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A Dead Author to Be Resurrected: the Ambiguity of American Democracy in Herman Melville’S Pierre

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A Dead Author to Be Resurrected: the Ambiguity of American Democracy in Herman Melville’S Pierre 5 The ALSJ Young Scholar Award for 2016 Shogo TANOKUCHI A Dead Author to Be Resurrected: The Ambiguity of American Democracy in Herman Melville’s Pierre Introduction erman Melville Crazy.” This was the notorious headline of the New York Day Book regarding Melvilleʼs seventh novel, Pierre: or, the “H Ambiguities (1852). Criticizing Pierre as a book of “the ravings and reveries of a madman,” the reviewer recommended that Melville be kept “stringently secluded from pen and ink” (Higgins and Parker 436). Contemporary reviewers viewed it as the book that led to Melvilleʼs death as an author. Melville experienced rejection and debt because of the harsh failure of his book and began to anonymously publish short stories.1 Along with the parallel between Melvilleʼs and Pierreʼs ruin as writers, scholars have conventionally interpreted the protagonistʼs death as a nihilistic end. F. O. Matthiessen notes that “nothing rises to take its place [“Pierreʼs world”] and assert continuity” (469) after his death in New York Cityʼs prison, “the Tombs.” Pierreʼs death seems to be pessimistic. After his encounter with Isabel Banford, who introduces herself as his half-blood sister, and the discovery of his fatherʼs adultery, the protagonist abandons his rich family and huge estate, Saddle Meadows. He becomes a writer to make a living with Isabel and an ill-fated maid, Delly, and to “deliver . miserably neglected Truth to the world” (283). Yet his The Journal of the American Literature Society of Japan, No. 15, February 2017. Ⓒ 2017 by The American Literature Society of Japan 6 Shogo TANOKUCHI aim cannot be achieved. Just before Pierreʼs death, his publisher criticizes his book as “a blasphemous rhapsody” in which he plagiarizes “the vile Atheists, Lucian and Voltaire” (356). Charged as “a swindler” (356), Pierre keeps his work in his study and refuses to publish. The ambiguity of his death, however, encourages reconsideration of his ruin. Pierre regards his end as a living death, saying, “now to live is death, and now to die is life” (360). Several scholars have noted that his end can be interpreted from many perspectives, not just nihilism. For instance, Sacvan Bercovitch points out that Pierreʼs death in the prison does not mean “existential nothingness” because “something is discovered here by somebody” (257). Masaki Horiuchi notes that “even if Melville could not understand the hidden meanings of Isabel when he had finished the novel, he succeeded in leaving her body as a corpse, waiting for a careful listening reader” (74). Building on these studies, this paper examines Pierreʼs ambiguous death from the point of authorship, arguing that the issue of authorship in Pierre reflects mid- nineteenth century American politics. The novel was written during a period when the Young America movement flourished. Driven by an ardor for the Revolutionary Fathers, people made an attempt to establish “universal democracy, equality, and the overthrow of European kings” (Rogin 73). Young American democracy, however, is inherently hypocritical; while Young Americans tried to realize universal equality, the hierarchical relationship between the ruler/ruled survived in the United States through slavery and Manifest Destiny. Melville expresses such conflict through Pierreʼs “sovereign authorship” (Dimock 76). Instead of Pierreʼs longing for equality, his writing reproduces the relationship between the oppressor/oppressed. Yet, if we focus on Isabelʼs authorship, not only on Pierreʼs, we can shed new light on Pierre as a destructive satire of American politics. This paper aims to read Pierre as a novel in which the destruction and re-creation of American democracy proceed together. Pierreʼs pessimistic ruin does critique the hypocrisy of American democracy. More importantly, however, Pierre and Isabelʼs deaths explore the possibility of a world without hierarchy. I. Melvilleʼs letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1851 presented his view of democracy. Denying a hierarchy among men, he emphasized a “ruthless democracy on all sides” (Correspondence 190): “[A] thief in a jail is as honorable a personage as Gen. George Washington” (190-91). Although he viewed the A Dead Author to Be Resurrected 7 similarity between the Revolutionary hero and a thief in a jail as “ludicrous,” he thought that “Truth is the silliest thing under the sun” (191). Melvilleʼs works express his ideal of “unconditional democracy” (191). In Chapter 26 of Moby-Dick (1851), Ishmael “ascribe[s] high qualities” to “meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways” (103) in the name of the “just Spirit of Equality” (104). The ludicrous ideal of democracy equates a Founding Father with a cannibalistic “savage” from the South Pacific: “Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed” (Moby-Dick 55). Melvilleʼs model of democracy was heavily influenced by mid-nineteenth century American politics. His life coincided with “the golden age of democracy” in the United States. While the franchise was extended to all white males during the early nineteenth century, Andrew Jacksonʼs election in 1828 and 1832 suggested that “common, uneducated men could rise to rule the state” (Berthold 150). As for Melville, his major works such as Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), and Moby-Dick corresponded with the Young America movement. After several Founding Fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, died in the 1820s, the younger generation made efforts to achieve universal democracy both inside and outside of the U.S. Melville became enthusiastically involved in Young America due to his intimate friendship with Evert A. Duyckinck, a pivotal figure in the movement.2 Young American democracy, however, suffered from an internal contradiction; instead of embodying equality, inequality in the U.S. survived through Manifest Destiny and slavery in the form of conqueror/conquered and master/slave relationships. As Dimock suggests, Andrew Jackson, one representative Young American, reproduced Jeffersonʼs discourse on America as an “empire for liberty” to sanctify the annexation of Texas as “extending the area of freedom” in 1843 (qtd. in Dimock 9). Jackson justified his expansionist policy to dispossess territories of the Florida Seminoles in the name of “pacification” (Robertson- Lorant 81). Moreover, the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act permitted slavery and postponed legal equality. When an escaped slave, Thomas Sims, was arrested in Boston, Melvilleʼs father-in-law, Judge Lemuel Shaw, ordered Sims to be remitted to Georgia in compliance with the Fugitive Slave Law. Melvilleʼs Mardi (1849) portrays this contradiction of American democracy through a fictionalized version of the U.S., Vivenza: “In-this-re-publi-can-land-all- men-are-born-free-and-equal. Except-the-tribe-of-Hamo [African Americans]” 8 Shogo TANOKUCHI (512-13). Implying slavery in the South, Melvilleʼs work sarcastically reveals the true nature of Jeffersonian equality.3 Melvilleʼs ideal of democracy, as Timothy B. Powell notes, reflects the two-facedness of American democracy: racial equality exposes “ruthless racism” under the U.S. rhetoric of “eternal democracy” (167). According to Michael Paul Rogin, by the time of writing Pierre, Melville believed in the power of “the literary romance” to reveal “the bloody truths” of American democracy, slavery and Manifest Destiny, “masked and implied by the political rhetoric of celebration” (75). Yet, in the novelʼs central chapter, “Young America in Literature,” the protagonist fails to produce subversive work because his literary environment is “concerned only with adoring his poems” and “ignore[s] the poetʼs inner meaning” (Rogin 76). As Rogin concludes, Pierre reflects Melvilleʼs disillusionment with the Young America movement, whose authors can no longer offer “access to the nationʼs interior” (76). Examining the issue of authorship throughout Pierre, however, enables us to see that, in addition to critiquing Young American democracy, the novel seeks for a way to realize the ideal of equality among men. Melvilleʼs famous essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850) indicates that the problem of authorship is inextricably connected to that of democratic equality. In it, he encourages American writers to tell “the Truth” “in this world of lies” (244), equating “the Truth” with democratic equality, and urging American writers to “carry republican progressiveness into Literature, as well as into Life” (245) to fulfill the “unshackled, democratic spirit of Christianity in all things” (248). He celebrates Nathaniel Hawthorne as the “Master Genius” (252) of national literature and examines how his talent originates in the “great power of blackness” (243). Superficially expressing “all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorneʼs soul,” Hawthorneʼs works imply the “Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin” (243). For Melville, writing helps gain access to the nationʼs interior to unveil its original sin. While exposing the fundamental problems of American politics, which allowed inequality to persist in society, American writers should show in their work how to realize a world without hierarchy, where the ruler/ruled relationship is resolved.4 Melvilleʼs Pierre makes a radical criticism of the U.S. by showing the problem of possession as the countryʼs original sin, which resulted in the hierarchy between the ruler/ruled. The novel narrates the history of possession of American land through Saddle Meadows. At the beginning, Pierre enjoys the beauty of Saddle A Dead Author to Be Resurrected
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