“One long brain-muddling, soul-bewildering ambiguity (to borrow Mr. Melville’s style)”

Yesterday I mentioned Melville’s possible “intentions” about Pierre, but I don’t like to pretend I know them. Interpretations of Pierre typically have, though. His contemporary critics, who almost universally eviscerated the novel, seem to have taken it unironically. They were certainly not pleased with Melville’s prose style, and several complained of his “inventing” words (especially by adding the suffix “-ness” to just about anything). They also bristled at the themes of incest, and even more so at a perceived denunciation of Virtue in favor of sinful complacency.

Those readers, mostly later, who did think Melville’s writing was any good here tended to regard it as parodying popular novels and purposely over-the-top. Later readers also began to appreciate the effect of the unrealistic dialogue, which pulls the characters out of any definite time or place, the mysteries, which evoke a Gothic atmosphere appropriate to the dark psychological themes, and the psychology itself. Pierre can easily be seen as a younger Ahab, an Ahab before he went mad, in the process of losing his mind.

There is also the question of how autobiographical the novel is.

I fell into the more ironic reading of Pierre, and I can also see, as is pointed out in the Historical Note to my Northwestern-Newberry edition (by Leon Howard and Hershel Parker, and the source of the historical information above), that there is a split midway through the novel where Melville seems to have begun to treat his subject more darkly. And I would entirely disagree with the premise of the reviewer from the Athenaeum, quoted in that Historical Note as follows:

We take up novels to be amused—not bewildered,—in search of pleasure for the mind—not in pursuit of cloudy metaphysics; and it is no refreshment after the daily toils and troubles of life, for a reader to be soused into a torrent rhapsody uttered in defiance of taste and sense.

But there is no denying that Melville is difficult here, and hardly commodious of the reader. Take Book VI, “Isabel, and the First Part of the Story of Isabel,” for example. Pierre has received a note asking him to call at a cottage and meet a woman who claims to be his father’s daughter. He arrives in the evening and meets Isabel, whom he’d seen before at a sewing circle and subsequently dreamt about. She’s dark, mysterious, beautiful. She has long black hair that she wears loose and is constantly enveloping her, Pierre, or both of them. That evening, she tells him the story of her early life, consisting mainly of faint and confusing memories. She uses the word “bewildering,” and all its affixed forms (there’s that “-ness”…), a lot. Then, “this abundant-haired, and large-eyed girl of mystery” asks Pierre to bring her her guitar.

She tells him that the guitar will finish her story, which cannot be spoken in words.

And still the wild girl played on the guitar; and her long dark shower of curls fell over it, and vailed it; and still, out from the vail came the swarming sweetness, and the utter unintelligibleness, but from the infinite significancies of the sounds of the guitar.

“Girl of all-bewildering mystery!” cried Pierre—“Speak to me;—sister, if thou indeed canst be a thing that’s mortal—speak to me, if thou be Isabel!”

“Mystery! Mystery!
Mystery of Isabel!
Mystery! Mystery!
Isabel and Mystery!”

Yes, that’s a song; in fact that’s an entire song. And that’s not the only place it appears.

Sometimes, when authors write exactly as they please, whether the intent is serious or ironic, it can cause what one might call an overabundantness of unfunness, or perhaps a surpassingness of painingness, demanding an extravagantness of forgivingness from even the lovingest and faithfullest of readers. Such as myself.

Title quote taken from a review in the New York Herald, also included in the Historical Note.