La scrittura sconfitta

the long version

Written in the wake of Moby-Dick and published few months after it, Pierre, or The Ambiguities (New York, July 1852) brought to completion the parabola of Melville's most ambitious attempts at monumental works of art. Invested with charges of "metaphysics," "second-hand Germanism," and "Transcendentalism," this ponderous novel was repudiated at home and abroad, sold poorly, and left its bewildering author financially prostrate. The novel of the ambiguities proved not only an aesthetic failure, but also a deliberate and functional representation of the failure of aesthetics itself. Pastoral idylls and gothic reversals, domesticity and the mysteries of genealogy, elopement and disinheritance, narcissism and titanism, murder, incest, and suicide – Melville capitalized on all the literary stereotypes at hand to dramatize the artistic de-formation (MißBildung) of his immature hero and expose the inadequacy of romantic consciousness at large. This aesthetic destruction, in turn, involved an unsystematic though devastating philosophical critique, one that put to question the ontological and theological notions of the metaphysical tradition. The binary logic of the metaphysical quest, the development and the distortion of the concept of being as idea, the relation between religion and metaphysics, the concept of nothing and the transvaluation of values, the instability of the self and its identity. Melville deliberately dramatizes the failure of aesthetic experience in order to make its philosophical implications utterly problematic. Being, truth, God as summum ens, the "strong" identity of the self: the central notions of metaphysics as "onto-theology" lose consistency and validity through an unsuccessful experience which, in resting heavily on them, causes their annihilation. Pierre is the novel which dramatizes the failure of the Western artist: a failure in which aesthetics is given as crisis of metaphysics. Smashed against the whale, the "ontological heroics" previously staged and performed as ideological conflicts on the decks of the Pequod are now handed down in pieces to a hero whose aesthetic experience exposes their foundational inadequacy.