| In his 1852 work Pierre, Herman Melville examines the role of artists in light of their continual battle against threats of decay and oblivion posed by temporal elements. The three modes of time presented in the work---memory, prophecy, and intuition---Melville proposes as the artist's ultimate source of knowledge and inspiration, but also as the greatest threats to his access to truth. The author's existing structural template provides a means to analyze the work through the three subjective incarnations of chronological time.Using these modes of time as a governing hermeneutic, Melville treats the tenuous relationship between time and art. In presenting the artist as subject to time, the author likewise offers a subjective, irrational, individualized, and at times contradictory perspective, opening a new aperture into his unique and dark Romantic poetics. As the novel's characters descend into oblivion, the likelihood of art's survival through time becomes increasingly dependent on Melville's success or failure in expressing his Romantic vision of past, future, and present ambiguity. |
