—without one visible wound—her sweet plumage hides it.—Thou hellish carrion, this is thy hellish work!  Thy juggler’s rifle brought down this heavenly bird!  Oh, my God, my God: Thou scalpest me with this sight!” (page 362.)  Here Melville is mocking the writing style of would-be Hamlets who are in real life merely Peter Quinces.  Ironic passages like this, without poetic beauty, however, get to be rather tiresome.

It’s important to note here that Melville was no dramatist, and was probably incapable of writing effective dialogue.  The exchanges between Isabel and Pierre, when not viewed with irony, resemble the work of a third-rate writer, rather than the work of a first-rate one. 

When I had that “aha!” moment of realization that Melville was a poet, I ordered a book of his poems. Some are very beautiful indeed.  No doubt about it, Melville was a very competent poet.  In Pierre, pace scholar Murray, it shows.

3. Melville’s Reflections on the Inner Life

The same scholar we quoted above wrote, regarding Pierre, that Melville “purported to write his spiritual autobiography in the form of a novel.”  Although Murray missed the mark regarding Melville’s style, here he scores a bull’s eye. Melville thought deeply and profoundly about life, and expressed its sometimes otiose ambiguities after a process of what  Germans might call Auseinandersetzungen mit der Wirklichkeit, confrontations with reality, in truly beautiful passages throughout the book.  These “asides,” these commentaries, provide by far the best parts of the novel.  All of them are deeply personal and universal at the same time.

Melville was dissatisfied.  At the time when Pierre was written, his reputation as an author was in steep decline.  Melville wrote profoundly—not always, but after Moby-Dick, more and more so; the public, however, wanted lighter entertainment.  He played Bach while the public demanded Telemann. 

As is the case with many unhappy people of genius, Melville sought something better.  He had a deep religious yearning—he states in the book a variation of Hopkins’s "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”  Yet he was unable and unwilling to flout reason to find an unambiguous source of transcendence.  This is the source of his parody of the Gothic novel.  Many people—then as now—believed/believe in Providence, the concept that behind all suffering, the answer abides.  We may not see or understand it, but God is behind everything, and, with a case of faith, we, happily inebriated, become convinced that everything will work out for the best.  Melville, however, like many moderns, concluded that existence reveals no certainties, only deeper and deeper ambiguities.  Pierre is sort of a boxing match of the soul, Ambiguities  (modernity) vs. Providence, (the Gothic novel)--Ambiguities wins, having soundly blackened the eyes of Providence—including its mystical third one.

Melville beautifully expresses the absolute silence behind nature, including human nature, in the following passage:

All profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence.  What a silence is that with which the pale bride precedes the responsive I will, to the priest’s solemn question, Wilt thou  have this man for thy husband?  In silence, too, the wedded hands are clasped.  Yea, in silence the child Christ was born into the world.  Silence  is the general consecration of the universe.  Silence is the invisible laying of the Divine Pontiff’s hands upon the world.  Silence is at once the most harmless and the most awful thing in all nature.  It speaks of the Reserved Forces of Fate.  Silence is the only Voice of our God.

                                                                         --page 204

Another example is this truly remarkable passage:

In those Hyperborean regions, to which enthusiastic Truth, and Earnestness, and Independence, will invariably lead a mind fitted by nature for profound and fearless thought, all objects are seen in a dubious, uncertain, and refracting light.  Viewed through that rarefied atmosphere the most immemorially admitted maxims of men begin to slide and fluctuate, and finally become wholly inverted, the very heavens themselves being not innocent of producing this confounding effect, since it is mostly in the heavens themselves that these wonderful mirages are exhibited.

But the example of many minds forever lost, like undiscoverable Arctic explorers, amid those treacherous regions, warns us entirely away from them and we learn that it is not for man to follow the trail of truth too far, since by so doing he entirely loses the directing compass of his mind, for arrived at the Pole, to whose barrenness only it points, there, the needle indifferently respects all points of the horizon alike.

                                                               --page 165

Have the indifference of nature and the dangers of meaninglessness ever been more beautifully expressed?  How modern Melville sounds!

I will close with another of my favorite passages:

Sucked within the maelstrom, man must go round.  Strike at one end the longest conceivable row of billiard balls in close contact, and the furthermost ball will start forth, while all the rest stand still, and yet the last ball was not struck at all.  So, through long previous generations, whether of births or thoughts, Fate strikes the present man.  Idly he disowns the blow’s effect, because he felt no blow, and indeed, received no blow.  But Pierre was not arguing Fixed Fate and Free Will no, Fixed Fate and Free Will were arguing him, and Fixed Fate got the better of the debate. 

                                                                                 
                                                                            --page 182

So much for the common view that humans have an abiding self, independent of nature!  The modern view, espoused by many scientists, that free will is an illusion, finds an early and beautiful expression here.

Quotes like these are what makes Pierre unforgettable.  The novel is replete with such passages.

Conclusion

In Melville we find ambiguities, and the absence of God; in many modern writers, such as Roth, however, the question of God doesn’t even come up.  I am reminded here of a statement by the astronomer Carl Sagan, namely, that he was comfortable with ambiguity and can live well without the security of final answers. Melville couldn’t.  Despite all the modern aspects of this novel, Melville's  futile search for a hand beyond the stars, as it were, strikes many of us as being somewhat atavistic.  Perhaps he was looking in the wrong direction, outside rather than inside. 

Searching for meaning and failure to find absolute answers, however, has been part of the human condition since time immemorial.  The uncompromising pressure of catechisms has tried their best, throughout history, to crush the sphere of intelligence.  Sometimes, under intense pressure of the will to believe, the sphere disappears; sometimes it has enough stuff of its own to respond to the unrelenting gravitational force of irrational faith by converting its original elements into something more substantial.  It then becomes a star, and infuses the darkness with light. The resultant luminescence might not be what we want; it might seem cold and inhuman at first, yet it is light nevertheless. This light, photons of which spotlight a central component of Melville’s genius, informs much of the novel, making Pierre, at least for some readers, an albeit uneven, yet unambiguous delight.