The Ambiguousnesses: Linguistic Invention in Pierre

The Ambiguousnesses: Linguistic Invention in Pierre HOWARD FAULKNER Washburn University Never rave, Pierre; and never rant. Your father never did either; nor is it written of Socrates; and both were very wise men. Your father was profoundly in love—that I know to my certain knowledge—but I never heard him rant about it. He was always exceedingly gentlemanly; and gentlemen never rant. Milk-sops and Muggletonians rant, but gentlemen never. —Mrs. Glendinning1 I f Horace was right and the art of art is to conceal art, then Melville is a particularly artless writer, and if Pierre’s mother is right, then neither is Pierre a gentleman. Unlike Hawthorne, who always had a predetermined form, but suffered from a thinness of material, Melville was a writer who constantly burst the bounds of structure, trying—always with difficulty—to stuff his rich material into a genre that seems to demand beginnings, middles, and ends. But of course, not all art conceals what it is doing. Perhaps from sheer exuberance, perhaps from frustration, Melville, like such cineastes as D. W. Griffith and Orson Welles, constantly expands, explores, and explodes the boundaries of his genre. And when such artists are working at their full talents, the result can be an immodest and exhilarating shared experience with all the techniques in full view. It may not look effortless, but the raw exuberance often makes other artists look timid. Melville rants and raves and is no gentleman, but whether he is working at his full talent in Pierre is another question altogether, for in this tortured novel, it is not merely structural experimentation or supplemental and seemingly superfluous digressions that disconcert the reader. Rather, the language itself insistently, repetitively, and distractingly breaks the semantic and syntactic boundaries of the most self-conscious of stylists. The nouns and C  2010 The Authors Journal compilation C  2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1971), 19; hereafter cited as NN Pierre. 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 41 H O W A R D F A U L K N E R adverbs of standard English seem inadequate to express Melville’s thoughts. He coins new words and appends affixes to existing words with an abandon and a prolixity that makes reading Pierre an experience unlike anything a reader has experienced before. His “impatientment” is relentless. For no serious stretch, can a reader relax into the prose. Of course, Melville was never hesitant to reform (and deform) English vocabulary. Mardi, perhaps Melville’s other most problematic novel, experiments , though infrequently, with the same kind of playfulness that explodes in Pierre. In the earlier novel, we find occasional examples of participles made into adverbs (“reelingly,” “jeeringly,” “toilingly”), of adjectives made into adverbs (“bluely”), of adjectives given unusual forms by the addition of suffixes (“robustious”), and of adjectives made into verbs (“healthfulize”). But only once does Melville indulge in what will become the hallmark of Pierre, the use of affixes to create new nouns when standard nouns forms already exist: “hereditaments.” By the time Melville wrote Moby-Dick, his fondness for expanding noun forms by using the suffixes -ment and -ness had greatly increased. If “discernment ” is a word, why not “concernment” rather than the simpler noun “concern”? He generally prefers -ness to the more common forms of nouns that would be formed with -ity: “morbidness,” “immutableness,” “subtleness,” “exclusiveness,” “enormousness,” “artificialness.” So, too, he uses the suffix to create new, more abstract nouns where there are already simpler equivalents: “perilousness,” “passionateness,” “whimsiness.” And when his whimsiness demands it, he simply invents new forms, such as “nappishness,” “uncompromisedness ,” or “inter-indebtedness.” Once more, we find adverbs from participles (“confoundedly,” “loungingly,” postponedly”) and strange comparatives and superlatives, almost always with a preference for the synthetic rather than the analytic formation: “profounder,” “selectest,” “ruggedest,” “ancientest.” Still, as frequent as this stylistic tic has become (and there are many...