Reconsidering Pierre

So far I haven’t had much good to say about Pierre, but of course there is good to say, and I did in fact like it. Lest that be misunderstood, I’ll wrap up with a rundown of what were, for me, some of the novel’s positive aspects.

First is the setting. Melville takes as his inspiration both upstate New York and Western Massachusetts, and the first half of Pierre has the stamp of an English village novel set in rural early America. The depiction of the early American aristocracy of families like the Glendinnings, whose ancestors included a famous general is interesting from the perspecive of American literary development, and many of the Romantic passages about the mountains recall Washington Irving’s myth-making. Later, when Pierre brings Isabel to the city, Melville traces the American population’s urbanization and contrasts the softness of village life, where community norms are all that’s necessary for society to function, with the hardness of the city, where vast numbers of anonymous people come together only through the more regulated means of policing.

The characters are also excellent. They are not, of course, realistic, but they are wonderful tragic types. Pierre is Romeo, and Hamlet. And Melville’s psychological exploration into his madness is gripping. Again, I would compare him to Ahab, and people love Ahab’s monomania.

The novel also deals much more directly with love than any of Melville’s other work, and while some of it is strange, some is lovely. Here is love, filtered through some very Melvillean prose about gliding and the sea:

No Cornwall miner ever sunk so deep a shaft beneath the sea, as Love will sink beneath the floatings 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 things; therein the mysteries of life are lodged; looking in each other’s eyes, lovers see the ultimate secret of the worlds; and with thrills eternally untranslatable, feel that Love is god of all.

Sorry, did I say lovely? What are those eye-fish? You have to take the weird with the wonderful, with this guy.

Then there’s lots of Melville’s greatest hits: Republicanism versus Europe, the individual and society, the principles of narration, nature and peace, Pantheism and Descartian vortices, fatalism, greatness and smallness in art, and, of course, ambiguity. Overall, the novel is more focused than Moby-Dick if not perfectly planned, but the familiar reader will find a lot that alludes to more than just the sentence or two contained in Pierre.