MELVILLE'S INLAND IMAGINATION: IDEALISM AND THE UNCONSCIOUS IN 'REDBURN' AND 'PIERRE'

Redburn and Pierre represent a diptych of Melville's development from a writer of psychological subtilty to one whose psycho-analytical concern proves strikingly modern, even as it specifically addresses key literary and philosophical questions of mid-nineteenth century America. Drawing upon his own earliest adventures for Redburn, Melville seems himself drawn into still earlier dreams and desires which transform the straitened prospects of a "boy" in the merchant service into a filial quest. This psycho-analytical pursuit introduces a new principle of narration to Melville's fiction. He creates a history as interesting for its elipses and omissions as for those images and impulses which are readily recalled. Redburn self-consciously tells one story about how his predilection for "roving" emerged early and grew consistently, but the domestic traumas which are largely circumvented in this self-conscious pattern form another, unconscious design.;Redburn and Pierre aspire to be only children--in both senses. First, their inflated ambitions seem to project an essentially childish solipsism, as in Redburn's desire to recover the old world of paternal authority and maternal regard or in Pierre's desire to redeem the childhood ideals which once seem substantiated in Saddle Meadows. Secondly, this unweaned self-absorption proves not only selective but ultimately exclusive, so that each climactically fails in his responsibilities as a "brother." Instead, Redburn and Pierre remain fixated by an infant faith which conceives identity in terms of a father-ideal that has been somehow betrayed in the flesh--in the father's material or moral bankruptcy and in the physical or sensual hunger to which they suddenly discover themselves heir.;In their endeavors to relocate themselves within or reincarnate themselves as this ideal, both these embattled sons adopt postures which Melville found popularized in contemporary American literature and in which he seemed to discern an analogous regression. Redburn's quest for the father's lost world focuses upon England in much the same way that Irving locates the germ of the Sketch Book in his earliest dreams of England as that "land of Promise" which must substantiate everything "childhood has heard." Similarly, Pierre's conception of himself as a "heaven-begotten Christ," in response to what he imagines to be his father's mortal failing, draws, upon the transcendental idealism and rhetoric of Emerson, literalizing "Nature"'s proclamation that "Infancy is the messiah.".;Redburn, in his return to the Old World, will try to mystify it as sacred history and therein recover the former, idealized authority of his father. Pierre, embarking upon a transcendent Duty, will try to mystify himself in a "heaven-begotten" identity and thereby redeem the former, idealized character of his father. Together, Redburn and Pierre embody a unique approach to the question of "self" and the direction of man's deepest nature. Melville defines this direction as psycho-analytical, probing the free reign of self-conscious intentions for the closed circuit of unconscious design.;Only in Pierre does Melville again create a virtual psychobiography--this time much more deliberately. The progress of the psychological anatomy is no longer a subtle undercurrent but the tide itself by which Pierre is so cruelly buffeted. Melville practices what, by conventional expectations, seems a narrative abandon, but which represents the passionate resolve to trace man's irrational motives beyond the progressive fiction(s) of linear form. Whereas in Redburn the ambiguities emerge indirectly through the gap in self-knowledge between the narrator and his personal narrative, in Pierre the ambiguities arise precisely from the narrator's close scrutiny of his narration, whereby "I am more frank with Pierre than the best men are with themselves.".