(This is an edited and slightly expanded version of a paper I wrote in grad school some years ago; again, the explanation for the tiresome MLA flourishes.)
Herman Melville’s seventh novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities can be said to be a work with more defenders than admirers, and therefor a work that attracts modes of criticism that emphasize justification instead of explanation; that is to say, the business of shedding some hermeneutical light is intimately bound up with the task of explaining (wishing) that the light will catch something worth seeing. The reader of such criticism is assumed a skeptic. Indeed, Pierre has generally only been judged worthy as a kind of post-Moby-Dick hangover (a metaphor for Melville’s psychological disturbances, which we hope weren’t overly determined by alcohol), or as a parody of contemporaneous novelistic modes, or as a precursor to broadly ‘modernist’ literary techniques, or simply the predecessor to Melville’s strong short fiction and poetry. Very few have taken the book to be of value in itself, and matters are not helped by Pierre’s lurid subject matter (The plot briefly summarized: A young man breaks it off with his fiancé so he can marry his sister.) or its oblique approach to its thematic concerns. Oftentimes, the emotions and subjects Melville evokes seem to exist at a right angle to the events of the story, especially the transparently autobiographical later chapters of the book in which the titular hero embarks on a doomed writing career. Pierre, whatever its eccentricities as a story or as a work of art, is too rich and profound in many of its sections to be dismissed outright, but a significant challenge to any critic, still having to play the role of a defender, is to elucidate on the ‘ambiguities’ alluded to in the title. The most effective way to do this is to consider, at least in part, the circumstances under which it was written and the motivations Melville had in writing it in the first place.
It is not unreasonable to suggest that Melville’s writing was every bit as exploratory as it was declarative; its sermonic tendencies may have obscured this point for some readers. Putative statement need not be lacking in a capacity for ambiguity. Melville wrote to work through his moral, aesthetic, spiritual, and psychological obsessions, and occasionally, over the course of a single work, his thematic and philosophical subjects would alter significantly, shooting off on discursive courses over which the author felt he may not have had full control. Of the most importance, Melville would leave the shifts in theme apparent to his readers, as they were easily trackable through the alternating generic modalities of his style; the attentive reader could trace Melville’s thought process, or at least a literary proxy of it, over the events of a story. Moby-Dick is the paradigmatic example of this tendency. The critic Andrew Delbanco put it quite well:
“He [Melville] was the first to understand that if a literary work is to register the improvisational nature of experience, it must be as spontaneous and self-surprising as the human mind itself. …by concealing the existence of earlier versions of his work, he ran the risk of falsifying himself. In this sense, Moby-Dick was like an active archeological site in which the layers of its own history are left deliberately exposed. (146)
I will argue that while foregrounding the writing process is useful for understanding many of Melville’s works, it is absolutely essential for understanding Pierre. Pierre is the novel where the act of composition is considered in a direct, literal fashion, and the value of writing is confronted and interrogated at length. The mental process revealed over the course of the plot is one of disillusionment, but that assessment in itself is incomplete. There are in fact multiple types of disillusionment on display, running from loss in faith in the security of the family unit, the viability of Christian morals, the achievability of an ideal artistic expression, the ability to communicate anything of oneself to others, and even the possibility of knowledge. In writing Pierre, Melville displayed a forfeiture of faith in writing itself, or in the creative act which had sustained him for many years. Considering his productivity after the publication of Pierre, it is safe to say that Melville recovered from this disenchantment to some degree, but his seventh novel represents what is probably his biggest crisis in faith; namely, his faith in his artistic mission. My task will be tracking the psychological and emotional trajectory of this crisis as presented in Pierre.
The origins of Melville’s ‘Kraken’ book lay in his frustrations concerning readers’ expectations. Pigeonholed as a relatively frivolous travel writer and “resident authority on things nautical and places exotic” (Higgins and Parker 5) Melville was keen to make the best use of his newly-discovered literary talents. The genesis of his first post-Moby-Dick outing was part of his expanding effort to attain artistic and intellectual autonomy and uniqueness: “…in mid-November 1851… Melville was ripe for an attempt at a new, non-nautical genre through which he might make a bid for a high, less specialized literary reputation and through which he might satisfy his internal needs to surpass his previous literary achievements” (Higgins and Parker 5-6). Inevitably, such ambition is accompanied by anxiety, and Melville was (oddly?) predisposed to exacerbate it by modeling the dysfunctional dynamic of the Glendinning family, the focus of his novel’s incestuous drama, after his own family’s internal scandals. Specifically, there is some reason to believe that Melville’s father, Allan Melville, had fathered an illegitimate daughter. In addition, he had died in a state of delirium not dissimilar to that of Pierre Glendinning’s father (Higgins and Parker 6). These disparate anxieties would coalesce to generate the story of Pierre. The symbolic capacities of the subjects already existed in incipient form, as observed by Higgins and Parker:
In Pierre, the plot involving the sudden appearance of an unknown young woman, supposedly half-sister of the hero, had the great advantage of being easily allegorized within Melville’s psychological preoccupations: in the “boundless expansion” of Pierre’s life and mind Isabel would represent the invading unconscious. (6)
This “invading unconscious” would prompt an internal unfolding that would disrupt every vestige of security the character of Pierre possessed. Once Pierre comes to recognize the needs of his inner life, he becomes inescapably dissatisfied with his hollow existence at his estate, Saddle Meadows. The story’s tragic dénouement is the revelation that Pierre is incapable of satisfying his social and psychological needs due to both his circumstances and personal flaws.
The parodic tendencies of Pierre are most conspicuous in the early parts of the book, where the pastoral quaintness of Pierre’s home at Saddle Meadows is too overtly saccharine to be taken seriously. As one critic described it, “…we can suspect that nature has been too thoroughly domesticated… This place is too soft a pastoral… its very lushness a symptom of unresolved and unrecognized problems” (Brodhead 226). The picturesque environment is meant to symbolize the infantile falsity of Pierre’s youthful mindset at the start of the story. Pierre’s troubles are clearly not meant to be contingent or avoidable, but a permanent feature of his condition that, in his ignorance and youth, he is initially unable to recognize. Saddle Meadows is only edenic in appearance because Pierre has yet to acquire necessary knowledge, and this knowledge significantly prompts an inward-directed psychological investigation that comes to generate very external social consequences.
As the great, exploratory symbol of Moby-Dick is the whale, the image that centers and structures the symbolic order of Pierre is the human face. This implies many things, including a thematic concern for communication (Human expressions are ‘read,’ after all.) and human subjectivity (Human expressions reveal inner emotional truths, after all.). It is a human face that initially disrupts Pierre’s harmonious existence. Attending a social gathering with his mother, Pierre observes a young woman whom the reader later learns is Pierre’s half-sister Isabel. Observing Isabel’s melancholy features exerts a profound influence on Pierre that proves life-altering: “…my creed of this world leads me to believe in visible, beautiful flesh… but now! – And again he [Pierre] would lose himself in the most surprising… ponderings, which baffled all the introspective cunning of his mind. Himself was too much for himself” [Italics mine] (Melville 49). Furthermore, Isabel’s face is said to “mystically appeal to his own private and individual affections… challenging him in his deepest moral being…” (Melville 49). It is important to bear in mind that all of these ponderings occur well before Pierre has any way of knowing who Isabel is or her relation to him and his father. Yet all of Pierre’s future anxieties are already present in incipient form, implying either an origin from within or a kind of mystical sympathy between the characters. The challenge of Isabel’s countenance is that of an authentic image- perhaps kindred to a Platonic form, or deeper truth- that disrupts the superficial (some might say degraded to artificiality) appearances of Pierre’s immediate environment. This initial shock prompts further, eventually self-destructive, reflections and discoveries.
Upon learning of Isabel and her illegitimate origins, Pierre relocates the portrait of his father, whom he had previously venerated, and pauses a while to observe his features as the painting mediates them; this is the novel’s second considered ‘reading’ of a human face. It prompts the first lesson of Pierre’s development, and that is the essential artifice and hypocrisy of the adult world and social environment he is about to enter as a young man coming of age. Imagining the portrait speaking to him, Pierre hears: “I [the image in the painting] am thy father as he [Pierre’s actual father] more truly was. In mature life, the world overlays and varnishes us… we, as it were, abdicate ourselves, and take unto us another self… in youth we are, Pierre, but in age we seem” (Italics Melville’s) (Melville 83). The painting of his father reinforced Pierre’s heroic conception of the Glendinning family dynamic, and the recognition of the hollowness and inauthentic nature of its idealized portrayal signifies a simultaneous loss of faith in the possible accuracy of artistic expression. In this section, Pierre learns that his social existence is false and that the lie is reinforced with the misleading idealizations of art.
The possible meanings of this revelation and their implications are temporarily deferred and the subsequent courses Pierre’s psychological development takes are significantly different. They primarily concern a repudiation of contingency, or the efforts of Pierre to locate an eternal, transcendent principle in his inner self that owes nothing to the circumstances of his lived, social reality or the material world. Pierre even asks himself, “How shall I steal yet further into Pierre, and show how this heavenly fire was helped to be contained in him, by mere contingent things… but I shall follow the endless, winding way… careless whither I be led, reckless where I land” (Melville 107). Pierre makes this declaration with the intention of acting on the dictums issued from within his soul, to forsake mere propriety for eternal Truth. The actions Pierre ends up taking are done with the purpose of creating a ‘pure’ social order in line with the eternal truths of God. The impossibility of achieving such an order is supposed to be the crux of the story’s tragedy, but the resemblance of Pierre’s mission to Melville’s own literary endeavor is unmistakable. Not content with his privileged but limited lot, he seeks alternatives courageously but recklessly, valuing the journey perhaps due to an intuitive understanding that the destination does not exist.
The manner by which Pierre seeks his alternative social and moral being was and remains the most controversial aspect of his story. He dissolves his relationship with the respectable young woman Lucy Tartan and arranges a false ‘marriage’ with his newly-discovered half-sister Isabel and then flees to a nameless city to pursue a career as a writer. The incestuous subtext is immediately apparent, and the fact that Pierre seeks to justify his actions with broadly moral rhetoric makes the arrangement that much more grotesque and bizarre. Amy Puett Putters put it quite well: “The work evolved… into a scathing portrayal of a young man consciously bent on doing right- honoring an obligation to support a girl he believes to be his late father’s illegitimate daughter- but unconsciously driven by incestuous love for this same girl” (239). It is important to understand, however, that Pierre’s ethical concerns are not mere sublimation of sexual desire. Rather, the two feelings coexist and amplify one another. Richard Brodhead aptly described the tendency as a “holy feeling” that increases with its combination with a sexual desire and the suppression of the awareness of that desire (235). The result is an often confusing but fascinating yearning that is both authentically holy and genuinely profane. Such a yearning is rearticulated in the later section in the form of Pierre’s attempt at beginning a career as a writer, a move that excites his inner desire for truth-telling but which he undertakes at least in part for vulgar (or at least practical), material reasons. He needs to earn money for his new family. However authentic each half of his desire may be on its own, practical demands work so that they cancel each other out, and Pierre is forced to lie to himself and others in order to pursue his ‘Truth.’ “The necessary deception,” observed the critic Lawrance Thompson, “to the effect that Isabel and Pierre are married, is but the first of innumerable subterfuges and lies which Pierre is forced to make… as he tries to imitate God…” (280). The result is that both Pierre’s publishers and the relatives of his surrogate family correctly brand him a liar, and Pierre’s final self-recognition is the novel’s tragic ending.
The fact that Pierre receives two nasty letters near the story’s end accusing him of being a liar and a fraud is significant. They repudiate not so much Pierre’s moral mission as his inability (or possible unconscious unwillingness) to properly communicate its importance and legitimacy to anyone else. The letter from Stanly and Frederic attacks Pierre’s pursuit of an alternative family and corresponding social structure, and the letter from the publisher attacks his artistic integrity, on moral grounds (Melville 356-357). Neither set of accusations reflects the true motivations of Pierre, but rather the social compromises he had to make to pursue those motivations, and our protagonist is left with the reputation of possessing those familiar faults- that is, essentially fraudulent modes of expression- that he had previously ascribed to the social milieu he has come to reject and that were interrogated at length vis-à-vis the painting of Pierre’s father. The most intriguing thing about Pierre is the manner in which Melville expands and alters the trajectory of its tragedy. The surface plot involves a young man learning the impossibility of leading a holy and truthful life in line with God’s eternal laws because the material and contingent social concerns of the world make such a life impossible. In pursuing this line of thought, Melville seemed to recognize a parallel with the creative desire, and the inherent uncertainty about whether art could codify and make coherent many of life’s mysteries. He also came to recognize art’s capacity to be frivolous or fraudulent, and this led to at least a temporary state of disillusionment with his creative capacity. The worst possible thing that could happen to an artist in Melville’s position is to be accused of inauthenticity, and this is exactly what happens to Pierre. The split nature of the book’s tragedy is somewhat confused, but undeniably rich and possibly the single most revealing and autobiographical sequence in all of Melville’s works. The depiction of the anxiety of the religious mission is partially abandoned for the portrait of the artist as young martyr.
Works Cited
Delbanco, Andrew. Melville: His World and Work. New York: Random House, Inc.
Print.
Melville, Herman. Pierre, or the Ambiguities. New York: Penguin. 1996. Print.
Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parker, eds. Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s Pierre,
Or the Ambiguities. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co. 1983. Print.
Brodhead, Richard. “Conscious Idealizings and Unconscious Sexuality.” Higgins and
Parker 226-236.
Emmers, Amy Puett. “New Crosslights on the Illegitimate Daughter in Pierre.” Higgins
and Parker 237-240.
Higgins, Brian and Hershel Parker. “Introduction.” Higgins and Parker 1-27
Thompson, Lawrance. Melville’s Quarrel with God. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
(Note: I have fallen behind on my promised follow-up to my post on Michelle Remembers, so here is a little something to tide over all zero of my regular readers. It is a slightly edited version of a paper I wrote for an independent study back in grad school, so of course MLA formatting is present in all of its glory. I had previously posted on Herman Melville and his third novel, Mardi,hereandhere. Enjoy! I hope to have the MR post up sometime in October.)
Herman Melville’s literary ambitions underwent a significant change in character between his second and third novels, shifting away from the genre of fictionalized (though how fictionalized is still debated) travelogue to the romantic, philosophical, and more self-consciously ‘literary.’ The change is announced from the author’s note that precedes the title page of Melville’s third production, Mardi (1849):
“Not long ago, having published two narratives of voyages in the Pacific, which, in many quarters, were received with incredulity, the thought occurred to me, of indeed writing a romance of Polynesian adventure, and publishing it as such; to see whether the fiction might not, possibly, be received for a verity: in some degree the reverse of my experience. This thought was the germ of others, which have resulted in Mardi.” (xvii)
Though the broad and expansive genre of the nautical adventure ostensibly remained the baseline for this literary project (Melville even promises to focus his attention on Polynesia, the setting of his first two works, Typee and Omoo.), Melville clearly intended for there to be dramatic formal, stylistic, and thematic alterations to the nature of his writing. In that respect, Mardi does not disappoint. Though Melville advertised an intention to compose a ‘romance,’ not necessarily in the Hawthornian sense of that word, there really is no pinning down the generic orientation of Melville’s third novel. The author’s note foregrounds, right from the outset, an interest in the relationship between truth and fiction, a topic which inevitably summons the larger subject of epistemology. Melville was notably frustrated by critics who took his Typee and Omoo as fabrications when he intended them to be reflections of his actual lived thoughts and experiences. The fact that a literary mediation cast doubt on what Melville understood to be the truth would be the first ‘germ’ in the cultivation of a radically new way he had about how he understood and ‘thought with’ literature. This was no doubt helped along significantly by the immense volume of new books he was reading in the months leading up to and during the composition of Mardi. Melville, being an expansive if occasionally confused thinker, must have noticed immediately that the problem of genre is at the heart of the question concerning the relationship of fiction and truth. The formal conventions of genre and the specific, often constraining storytelling elements that go along with it, impose a degree of artifice on the vagaries, disunities, and contradictions that mark human thought. Human thought may not necessarily be ‘the truth’ of the universe (in fact, it quite probably is not) but it is quite obviously the only material human beings have to work with for comprehending themselves and their environment, or whatever other phenomena they may care to ponder. While composing Mardi, Melville discovered with an intense zeal his capacity for intellectual, spiritual, moral, and aesthetic exploration, and this led inexorably to a frustration with genre, more specifically his chosen genre of the seafaring romance. The consequence of this struggle is a book that is of multiple genres, and which possesses little formal unity. The critic Merrell R. Davis isolated no fewer than three distinct books within Melville’s ostensibly single volume: “The Narrative Beginning,” “The Romantic Interlude,” and “The Travelogue-Satire.” It may be possible to isolate further books still. Overall, Mardi gives the reader a vivid sense of the circumstances of its writing; when Melville seemingly exhausted the epistemological potential of one genre, he would move on to another, leaving the attentive critic with the over-arching impression of a meditation whose structural integrity hinges on the ongoing act of literary composition.
For these reasons, what ‘standard’ formal coherence exists in Mardi is, I would argue, a product of Melville‘s engagement with his major theme: knowledge. Mardi can be taken as an intelligible record of an artist’s intellectual growth, but not as a fully-realized aesthetic achievement. Melville’s favored rhetorical devices for the exploration of the range and limits of the human mind, especially in the later sections of the book, were the allegory and the philosophical dialogue. The shifts in genre that occur throughout the novel, for the most part, can be tracked through the alteration of these rhetorical devices and related stylistic shifts; it is a compositional approach that has the effect of altering the ‘reality’ (that is, the superficially realistic qualities of the story and how they relate to the putative reality of the reader) of the narrative. If one were to merely consider the events of the narrative, then Mardi would seem to be a more easily classifiable text. As the scholar Chris Sten noted, Mardi can be understood as an “imaginary voyage,” or “one of the principal forms of the novel before the twentieth century. The precursor of the modern genre of science fiction, which proposes to describe life in a distant time, the imaginary voyage pretended to describe life in a distant place…” (64) This narrative form proved to be sufficiently expansive to accommodate the full range of Melville’s developing obsessions, leaving room for philosophical speculations, mythopoeic questing, rugged nautical adventure, pointed political satire, and much else besides. The imaginary voyage would seem to have allowed Melville the opportunity to think about the world through a representation of the world (arguably the business of all literature) in the fluid and multifaceted way he desired.
As I have indicated, the chief theme of Mardi is knowledge, and the cumulative effect of the narrative is that of a journey inward, into the life of the mind. The story’s essentially tragic orientation is recognition of the frustrating insecurity that comes from an awareness of the limitations and frequent unreliability of human thought and perception. The basic plot, or the bulk of it anyway, consists of the narrator Taji’s efforts to recover the maiden Yillah (a symbolic personification of a utopian or spiritual ideal) within the mythical South Seas archipelago of Mardi. Assisting him is an entourage from the island kingdom of Odo whose members are each representations of certain human intellectual and creative faculties. As Merrell Davis observed, “The voyage through Mardi is both a quest and a sight-seeing expedition, at once a grand tour of the innumerable islands of a mythical archipelago and a quest to recover a phantom… the voyage affords an opportunity for presenting… satirical characterizations which are directed toward the exposure of the follies and vices of man and the institutions which man has created” (142). Mardi is a world in itself, an arena to be explored or mapped out. Yillah can be taken as an ideal clarifying principle, or a vision of utopia. Her perpetual elusiveness illustrates both the limitations of human knowledge, and the un-achievability of a utopian social order. The relationship between the world and the means of representing the world, and by extension understanding the world, has central importance in Mardi. The proliferation of diverse social orders and personalities in conjunction with a proliferation in symbolic representation is, I will argue, the principal reason behind its stylistic changes; as the world changes (that is to say, as we perceive more and more of the world’s varied constituent parts), so must the mode of representation, and any shift in representation in turn informs how the world comes to be understood, and how new information about it is processed. The practical effect of this unfolding in the context of Melville’s novel is a drift away from representing reality into representing representation, or the patterns of human thought itself. The ‘voyage thither’ of the subtitle could just as easily be ‘a voyage inward.’
As I have established, Mardi is conspicuously lacking in a formal structure from a strictly ‘literary’ point of view, but some unity becomes legible if one thinks of it as less a novel and more a creative representation of an intellectual development. In some respects, Mardi is a bildungsroman (or a confessional) masquerading as a romantic quest. One critic who has gone further than most in tracking the elusive formal unity of Mardi is Bruce L. Grenberg, who reasonably observed, “Surely it is foolish to think that the shift from adventure-narrative to allegorical quest slipped into Mardi undetected by Melville… it seems manifest that Melville saw a unity in the book that has eluded most readers, a unity that comprises more than a simple consistence of narrative point of view” (27). The narrator of the story, who will eventually adopt the moniker Taji, begins his tale as a bored and listless crewmember on a whaling ship becalmed at sea. His dissatisfaction stems not just from mere boredom, but a more deeply felt spiritual malaise. His vision of the universe is monistic, and perhaps panentheistic: “Thus all generations are blended: and heaven and earth of one kin… the nations and families, flocks and folds of the earth; one and all brothers in essence… All things form but one whole; the universe a Judea, and God Jehovah its head” (Melville 12). The narrow and circumscribed world of the whale ship Arcturion is hardly a fitting place to become better acquainted with the expansive divinity of the wider world. This line also marks the first unambiguous evocation of a Neoplatonic conception of the world, a view that Melville granted a number of his narrators, most notably Ishmael from Moby-Dick. In the Neoplatonic scheme, the Great Chain of Being, the most perfect being sits atop a metaphysical hierarchy and governs the apparent plurality of all things, including the principles of change and evolution. The unity of the plurality can be understood in terms of the most perfect being on top- God. “[F]or certainly in this conception of the universe, angels and earthlings… and human ‘nations and families’ can indeed be ‘brothers in essence… for all these creatures have in common their spiritual selves (their essences) and all emanate from the Supreme Being” (Zimmerman 39). This understanding of ultimate truth deeply informs Taji’s quest and helps explain the seemingly endless proliferation of island nations explored in the later chapters of Mardi; from the Neoplatonic standpoint, one arrives at ultimate truth through an engagement with the diversity of forms- and concludes that they are ultimately One.
Even in the early, realistic chapters of Melville’s novel, Taji’s quest has a clear intellectual component, and the reader receives some subtle hints of the future dissolution of the recognizable ‘real’ world and the entrance into the fanciful world of the mythical archipelago. Taji’s motivation for abandoning the Arcturion with his simpleton companion Jarl sets up the eventual generic shift: “We are asked to join a narrator who… flees a known and secure reality in search of self, tries simultaneously to penetrate and transcend the facts of the world in an effort to grasp the comprehensive meaning of those facts. We are asked to enter the world of the mind” (Grenberg 28). However, such an abdication of security, both physical and social (Jarl aside), cannot have immediate rewards. Abandoning one’s ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is not a soft measure, and the most immediate effect is not one of transcendent experience but an encounter with the raw, brutal reality of the natural order. Here the reader gets their first epistemic model- Empiricism. More precisely, an empiricist approach to the natural world is joined with a Transcendentalist sensibility in Taji’s character. “With the security of social order and custom behind him, the narrator finds himself frighteningly close to the dense reality he would transcend… Melville is asking us to join his narrator in exploring the world as it truly is, not as it seems to be through habit and common perception” (Grenberg 28). This intimate encounter with reality is perfectly matched with a relatively realistic (but typically rhapsodic and allusive) narrative style in the early chapters, and Taji’s method of epistemic mastery is careful observation and classification. This is on display in chapter 13, where Taji describes the various species of shark observed from his and Jarl’s boat. This task has a peculiar sense of urgency: “Ever present to us, was the apprehension of some sudden disaster from the extraordinary zoological specimens we almost hourly passed” (Melville 40). The use of the term “zoological specimens,” as well as the explicit reference to the great German naturalists Muller and Henle, implies a solid grounding in the empirical or natural sciences. Taji is classifying to conquer, to gain a knowledgeable basis for making his way in an apparently hostile and volatile environment. Taxonomy is just the first of a plethora of knowledge-organizing models to come in Melville’s narrative. It proves inadequate in itself as a means for truly achieving transcendent knowledge. As Grenberg observed, “The mind can work upon, but not control, the reality that exerts itself suddenly and without warning… it is this quality of nature’s unpredictability, with its implicit unconcern for human concerns, that most thwarts the narrator’s efforts to control his existence” (29).
It is tempting to mark the Aleema sequence of the novel as the first major generic transition Melville imposes. It is the point where Taji confronts and kills the priest Aleema who is about to sacrifice the fair maiden Yillah as part of a religious ceremony. This seems to be the moment where the far-fetched, but nonetheless reality-bound sailor’s yarns of the early chapter give away to the mythopoeic constructs of the romantic quest. However, Chapter 38 (“The Sea on Fire”) may be a more appropriate marking point since it features a major epistemic shift for the narrator-protagonist. After the events on the Parki, Taji, Jarl, and new companion Samoa come upon a phosphorescent patch of sea late at night. It has a strange, otherworldly, ethereal majesty that prompts much speculation: “Now, sailors love marvels, and love to repeat them. And from many an old shipmate I have heard various sage opinings…” (Melville 123) Taji then proceeds to list the possible explanations for the sea’s luminescence, which include Jarl’s formulation that it is the consequence of “commotion among the mermaids,” Faraday’s theory that an electrical phenomenon in the atmosphere is responsible, and the theory that it is the product of dead matter in the sea itself. “But these are only surmises; likely, but uncertain. After science comes sentiment…” (Melville 123) When it comes to assigning significance or meaning to an observed phenomenon, mere description or classification will not do. Sentiment, or the peculiar, emotionally-charged vagaries of the human heart, seeks to inflict its own logic. “The narrator’s gloss upon the fiery sea has multiplicity as its most salient feature… As logical explanation, scientific or otherwise, the narrator’s argument and conclusion are muddle-headed. As poetic statements of Melville’s larger purposes, however, they are pure revelation” (Grenberg 31-32). The poetic principle here is of a strongly Romantic character: the imaginative engagement with nature. Such a program introduces an additional lair of multiplicity through the introduction of ambiguity. The poetic principle lends itself to a peculiar personifying power when applied to the natural world, and in a manner that prefigures the far more violent quest of Captain Ahab, Taji is imbued with the desire to find the ultimate secret at the heart of nature. “Yillah is nature’s prized secret, which the narrator is determined to possess at whatever risk or cost” (Grenberg 32-33). Many a reader may find the introduction of such a romantic, mythopoeic entity like Yillah into a narrative that heretofore had been more-or-less realistic somewhat jarring, but her arrival could be said to have been subtly foreshadowed by the phosphorescent sea, since that is a point where the recognition of the desirability, if not necessity, of a new form of knowledge occurs.
The arrival of Yillah and Aleema on the scene prompts an action from Taji that parallels his abandonment of the Arcturion at the beginning of the novel. Taji confronts and kills Aleema and “rescues” Yillah. There follows a stretch of ten chapters where Yillah and Taji are together. It is important to give this portion of the novel some attention, since it in large part defines the scope of Taji’s quest for Yillah following her disappearance. The significance of the young lovers’ interactions corresponds to an ideal or idealized state, when nature is fully apprehended and in perfect harmony with the engaged imagination. This engagement is dialectical, and in Melville’s story occurs in the arena of social interaction. The foundational unit of this perfect state is two people- Taji and Yillah. Yillah can take on a social existence- that is, she can come to symbolize an ideal of social organization- in the later travelogue-satire sections of Mardi in part because of the dialectical quality of her introduction and early development.
The murder of Aleema is not the only sin Taji commits when it comes to Yillah. He also fabricates a story that brings Yillah’s mythical identity in line with his own. Upon their first meeting, Yillah tells a story about how she is a native of Oroolia, “the island of delights,” and how in youth she was ensnared by a sentient vine and transformed into a blossom, which in time rebirthed her and cast her ashore on the island of Amma, the home of the priest Aleema. She indicates that she has no actual memory of these events, but that they were revealed to Aleema in a dream. Taji is skeptical of the literal veracity of this story, and believes, not unreasonably, that Aleema has deceived Yillah as part of the sacrificial rites: “For ulterior purposes connected with their sacerdotal supremacy, the priests of these climes oftentimes secret mere infants in their temples; and jealously secluding them from all intercourse with the world, craftily delude them, as they grow up, into the wildest conceits” (Melville 139). Taji, with his Neoplatonic orientation and its demands for a plurality of experience as the chief means of acquiring authoritative knowledge, strangely has no compunctions about indulging Yillah’s fantasies for personal gain; whatever his interest in Yillah, he does not have any immediate inclination to lift her veil of delusions. “To possess her finally, the narrator does not discredit her dream world; he enters it by claiming for himself a divine origin in Oroolia and a dream past in which he was her lover” (Grenberg 33). This induces a state of “Romantic ecstasy,” or of seeming intimacy with Nature’s divine secret, the ultimate aesthetic goal of the Romantic imagination. What this might suggest is an end to all strivings, if not for the complicating factor of time. Romantic ecstasy is always fleeting, but leaves its mark to the effect of a restless epistemology. “In conception, and perhaps in aspiration, Melville was… akin to Emerson and Thoreau; if these elevated moments were to be accepted as anything more than hallucination or willing self-deception, they had to be integral to one’s persistent experience of the world” (Grenberg 34). Significantly, Taji and company make landfall on the island kingdom of Odo not long after acquiring Yillah. The domain of the sea, unencumbered by the social conventions represented by the whale ship Arcturion, could be a credible arena for the development of dreams, or the imaginative faculties. Sure enough, Taji manages to achieve an ideal in the form of Yillah, but such an ideal needs to be tested against the persistent, lived experience of the world in order to be authoritative and truly transcendent. In a turn of events at once predictable and indicative of yet another epistemic shift, Yillah vanishes not long after the group arrives in Odo. This sets the stage for the final section of the novel, the travelogue-satire with conspicuous shades of allegorical significance.
The sequence of events from Aleema’s murder at the hands of Taji to the disappearance of Yillah at Odo bears the character of an Edenic fall from grace, most conspicuously in the psychological effect it has on Taji. He ponders to himself and to the wider heavens, “To you, ye stars, man owes his subtlest raptures, thoughts unspeakable, yet full of faith. But how your mild effulgence stings the boding heart. Am I a murderer, stars?” (Melville 179) Taji now has the stain of an original sin, and he now must dwell in a world which constantly reminds him of his fallen state. His soliloquy to the stars reflects an awareness of, and a certain faith in, a heavenly, transcendent sphere, but at this point in his story the loss of Yillah has effectively cut him off from it. Here there is an epistemic shift towards the moral, and the moral compass Taji adopts is of a special significance itself: “Melville’s Mardian world and Taji’s ensuing search for Yillah throughout that world are irredeemably humanistic, and the ensuing search for Yillah… the attempt to realize humanity’s highest dreams, takes place in a context almost totally devoid of religious and transcendental implications…” (Grenberg 35) It is no longer the transcendent but the social that is held up for scrutiny by Melville, and appropriately enough, the generic orientation of the text transforms from romantic adventure yarn to travelogue-satire. Though there is a shift to the social, the world Melville depicts does not get any more noticeably earth-bound; this is the section of the narrative where Taji acquires his name and takes on the role of a Polynesian Demigod from the sun. This role involves Taji taking on yet another fictional backstory which he cannot substantiate or expound upon at any length, and one that, oddly enough, strengthens his new-found social role within the kingdom of Odo. While interacting with King Media (a self-styled Demigod himself) Taji remarks, “As for anything foreign in my aspect, and my ignorance of Mardian customs: – all this, instead of begetting a doubt unfavorable to my pretensions, but strengthened the conviction of them as verities” (Melville 174). The transcendent realm may be remote from social existence, especially in terms of knowledge, but it still exerts an authoritative influence. Furthermore, the social is no less mythological in potential. When Taji becomes a demigod, he assumes a cultural significance to the Mardians, and soon his desires and aspirations, his grand Yillah-oriented narrative, assumes a social significance which prompts action and questing among other parties. As H. Bruce Franklin observed, “This penultimate abdication [Taji leaving the ocean and arriving in Mardi] is his [Taji’s] penultimate allegorical death… From this point on, ironically and appropriately the Mardians become far more important than the narrator. ‘Taji’ as a Mardian conception becomes more significant than the player of Taji. The three mythologists and their king make Taji’s quest their own” (44). When personal transcendent knowledge assumes a social significance, it becomes myth, and myth prompts knowledge-seeking of a related, and perhaps cyclical, character. Taji’s quest for Yillah becomes a kind of epistemological compass by which the Mardian explorers navigate their archipelago, and a frame of reference which helps, at least in part, to contextualize the information they acquire on their journey. The journey has social significance not just because it is different and often conflicting social orders that are held up for scrutiny over the course of the travelogue-satire, but because the questers who adopt Taji’s obsessions are ideals and constituent parts of a civilized social order. Grenberg is again quite helpful: “Taji and his companions in the quest, Media, Yoomy, Babbalanja, and Mohi, constitute not only the multifaceted individual personality… but also the multifaceted structure of civilized society… it is natural to stress the characters’ identities as functions of the mind… but it is also noteworthy that Melville draws an analogy between the individual and his society” (35). Roughly, the questing characters can be taken as representations of mental faculties: Media is volition, Mohi is memory, Yoomy is creativity or imagination, and Babbalanja is reason and, occasionally, mystic perception. The social analogues of these mental functions are the philosopher (Babbalanja), the historian (Mohi), the poet or artist (Yoomy), and the politician (Media). Additionally, it is quite tempting to conceptualize these characters as the disparate parts of Melville’s artistic sensibilities, which he needed to synthesize in the space of the text in order to carry off a truly great feat of the literary imagination. Taji fades into the background in order to give these new arrivals center stage, and this robs the quest for the missing Yillah of a great deal of dramatic urgency, but it can be argued that Taji does not fade from the narrative so much as he is fragmented into this new set of personalities which dramatize the conflicted and multifaceted nature of his epistemological quest. Furthermore, Taji’s psychological and spiritual division can be understood as the inevitably and dramatically appropriate response to his fallen state and the loss of his Yillah: “[The] elastic relationship among the questers- threatening to break altogether periodically throughout the quest- reveals the disintegration of Taji’s personality in a world without Yillah” (Grenberg 36). By this point in the novel, Taji’s orientation toward knowledge has changed significantly. In the beginning, his endeavors were marked by a general sense of intellectual restlessness and social isolation. The latter quality in part informs Taji’s sense of independence, which aids his abilities as an inquirer, and his receptivity to the outside world. A broad sense of curiosity and a desire to absorb information marks the early stage on Taji’s intellectual journey. The encounter and communion with Yillah and her subsequent disappearance radically alter the manner in which Taji seeks understanding. “Before he first discovers Yillah, his wanderings have no definite object. After he loses her, he no longer drifts; he then searches specifically if futilely. In Mardi, therefore, the hero’s life is presented in two stages: he is a wanderer, and then a searcher” (Dillingham 105). A search implies an object or goal. It is essentially a teleological project, and the structure of Melville’s allegory makes it clear that his protagonist eventually develops a strong desire to believe that human striving for knowledge and understanding would eventually yield fruits. The epistemological goal, here represented by Yillah, serves an interpretive function in this quest; it is the standard by which new information is measured and contextualized.
Dysfunction of some sort marks every social order encountered by the questers in the kingdom of Mardi. For Grenberg, there is a recurring pattern to the seemingly diverse range of social problems Melville presents through his Mardian kingdoms- the inability of their rulers and citizens to properly integrate knowledge and experience into a coherent sense of self, a necessary prerequisite for a stable social identity. “The disintegrated world of Juam, Willamilla, Ohonoo, and Vivenza is presented as a product of the disintegrated personalities of its rulers. Thus, the quest for Yillah is both internal and external, the search for unity by the unintegrated self in a disintegrated world” (36). Isolation combined with stasis creates the inadequacies present in the island kingdoms. For Melville, relativism of a sort colors his assessments of different sociocultural landscapes, not because he felt there were no standards for judgment (Yillah’s presence would determine a utopian order) but because he felt that only comparisons among different social possibilities could yield sufficient information about the range of human possibility, understanding, and capacity to live and work in cohesive groups. This understanding may very well be a reflection of Melville’s conception of perfect knowledge, the ability to integrate and properly contextualize and comprehend the essence of the full range of baffling and frightening information the external world hurls at human subjects. “The individual islands clearly signify the isolated and fragmented nature of individuals and states who through ignorance, weakness, stubbornness, or pride have cut themselves off from the world… the beliefs and behavior of all those they meet are presented as direct products of the ways they look at their world” (Grenberg 36-37). The lack of utopia in Mardi is reflective of a lack of unity to human experience and perception, and thus signifies the impossibility of grasping any kind of ultimate knowledge. This has profound implications for the eventual emotional effect of Melville’s novel. Taji’s seeking after knowledge leads him to a greater incoherence, which strikes at the very unity of his sense of self; and yet he presses on. “Taji simply refuses to accept the implications of his own experience. His dream of attaining oneness with the universe is so intense that it blinds him to the facts of the world’s recalcitrance. Melville wants us to see these dreams as both irresistible and impossible… Taji’s quest is as hopeless as it is necessary to his self-definition.” (Grenberg 47) It is well worth mentioning that Taji’s transition from wanderer to quester inevitably entails a more active and opinionated engagement with the world. In short, the more he learns, the more he is prompted to act towards a focused end. The result of this development is a gradual articulation of the theme of the relationship between knowledge and action. How does what we know (or think we know) encourage us to act, or not act? For Melville, Mardi served as a sort of dry run for this theme, which would receive its greatest treatment in Moby-Dick, but the question has tragic implications in the context of Mardi as it is.
No consideration of Mardi would be complete without some attention paid toward Hautia, the mysterious and sensuous queen of Flozella. Her heralds pursue Taji and his companions all over Mardi, attempting to entice him to Hautia’s lair. Additionally, a trio of Aleema’s former associates pursues the band in an effort to kill Taji in retaliation for the murder of the priest. Respectively, these different pursuers represent forces that would halt meaningful intellectual exploration; Hautia is the realm of comfortable illusion, while the vengeful companions of Aleema are potent reminders of the fallen state that inevitably tortures and limits the experiences of human beings. Hautia is of slightly greater interest for the simple reason that she serves as a double for Yillah, or antithesis to Yillah’s thesis. If Yillah is a poetic ideal, then Hautia is the folly of poetic illusions, or the superficially beguiling sights and sensations that distract people from the pursuit of real truth; artifice as opposed to art. In her own way, Hautia represents the hazards of investing oneself too much in a beautiful illusion, much like Madame Bovary or Dorian Gray, and in that respect is the exact opposite of Yillah, who offered a ‘genuine’ vision of truth and beauty. “As the symbol of fathomless creative power, she serves as both inspiration and nemesis to Taji and… to Melville, for as creative imagination she on the one hand offers the possibility of all things, while on the other hand she denies to all things any status other than that of possibility” (Grenberg 55). This problem goes right to the heart of Melville’s project, which is fiction. Fiction, when in thrall of Yillah, is in harmony with the governing principles of nature. When it takes its cue from Hautia, fiction consists of nothing more than the meretricious beauties of mere fantasy and wish-fulfillment, superficially attractive, but lacking the permanent, self-sustaining value of truth.
Taji’s quest to recover Yillah, and achieve what he most desired from intellectual exploration- the perception of, and communion with, the ultimate truth or governing principle of the universe, is a failure. His consolation is to continue in his pursuit beyond the realm of both quotidian reality, social responsibility, and the circumscribed nature of human thought itself. His final defiant declaration as he leaves the Mardian archipelago pursued by Aleema’s former companions is quite telling- “Now, I am my own soul’s emperor; and my first act is abdication! Hail! Realm of shades!” (Melville 654) This intensely Miltonic line, which recalls Satan’s outburst upon his banishment in Paradise Lost, can be understood as a kind of spiritual and intellectual suicide. As Yillah cannot be found in Mardi, ultimate truth cannot be comprehended by ordinary human thought processes and habits. Surrendering to the wide unknown strangely enough does not end Taji’s forward momentum; he has reached the limitations of earthly knowledge and then sets out for parts unknown. It is quite tempting to consider this in light of Melville’s growth as a writer. As the critic Harold Beaver remarked, “Fiction was the one centre where all divergencies might converge and where all inconsistencies must necessarily consist. That was to become Melville’s task: not to resolve the dichotomies of love and hate, male and female, fact and fiction; but to calibrate their mutual tension” (39). In the end, such a project could be emotionally powerful, intellectually edifying, and aesthetically pleasing, but never attuned to any revelatory promise. For Melville, that was the tragedy of thought but the triumph of his fictional art.
Works Cited
Beaver, Harold. “Mardi: A Sum of Inconsistencies.” Herman Melville: Reassessments. Ed. A.
Robert Lee. London: Vision and Barnes and Noble, 1984. 28-40. Print.
Davis, Merrell R. Melville’s Mardi: A Chartless Voyage. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1952. Print.
Dillingham, William B. An Artist in the Rigging: The Early Work of Herman Melville.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972. Print.
Franklin, Bruce H. The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1963. Print.
Grenberg, Bruce L. Some Other World to Find: Quest and Negation in the Works of Herman
Melville. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Print.
Melville, Herman. Mardi, and A Voyage Thither: The Northwestern-Newberry Edition.
Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library,
1970. Print.
Sten, Christopher. The Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel.
Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1996. Print.
Zimmerman, Brett. Herman Melville: Stargazer. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s
One of my favorite quotes concerning the Theory of Art, which addresses both the artist’s role in society and the psychological attributes which govern their sensibilities, comes from the reliably causticHL Mencken:
“It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist. The special quality which makes an artist of him might almost be defined, indeed, as an extraordinary capacity for irritation, a pathological sensitiveness to environmental pricks and stings. He differs from the rest of us mainly because he reacts sharply and in an uncommon manner to phenomena which leave the rest of us unmoved, or, at most, merely annoy us vaguely. He is, in brief, a more delicate fellow than we are, and hence less fitted to prosper and enjoy himself under the conditions of life which he and we must face alike. Therefore, he takes to artistic endeavor, which is at once a criticism of life and an attempt to escape from life.
So much for the theory of it. The more the facts are studied, the more they bear it out. In those fields of art, at all events, which concern themselves with ideas as well as with sensations it is almost impossible to find any trace of an artist who was not actively hostile to his environment, and thus an indifferent patriot.”
Indeed. Artist-as-anti-nationalist-agitator archetypes aside, if we focus on the salient characteristic of a “pathological sensitiveness” we come to a very compelling theory concerning the creative process, a theory that takes on a more elaborated form when we read it in tandem with the American philosopher CS Peirce’s conceptions of signs and aesthetics (or ‘esthetics,’ as he would have preferred). To understand this framework, one first needs to have a basic grasp of scientific inquiry as Peirce had it. The business begins with a shock: an unusual phenomenon is observed which throws a state of belief (in the complacent sense) into disarray. The inquiring mind then proceeds on its mission, and the first form its course takes is abductive; that is, the line of intuition advances by way of a guess in large part influenced by “experiential context.” What emerges is hypothesis. Peirce attempted to characterize this mental voyage in logical terms that would make abduction a natural third companion to the familiar duo of deduction and induction, both of which follow abduction in Peirce’s theory of the process of inquiry. To use Peirce’s words: “The surprising fact, C, is observed. But if A were true, C would be a matter of course. Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.” If we take that “matter of course” line to mean “giving a satisfactory explanation of that fact,” then we have a reasonably stable foundation for considering Peircean abduction as a means of hypothesis-generation. If we are to contrast it with deduction and induction, then we would have the following trio of reasoning models:
I will admit, one aspect of abduction that has sometimes left me confused is the relationship between the rule/first principle and the case/hypothesis. As near as I can tell, both are equally uncertain in light of the observed “startling fact,” in Peirce’s account, and taken together are something like two halves of the hypothesis that is suspected “may be true.” Understanding the rule/first principle as the “experiential context” clears things up a little, I think, as it provides the necessary material that can react with the new observed phenomena (“startling fact”) to generate the hypothesis, but it nonetheless seems to have equal conditional status with the “fully formed” hypothesis. The following visual aid might be a little more comprehensible (if you are anything like me). The solid line boxes hold the premises that are presupposed to be true; the dashed boxes contain the premises that are inferred.
It is also worth mentioning that with abduction, the apparent path of mental activity is non-linear, or if taken in syllogistic form, proceeds from conclusion (result/observation) to major premise (rule/law/first principle) to minor premise (case). In Peirce’s theory of inquiry, both the conditional major and minor premises need to be taken together and subject to testing. In contrast, deduction proceeds in a more linear fashion from major (rule/law/first principle) to minor (case) premise and on to conclusion (result/observation), whereas induction proceeds from a “conclusion” (really, a possibly-generalizable observation that can be figured as an antecedent) to a minor (case) premise and then a major (rule/law/first principle amenable to falsification, or a consequent). It seems to me that the conclusion/observation phase of induction is somewhat interchangeable with the case phase, as induction ultimately proceeds by a kind of pattern recognition that simply generalizes from multiple considered cases.
In any case, I don’t wish to be sidetracked here. The relevant matter is that, within the confines of Peirce’s understanding of inquiry, the process of abduction generates a hypothesis. It then comes timeto test it: “…[H]e applies the hypothesis through deduction, and infers the necessary consequences, which will be tested… Lastly, by using a kind of induction – that is, a generalization based on a certain number of positive test results – he concludes that the results verify the hypothesis until he finds conflicting evidence.”
The deductive segment of inquiry entails pondering what would logically- syllogistically- follow if the hypothesis were true. This provides the means by which we can then test the hypothesis, and after a certain number of confirmatory test results attained through experimentation, we can apply our inductive pattern-recognition skills to reach a provisional conclusion which can be taken to be true until another “startling fact” troubles the complacency of our beliefs. But pray tell, how might this be applied to artistic or creative endeavors? Over on the previously-quoted Signo-Semio blog,we get a description of Peircean esthetic inquiry that reads almost like a more technical-theoretical version of the Mencken witticism I quoted at the outset of this writing:
“The process used in scientific inquiry can be adapted to the creation of a work of art.
1. At the outset, the artist is in an unsettled state, not due to a surprising fact, but to an unsettling feeling. He is plunged into firstness, into a chaos of “qualities of feelings” (Peirce, 1931-1935, 1.43): a feeling arises that seems appropriate, but there is no object to which it is appropriate. This is like the feeling of “déjà vu”, Peirce explains. It is like having the impression, upon meeting someone, that we have already met him, but we do not know when or where we would have met him nor who he is. The sense of recognition that arises seems appropriate, without having any object to which it is appropriate.
2. The artist begins creating the work of art by using abduction. But while scientific abduction consists in hypothesizing a solution to a conceptual problem, artistic abduction or hypothesis consists in trying to express the problem, in letting qualities of feelings arise, in trying to capture them, in “thinking” them, and considering them as appropriate.
3. Next, employing a kind of deduction, the artist projects his hypothesis into his work; that is, he is going to present the qualities of feeling by giving them form, by embodying them in an object to which they could be appropriate. In taking form as this object, the work of art creates its own referent – it is self-representing. The hypothesis, which is initially vague, becomes focused, or made more precise, through projection into a form, and can then be “tested” by induction.
4. The last stage is induction, which is the artist’s judgment of his work. How can the artist test the value of his creation? Not at all in reference to any external reality, since a work of art is self-representing, but in reference to itself. A work of art is self-adequate when it presents itself as a reasonable feeling, when it is the intelligible expression of a synthesized quality of feeling (Peirce, 1931-1935, and 5.132).
Works of art are not necessarily “beautiful” in the customary sense. In order to define the esthetic ideal, Peirce replaces the notion of “beauty” by the Greek term “kalos” – what is admirable in itself – which for Peirce is the presentation of a reasonable feeling (1931-1932, 1.615).
The function of a work of art is to make qualities of feeling intelligible. Intelligible expression necessarily implies thirdness, or the use of signs, but since qualities of feeling are found at the level of firstness, they can only be expressed through iconic signs (signs that refer to their object at the level of firstness: see the chapter on Peirce’s semiotics). A work of art is thus an iconic sign, which Peirce also calls a hypoicon (1931-1935, 2.276).”
As I’ve already dawdled a little too much hashing out the different modes of logical reasoning, to the best of my very modest ability, I won’t allow myself to get distracted with too much by the way of introductory material on Peirce’s categories and related semiotic system. I highly recommend any interested readers who are unfamiliar with them readSigno-Semio’s account.
One may detect in the Peircean process of artistic creation an echo of the “intentionality” commonly associated with phenomenology, particularly in the shift from the domain of Firstness suggested by the “qualities of feeling” to possibly appropriate “objects” which may embody them. Consciousness needs to be directed towards an object to attain legibility as typically-experienced “awareness.” The structure of that awareness can be understood in semiotic terms, and has a specific character when directed towards creative ends. The qualities of feelings seek their objects to make themselves known in the work of art, or in more precise words, and again to lean on Signo-Semio, “[t]he purpose of a work of art is to capture firstness by making it intelligible. The only way to achieve this is by means of iconic signs. However, a pure icon remains unrepresentable; it cannot be materialized. It can only be thought, or rather, “seen in thought”, felt in thought, iconically thought. The work of art is a construction made of iconic signs and leads the receiver to the iconic thought.” And so, the work of art can be considered a particular type of sign: the hypoicon. The hypoicon is distinguishable from the pure icon because it is an external object, belonging to Thirdness, whereas the pure icon only exists mentally, or in Firstness. I would argue that “work of art” in this context seems more specifically to refer to traditional visual arts along with, perhaps, music. Regarding literature, with its obvious dependence on the conventionality of language, things would seem to proceed more symbolically, though if one considers the immediacy of the subjective literary experience as a coherent whole, we end up with something more like a hypoicon. It must be made clear, however, that to regard the mental experience of reading a text as a concrete “hypoicon” requires some critical separation from the immediacy of the experience, since a hypoicon cannot be merely mental. In typical fashion, Peirce identified three types of hypoicon, and the third type, metaphor, is clearly the most germane. To quote the critic Joao Queiroz: “The metaphor is an icon of analogical relations between interpretative effects, or the interpretants. The metaphor represents the interpretative effect of a sign by creating an analogical parallelism with another interpretant.”
I will return to the iconic qualities of literary experience shortly. First, it may be helpful to define the literary text as a sign more definitively. In accordance with Peirce’s ten categories of sign functioning, it would be a complex form of rhematic symbolic legisign, or a “Class-8” sign. It is important to understand that Peirce’s ten classes of sign are not static labels for this or that perceptual phenomenon; they indicate something more like a hierarchy of interpretive processes that a single phenomenon can be subject to, and when we characterize the work of art as a “Class-8” sign we are simply saying that it typically prompts that level of semiotic process. We read the novel, so understood as a legisign because it is conventional, or in line with cultural habits and definitions that dictate its legibility as a concept. Comprehending the words, we find the sign’s relationship with the object is symbolic; the conventional sign (legisign) comes to its object by means of the established rules of language, conjuring the material of the interpretant, which is rhematic because of the immediacy of the experience imparted by the images, events, linguistic rhythms, and sensory inputs the reader experiences through the text. We have a form of Thirdness leading us to Firstness. The literary theorist John K. Sheriff may be useful here: “Peirce does not write extensively about art as sign, but he makes clear in various writings that art always partakes of the mode of being of Firstness as well as Secondness or Thirdness. Literary art, being inseparable from language, of course partakes of Thirdness (is a Symbol), but it creates an interpretant that has the mode of being of Firstness (is a Rheme)” (76).
The voyage that a reader undergoes from the point of symbolic Thirdness to experiential Firstness itself involves “iconization.” This was memorably described by the criticChristina Ljungberg:
“Cognitive activities such as reading involve orienting ourselves in the fictional world of literature in which meaning is constructed by the reader who interprets the verbal signs. In this sense, iconicity is generated by the readers as they decipher the signs, in their activity of making meaning – much like a detective trying to solve a murder case which, even though clues are indexical signs, involves evoking possible scenarios by calling up images, structuring these by putting them in context, and then picturing potential motifs and lines of development by comparing these to similar cases (cf. Ljungberg 1999: 13-14). Reading experientially is thus the performance of actively taking part in the dialogue with the text, the performative generation of a fictional world, a mental space in which we are able to move (cf. Gass 1985: 227; Colapietro 2010: 40). Similarity plays a fundamental role for such cognitive activities. As Dines Johansen argues, literature “mimes and stages, as it were, desires and passions, that is, it invites not only intellectual understanding but empathy” (Johansen 2002: 326). To “iconize” a literary text, he suggests, means to evoke images connected to memories and fantasies that are drive cathected. Johansen discerns three ways of iconizing texts, namely imaginative iconization or “imaginization”, calling forth mental images generated by different modes of perception and conceived by what is represented; “diagrammatization” or structuring the network or diagram of what is represented in the text, ‘reading for the plot’; or “allegorization”, relating relationships of the text world to other conceptual structures (ibid., 2002: 327). Reading literature thus means “working with two sets of references, one referring to the universe of the text, the other one to the lifeworld and the memories of the reader. The constant intertwining of these two sets of references ends in identification”; it also explains why an exciting text causes real sensory-motor activity (ibid., 2002: 329). The phenomenon of similarity is crucial here. Even if the images evoked by readers from a similar culture will never be identical since we all contribute with our private experiences to the “iconizing” of the text, they will be similar. Subjectivizing it does not mean making it personal and unique but includes “objective” properties and mind sets as well as the cultural imaginary and our species-specific make-up (cf. Johansen 2002; Ljungberg 2009).”
This process of iconization, while most relevant to the task of literary interpretation and criticism, holds a compelling resemblance to the early phase of the artist’s path to creation: the startling, complacency-shaking qualities of feeling occasion an artist to seek out the objects that may match them for the creation of his artwork. I am, for the purposes of this inquiry, most interested in that unsettling, disruptive quality of Firstness the artist initially experiences that prompts his creative actions. The unsettling quality has led to a cultural mythology around the concept of the Tortured Genius, or the creative who derives inspiration from his or her mental illness and emotional instability. Mencken was satirical about this concept: “He [the artist] is… a more delicate fellow than we are.” My impression from the sources on Peirce that I’ve encountered so far (I may yet encounter others) was that he was more logical, and associated the artist’s disturbance with the creative energies and observational prowess of the inductive sciences. The emotional-psychological state of the artist he considered less important than the formal structure of his creative journey, or how it proceeded semiotically in the mode of creative inquiry.
All of this leads me to a consideration of a fascinating article with the title “Moods and the Muse” that recently came into my purview. It was written by Bruce Bower and published in the June 17, 1995 issue of the periodical Science News. Leading, appropriately, with an account of the notoriously tempestuous Romantic poet Lord Byron, the article endeavors to present some myth-busting research concerning the alleged tie between mental instability and creative acumen. The opening paragraph says of Byron, “His volatile temperament frequently set off sparks of poetic imagination… Byron expresses a widespread intuition that creativity and genius feed off mental turmoil.” More ancient cultures (the Greeks, etc.) associated some of the more colorful and expressive modes of madness with divine inspiration, and believed they could influence sublime creative endeavors and spirited performances. In our modern age, the spiritual has been supplanted by the medical. As Bower says, “Modern scientists have conducted more than a dozen studies documenting a higher rate of mental disorders, particularly of mood such as depression and manic depression, in painters, poets, musicians, and novelists.” Of course, there are plenty of mentally ill individuals who never attain creative greatness, just as there are many people who attain creative greatness who are fairly mentally stable, even-tempered, and emotionally content. Regardless, it would seem that mental illness and artistic endeavor go hand-in-hand often enough to lend some credence to the cultural myth of the Tortured Genius, and it provides a hint as to the common character of the “unsettling feeling” which prompts the Peircean abduction that shapes the artistic hypothesis in pursuit of an imaginative form. Like any prominent myths, however, it cries out for, if not a debunking, then certainly some attenuation or nuance. The psychiatrist Arnold M. Ludwig, employed at the University of Kentucky Medical Center at the time of the publication of Bower’s article, was more than up to this task. He insisted that the connection between mood conditions and novel patterns of thought has been somewhat overstated and predicated on an overly narrow view of “creativity.” There may be something to the popular notion of the Tempestuous Romantic Poet à la Byron, but the creativity of the research scientist or the architect would seem to emerge from a more mellow disposition. There is a point of commonality with the Tempestuous Poet, though, and it immediately summons the specter of Peirce: “’Mental illness is not the price people pay for their creative gifts,’ [Ludwig said] ‘While mental disturbances may provide individuals with an underlying sense of unease that seems necessary for sustained creative activity, these disturbances are not the only source for inner tension.’” The ‘underlying sense of unease’ is what ‘seems to be necessary for sustained creative activity.’ While the word ‘seems’ is doing some necessary hedging work here to keep the conversation appropriately scientific, it is nonetheless tempting to think that Ludwig is (unknowingly?) appealing to the ‘startling fact’ or ‘unsettled feeling’ earlier invoked by Peirce that elicits the abductive journey towards hypothesis, and whatever creative and scientific inquiry may follow. Creative minds would seem to be exceptionally prone to this unsettlement, and it is that, and not mental illness per se, that makes artists (or scientists, or philosophers, or many others besides) of them. To put it slightly differently, one could suggest that mental disturbance more generally instead of mental illness in the diagnosable sense is truly the key to sustained creativity through frequent unsettlement of belief. Just the same, different varieties of mental illness seem to carry very specific modes of disturbance, and these modes have implications for the specific path taken by the individual artist in their endeavor. The psychiatrist Kay R. Jamison, who has also studied the association between mental illness and creativity, is discussed in the Bower article alongside Ludwig, and Bower paraphrases her insights on the matter as follows: “Mild episodes of mania boost the fluency and frequency of thoughts… For instance, mildly manic patients spontaneously use unusual words and creative sound associations, such as rhymes and alliteration, more often than emotionally healthy controls… Mania produces other effects conducive to creative accomplishment… such as the ability to work long hours without sleep, to focus on ideas intensely, to maintain bold and restless attitudes, and to experience deeply a variety of emotions.” From a Peircean perspective, the phrase “frequency of thoughts” is suggestive. It seems indicative of constant bouts of startling disturbances, or recurrent plunges into Firstness that compel the hypothesizing of theoretical resolutions. No doubt many of the inward disturbances can foment semiotic processes that need no external realization, but I would imagine many of the most intense ones do.
And on that note, I wish to conclude this admittedly rambling speculative piece (which turned out to be more quote and summary coupled with vague associative implications than novel intervention; such is the habit of the distracted mind) with a somewhat narcissistic sketch. Some months ago, I wrote a poem that I genuinely liked. It was just four short verses, all written in iambic tetrameter (I think, I tried), and I thought it turned out quite good. That is, when I went back to re-read it, I found that all three brands of iconization that were mentioned in that Ljungberg piece I quoted earlier played out in my head, and that is not something I could say about most of the material I have written recently or ever. My desire to understand how I might recapture the creative process which birthed it prompted me to revisit Peirce’s thoughts on inquiry and esthetics. If I were to characterize my memory of writing this poem in a manner which dovetailed with the Peircean program, I would start by recalling that the troubling feeling that prompted it was anger. The inchoate quality of anger experienced as Firstness forced a sense of urgency to my hypothesizing of an appropriate artistic problem to accommodate the feeling. I came to the following proposal: anger prompts a contradictory impulse, or a desire to ‘push back,’ usually against the object that is perceived as provoking the anger, though I assume most who may read this are familiar enough with the concept of transference to appreciate that that may not always be the case. The contradictory impulse, so forged in rage, requires an immense and urgent theme to confer that sense of aesthetic effectiveness. The search for the theme uncovers a kinship between feelings; anger is delivered by fear. Not arbitrarily, death emerges as my chosen theme; it is suitably immense, adequately related to my unsettlement of feeling, and is attractive as an artistic subject when handled in counterintuitive, novel, or contradictory ways. And so, my artistic hypothesis pertained to a contrarian stance on the significance of death. I then proceeded in search of my objects, or the images, motifs, metaphors, and rhythms that could be gathered to give my hypothesis form. And yes, I would call this entire voyage therapeutic. As for the matters leading unto induction… follow the bouncing ball.
(I had previously written about Irredeemablehere.)
Exactly what it says on the tin- more of my quasi-random thoughts on the comic book series Irredeemable by Mark Waid.
The Plutonian is a freaky fellow, no? I can’t easily recall the beginning of a graphic novel that so thoroughly shook me. As is often the case with such things, the proverbial super-powered devil was in the details. As Plutonian murders his former superhero associate The Hornet (along with The Hornet’s entire family), he pauses for a bit of implicitly-confessional gloating (describing the Hornet’s daughter as a ‘carbon bag of atoms and bioelectrcity’). After that, The Plutonian indulges in the pseudo-mercy of killing the father first so as to spare him the sight of his daughter being incinerated. He then gifts himself a more overt, darkly ironic confession- delivered to the frightened girl- which establishes the theme of the entire comic- ‘I’m a superhero.’
As I’ve had occasion to mention before, the word ‘deconstruction’ is thrown about a little too easily by fans and critics when it comes to stories like Irredeemable. If one employs some elementary Google-fu, the first definition of deconstruction that will come up reads as follows- ‘a method of critical analysis of philosophical and literary language which emphasizes the internal workings of language and conceptual systems, the relational quality of meaning, and the assumptions implicit in forms of expression.’ Obviously, language evolves and is as context and use-bound as nearly anything else anthropocentric, so this definition need not be comprehensive. I don’t know the specific history of this semantic drift, but it would seem at some point the common understanding of ‘deconstruction’ shifted from ‘method of critical analysis literally nobody understands’ to ‘creative work which takes an overtly critical stance towards a certain set of familiar tropes.’ In the case of Irredeemable, we have a story which emphasizes, for what is definitely not the first time, the fact that superheroes are kind of ideologically dodgy. It doesn’t run with this premise in quite the same satirical spirit as something like The Boys, but nonetheless it emphasizes those old truisms about the alienating capacity of unchecked power, the tyrannical qualities of agents of violent authority operating outside the official sanction of public institutions, and the stark fact that few can do the vigilante schtick without coming away morally compromised. In short, the narrative draws attention to those in-built features of superhero stories that may stop a non-negligible portion of people from enjoying superhero stories if they thought about them too much. There’s your ‘deconstruction.’ The Plutonian himself is, of course, another on a long list of subversions of the most quintessential of superheroes, Superman. The core of Superman’s appeal is also his least plausible quality- boundless, unchallengeable power in possession of one man who only ever uses it for good, despite the inevitable alienation and ambivalence such power would produce. The subversive force of the ‘evil Superman’ trope comes from an innate audience tendency to appreciate being subjected to the bleeding obvious after it has been denied them so often in certain kinds of stories.
The remarkable thing about the Plutonian’s eventual break-down is that it is so recognizably human. He doesn’t taste increasingly large doses of prestige and power, gradually getting drunk until he takes his intoxication to a hapless mortal public. He doesn’t run into increasingly powerful and dastardly villains who are nearly impossible to subdue, summoning the possibility of necessary executions and the dreaded slippery slope that may entail. No. The Plutonian makes a very foolish error in the spirit of altruism. In order to better humanity, he donates a piece of alien technology (salvaged from the wreckage of one of their crafts in the wake of a failed invasion of earth; as a sidenote, I will say that these aliens, called the Vespa, are some of the most memorably nasty hostile extraterrestrials I’ve ever seen in a work of fiction.) to a scientist who had previously been critical of the Plutonian for retaining it. The scientist, apparently being an inveterate bungler, ends up unleashing an alien virus that travels on soundwaves and has the horrifying effect of stripping the flesh off the bones of children and animating their skeletons. This plague is eventually brought to heel, but knowledge of the Plutonian’s involvement remains with the scientific team who were experimenting with the Vespa technology. In yet another compelling narrative choice on the part of Mark Waid, this knowledge does not lead to a public shaming of the Plutonian; the scientist instead makes the decision to inform only Tony’s sidekick, friend, and confidante Samsara. The poisoning of this relationship, probably the most significant Tony had, is the major precipitating event for his psychological break-down and subsequent rampage. Dramatically, this works much better than a hypothetical estrangement from an adoring public. It showcases that emotional intimacy, not abstract social prestige, was of central importance to Tony. This makes his character more complex and sympathetic than the alternative publicity-conscious evil Superman that would have been more intuitive for a great many readers.
Although the Plutonian is the most obvious archetype subversion in the story, he is hardly the only one, and I feel special attention should be paid to the Hornet as an especially depressing (ahem) ‘deconstruction’ of the ‘badass normal’ superhero type. The term I’ve shamelessly culled from TV Tropes, and it is basically exactly what it sounds like: a superhero with no innate superpowers who depends on a combination of wits, skill, and technology to hold his own in a world of superpowered beings. They are often viewed as inspiring since they frequently prevail in superhero narratives despite their mortal limitations, earning the respect of their metahuman colleagues and soundly defeating much more powerful adversaries. However inspiring they may be, though, it can be difficult to construe them as realistic even by the fanciful standards of superhero comics, and Irredeemable delivers a blunt-force dose of reality by having its resident badass normal, the aforementioned Hornet, killed off by the Plutonian with little seeming effort. The reader is then not even granted the consolation of sympathy, as it is later revealed that the Hornet’s insecurities concerning his lack of powers led him to an absolutely unconscionable act- handing over Qubit’s teleportation technology to the Vespa so that they may more easily continue their genocidal campaign of conquest throughout the multiverse in exchange for leaving the earth, and the promise of returning to assist in containing the Plutonian should he ever go rogue. This act presumably condemns countless sentient beings to a gruesome death. In the universe of Irredeemable, the badass normal is not ennobled by his lack of powers, but rendered a coward. And a dangerous one at that.
I still need to say something about why I’ve titled these Irredeemable posts as I have. Of course, it has something to do with the villain Modeus and Bette Noir (personal favorite character, perhaps along with qubit and the Plutonian himself), but we’ll save that for the follow-up. And then after that, I believe it will be time for Incorruptible.
(Update- I would write about Irredeemable again here.)
WARNING- POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOR A COMIC BOOK SERIES THAT’S ALMOST A DECADE OLD.
Sometimes impatience works in your favor. When I first heard about the comic book series Irredeemable by Mark Waid (art by Peter Krause and Diego Barreto, released by Boom! Studios in a 37-issue run from 2009 to 2012), I was sufficiently intrigued to poke around the various issues available from the usual disreputable online sources, and of course I skipped to the ending to see how it all wrapped up. I must admit, though it may not be strictly rational, I find the idea of a ‘rogue’ or ‘evil’ Superman figure peculiarly disturbing. As an artifact of broad-category speculative fiction, the concept resonates as a vision of unmediated destruction. No physical-psychological barrier provided by a missile, drone, bomber, or other implement of death, just apocalypse induced through direct bodily contact. Or laser vision. As a means to mythologize some of the most potently destructive implements of post-industrial modernity- to put a face and active will to more impersonal political and historical phenomena- Evil Superman gets the job done. Do I need to bother reminding the reader what kind of cape Homelander wears? In any case, my curiosity about Irredeemable specifically was poked to the degree that I felt I had to investigate, but I was not anticipating the compulsion to read all 37 issues of the comic’s run.
Anyone else have the tune “Kryptonite” stuck in their head?
But that ending left a mark, and I had to change course. To be honest, the aspect of the story’s climax that stuck with me most powerfully wasn’t so much the gimmicky multiverse dénouement that had the scattered “essence” of The Plutonian reify into the fictional construct of the Man of Steel in what is heavily implied to be “our” universe. Rather it was Qubit’s little speech about “Tony” being a Golem, or a concept made real (How’s that for reification?) that was tainted by an imperfect creator. For those who do not remember, The Plutonian of this narrative was created when a god-like race of extraterrestrial beings sent a probe to monitor the psychic energy of the human race, and it became enamored with the psychological plight of a distraught woman who had just committed infanticide. The concept of redemption- the purification of sins- became the originating “essence” of the Plutonian, and the guiding motivation for his heroism during his pre-rogue years. Of course, the notion of a superhero bringing restorative justice to mankind is hardly unique or new; it’s kind of the entire point of such characters. But baking in a little bit of original sin in the form of humankind’s capacity to choose *not* to be restored struck me as quite novel. Plutonian’s “mother” seemed to favor a course of regeneration through violence, the precise opposite of the values that would later be instilled in Plutonian by his final foster father. I want to evade the banal ego/superego analogies, but you know, when character clashes with socialization… In the case of poor Tony, it becomes an object lesson in Gnostic principles. The archon Sophia (Tony’s infanticidal creator) creates the demiurge (Tony) in a moment of weakness (the aftermath of her murder). The demiurge then goes on to create a world in his image. The Plutonian’s heroic acts change the world in which he lives in profound ways, ushering in a new era of superpowered heroes and villains. But the flawed nature of the creation cannot be obscured. Something has to give, and when it does… apocalypse.
And so, I had to read the whole thing. Of course. Inevitably, dealing as it does with long-established tropes in heavy need of (heh) “deconstruction” the narrative comes fairly heavily freighted with pastiche. No character is precisely themselves (though I will acknowledge that the superhuman abilities of Bette Noir and Kaidan struck me as being quite original, though it is possible I missed some obscure characters in the backlog of DC costumed archetypes that could have served as templates) but an homage or reconfiguration of all your familiar favorites. The Hornet’s fear and resentment of his super-powered colleagues recalls Batman, as does the hidden cave lair of the Inferno. Qubit is apparently a pastiche of the 10th Doctor. Gilgamos reminds one of Hawkman, Charybdis and Scylla of Hawk and Dove. This is not a bug, of course, but a feature. A narrative like Irredeemable is predicated on exhibiting the familiar with a significant change thrown into the mix (in this case, the moral alignment of Superman). An experiment to see how the rules of the universe, moral and technical, reconfigure themselves in the wake of a profound alteration. And naturally we learn something of the nature of those foundational rules in the process. Some might say that’s the meat and potatoes of an apocalyptic narrative.
Mark Waid doesn’t stop with allusions to Gnosticism. A significant chunk of the second half of the story is given over to a clear pastiche of The Divine Comedy in which the Plutonian is stranded on an intergalactic insane asylum and must overcome a series of psychological challenges with the aid of a (explicitly identified as such) Virgil figure. He acquires a series of dysfunctional alien allies in the process, learning little in the way of wisdom but much in the way to expand and consolidate his power. So perhaps it would be best to take this particular section in the spirit of parody. The Virgil analogue meets a blunt and brutal end that’s befitting of an irreverent read on Dante.
I feel something should be said of Modeus, the mind-hopping imp who has a Joker-esque homoerotic fixation on the Plutonian. Despite his relationship with Tony being of central importance to the story, it is tempting to view him principally as an alignment-flipped version of Qubit. The fact that it is Qubit’s consciousness to which Modeus becomes bonded by the story’s end seems quite appropriate; a reminder that nobody emerges from this story uncompromised. In the wake of apocalypse, heroic purity is exposed as illusion. And yet there is that hope- to “get it right this time.” I think I’ll brood on that before returning to this series.
Oh, and by the way, Irredeemable has become somewhat infamous in some fan circles as having more plot holes than that proverbial slab of Swiss cheese, but in case it wasn’t obvious from the tone of this think-piece, I’m not too worried about that.
High Pressure Days 