Forms of Performance in Herman Melville’s Pierre

Session Coordinator: Jeffory A. Clymer
Department of English
1215 Patterson Office Tower
University of Kentucky
Lexington , KY
40506-0027
jeff_clymer@hotmail.com

“For not in words can it be spoken”: Musical Performance and The Musical Subversions of Linguistic Failure in Herman Melville’s Pierre

During the 1840s, music criticism was given a prominent place in such Transcendentalist magazines as The Dial, The Pioneer, and The Harbinger. From the musical writings in these magazines, most notably those penned by John Sullivan Dwight, there emerged what one could rightly consider a Transcendentalist theory of music. This essay explores the key components of Dwight’s music theory that appeared in those magazines and utilizes them to analyze the presence of musical performance in Herman Melville’s 1852 novel, Pierre ; or, The Ambiguities.

In particular, I will argue that in accordance with Melville’s well documented frustration with language as a purveyor of knowledge, it seems right that in Pierre, Melville would turn to music and musical performance as a way to articulate thought, for when Melville was writing Pierre, music, as theorized by Dwight and others in the Transcendentalist magazines of the time, was considered the perfect human expression, the means by which to give the fullest utterance to the soul.

Aaron McClendon
Saint Louis University
mcclena@SLU.EDU

Psychological Landscape and the Search for Truth in Herman Melville’s Pierre

The hauntingly idyllic representation of landscape in Herman Melville’s Pierre has been duly noted by several critics – including Samuel Otter and Mark Slouka – who have focused largely on its gothic affinities and repressive snares. My essay contends, however, that through the overtly ironic treatment of nature in the novel, Melville attempts to supersede the popular vision of an America defined by the landscape in favor of a product borne of American minds: namely, a literature divorced of the “unapproachable” European tradition that Melville outlines in his treatise, “ Hawthorne and His Mosses.” By interiorizing Pierre’s authorial struggles as a new psychological landscape in which one mines the veritable depths of the soul for that “elusive Truth”, Melville severs the bond between past and present, inheritance and destiny.

Ultimately, this psychological landscape reveals to Pierre a mirror of himself in the mythic titan Enceladus, who is mired to the earth after assaulting the gods. Here, Pierre is defeated – his novel unfinished – and the role of fiction as an instrument of truth is problematized; as a product of the imagination, the landscape of the American mind reveals only the ambiguous nature of truth itself – one not incongruous with the celebrated ambiguities of Pierre.

David Olsen
Saint Louis University
olsendb@SLU.EDU

Melville’s Inalienable Properties

Much of the Melville canon can be read through the lens of property relations. Pierre; or, the Ambiguities, in particular, presents a remarkably meticulous analysis of how notions of property rights and ideas of subjectivity are mutually constituted. To say that Pierre theorizes the relationship between property and identity is, of course, to place the novel within the American strain of political and philosophical thought derived from John Locke. But while Pierre falls within this tradition of theorizing the liberal subject, I am not advocating that we simply add “property” to the list of ideas that scholars have routinely identified as Melville’s philosophical obsessions. I argue, instead, that Pierre is interesting precisely because Melville takes two concrete forms of American property relations—the estates of the landed gentry in upstate New York and the somewhat overlapping, somewhat sequential development of an urban, market economy along the antebellum Northeastern seaboard—and churns them into a meditation on how alienability, the definitive aspect of capitalist property, impacted forms of non-slave identity in the antebellum United States.

Jeffory A. Clymer
University of Kentucky
Jeff_clymer@hotmail.com