NOTES ON HERMAN MELVILLE’S PIERRE: OR, THE AMBIGUITIES

            Pierre offers tribute to Lucy: “‘Because in us love is profane, since it mortally reaches toward the heaven in ye!’” As long as the heavens are not directly challenged by his description, the portrait stops short of a desired perfection. How prophetic are his words to Lucy since their desire appears a fragile affront to the divine and thus limits their destiny. “Upon the sill of the casement, a snow-white glossy pillow reposes, and a trailing shrub has softly rested a rich, crimson flower against it.” Pierre’s witnessing offers greater testimony than her actual appearance. “Well mayst thou seek that pillow, thou odoriferous flower, thought Pierre; not an hour ago, her own cheek must have rested there. ‘Lucy!’” When she actually appears, the reality has been transformed into a further stage of his witness. Melville makes her presence contingent on his aspirations; she complements the overall portrait of his heritage.

            The ultimate dilemma of the novel relates to the limits on the legacy that it advances. “With no chartered aristocracy, and no law of entail, how can any family in America imposingly perpetuate itself?” As dominant are the Glendinning roots, they are permanently circumstantial. And the blessing of the family can just as easily yield a curse. The pride of Mary Glendinning substitutes for the actual link of the family heritage. “This romantic filial love of Pierre seemed fully returned by the triumphant maternal pride of the widow, who in the clear-cut lineaments and noble air of the son, saw her own graces strangely translated into the opposite sex.. (I,ii)” With the death of the father, she is the real link to the deeds of the his predecessors, all that is Saddle Meadow. But the great grandfather’s stellar legacy is hardly an untainted birthright.

On the meadows which sloped away from the shaded rear of the manorial mansion, far to the winding river, an Indian battle had been fought, in the earlier days of the colony, and in that battle the paternal great-grandfather of Pierre, mortally wounded, had sat unhorsed on his saddle in the grass, with his dying voice, still cheering his men in the fray.

His demise on appearance makes the conquest appear incomplete. Nevertheless, the “sacrifice” is entirely a monument to European culture and its dominance of the continent. Even though there is an element of disquiet in the inheritance passed to Pierre, Melville asserts his overall judgement in a dissertation on the English origins of family nobility. “For not Thames is so sinuous in his natural course, not the Bridgewater Canal more artificially conducted, than blood in the veins of that winding or manufactured nobility.” His qualification only makes the American affirmation seem all the more lively:

But whatever one may think of the existence of such mighty lordships in the heart of a republic, and however we may wonder at their thus surviving, like Indian mounds, the

Revolutionary flood; yet survive and exist they do, and are now owned by their present proprietors, by as good nominal title as any peasant owns his father's old hat, or any

duke his great-uncle's old coronet.

The reference to the “Indian mounds” are hardly a passing one: in metaphor the heart of this lament for the subjugated remain. It serves as the well spring for Pierre’s self-knowledge. In his discovery, he will tap the psychological distress which is so characteristic of ante-bellum America.

            In his speech before Congress on the Mexican War, Abraham Lincoln concludes by noting the very psychological instability that seems to characterize President James Polk:

“As I have before said, he knows not where he is. He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man. God grant he may be able to show, there is not something about his conscious, more painful than all his mental perplexity!” His displacement is literally cause by a verbal over-extension with regards to the actual borders of Texas. Lincoln intimates that such verbal exaggeration has gone to his head, “his mental perplexity”. In rather gross terms, Polk is left without a leg to stand on: “If I should claim your land, by word of mouth, that certainly would not make it mine; and if I were to claim it by a deed which I had made myself, and with which, you had had nothing to do, the claim would be quite the same, in substance--or rather, in utter nothingness.” As his claim is based on a figment, then the obvious source of such a phantom can only be in a mental delusion. But corresponding to such a delusion is a rather substantial belief in the ability of blood sacrifice to transform illegally occupied land. “And if, so answering, he can show that the soil was ours, where the first blood of the war was shed [...]” It is almost as if

divine intervention guarantees the claim based upon a sanctity of blood. Morever, such an error misinterprets America’s fundamental mission. The mistake appears to place the operation on a firmer footing. “This is a most valuable,-- most sacred right--a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government, may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much of the teritory as they inhabit.” Overall there is almost biblical identification with the sacredness of such a theft. But Polk’s zeal only deepens his dilemma. The heritage of Pierre cannot stray that far from the dominant psychology of the time. The intense belief in the manifest form of conquest is the veneer of a profound discomfort in the psyche.

            Melville confidently asserts the ground for Pierre’s legacy: “We poetically establish the richly aristocratic condition of Master Pierre Glendinning” I,v. His social condition is subject to contrary influences: “Now Pierre stands on this noble pedestal; we shall see if he keeps that fine footing; we shall see if Fate hath not just a little bit of a small word or two to say in this world.” So he is able to elaborate on his “family pride”. The pride is only as strong as the strength of personality of Mary Glendinning. At the same time, he is subject to a radicalism: “And believe me you will pronounce Pierre a thorough-going Democrat in time .” His radical spirit is inspired by his pride but all offers a strain that enables him to challenge his family origins. Even with regards to Lincoln’s arguments, the “nobility” is a characteristic that can be accessed by all people even if the deluded assertions of freedom have limited its application to a select. So the ultimate pessimism of the novel is not an end in itself but rather a burden to extend the implications of democracy.

            Ironically, his lineage unsettles this democratic impulse in the opinions of his mother Mary. “Many women carry this light of their lives flaming on their foreheads; but Mary Glendinning unknowingly bore hers within” (I,i). Pierre rather affectionately calls his mother sister “‘Romeo! oh, no. I am far from being Romeo——" sighed Pierre. "I laugh, but he cried; poor Romeo! alas Romeo! woe is me, Romeo! he came to a very deplorable end, did Romeo, sister Mary.’”Critically, the Shakespearean reference cannot entirely be resolved metaphorically. It marks the degree to which any woman will fall short of the ideal embodied by Mary Glendinning. Lucy is only an appendage to the fundamental union expressed between Mary and Pierre.

            Pierre’s regard is enshrined in the image of Lucy Tartan, in her expression of divine bounty. “Her cheeks were tinted with the most delicate white and red, the white predominating. Her eyes some god brought down from heaven; her hair was Danae's, spangled with Jove's shower; her teeth were dived for in the Persian Sea.” Her brilliance radiates around her eyes. Herself, a painter, she supplements the portrait that she embodies. From inner vision to solid reflection to state of character, continues to reinforce the details of the constellation. “[I]n a world so full of vice and misery as ours, there should yet shine forth this visible semblance of the heavens. For a lovely woman is not entirely of this earth.” There is something evidently competitive with the heavens in the portrait. But that deviation is entirely the property of Pierre’s desire. He cannot accede to his elevated regard due to contradictory nature of his mother’s devotion. As well, Lucy’s mother somewhat upsets the apparent balance of Pierre and Lucy: “The two Platonic particles, after roaming in quest of each other, from the time of Saturn and Ops till now; they came together before Mrs. Tartan's own eyes; and what more could Mrs. Tartan do toward making them forever one and indivisible?” How could a matchmaker do anything but tamper with this harmony. But the mother’s interest limits the image from overcoming Pierre’s psyche. To the perfect balance admits a flaw: “‘Some nameless sadness, faintness, strangely comes to me. Foretaste I feel of endless dreariness’” Pierre witnesses a more profound world from which Lucy is excluded.

            Pierre’s resistance to these influences characterizes the heart of his desire. “‘Damned be the hour I read in Dante! more damned than that wherein Paolo and Francesca read in fatal Launcelot!’” He adds another layer to the zeal experienced by Dante. Already Dante comments on the gloss on the medieval romance Lancelot. This distances the passion between Francesca and Paolo into a region that overheats their attraction. They cannot help but be propelled in this gulf between them as it holds the same form of their historical framing of the romance. This is where the light assumes carnal matter.

In natural guise, but lit by supernatural light; palpable to the senses, but inscrutable to the soul; in their perfectest impression on us, ever hovering between Tartarean misery and Paradisaic beauty; such faces, compounded so of hell and heaven, overthrow in us all foregone persuasions, and make us wondering children in this world again.

This highly abstracted structure makes the feelings unbearable for the lovers. Pierre is similarly drawn to the core of his being–the image of Isabel. The emergence is such a piece with this conflict in the self. Interestingly enough, Melville has made the image of Lucy appear irresistible. That should give her the independence in the tale. Instead, she is paralyzed and Pierre is offered the touch of the irrepressible force.

            Pierre appears to submit his nobility to an enslavement by his passion. Thus he impresses his domination over Lucy as well as his exhaustion of his mother’s pride. He is disengaging his legacy from its origins.

Explain thou this strange integral feeling in me myself, he thought——turning upon the fancied face——and I will then renounce all other wonders, to gaze wonderingly at thee. But thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space.

His gaze is then self-admiring. He thus detonates the effects of his passion. He cannot but yield to the appeal of the face. The visible is simply an aspect of the creative impulse. “But during those two days of his first wild vassalage to his original sensations, Pierre had not been unvisited by less mysterious impulses.” Even the reckless invitation of desire are subordinated to this creative generation. In a transcendental economy of desire, women submit to the order of created form. Melville’s solution is much more reckless. He admits to the effects of the mesmerizing image. But it is Isabel who comes to embody the risk. In turn, Pierre is shaken by the encounter: “[H]e would be seized with a singular impulse to reveal the secret to some one other individual in the world.” His desire for Lucy is the obverse face of the same for Isabel: “‘No,’ said Pierre, gravely; ‘it is the last. Now, first I see a meaning there.’ Yes, he added to himself inwardly, I am Pluto stealing Proserpine; and every accepted lover is.” And so he initiates the conflict among the angels. As a self-appointed divinity, he cannot let the “fleecy Lucy” survive such combat. Lucy is sacrificed in the infernal dialectic : “Ay, Pierre, now indeed art thou hurt with a wound, never to be completely healed but in heaven” [...] Melville eschews the transcendental while all the time evoking its resolution.

            As Pierre swerves towards the image of Isabel, he starts to reevaluate the perspective about the father: “[H]e was secretly in love with the French young lady, and did not want his secret published in a portrait” [...] His portrait invokes an alternative legacy:

Look, again, I am thy father as he more truly was. In mature life, the world overlays and varnishes us, Pierre; the thousand proprieties and polished finenesses and grimaces intervene, Pierre; then, we, as it were, abdicate ourselves, and take unto us another self, Pierre; in youth we are, Pierre, but in age we seem.

In romantic discovery, he strips away the overlay of time. Pierre breaks down the same disruption in his own experience. It is as if the aristocratic trappings have erased his democratic spirit. The attraction to the French woman appears to violate a dominant notion of racial purity. Actual desire cuts across such lines and emphasizes universal liberty.

            Pierre has already prepared himself for the transformation that is to follow. What is divided in the temporal becomes united in the eternal. “[T]ey reciprocally identified each other, and, as it were, melted into each other, and thus interpenetratingly uniting, presented lineaments of an added supernaturalness.” This unity erupts his creative identification with the Dante that he had resisted:

On all sides, the physical world of solid objects now slidingly displaced itself from around him, and he floated into an ether of visions; and, starting to his feet with clenched hands and outstaring eyes at the transfixed face in the air, he ejaculated that wonderful verse from Dante, descriptive of the two mutually absorbing shapes in the Inferno:

"Ah! how dost thou change, Agnello! See! thou art not double now, Nor only one!"IV,v

In this unity Pierre appears to recede from the visible world. “Then Pierre felt that deep in him lurked a divine unidentifiableness, that owned no earthly kith or kin.” This is accompanied by the release of an unprecedented energy :

as it is the magical effect of the admission into man's inmost spirit of a before unexperienced and wholly inexplicable element, which like electricity suddenly received into any sultry atmosphere of the dark, in all directions splits itself into nimble lances of purifying light; which at one and the same instant discharge all the air of sluggishness and inform it with an illuminating property [...]

            Whereas Mary Gelendinning’s pride had served the proper balance for the father’s loss, now her very strength becomes an abomination. “[B]ut the Infinite Haughtiness had first fashioned her; and then the haughty world had further molded her; nor had a haughty Ritual omitted to finish her” I,v. When she finally confronts Pierre, the writer notes the full force of this assertive pride: "Some slut, I tell thee! I am no lady now, but something deeper,——a woman!——an outraged and pride-poisoned woman!" The lines echo nothing less than the transformation of Lady Macbeth.“ Come, you spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,/And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full/Of direst cruelty!”I,v

It is with some wonder why the lines of Mary Glendinning lack the dramatic import of Lady Macbeth’s speech. Certainly she has girded herself for the change to which she submits. And her words have all the intensity of the Shakespearean soliloquy, an effect that Melville has worked to capture. Nevertheless, the novelist does not extend the dramatic interplay beyond this confrontation. Even the announcement of the mother’s death is done entirely after the fact.

            The only things that can somewhat compensate for the lack of development is Pierre’s attempt at a total transformation of the self. He also rewrites his nature.

Omitting more subtile inquisition into this deftly-winding theme, it will be enough to hint, perhaps, that possibly one source of this new hatefulness had its primary and unconscious rise in one of those profound ideas, which at times atmospherically, as it were, do insinuate themselves even into very ordinary minds. In the strange relativeness, reciprocal-ness, and transmittedness, between the long-dead father's portrait, and the living daughter's face, Pierre might have seemed to see reflected to him, by visible and uncontradictable symbols, the tyranny of Time and Fate.

There is no impediment to his realization as is indicated by the emphasis on the reciprocal. The rather abstract nature of his order is a total affront to apparent natural roots invoked by the mother. But Pierre challenges the divine order. He is rewriting his history

"Thus, and thus, and thus! on thy manes I fling fresh spoils; pour out all my memory in one libation!——so, so, so——lower, lower, lower; now all is done, and all is ashes! Henceforth, cast-out Pierre hath no paternity, and no past; and since the Future is one blank to all; therefore, twice-disinherited Pierre stands untrammeledly his ever-present self!——free to do his own self-will and present fancy to whatever end!"

The novel grounds his personality in a clearly enunciated legacy. It immediately seems to attain a clarity about his origins. The overwhelming contradiction to that legacy is his father and the

history of Isabel.

            Melville contemplates self generation. He seeks to reverse the order of paternity so that it the son who creates the father. With such a claim on time, the writer is the ultimate creator.

Had Milton's been the lot of Caspar Hauser, Milton would have been vacant as he. For though the naked soul of man doth assuredly contain one latent element of intellectual productiveness; yet never was there a child born solely from one parent; the visible world of experience being that pro-creative thing which impregnates the muses; self-reciprocally efficient hermaphrodites being but a fable. XVIII

The hermaphrodite is the image of defiance. Experience yields to the imagination of the author who in turn generates his conditions of birth. Where experience and intellectual genesis wrestle in a quarrel over primacy, the product of fiction is this seamless entanglement which has no predecessor. It burns away all its ties to its point of entry. “He likes to be not only his own Alpha and Omega, but to be distinctly all the intermediate gradations, and then to slope off on his own spine either way, into the endless impalpable ether.” What variation from the theme is then not already incorporate in the novelist’s conflagration. That creative furnace burns with this integral vision. It is blasphemous. :Our God is a jealous God; He wills not that any man should permanently possess the least shadow of His own self-sufficient attributes.” The ‘self-sufficiency” is the signature of the fictional world. No wonder Pierre becomes paralyzed in this realization. His life is his novel! It is the result of his efforts at self-generation.

            Pierre’s sense of election proceeds from the harmony of nature. There is nary a witness against his immaculate incarnation. At the same time, the presaging of such an event must be an ultimate forboding. And this is where Pierre faces the stark presence of God. What initially had

been an announcement of pleasantry by its insufficiency invokes this deeper strain of melancholy: “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” XIV. What remains unsaid, withdrawn from his promise, is the region where Pierre asserts his personality. “His thoughts were very dark and wild; for a space there was rebellion and horrid anarchy and infidelity in his soul” XIV. The nothingness, this gap projects from the horrid lapse of divine silence. He fills in what cannot be filled. Hence the very assertion of his feelings are fraught with such prodigious instability. It is in the landscape of silence that Pierre accepts the doom to which he has become accustomed.

"Lo! I leave corpses wherever I go!" groaned Pierre to himself——"Can then my conduct be right? Lo! by my conduct I seem threatened by the possibility of a sin anomalous and accursed, so anomalous, it may well be the one for which Scripture says, there is never forgiveness. Corpses behind me, and the last sin before, how then can my conduct be right?" XIV

Ths is a story in search of a misdeed with which to explain misfortune. As such, we have the tragic conflict between Pierre’s tragic blamelessness and the source of guilt and shame. Pierre, therefore, challenges any illusion of natural law. What had been destined in his name demands to be repeated by actions in his name. If the silence of God besets him, then he must insure a permanence to this muteness.

            The pamphlet that Pierre discovers expresses the belief that he bridge his lapse. If a lapse in faith had created his exile then maybe a new realization of the divine might enable him to overcome his corruptibility. “To any earnest man of insight, a faithful contemplation of these ideas concerning Chronometricals and Horologicals, will serve to render provisionally far less dark some few of the otherwise obscurest things which have hitherto tormented the honest-thinking men of all ages”XV. The flimsy assertiveness of this document assumes that will alone can push aside the fallen nature with a new belief. “For in then- wickedness downright wicked men sin as much against their own horologes, as against the heavenly chronometer.” In this abstraction, Pierre confronts Hamlet’s experience of time:

The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right! I, ii 187-8

The weight of this discontinuity weighs on his psychology. But there is utmost vanity in assuming that Pierre can set is right. Hence, the rather chaotic form of the self seems to be in constant battle with itself. The real lapse is this initial harmony. “That is the offense against nature. No, this conceit merely goes to show, that for the mass of men, the highest abstract heavenly righteousness is not only impossible, but would be entirely out of place, and positively wrong in a world like this.” Since ideas celestial (chronometrical) appear to imply a divine harmony to contrast with human dissonance, the pamphlet expresses a supreme vanity. Not only does its writer suggest such a grand scheme, but his awareness gives him special access to that scheme. The hubris is astounding: “God's own sun does not abate one tittle of its heat in July, however you swoon with that heat in the sun.” Man must suffer because in its infinite form, that suffering is the foretaste of a rectification that exists in paradise. No wonder against this evil turn, Pierre aspires after the ascendency of the Titan. How else to protest against such meager justification of human misery.

            With Glen, Melville is able to exploit this discrepancy. His glimpse of the supposed harmony only offers him a bewilderment of the soul:

If in the eye of unyielding reality and truth, the earthly heart of man do indeed ever fix upon some one woman, to whom alone, thenceforth eternally to be a devotee, without a single shadow of the misgiving of its faith; and who, to him, does perfectly embody his finest, loftiest dream of feminine loveliness;

But the self strays from the vision: “The confirmed bachelor is, in America, at least, quite as often the victim of a too profound appreciation of the infinite charmingness of woman, as made solitary for life by the legitimate empire of a cold and tasteless temperament”. The only way for Glen to still this wandering is to assert what is at his core, his belligerency. “The immediate motive of Glen then must be the intense desire to disguise from the wide world, a fact unspeakably humiliating to his gold-laced and haughty soul.” Pierre faces his heritage in the form of this excessive pride.

            In Melville’s Pierre, he tries to “bring forth” the primordial roots of his tragic grief. He comes upon a rock that he describes as the “Terror Stone”. “Pierre plunged deep into the woods, and paused not for several miles; paused not till he came to a remarkable stone, or rather, smoothed mass of rock, huge as a barn, which, wholly isolated horizontally, was yet sweepingly overarched by beech-trees and chestnuts.” The mass of this rock seemed almost sculpted for him. “ A deep-down, unutterable mournfulness is in me. Now I drop all humorous or indifferent disguises, and all philosophical pretensions. I own myself a brother of the clod, & child of the Primeval Gloom.” To express his gloom, “he had thereupon fancifully christened [it] the Memnon Stone.”

The name situated his emotions within a deeper historical tradition. “[Memnon’s] wailing subjects built a monument in Egypt to commemorate his untimely fate. Touched by the breath of the bereaved Aurora, every sunrise that statue gave forth a mournful broken sound, as of a harp-string suddenly sundered, being too harshly wound.” Melville is documenting the origins of Shakespearean tragedy. At the same time, he offers gestures that are too great for the European transformation of this grief. “Herein lies an unsummed world of grief. For in this plaintive fable we find embodied the Hamletism of the antique world; the Hamletism of three thousand years ago: "Theflower of virtue cropped by a too rare mischance." And the English tragedy is but Egyptian Memnon, Montaignized and modernized; for being but a mortal man Shakespeare had his fathers too.” Others in the community either ignore the stone or rather humorously extend its origins to Solomon “‘after all these tedious preliminaries, this not-at-all-to-be-hurried white-haired old kinsman, had laid his tremulous hand upon Pierre's firm young shoulder, and slowly whispered—"Boy; 'tis Solomon the Wise.’”    The text offers the terror stone as a “head-stone”. He pushes so close to death so that he can engage both the majesty and the grief. Its utter precariousness seems like a challenge to gravity. At first glance, it suggests a contempt for humanity. And so in its gesture, Pierre sees a purpose in the rock.

Not only might this stone well have been the wonder of the simple country round, but it might well have been its terror. Sometimes, wrought to a mystic mood by contemplating its ponderous inscrutableness, Pierre had called it the Terror Stone. Few could be bribed to climb its giddy height, and crawl out upon its more hovering end. It seemed as if the dropping of one seed from the beak of the smallest flying bird would topple the immense mass over, crashing against the trees. XII, iv

He tempts this vertiginous path.” But never had he been fearless enough—or rather fool-hardy enough, it may be, to crawl on the ground beneath the vacancy of the higher end; that spot first menaced by the Terror Stone should it ever really topple.” So he skirts the very vacuum that the rock implies. In this manner, the rock evokes a fear that cuts across his being.

            His contact with the rock identifies how he is surpassing himself. It sings of his metamorphosis. “Yet now advancing steadily, and as if by some interior predetermination, and eying the mass unfalteringly; he then threw himself prone upon the wood's last year's leaves,

and slid himself straight into the horrible interspace, and lay there as dead.” XII, v This is the hollow of God’s hand: “He holdeth all of us in the hollow of His hand?——a Hollow, truly!”

Such is Pierre’s stage where he delivers his self analysis with soliloquy’s force/

"If the miseries of the undisclosable things in me, shall ever unhorse me from my manhood's seat; if to vow myself all Virtue's and all Truth's, be but to make a trembling, distrusted slave of me; if Life is to prove a burden I can not bear without ignominious cringings; if indeed our actions are all foreordained, and we are Russian serfs to Fate; if invisible devils do titter at us when we most nobly strive; if Life be a cheating dream, and virtue as unmeaning and unsequeled with any blessing as the midnight mirth of wine; if by sacrificing myself for Duty's sake, my own mother re-sacrifices me; if Duty's self be but a bugbear, and all things are allowable and unpunishable to man;—then do thou, Mute Massiveness, fall on me! Ages thou hast waited; and if these things be thus, then wait no more; for whom better canst thou crush than him who now lies here invoking thee?"

The foreordained provides a natural harmony for the turmoil that besets Pierre. It replaces his legacy with “Fate”. This appears to be a more satisfying emotional resolution. In its very illusion, Pierre can escape the dominance of experience: “‘If Life be a cheating dream.’” Thus he can provide his own determination by giving to this greater force, the “Mute Massiveness”. He projects himself out beyond the realm of virtue’s resolve.

            The myth offer narrative form for the turmoil in Pierre: “His wailing subjects built a monument in Egypt to commemorate his untimely fate. Touched by the breath of the bereaved Aurora, every sunrise that statue gave forth a mournful broken sound, as of a harp-string suddenly sundered, being too harshly wound.” The “mournful broken sound” finds echo in Isabel’s guitar. Even her name Bell is the knell of this ancient plaint.

Herein lies an unsummed world of grief. For in this plaintive fable we find embodied the Hamletism of the antique world; the Hamletism of three thousand years ago: "The

flower of virtue cropped by a too rare mischance." And the English tragedy is but Egyptian Memnon, Montaignized and modernized; for being but a mortal man

Shakespeare had his fathers too.

Pierre appears to rewaken the mute and as thus he is a poetic herald. “Fit emblem

that of old, poetry was a consecration and an obsequy to all hapless modes of human life; but in a bantering, barren, and prosaic, heartless age, Aurora's music-moan is lost among our drifting sands, which whelm alike the monument and the dirge.” He cannot simply reflect the moan; he must live it. Almost as a curse, he accepts the deep grief. Its thus overcomes the placid of the novel’s early rendition.. Only the deep stirring of Pierre’s heart can break the resistance of the “bantering, barren, and prosaic heartless age”. If he is engaged by this stirring, then “Aurora’s music-moan” comes to life. In the Montaingnized form, the modernization has further muted Aurora’s plaint. Shakespearean tragedy still echoes the feeling but it has been rendered inchoate. In his experience, Pierre has witnessed his own affintity with Hamlet. But Hamlet’s fate has been compromised in Shakespeare. While he is shaken by the resonance of these deep truths,

he will not yield to the “madness” of his grief.

The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me: II, ii 603-8

His melancholy awakens a deeper nature. But he ascribes the influence of the spirit to the devil’s abuse of his weakness. Moreover, he seeks to resolve the dilemma by his own appeal to the King’s conscience:

the play 's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king. 609-10

His arbitration is to follow entirely logical lines. The clarity of the theatrical representation will so affect the king that he will admit to the accusation of his nephew. As well, the intensity of this realization will overcome Claudius by the guilt that the he will suffer. If Hamlet is to attain this vantage point, he himself must engage a feeling that is so much more encompassing than can affect his uncle. Verily, it must exceed the abstract balances of consciousness. Early in the scene he confronts the ability of theater to propel the deeper tears of the soul.

But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? 555-63

In the act, all aspects of the drama are combined to convey a disruption in the personality, “his whole function suiting.” Such representation though distant from the actor causes all the emotional accommodation. Again, the lament of Hecuba for her son Polydorus has the ability, even in a weak performance, to engender tears in the actor and by extension in the audience. The grief in its mythic form is so intense and the details of the acting touch the viewer in a emotional way comparable to that original melancholy. If the actor is so enthralled, then Hamlet is all the more taken by his burden, his “motive and [his] cue for passion”. Melville notes the nobility that permits Hamlet to countenance such all encompassing feeling: “Now as the Memnon Statue survives down to this present day, so does that nobly-striving but ever-shipwrecked character in some royal youths (for both Memnon and Hamlet were the sons of kings), of which that statue is the melancholy type.” By contemplating the same type, Pierre is able to attain the profundities of this noble emotion. That nobility has been compromised by the Shakespearean rewrite. “Herein lies an unsummed world of grief. For in this plaintive fable we find embodied the Hamletism of the antique world [...]” In the stone, Pierre can give voice to all that has been muted in the Shakespearean tragedy. He can aspire after the Titans. Prometheus defies Zeus and underlines the limitations of any theology. Even the gods face challenges of psychology. Like Shakepeare, Zeus has his fathers. Melville confronts such disorders beset the spirit of a man: “That hour of the life of a man when first the help of humanity fails him, and he learns that in his obscurity and indigence humanity holds him a dog and no man: that hour is a hard one, but not the hardest.” XXII, i. The source of these instabilities are in his actual nature. “There is still another hour which follows, when he learns that in his infinite comparative minuteness and abjectness, the gods do likewise despise him, and own him not of their clan.” It is Prometheus’s defense of humanity in that man has the same nobility has the gods. Thus, he cannot yield to all that is capricious in the judgement of the gods. Pierre rejects these cosmic sums. And in his “abjectness” he returns to his divine origins. For he makes claims to a deeper legacy that will disproportion the rejection: “the gods [...] own him not of their clan.” That is the moan of tragedy, the terror of the stone. It cannot yield to the logic of tragedy’s resolution.

            In the image of another rock, Pierre will celebrate the gesture of the Titan. “This American Enceladus, wrought by the vigorous hand of Nature's self, it did go further than compare;—it did far surpass that fine figure molded by the inferior skill of man.” On the verge of annihilation, Pierre is able to raise his defiant transcendental gesture.     Pierre’s confrontation with the nature of the Terror Stone introduces him to an inconsolable grief that overcomes the limited proportions of tragedy. Already the stone has invited “the repulsed group of heaven-assaulters”. Pierre’s onslaught is all the more an affront to the metaphysical representation. He pursues this challenge even in his dream: “‘Enceladus! it is Enceladus!’—Pierre cried out in his sleep.” His waking presents an even more intense dynamic for him, the shift from “ ideal horror to all his actual grief”. But only the reference to the ideal of Enceladus offers sense of the details of Pierre’s actual grief.

Old Titan's self was the son of incestuous Coelus and Terra, the son of incestuous Heaven and Earth. And Titan married his mother Terra, another and accumulatively

incestuous match. And thereof Enceladus was one issue. So Enceladus was both the son and grandson of an incest; and even thus, there had been born from the organic

blended heavenliness and earthliness of Pierre, another mixed, uncertain, heaven-aspiring, but still not wholly earth-emancipated mood; which again, by its terrestrial taint

held down to its terrestrial mother, generated there the present doubly incestuous Enceladus within him; so that the present mood of Pierre—that reckless sky-assaulting

mood of his, was nevertheless on one side the grandson of the sky. For it is according to eternal fitness, that the precipitated Titan should still seek to regain his paternal

birthright even by fierce escalade. Wherefore whoso storms the sky gives best proof he came from thither! But whatso crawls contented in the moat before that crystal fort,

shows it was born within that slime, and there forever will abide. XXV, v

The incestuous line in Pierre is only a recapitulation of the Titanic protest. This is Pierre’s divine nature, one that challenges heavenly edict. As the text indicates he is invigorated “by the present doubly incestuous Enceladus within him”. His actual grief is only the limit of Melville’s creative gesture. His character is thus ridden by the quotidian melancholy that wears him down. Previously, Pierre reflected how his dilemma has no transcendental rescue:

"A deep-down, unutterable mournfulness is in me. Now I drop all humorous or

indifferent disguises, and all philosophical pretensions. I own myself a brother of the clod, & child of the Primeval Gloom. Hopelessness and despair are over me, as pall on

pall. Away, ye chattering apes of a sophomorean Spinoza and Plato, who once didst all but delude me that the night was day, and pain only a tickle. Explain this

darkness, exorcise this devil, ye can not. Tell me not, thou inconceivable coxcomb of a Goethe, that the universe can not spare thee and thy immortality, so long as—like

a hired waiter—thou makest thyself 'generally useful.' Already the universe gets on without thee, and could still spare a million more of the same identical kidney.

Corporations have no souls, and thy Pantheism, what was that? Thou wert but the pretentious, heartless part of a man. Lo! I hold thee in this hand, and thou art crushed in

it like an egg from which the meat hath been sucked." XXII,iii

The “universe gets on” in its banality. No belief in a deeper purpose will offer sustenance to the inconsolable. The writer awaits the realistic–a bureaucratic display of the “useless” minutiae of his everyday.