Reading Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities by Higgins Brian; Parker Hershel;

Author:Higgins, Brian; Parker, Hershel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2006-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

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THE PAMPHLET AND THE CITY:

THE KRAKEN ENDING

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In Book XIII, “They Depart the Meadows,” the shortest Book in the novel, the Saddle Meadows section ends, with an ironic reminder of the opening of Book II. The “vainglorious driver” of the coach taking Pierre and Isabel to the city seems a “bravado-hero” reminiscent of the exuberant Pierre who four days earlier had taken Lucy for a drive in his grandfather’s enormous old phaeton. In contrast to the “elated” coach driver, an image of power and control as he threads his four reins among the fingers of his gloved hand before flourishing his whip (202), Pierre is now a dismayed passenger, hopelessly entangled in the “complicating knots” (175) he has tied about himself and Isabel. They are accompanied by Delly Ulver, the disgraced daughter of the occupants of the farmhouse where Isabel had been employed. This departing “bridal-party” is “sad as funerals,” according to the Shakespearean commentator, old Casks, the innkeeper (203).

Though Pierre and his companions have “forever fled the sweet fields of Saddle Meadows” for the city (203), subsequent Books repeatedly recall passages in the Saddle Meadows section. In the first chapter of Book XIV, “The Journey and the Pamphlet,” we learn that Pierre’s thoughts in the silent coach are “very dark and wild”; for a while “rebellion and horrid anarchy and infidelity” fill his soul (205). His rebellious mood recalls his threat to the “sovereign powers” in his first soliloquy: if they abandon him to an unknown misery, his “fond faith” in them might “clean depart” and give him up to be a “railing atheist” (41). Isabel’s letter had prophesied that the “banded world” would call him “fool, fool, fool!” if he yielded to a “heavenly impulse” in responding to her “unquenchable yearnings” (64). On the journey to the city, it is the “Evil One” (205), or his own “evil mood” (207), that propounds to Pierre “the possibility of the mere moonshine of all his self-renouncing Enthusiasm” and hoots at him and calls him a “fool” (205). Memories of his “heroic” words to Isabel, “Comfort thee, and stand by thee, and fight for thee, will thy leapingly-acknowledging brother!” can still momentarily elate him. But the narrator’s language recalls once more the sublimating deludedness of Pierre’s chivalric impulses. Remembrances of the “divine inspiration” of the hour when these heroic words “burst from his heart” unfurl themselves “in proud exultations in his soul; and from before such glorious banners of Virtue, the club-footed Evil One limped away in dismay” (205–6). Pierre’s forgetful elation is quickly dispersed, however, by insistent memories of his mother’s “dread, fateful parting look” and “heart-proscribing words” at their last meeting, and by equally wrenching memories of Lucy’s “agonizing shriek” and swoon. The “nameless awfulness” of his “still imperfectly conscious, incipient, new-mingled emotion” toward Isabel also forces itself on his consciousness, so that he is compelled to recognize, if only fleetingly, that he seems “threatened by the possibility of a sin anomalous and accursed” (206). Despite the self-revelation at the

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