Leviathan

“Two Books Are Being Writ”

Melville’s most remarkable figure of the artist at work is arguably Pierre, the protagonist of the eponymous novel published in 1852 under the imprint of Harper & Brothers. Introduced as a “poetic boy” (Pierre 139) willing to risk everything in the name of “Truth,” Pierre Glendinning’s story takes an unforeseen turn in the last section of the book when he is eventually (and abruptly) revealed to be a writer on a mission to “gospelize the world anew” (Pierre 272). Among scholars, this plot development of Pierre has been a matter of some debate. According to Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (1978; 2006), Melville made drastic changes to the novel at the turn of 1851–52 upon reading unfavorable reviews of Moby-Dick. Higgins and Parker provide a precise time window for this occurrence to have happened. In their words:

A few days after Christmas . . . Melville announced that he was going to New York to arrange for Harper & Brothers to publish his new manuscript, which was then ready to sell as a romance of about 360 pages . . . This short version of Pierre must have been complete, for he had never approached the Harpers for a contract without a book that he at least thought was finished. What he took with him was very much the book readers of Melville are familiar with—except that it contained no passages on Pierre as an author.

(Reading 29) [End Page 52]

Higgins and Parker surmise how the Harpers’ low-ball offer for Pierre, which Melville had no choice but to accept, might have prompted him to hastily update his original “Kraken book,” a pastoral-novel-turned-gothic-romance, adding interpolated materials depicting Pierre as a rebel waging war on the literary establishment. Scholars also make the case that Melville’s falling-out with New York literato Evert Duyckinck had found its way into the book. Indeed, an 1851 argument over a daguerreotype unfailingly resurfaces in the novel, reproduced almost verbatim from Melville’s correspondence. This would make the pair with Higgins and Parker’s conjecture that “something violent happened to rupture” (Reading 153) Duyckinck and Melville’s friendship around January 1852, urging the latter to upgrade his manuscript with scathing barbs directed at his former friend and editor. As Paul Grimstad suggests,

Melville used the text of this letter for some of the first material he added to Pierre, and the changes he made lay bare the process by which lived events are generalized into allegories. . . . Fusing correspondence from a year earlier with an event from a few weeks before, Melville recasts his walk from the Harpers’ offices to Duyckinck’s Clinton Place address as Pierre’s running into the “joint editor of the Captain Kidd Monthly.” In calling the paper the “Captain Kidd Monthly” Melville again absorbs into the doing of composition Duyckinck’s having chastised him for his “piratical running down of creeds” in his review of Moby-Dick.

(86)

Nonetheless, I second Michael D. Snediker in his assessment that “[w]hile the first and second halves of Pierre indeed differ in spirit—a Reubens followed by a late Rembrandt . . . attachment to these differences overlooks the novel’s constitutive continuities” (222). Even if we remove the Pierre-as-writer chapters, Melville’s intentions with Pierre remain unclear.¹ Perhaps he was looking for a different kind of audience—new readers to win over, or to provoke (Mariani 69), or both things at once. At any rate, since Pierre’s original manuscript is now irretrievable, “Parker’s thesis,” John Bryant argues, “is a good ‘guess,’ one that feels right in some intuitive sense . . . but one that must remain a guess pending more solid evidence” (Fluid 117). In fact, many of Melville’s works—most notably Moby-Dick, as Charles Olson argued in 1947—present such a bifurcated structure. To look for a primeval ur-Pierre in the text, extirpating every reference to late-added materials, is to follow the example of archeologist Heinrich Schliemann, whose non-stratigraphic excavations in Turkey first brought the ancient site of Troy to light, but only at the price of significantly damaging the upper layers.

Yet, in reading Pierre the events of January 1852 do hold weight. In this case it is pointless to separate the art from the artist. One does not even need to know Melville’s life to get a sense of how he “wrote his own frustrations into [End Page 53] the book” (Kelley 89). The analogies between Melville’s and Pierre-as-writer’s careers run deep. Both author and character have rocky relationships with their audience and publishers. Both their debuts are well-received works centered on a ‘tropical’ setting, retrospectively dismissed by their authors as “immature freshman exercises” (Pierre 257). Pierre-as-writer’s defiance mirrors Melville’s even from a language point of view, with the first striving to “gospelize the world anew,” and the second complaining to Hawthorne that “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter” (Correspondence 192). As Paul Grimstad argues, Melville based each instance of fictional acclaim for Pierre’s sonnets on actual reviews of Moby-Dick, “methodically inverting their diction to reflect praise” (84), so as to exact revenge on those critics who found faults in his writing. Thus, in devising Pierre’s metafiction, Melville, as Pierre with his book, seemed too “to have plagiarized from his experiences” (Pierre 301). It is impossible not to see parallels between these chapters and the descriptions of Melville’s own frenzied creative process one can found in his letters—the “mesmeric state” (Correspondence 174) he once mentioned to Duyckinck. In depicting Pierre’s struggle of putting pen to paper, Melville ambivalently memorialized his own creative drive and process—he at once celebrated and satirized himself. As a piece of metaliterature, Pierre sits at the messy intersection of self-parody, self-pity, and self-aggrandizement: Pierre’s downfall is Melville’s self-directed cautionary tale.

In this respect, it is interesting to see how failure is depicted in the novel. In reading Pierre, Michael D. Snediker contends, we see “the ping-pong of Melville’s being ridiculous, versus Melville’s authorization of ridiculousness at something else’s expense” (227). Melville’s is a “controlled representation of the failure of aesthetics as such, through a deliberate authorial annihilation of the hero and his experiences” (Nori 351). This representation is structured around three interdependent levels. Firstly, Melville interposes a second, disen-chanted artist between the reader and Pierre’s art, the unnamed narrator. He is the “implied author” (Knight 164) of the text, a fictive writer who “manipulates his materials and calls attention to himself as manipulator” (165). His account of Pierre’s story is often interrupted by his own reflections on art and craft. “Pierre,” Karl F. Knight claims, is “in part [the narrator’s] story”—the story of an author “who tries to examine the moral universe by tracing the career of a naïve youth who moves from exuberant idealism to despairing self-knowledge” (164). It is no accident that the narrator’s voice and Pierre’s are perfectly attuned. As Wyn Kelley puts it, the narrator “often echoes Pierre’s rhetoric” and they “[b]oth use language that is excessive to the point of grotesquerie” (86). The narrator’s attitude towards the young hero is inconsistent; he is “teasing and sardonic” (Bryant, Tales 118) as much as sympathetic, oscillating [End Page 54] between pity and indifference as much as “between omniscience and limited knowledge” (Knight 167). At times the narrator is visibly not at ease telling Pierre’s story, as if he had been forcefully assigned to it and something about it is distressing him. He has clearly no intention to go certain places as the story unfolds; he ambivalently praises and mocks Pierre’s literary efforts, all the while parroting his language and writing style. That is because he, as a fellow artist, feels Pierre’s pain as much as he can rationalize it. One might speculate that he is but an alternative, older version of him—the author Pierre would have eventually become had he not killed himself. Pierre believes that by tirelessly toiling away at one’s desk, by giving one’s all, “Truth” is attainable and transmissible. The narrator knows that this is not the case: he has been there before, he knows that that road goes nowhere—hence his compassion. Both are projections of Melville as an artist—refractions of his younger and current self, facing each other. If the narrator is strict with Pierre, this is because Melville is equally strict with himself.

All of that becomes more and more clear in Book XXII, when Melville widens the frame to reveal a third artist. We soon discover that Pierre’s work is indeed centered on another “author-hero” (Pierre 301) called Vivia, a defiant thinker of sorts. The title of “author-hero,” Michael Jonik contends, echoes “Carlyle’s ‘poet-hero’” (87): Vivia could be himself a writer at work on a manuscript, thus continuing indefinitely the novel’s Droste effect of artist-figures. However, mine is hardly more than a speculation. As a character, Vivia is an undistinguished shadow. His whole personality is defined by five passages of Pierre’s manuscript, arbitrarily selected by the narrator. Judging from those fragments, Vivia does not seem to have a story arc of any kind. Except for the second quote, that vaguely alludes to some other, unidentified “heroes” (Pierre 301), all the excerpts from Pierre’s manuscript are seemingly taken from “a philosophical soliloquy” (Jonik 87), in which Vivia thunders against “idealist philosophies that express ‘speculative indifference’ concerning death and human suffering” (88). Vivia is not afraid to call his enemies by name: Spinoza, Plato, and Goethe all fall victim to his barbs.² Introduced this way, his story looks more like a rambling one-man play than a coherent narrative. Apparently, Vivia’s bare words are all that matters to the narrator. Vivia, Sacvan Bercovitch summarizes, is “the self made word” (263).

Therefore, the outline of Pierre’s book is anything but clear. The narrator devotes whole pages to the description of Pierre’s grueling writing routine, “a creative process that does not expand life into art, but contracts life through art” (Nori 363). We know all too well Pierre’s dedication and the hardships he suffers. What we do not know is what drives them—what Pierre’s book is about. We do not know its plot, its structure, its genre—nor its title, for that [End Page 55] matter. One may notice how the manuscript is described as an object more than a text. Pierre’s book is not a nested book, a story-within-the-story, but a mere stage prop whose aura and physicality are emphasized by the theatrical gesture with which the author bids farewell to it. In Book XXVI, Pierre indeed symbolically “crucifies” his manuscript (Bianchi, Pierre 374). He nails it to the desk and spits upon it, ritually desecrating the only existing copy of his book.³ Pinning the manuscript to the desk, Pierre figuratively blends one into the other. In doing so, he creates something like a modern art installation, a veritable monument to the creative act: the work of art is now one with the process that created it. Thus, Pierre unintentionally lends support to what the narrator was already implicitly suggesting from the outset. Namely, that the true heroic value of Pierre’s effort rests primarily on the effort itself—“that which now absorbs the time and the life of Pierre, is not the book, but the primitive elementalizing of the strange stuff, which in the act of attempting that book, has upheaved and upgushed in his soul” (Pierre 303).

The emphasis placed on the process at the expense of the text is even more apparent if we consider that Pierre’s book is incomplete. Two years before their falling-out, Melville had written to Duyckinck how he thought that “taking a book off the brain is akin [to take] an old painting off a panel” (Correspondence 174). “Two books are being writ,” echoes Pierre’s narrator, “of which the world shall only see one, and that the bungled one. The larger book, and the infinitely better, is for Pierre’s own private shelf” (Pierre 303). “Here, then, is the untimely, timely end,” Pierre cries in his cell, “Nor book, nor author of the book, hath any sequel, though each hath its last lettering!” (356). Here, the narrator and Pierre discover themselves adepts of Ishmael’s credo. Both embrace formlessness and incompletion—either as a fiat of destiny or as a structural need. Pierre’s “bungled” book is incomplete in no less than three ways. It is factually incomplete—as the book is left unfinished; it is ideally incomplete—as the book is but the shadow of Pierre’s theoretical inner “larger book”; and it is metadiegetically incomplete—as the narrator knowingly selects only five fragments of Vivia’s story and deliberately fails to provide a plot summary.⁴ Pierre’s narrator acts like an editor whose job it is to review works submitted by budding authors: he does not need to read the whole book to determine if it is valid. As a character, Vivia is but a reflection—‘but the reflection of a reflection,’ to paraphrase Ishmael—a character-mirror placed in front of other character-mirrors, with every mirror shattered, distorted, or angled differently than the other ones. If Vivia is in fact but “the self made word,” as Bercovitch has it—that is, if he and the book are impossible to tell apart—the narrator already warned us: “all the great books in the world are but . . . mirrors, distortedly reflecting to us our own things; and never mind what the mirror may be, if we [End Page 56] would see the object, we must look at the object itself, and not at its reflection” (Pierre 282–3). Vivia is a book-mirror, a miniature image of Pierre. He is Pierre’s “consummate self-made object of love” (Bercovitch 258). With Vivia, Pierre momentarily turns his incestuous/narcissistic drive away from Isabel towards himself, as “in incest we make love to someone of the opposite sex in whom we see ourselves mirrored” (Thomas 422; see also Silverman 83). It is for sure no coincidence that “Vivia” is also a female name.⁵

However, there is no use in pretending that all these personae had nothing to do with Melville. The narrator’s, Pierre’s, and Vivia’s voices distinctly echo that of the author. As John Bryant puts it, Pierre is Melville’s “most dangerous and dangerously autobiographical fiction” (Half Known 26). Melville indeed “plagiarized from his experiences,” using “lived events,” reviews of Moby-Dick, and his own private correspondence as raw material. Excerpts from an 1851 letter to Hawthorne in which Melville approaches the thinking of Goethe with “a mixture of reverence and scorn” (McIntosh 387) (“What nonsense! . . . there is an immense deal of flummery in Goethe,” Correspondence 193–194) reverberate in the Vivia fragments, with Pierre’s “author-hero” mercilessly lambasting the great German thinker: “Tell me not, thou inconceivable coxcomb of a Goethe, that the universe can not spare thee and thy immortality” (Pierre 301).

It is key, however, not to jump to hasty conclusions. Vivia’s philosophies may not necessarily be Melville’s. As Michael Jonik reminds us,

we should be careful to take [Vivia’s] dismissals as evidence of Melville’s own philosophical attitude. The narrator’s “over-the-shoulder” reading of Pierre’s dramatization of Vivia leaves it purposefully ambiguous as to whom to attribute these assertions: Are they Melville’s? The narrator’s? Pierre’s? Vivia’s?

(88)

Nevertheless, the point here is not content as much as style. One can argue about Melville’s philosophies in relation with the Vivia fragments and other such “ambiguities,” but the fact remains that Vivia’s tone, words, and attitude match Melville’s. Vivia is an offshoot of Melville, a more extreme, unrestrained version of him—his bitterness and frustrated literary ambition visibly personified. It is as if Melville gave a face—albeit an undistinguished one—to his own outrage against New York’s literary scene and marketplace. Yet, he also put some (strategic) distance between himself and such refractions. He structured Pierre’s depiction of creative failure as a game of Chinese boxes, with every “author-hero” that, in some degree, contains/parodies all the other ones:

Melville (real author) ⇒ narrator (implied author) ⇒ Pierre (character-author #1) ⇒ Vivia (character-author #2)

This multileveled game—a “surrealist regression of narrators” (Bercovitch 262), each one angrier than the last—allows one to step out to see things from [End Page 57] a distance. Had the novel been narrated in the first person, all these layers and nuances would be lost. As Elizabeth Renker puts it, “[t]he shift to third-person narration in Pierre represents for Melville a newly configured position for the observation of text itself” (70). Without the narrator’s mediation, Pierre’s metafiction would rest on a pretentious apology of misunderstood genius. Instead, Melville shuffles the cards and entrusts one projection of himself with the task of judging the work of a second. This is the narrator’s main role as a literary device—the reason why Melville created him, in addition to the necessity of not repeating Mardi’s mistake of having a dead man telling his own story, or Moby-Dick’s choice of having a character somewhat capable of hearing the thoughts of other characters. As Karl F. Knight suggests, “the narrator is . . . used precisely for the purpose of compounding the ambiguities of the book, a technical triumph of an effective vehicle for realizing the intention announced in the subtitle” (164).

In short, Pierre’s narrator serves a filtering function. “Two books are being writ; of which the world shall only see one” (Pierre 303), he declares. However, he prevents the world from seeing both. He denies us Pierre’s book, allowing the reader to read only what he thinks s/he should read. For all we know, the fragments he selected may very well be key points of the narrative as much as scrapped material—the way he sees it, it would make no difference. Yet, what the narrator omits, he omits it out of compassion. He pokes fun at Pierre’s self-inflicted agony of composition, growing “more antagonistic toward Pierre with the latter’s increasingly solipsistic and self-punishing behavior” (Silverman 97). One cannot rule out the possibility that his scorn is in fact self-directed, though, considering that the narrator sees himself in Pierre no less than Pierre sees himself in Vivia. Hence, in concealing Pierre’s work from the reader the narrator is surreptitiously shielding it from judgment. In a way, his sympathy towards Pierre matches Melville’s for the losers, the defeated, and the wretched of the Earth, whose point of view Melville would so finely convey in the writings of his mid-1850s, post-Pierre, short-stories phase.

As Sacvan Bercovitch suggestively argues, in the end “[i]t makes no difference whether or not ‘Vivia’s book’ will ever be published, because in the long view it has been published as Pierre” (303). There is no point in denying that Vivia’s fragments and the Pierre-as-writer chapters look similar. Very little in Melville’s other novels matches their anger, not even Ahab’s fiercer tirades. However, Pierre’s metafiction might also be about something else. Pierre is not (only) the story of Melville writing Pierre. The experience gap between Pierre and the narrator speaks volumes. Dramatic exaggeration notwithstanding, these chapters may tell another story. As Ruggero Bianchi (Invito 88) and others note, Pierre’s metafiction may also be a grotesque dramatization of Melville [End Page 58] writing Mardi, the one novel that forever altered the course of his career. And even if Vivia’s book is decidedly darker in tone than Mardi’s mystical periplus, Pierre-as-writer’s energy equals Melville’s in 1847–9, with two bestsellers under his belt, the nose buried in Carlyle, Burton, and Spenser, and limitless creative possibilities at hand. This is not to say that Pierre’s metafiction is a biographical account. In 1847, Melville was no disowned scion overtaken by incestuous passions living in a commune. He was a promising author freshly married with the daughter of a chief justice. His writing routine at the time may have been intense, but it was obviously nowhere near Pierre’s (Parker 567). In fact, Pierre does not record Melville’s life circumstances during the composition of Mardi as much as his creative attitude. At the center of it is his drive to transcend the autobiographical Typee/Omoo formula to venture into uncharted territories. The Pierre-as-writer modality, in other words, is a way for Melville to dramatize his entire career, merging the critical rebuttal he suffered in 1849 (one critic defined Mardi “[a]n undigested mess of rambling metaphysics,” qtd. in Mardi 668) with the impending disaster he was courting in 1852. As a writer, Pierre is as naïve and immature as Melville was in January 1847 and as embittered and self-destructive as Melville would be in January 1852.

Thus, it is no coincidence that Mardi includes in turn a subplot focused on the efforts of a character-author. Even here we see a persona appointed as a mediator between the reader and the text-within-the-text. Even here the nested text is a work of art whose plot and characters remain unknown. Even here Melville deliberately withholds information from the reader, and the metafiction is structured as a plot-absence whose narrative void serves both a self-glorification purpose and a (preemptive) critique of the literary marketplace’s shallowness. Therefore, to get a sense of how Pierre’s multileveled game of author-heroes was already foreshadowed in Melville’s third novel, let us examine Mardi’s metafictional turn, Chapter 180, and the artist-figure at its center, the legendary poet Lombardo.

“Nothing But Episodes”

Richard H. Brodhead notes that “It is sobering to turn from Mardi to Pierre and to see how quickly Melville’s sense of artistic promise turns into despair” (52). To do the same but in the opposite sense as I am doing here leaves perhaps an even more bitter taste. In the matter of five years, Melville went from believing that he could succeed in composing a critically acclaimed, Dante-like work of art steeped in metaphysics and absolutes, to pitying his own past efforts through the bleak satire of Pierre’s metafiction. The backward connection between the novels is apparent. Vivia’s name, for [End Page 59] one thing, sounds definitely “Mardian”: its phonetics echo pseudo-Polynesian monikers such as Vivo (a Mardian genie), Vee-Vee (a young page of King Media), and Vivenza (an island which functions as allegory of the United States). And if Pierre is a “bungled” book, Mardi is not that far behind. Mardi unleashed Melville’s imagination only at the price of structural imperfection. More than a novel, it is a “laboratory of a novel,” the one work that made Moby-Dick creatively possible, as Giorgio Mariani (29) contends. Accordingly, it is easy to see the seams. Melville’s third opus is a ‘chartless voyage’ (Mardi 556) whose makeshift structure was hastily improvised along the way (Branch 318). The fact that Mardi is made by at least three different books clumsily crammed into one is noticeable to even a casual reader (Davis 45). Perhaps, “after it had become clear to Melville that the final version of his book would most probably be criticized for its formlessness” (Branch 336), he felt compelled to include a metaliterary subplot that would justify such an unconventional approach. Hence the inclusion of Chapter 180, in which another book-treated-as-a-prop, the Koztanza, and his author, the Mardian poet Lombardo, take front stage.

At this point in the novel, we are approaching the end of Mardi’s circular “travelogue-satire” (Davis 142). Taji, the narrator-hero, has long receded in the background of his own quest. Now at the center of the story is his Mardian entourage, which consists of a king (Media), a historian (Mohi), a poet (Yoomy), and a loquacious “questioning, doubting seeker” (Meldrum 460), the philosopher Babbalanja, occasionally possessed by an equally talkative demon (Azzageddi). The realistic, Typee-ish overtones of the first section of the novel are thus well behind. The initial Polynesian setting has made way to a Swiftian, other-worldly realm of isles populated by blue-eyed sultans, in which every atoll, reef, or dreamy islet visited by Taji’s coterie stands as an allegory of something. The kingdom of Bonovona, held by “king-philosopher” (Mardi 589) Abrazza, is where “Melville calls attention to Mardi as a product of hard labor by including an allegory about his own making of the novel” (Weinstein 251). By means of a dialogic, theatrical chapter that seems equally to channel Plato and to anticipate passages from Moby-Dick, Melville stages a reflection on “the tragic dimensions of the theme of the artist” (Meldrum 466), as the four travel companions engage in a lively debate around the Koztanza, one of Mardi’s national poems.

Here, the etymology alone is revelatory. In Chapter 180, Mardi’s usual Arabesque/orientalist onomastics (Finkelstein) make way to a pool of names gesturing towards European cultures. “Lombardo,” as noted by Dennis Berthold (73) is “clearly an Italian name” that “conflates several proper names in [Dante’s] Commedia,” such as Purgatory XVI’s Marco Lombardo, or Lombardy’s very own Virgil (Bianchi, Mardi 480). Names like “Abrazza” and “Bonovona” sound [End Page 60] equally Dantesque, with “Bonovona” conflating Bologna (whose original Latin name was “Bononia”) and Verona, two places mentioned in the Commedia (in Hell XXIII and Purgatory XVIII, respectively). As the city of Verona also recurs in Shakespeare, perhaps it is no accident that the name “Lombardo” incorporates the word “bard.” For its part, Koztanza—Berthold (74) maintains—could refer to Dante’s Constance, the Kaiserin of the Holy Roman Empire mentioned in Purgatory III and seen in Paradise III. One cannot help but notice how “Koztanza” also encompasses the word “stanza,” as to make the references to Italy and poetry even more explicit. Thus, “Lombardo” and “Koztanza” could hint at Italian, British, and German literatures and cultures—that is, at most of Melville’s influences at the time of the composition. Less than two years away from composing his great whaling epic, here Melville is clearly wearing his ambition on his sleeve. The Koztanza is no creative miscarriage like Vivia’s book, but a literary monument akin to Dante’s Commedia or Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Even if Chapter 180 is not devoid of ironic overtones, and in writing about Lombardo Melville is clearly harboring doubts about Mardi’s eventual success, we are still a long way from the bitterness of Pierre. In 1847–9, Melville was still confident, as was his sister Augusta, that “Oro’s blessing” (qtd. in Correspondence 114) will eventually be upon Mardi, his “own Koztanza,” and that the novel, as Melville wrote to Richard Bentley echoing Lombardo (Mardi 600), “has not been written in vain” (Correspondence 132).

In Pierre, Melville will insert a judgmental narrator between Vivia’s book and the reader. Here, the filtering function is performed by a character (Babbalanja), with a narrator (Taji) that, in contrast with other metaliterary sections of the novel (Meldrum 461), reports the scene without comment. In this case, no passage from the book-within-the-book is quoted. The only words we hear from Lombardo are supposedly taken from another text, his autobiography (Mardi 597), and are at any rate always recalled by Babbalanja. Considering how the latter is “no mere recorder of . . . legends” (Davis 173), but rather an interpreter of them, more interested in meanings that in facts—one who, nonetheless, is purportedly reciting a “thousand pages” (Mardi 601) poem from memory—one may entertain the hypothesis that the Lombardo described by Babbalanja could easily be more a projection of his than anything else. Babbalanja is no artist like Pierre’s narrator. However, he too has a penchant for aesthetics. His reflection on art and authorship covers all the steps of Lombardo’s creative process, from the initial spark (“a full heart” and “the necessity of . . . procur[ing] his yams”, 592), to the revisions (“Genius is full of trash”, 595; “I probe, tear and wrench”, 599), to the ‘mesmeric state’ experienced by Lombardo during the composition (“[he] never threw down his pen; it dropped from him”, 596). Here Lombardo is clearly a stand-in for Melville, ever the [End Page 61] “inveterate reviser” caught between “oscillating revisions” (Bryant, “Editing” 115), one who called “botches” (Correspondence 191) his published works, and that wondered to Hawthorne “[W]hen shall we be done growing? . . . [W]hen shall we be done changing?” (213).

In fact, we do not know whether the Koztanza possesses an ending. Perhaps, even Lombardo died leaving his masterpiece incomplete, as Pierre does.⁶ What is certain is that both Pierre’s and Lombardo’s are books consciously “committed to imperfection” (Pierre 334), textual revolts against the tyranny of form. And indeed, the highlight of the discussion on the Koztanza is the moment in which Babbalanja justifies to king Abrazza the assumed “lack [of] cohesion” (Mardi 597) of the poem. Through Babbalanja, Melville lays out the foundation of his aesthetics of incompletion. The more one work of art has flaws, argues Babbalanja, the more it looks like the elusive, ungraspable, and unrepresentable reality that is supposed to mirror. In his words:

Years before Pierre’s game of refractions, one can already see the same dynamic at play. Even here we see a projection of Melville (Babbalanja) evaluating the work and deeds of another (Lombardo). Even in this case, countless details are provided regarding the process and the reception of the book-prop, but no synopsis is to be found. All we know is that the characters of the Koztanza are “rare worthies” (596), and that the text lacks consistency. As in the case of Vivia’s book, what seems to matter here is not the substance of the body of work as much as its aura. Pierre’s narrator will omit the better part of Pierre’s manuscript out of compassion for the reviled artist. It is not far-fetched to assume that Babbalanja, for his part, is concealing the substance of the Koztanza out of disdain for the “fops and brawlers” (601) that cannot understand it. At a closer look, their motivation is the same—their lack of confidence in the general reader.

In this respect, the closing notes of Chapter 180 are significant. Babbalanja asks everyone his opinion about Lombardo’s magnum opus, a work that everyone present claims to know. Abrazza, notwithstanding his professed expertise, is forced to admit that he never read it. Mohi read it but pretends to ignore it when in public. Yoomy feels that his heart was “bettered” (602) by it. Media read it nine times. Interestingly, Taji, who is also present as a character—and reports the whole scene as a narrator—does not answer, nor utters a single word in the whole chapter. Perhaps, what Melville is suggesting here is that the [End Page 62] artist, despite his/her efforts, has no ultimate control on the eventual reception of the piece of art. Once published, the book can be equally adored, despised, or met with general indifference. Not even a literary monument “claiming kin with mountains” (600), Melville implies, is nothing more than a reflective object that, like Moby-Dick’s doubloon, “to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self” (Moby-Dick 382).

But there is also another possibility. Melville’s point could be that in the age of mechanical reproduction the substance of the work of art is no more a determining factor. To meet the market’s demand, authors are forced to become “bargainers,” and “bindings,” “not brains make books” (Mardi 599). According to this view, the real accomplishment is not the work of art itself but the very process that made it possible. Literary greatness, says Ishmael, rests on suspension and irresolution. The process is the real work of art—the book is but the artist’s signature on the bottom of the portrait. Hence Babbalanja’s admiration and Pierre’s narrator’s compassion, hence the focus that both accord to Lombardo and Pierre’s writing routine at the expense of the text. Melville’s choice of appointing projections of himself as mediators between the book-prop and the reader manifests how deeply he realized that only an “author-hero” can truly understand the pain of another. In 1847, this meant having a philosopher crowning a poet with a laurel wreath. In 1852, this resulted in a writer seeing his own failed ambitions reflected in the work of a younger colleague. And even though Mardi and Pierre’s metafictions record two precise moments in his career, there is no doubt that both subplots, with their strategic lacunae and their halls of mirrors of characters and narrators, are part of a meditation that Melville carried on until the last of his writing days.