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  • The Feral Sublime:Caspar Hauser and Melville's Pierre
  • Len Gutkin

Ferality and Madness in Pierre

In Paul Auster's postmodern detective novel City of Glass (1985), the protagonist, Quinn, encounters a man named Peter Stillman, who we learn spent his childhood locked in a room, all human contact shut out.1 Having eventually been rescued and even taught to talk, Peter speaks a strange English marked by the trauma of his past, his weird, off-kilter idiom reflecting his late arrival to language and to the consciousness that language permits. In a stunning four-page monologue, Stillman provides Quinn with an account of himself and of his late emergence into sociality and subjectivity:

I know that all is not right in my head. And it is true, yes, and I say this of my own free will, that sometimes I just scream and scream. For no good reason . . . I forget how to make the words come out of my mouth. [ . . . ] But I do love going to the park. There are the trees, and the air and the light. There is good in all that, is there not? Yes.

(Auster 21).

In Stillman's speech, Auster splits the difference between the distortions of pathology and the intensities of poetry, creating a linguistic texture I call the feral sublime. This strategy is by now a familiar one, and is in part descended from Faulkner's representation of Benjy's interiority in The Sound and the Fury. While Benjy is not, of course, feral, the otherness constituted by his cognitive limitations and the linguistic strategies deployed to represent his semi-verbal consciousness make him part of the history of the feral sublime.2

But the locus classicus of the feral sublime in American literature is Pierre's mysterious Isabel, for whom ferality is a form of Melvillean madness.3 The whole of Pierre might be thought of as a novel gone mad, dementedly refusing generic normativity, lurching from one overwrought genre-parody to the next, pushing its prose, on the one hand, to the limits of bad taste and, on the other, to the limits of an experimentalism that looks, today, uncannily modernistic. And not only is Pierre constructed madly, but it may also have been—so its initial reviewers thought—an actual document of insanity. The New York [End Page 20] Day Book accused it of containing "the ravings and reveries of a madman," while the Charleston Mercury reported that Melville "was really supposed to be deranged" and that his "friends were taking measures to place him under treatment." One reviewer claimed that Melville and his creations are a "collection of lunatics" (as qtd in Levander 424).

As with Ahab and Bartleby, Isabel's madness involves a failure of socialization that requires an exploration of the failure of language. But unlike Bartleby, who rejects language altogether, reducing it to a single sentence of negation, Isabel never stops talking, at least once she gets started. For much of her early life, as recounted in her two-part monologue, she had hardly anyone to speak to at all. The house where she spent her early years was a zone of silence in which "[n]o name; no scrawled or written thing; no book, was in the house; no one memorial speaking of its former occupants. It was dumb as death." The couple in charge of her "were not entirely unkind to me; but, I repeat, they seldom or never spoke to me" (NN Pierre 115). Her eventual asylum home dilates the primal scene of language-deprivation: most of the inmates "were dumb, and could not, or would not speak, or had forgotten how to speak" (120). Representations of Isabel's madness depend on the specter of the feral child, in which Melville had a pronounced interest, as evidenced by his repeated allusions, throughout his oeuvre, to the story of the German wild-child Casper Hauser. A network of verbal and thematic echoes connecting Pierre and an important early account of Caspar Hauser strongly suggest Melville's debt to the Hauser story.

Hauser and Melville

The tale of Casper Hauser, an unsocialized teenager who seemed to emerge out of nowhere in Nuremberg in 1828...

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