"Strange, Imperious Instantaneousness": Mysteries of Space/Time in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

“Strange, Imperious Instantaneousness”: Mysteries of Space/Time in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities BRAD J. RICCA Case Western Reserve University Now, in this matter Mr. Melville . . . might have been mad to the very pinnacle of insanity; he might have torn our poor language into tatters, and made from the shreds a harlequin suit in which to play his tricks; he might have piled up word upon word, and adjective upon adjective, until he had built a pyramid of nonsense, which should last to the admiration of all men; he might have done all this and a great deal more, and we should not have complained . . . at page 248: The strange, imperious instantaneousness in him. Here in an instant was our whole theory upset. The hieroglyph on the Rosetta stone was not more puzzling than this noun of Mr. Melville’s. Review of Pierre by George Washington Peck New York American Whig Review (1852) The Pamphlet (Exposed!) and the Longitudinal Method A ppearing in Book XIV of Herman Melville’s Pierre, the Plotinus Plinlimmon episode is so notorious that it is often either ignored as filler or dismissed as satire. According to Brian Higgins, such inconsistency concerning this chapter may be dangerous: for though as “a satiric device it can be most effective; it can also easily leave the author open to misinterpretation.”1 Leon Howard and Hershel Parker agree that “Critics are still confused . . . by the meaning of the setpiece which constitutes the philosophical crux of the novel.”2 Richard Dean Smith similarly believes that readers have “inconclusively examined the implications of Plinlimmon’s conclusive dichotomy . . . ‘That in things terrestrial (horological) a man must not be governed by ideas celestial.’”3 John Wenke posits that there might indeed be meaning here, that “Plinlimmon’s treatise focuses the hermeneutical C
2006 The Authors Journal compilation C
2006 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc 1 Brian Higgins, “Plinlimmon and the Pamphlet Again,” Studies in the Novel 4 (1972): 27-38. 2 Leon Howard and Hershel Parker, Critical Essays on Melville’s Pierre (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983), 406-7. 3 Richard Dean Smith, Melville’s Science:“Devilish Tantalization of the Gods!” (New York: Garland, 1993), 214; hereafter cited as Smith. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 3 B R A D J . R I C C A process and translates the informing tensions of the narrative into suggestively (and seductively) compressed concepts.”4 Like the many digressive chapters of Moby-Dick, the Plinlimmon pamphlet offers related technical information that is perhaps crucial to the overall understanding of the novel and may offer, as Carl Bredahl hopes, “a different . . . perspective on Pierre’s dilemma.”5 After leaving the family estate, Pierre finds a strange pamphlet that he (at times unconsciously) keeps with him. Alone in a New York coach, he finally reads this “very sleazy” pamphlet that is “so metaphysically and insufferably titled as this: ‘Chronometricals & Horologicals.’”6 The tract is a dense, inflated account of time-keeping as it relates to man’s obligation to Christ’s figure of moral perfection. The basic argument is a fairly simple distinction between “Christ’s chronometrical morality, which cannot be acted upon in local times and places, from those relative, horological maxims false to higher, spiritual truth.”7 But is the pamphlet, strictly speaking, a Melvillean religious satire? Given its often difficult, temporal language and examples, the pamphlet’s primary trope can be read not only as satiric misinterpretation but as scientific interpretation; specifically, as a fiercely contextualized meditation on time and space. Earlier in the novel, Pierre stares at the sky and claims: “thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space” (NN Pierre 52). The “countenance of mystery” that so frustrates Pierre is not only the stars, but also the strange portrait of his father that he seeks to demystify. But since the mystery he perceives is both “infinite” and “dumb,” Pierre must look to the more “visible” subjects (“surfaces”) that mask the “underlying” answer...