‘A Shakespearean Critique of Emerson in Melville’s Pierre: Metaphor as Smokescreen and Enthusiasm’

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), 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 b