“Or, the Whale”: Unpopular Melville

in the Popular Imagination, or a

Theory of Unusability
RICHARD HARDACK

The novelist Herman Melville’s work went largely unnoticed after

Moby-Dick. Critics thought that he crossed the literary line
and recommended burning Moby-Dick.
Bob Dylan, Chronicles1

Consequently, in the production of Pierre, Mr. Melville has deviated

from the legitimate line of the novelist.
Review of Pierre (1852)2

Crossing the Line: Jumping the Shark, or the Whale

I
recently saw a local band playing in San Francisco whose name is “Or,
The Whale,” an in-joke for Melvilleans, or perhaps part of a tradition
going back to the late 1960s, when another local band named itself
Moby Grape. (They played, incidentally, in the Castro, not far from the bar
Moby Dick, creating a kind of Melville enterprise zone.) That once unpopular
novel has had a surprising influence on popular music, ranging from Led
Zeppelin’s fifteen-minute drum solo indulgence titled “Moby Dick” to the
techno-musician Moby (Richard Melville Hall), who claims to be distantly
related to the author. In the late 1960s, the record label of the folk-rock group
the Turtles was called White Whale, presaging a contemporary indie band of
the same name. Before the digital age, one could find numerous Moby Disc
record stores in the Northeastern United States, and even a Moby Disques near
the Panthéon in Paris, which one imagines would have amused Melville. The
musician-artist Laurie Anderson staged a performance piece inspired by Moby-
Dick, and Stanley Crouch situated Melville’s opus as a proto-jazz novel for its

C 2009 The Authors

Journal compilation 
C 2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

1 Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume I (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 123. A version of this
essay was presented to the Melville Society at the 2006 MLA Conference in Philadelphia. My
thanks to M. Thomas Inge and the panel participants.
2 Southern Literary Messenger, September 18, 1852, in Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, ed.
Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 436.

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improvisational verve. Emblematically, it is as if Moby-Dick can be “played”

in many keys, or is amenable to many arrangements. However, as I elaborate,
almost all references to Melville in popular culture rely on Moby-Dick and a
few other sources whose useful indeterminacy or ambiguity allows them to be
adapted to as many uses as artists and critics can devise.3
In the United States, Melville is known in the popular imagination for
relatively few works: the “B” trilogy of “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and “Billy
Budd”; and the well-known but not necessarily well-read Moby-Dick. (In the
nineteenth-century, Typee was popular partly through its notoriety, but has
receded from public consciousness). On the other hand, relatively few, perhaps
even within the academy, read Mardi, the almost wholly ignored Israel Potter
and Clarel, and to some degree Pierre and The Confidence-Man. A useful context
might be to think of film adaptations of Melville’s work: one could contrast
numerous Hollywood productions of Moby-Dick with Leos Carax’s intriguing
but singularly inaccessible French adaptation of Pierre, POLA X (an acronym
for Pierre Ou Les Ambiguı̈tés X, referencing the fact that Carax filmed his tenth
screenplay, though perhaps, as with the amplifiers in Spinal Tap, he should
have gone to eleven). It is hard to imagine that contemporary Hollywood
would bring Pierre to the screen.
Recently, Paul Lauter has assessed why several of Melville’s other works
became staples of the pre- and post-war canon, situating their popularity in
terms of their appeal to new critical pedagogy. And Donald Pease has evalu-
ated their hegemonic function in reifying a Cold War American resistance to
communism.4 But the equally relevant question is why most of Melville’s works
remain unknown or unpopular, not just resistant to interpretation, but almost
invisible and “unreadable” in popular media. (I call these works unpopular
as well as lesser-known because they tend to elicit visceral negative responses
when read; with Melville, the categories of lesser-known and unpopular over-
lap to a considerable degree).
With important exceptions in the academy, where it became pedagog-
ically instrumental, Moby-Dick became popular despite its density, but that
might be because it was often read in ways that deemphasized its hybridity and
presented digestible, usable narratives. I define this hybridity in terms of genre,

3These examples are a partial update to M. Thomas Inge’s excellent resource, “Melville in Popular
Culture,” A Companion to Melville Studies, ed. John Bryant (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986),
695–739.
4 In “Melville Climbs the Canon,” American Literature 66:1 (1994), 1–24, Lauter suggests that Billy
Budd and Moby-Dick initially became popular as kinds of palimpsests because they tested readers’
acuity and appealed to high-cultural sensibilities that valorized Modernist obscurity, but not for
their cultural criticisms (16, 19). See also generally Donald Pease, Visionary Compacts: American
Renaissance Writings in Cultural Contexts (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).

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and somewhat differently from the way William Spanos does in The Errant Art
of Moby Dick, when he focuses on legitimation and consensus. According to
most critics, Moby-Dick found favor with the public for its politics, characters,
or adventure, not its highly idiosyncratic dramatization of transcendental
metaphysics, parodies of Goethean physiognomics, or other hybridized dis-
courses (much as they might appeal to some modernists and scholars). While
some readers and reviewers appreciated such combinations of genres, or what
Sheila Post-Lauria terms, after Evert Duyckinck, “linguistic infelicities,” most
found ways to neutralize them.5 While it is only a generalization, one could
say that popular Melville tends to be usefully misread, and unpopular Melville
read more “accurately,” but uselessly. Popular Melville reflects one side of this
pasteboard mask.
Here I explore what it means for the works of our national author to be
so divided, or perhaps POLA-rized, in the popular imagination between the
accessible and inaccessible, and the utilizable and unutilizable. In the spirit
of his subtitles, I consider a range of alternatives to account for Melville’s
quondam popularity. Given the way Melville is simultaneously posited as our
best-known and most obscure author, how are we to view works such as
Mardi and Pierre, which are rarely referenced in popular culture? How do we
treat the twentieth-century “cross-over” texts like Moby-Dick, which academics
might contend eventually became popular with the public for reasons that are
inconsonant with their appeal to scholars? Do Melville’s later or unpopular
writings not embody Cold War values? Can one develop a single argument
that explains why works as diverse as Mardi and The Confidence-Man solicit
responses from the public ranging from indifference to hostility? Is Pierre
unpopular because it articulates something radically different from or more
offensive than Moby-Dick? Is the anomaly that Pierre is enduringly unpopular,
Or, the Whale now popular? As Moby-Dick’s subtitle suggests, or as Pierre’s
protagonist experiences, we are usually engaging with at least two Melvillean
texts when we read: one as it was perceived in its day, and one as perceived
in the present; and yet another text when it becomes “rehabilitated” by the
academy, or is received in popular culture. Why do Melville’s texts seem
especially divergent: one book written in blood, the other in ink, already hybrid
in creation and reception?
My overarching claim is that what has made some of Melville’s texts
popular are the uses to which they can be put. Their adaptability neutralizes
their disruptive hybridity or mixed forms. (In Melville’s works, hybridity

5Sheila Post-Lauria, Correspondent Colorings (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996),

135.

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represents a contested mixture of genre and ontological categories that can

be complementary or incongruous, and often produces, but is distinct from,
ambiguity. Ambiguity is an aesthetic effect, but hybridity is primarily a con-
dition of identity). Lawrence Buell suggests that the emotionally restrained
cantos of Clarel were “‘eminently adapted for unpopularity,’ as Melville later
remarked.”6 In this regard, the popularity of Melville’s texts is connected to
their adaptability. Melville’s unpopular works are resistant not to interpretation
but to paraphrasis and accessible adaptation, and thereby reflect a kind of
sterile hybridity. This hybridity becomes critical to Melville studies not only
because reviewers praised and rebuked his works for that same quality but
because Melville’s style—in its overall trajectory, if not in purely linear or
absolute fashion—progresses in and through its treatment of mixture and am-
biguity. In his early novels up to and including Moby-Dick, Melville often treats
mixture as a sign or source of hopeful experimentation, radical possibility, and
democratic authenticity—emblematized, for example, by Ishmael’s fondness
for what he terms the “Anacharsis Clootz deputation,” or emphatically mixed
society, aboard the Pequod.7 But in Pierre and The Confidence-Man especially,
Melville regards mixture as a sign of manipulation, seductive trickery, and
failed aesthetic and social possibilities, emblematized by the way his father’s
portrait made Isabel seem “sinisterly becrooked, bemixed, and mutilated” to
Pierre.8 Many of Melville’s better-known works can be situated as “uncertain”
in ways that leave them open to manifold applications. But contrary to popular
perception, Melville’s demanding, less-read works tend not to be ambiguous,
but too fixed, too tightly overwritten and determinate to be usefully adapted
to anything other than themselves (or a theory of their own unreadability).
Melville’s early, genre-crossing novels (including Moby-Dick) offer useful hy-
bridities, ambiguities, and uncertain voicings. This usability reflects a text’s
potential to further a political or social agenda, but also the extent it allows
readers to develop non-contradictory claims about interpreting the work.
Melville’s works tend to be popular when readers can choose among
ambiguities and meanings, and feel they are solving a problem and engaging in
a form of dialogue with a text; his works tend to be unpopular when readers
are given too many choices without any way to resolve them satisfactorily.
6 Lawrence Buell, “Melville The Poet,” The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert
S. Levine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 136, 141.
7 Moby-Dick or The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle
(Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988), 121;
hereafter cited as NN MD.
8 Pierre, or the Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle
(Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1971), 197;
hereafter cited as NN Pierre.

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But, in ways some readers might not be consciously aware of, Melville’s un-
popular texts demand an increasingly repetitive and restrictive reading of their
increasingly counterfeit ambiguities. Borrowing from William Empson, I argue
that Melville’s “non-realistic” narratives fit under four categories of ambiguity,
in terms of how they can be adapted.9 A few works, such as Mardi, are so
inordinately ambiguous they suspend all conclusions and allow for few appli-
cations. Several works, emblematized by Moby-Dick, are usefully ambiguous,
open to multiple readings that foreground but do not require forms of closure.
Other works, such as “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno,” are seen as considerably
more ambiguous than they are, which still allows them to be usefully adapted
to multiple ends. Finally, works such as Pierre appear irremediably ambigu-
ous, but are not ambiguous at all, a combination that leaves them relatively
unusable. Works in this last category generally lack an array of qualities that
make texts popular outside, and in many cases even within, academic settings;
they cannot easily be adapted to other media (from comics to films) so as
to reach audiences significantly larger than those of the original work; and
they do not offer marketable characters who can be “paraphrased” in popular
culture. They also tend not to be useful for generating suitable undergraduate-
level paper topics, or lively thematic classroom discussions, especially at the
high school level, regarding the ways literature helps students understand their
social responsibilities; the ways students can decipher metaphorical language;
or the multivalent possibilities of textual interpretation.
For Melville, genre-hybridity sometimes gives a text its useful pliabil-
ity, a condition that the author’s unpopular works generally do not possess.
Melville’s popular works offer an appealing degree of accessible indeterminacy;
but the only apparent, overdetermined and inaccessible ambiguities of his
later works also helped make them unpopular or unreadable. Readers are
often misled because those texts invite them to identify ambiguity as part of
their experience of reading. But from Mardi to The Confidence-Man, Melville’s
writing—discounting Redburn and White-Jacket, which Melville considered
stylistically regressive—actually becomes less ambiguous in its claims. Melville
then largely moves from an ambiguity that opens interpretation to one that
shuts it down. One can begin to contextualize Melville’s use of ambiguity by
interrogating the ors of his titles: Moby-Dick seems to indicate “the whale” is
a different way of referring to the same creature. But Pierre suggests that “the
ambiguities” is not simply an equivalent way to refer to Pierre. In the first case,
the title equates Moby Dick with the whale, offering us both; in the second
case, the title designates either Pierre or the ambiguities, but not both. This

9 See William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1966).

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switch from equivalence to difference parallels a much larger shift, in which

self-difference dominates and problematizes representation. The alternative
iteration of Moby-Dick’s title, as it comes down to us—“or the Whale”—evokes
the ambiguity that fomented the revival of Melville studies during the era of
new criticism; but ironically, the “alternative” ambiguities that Pierre promises
are withdrawn from the reader, as part of a process that situates ambiguity
as the lure of a confidence game. It is not the clues that disappear in that
novel, or that turn out to be deceptive, but the mystery itself. Moby-Dick to
this day marks a dividing line, after which Melville’s novels largely lose their
ambiguity—which makes them relatively unadaptable in other media—but
retain their vexing hybridity. Balancing the sometimes chaotic formlessness
and encyclopedic referentiality of Mardi with the rigid schematization and
self-referentiality of The Confidence-Man, Moby-Dick represents Melville’s most
balanced mixture of hybridity and ambiguity, of irresolution and closure.
Ironically, Moby-Dick is sometimes misconstrued as a text with determinate
or “certain” messages (involving Ahab, democracy, slavery, etc.), which it
structurally cannot offer, while Pierre and The Confidence-Man are misread
as texts that lack determinate meanings, which I contend they present in
structural terms. That is, the meaning of the ambiguities and confidence games
in these novels lies in their structures, which associate false ambiguities and
false mysteries with the process of reading itself.
The “apparent inconsistenc[ies]” or ambiguities of Pierre and The
Confidence-Man are distractions that allow Melville to embed a finely-honed
and uncompromisingly dark message.10 Melville’s unpopular works often re-
flect hybrid unadaptability, an author too in control of his works, who has left
little room for a non-academic reader’s further intervention. (Pierre and The
Confidence-Man are especially difficult for undergraduates because they mis-
lead readers into trying to decipher “mysteries” that have no solutions.) From
their subtitles to their subtleties, some of Melville’s unpopular works become
decipherable as in-jokes for idealized readers, but do not invite the kind of
interaction that would require the writer, in the most charged language of The
Confidence-Man, to “trust” the likely reader. After Moby-Dick, Melville seems to
grow impatient with “innocent,” “fresh-hearted” readers “kept unspotted from
the world,” or “untainted by the world, because ignorant of it” (NN CM 37,
241).
To give an example of Melville’s indeterminacy across registers, I turn to
the issue of property, partly to present an example of a “useful” misreading
10 The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Harrison Hayford Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas
Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1984),
183 (emphasis mine); hereafter cited as NN CM.

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of Melville’s most familiar text, and to indicate why such misreadings can
be profoundly disturbing. Popularity can reflect both an implied ownership
of texts, as well as a proprietary use of “proper” meanings. In a law school
class on property, my professor assigned an excerpt from Moby-Dick intended
to illustrate an early nineteenth-century case about natural property rights,
Pierson v. Post (3 Cai. R. 175 [N.Y. 1805]). We read “Fast Fish and Loose Fish”
simply as a parenthetical gloss of Pierson, and as a straightforward account
of how whalers settle property disputes regarding mortally-wounded whales.
We never acknowledged the context of the chapter within the larger work, its
sardonic tone, or the fact that Ishmael was addressing American imperialism in
Central America, and mocking the very legal system and landlocked jurispru-
dence with which we were engaged. Such a misreading allowed us to address
the chapter to begin with, but only by dispensing with any consideration of
Melville’s antipathy toward some antebellum vindications of property rights.
That misprision speaks to the shortcomings of legal academia, but it also
locates the surprising adaptability of a chapter that already begins to lose any-
thing like what we might term ambiguity. If anything, the fault of this section of
Moby-Dick is its unusual unequivocality—it is among the most unambiguous,
anti-imperialistic polemics in U.S. literature, self-contained and undialogical
even in its condemnation of power.11 Melville develops this voice in Pierre and
The Confidence-Man, but his diatribes in these later works become so finely-
woven they cannot be parsed into anything other than themselves. I would
challenge even a lawyer from Steel, Flint and Asbestos or a property professor
to try to co-opt any chapter of Pierre as an apologia for property rights.
But even a thorough consideration of historical background would have
provided only one layer to a reading of this chapter, for in context almost
any useful reading must disregard considerable hybridity, inconsistency, unre-
liability, and narrative disjunction. More so for our reading of Melville than
for most writers, historical context is relevant to but not determinative of
meaning, and most especially because of Melville’s narrative strategies. Moby-
Dick is a tale told by what may be an unreliable cipher: a man who calls himself
Ishmael, assumes an ostensibly black or Ishmaelite identity, narrativizes Ahab’s
“soliloquies” (which he cannot have witnessed), and tells a fantastic tale about
a sometimes omnipresent and possibly sentient white whale, whose attacks
(for our purposes) only he can corroborate and that only he survives. Like
Gulliver, Ishmael flees land, and perhaps women, family, and sanity, and may

11 At the other end of the spectrum, as Paul Lyons remarks, most works that treat “U.S. impe-
rialism in Oceania . . . begin with a reading of anti-imperial passages of Melville, projecting the
viewpoints of each reader’s era onto Melville’s texts.” American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S.
Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2006), 40.

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do so at least figuratively to avoid killing himself or assaulting another. In

other words, he may be as untrustworthy as his old-world counterpart (and all
the more so because he can be so charming and disarmingly erudite). But in a
“usable” version of Moby-Dick, we would be hard-pressed to address its most
basic condition, that it is told through and within a nexus of contradictions
and uncertainties. Any given claim one could make about Ishmael regarding,
for example, his attitude toward Ahab, solitude, or the masses of men, could be
neutralized by an equally valid counter-argument. Yet few critics, and certainly
fewer who have heralded the text as a political manifesto, treat Ishmael as the
Gulliver or Pym-like figure he compels us to see him as.
Do people who consider Moby-Dick an adventure story, or a literal
source of legal commentary regarding whaling rights—who ignore or down-
play its narratology, encyclopedic hybridity of forms, or essential flaws—turn
it into a better, more unified work by engaging with it along one discursive
register only? For that matter, do readings that emphasize its dialogic voicings
turn Moby-Dick into a useful text by suggesting, unrealistically, that its voices
can finally be made coherent within any comprehensive framework? (Even a
dialogical reading, for example, must effectively ignore the possibility that all
the text’s voices are ventriloquized by a proto-confidence man). In most “use-
ful” responses to the text, Moby Dick’s unpopular or contradictory elements are
turned into tangents, oddities, and secondary distractions; in Pierre and The
Confidence-Man, those are, at least in comparative terms, the only elements.

“We will be always happy to hear Mr. Melville discourse about

savages, but we must protest against any more
Absurdities, misnamed ‘Ambiguities.’ ”
George Washington Peck12

Mixed Messages, or the Hybridities

A
gainst readings that designate Melville as a writer who vaulted into
obscurity after Typee, some critics have proposed that Melville was
less unpopular than we often think. In Correspondent Colorings, Sheila
Post-Lauria argues that the initial reception of Moby-Dick should be under-
stood as part of a debate about the proper form of the metaphysical or mixed-
form novel, and its endings. According to Post-Lauria, Melville was trying to
attract general rather than simply middle-class readers by mixing genres in
a single work; his readers would have assumed that such hybridity need not
“diminish or even negate the possibility for creativity” (109, 111–12). Pierre
12 Review of Pierre in American Whig Review, November 16, 1852 (Higgins 451).

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thereby can also be addressed in the context of American interest in the French
sensational romance. (Perhaps not surprisingly, Pola X emphasized Pierre’s
debt to that popular genre, and its animus toward aristocratic characters).
Under this assessment, the forms of Melville’s novels affected their reception
at least as much as their content.
But Pierre’s problem for some reviewers was that it capitalized on too
popular a form, and was too imitative of the deleterious French romance.
(Readers objected to Pierre’s unequivocal turpitude, even if they could not
decipher its other ambiguities). However, even such postulations do not fully
explain the virulence of the anti-transcendentalist diatribes Pierre garnered,
its still relatively poor sales, or its effect on readers today. And if Pierre is
unpopular, The Confidence-Man is notoriously unapproachable. Dealing with
some of the same issues of genre-crossing from a different perspective, John
Evelev describes Melville as playing both sides of an “emerging line” between
low and high culture that he himself helped formulate, as he attempted to
negotiate vocation and culture in the guise of middle-class professionalism.13
As those lines were drawn, however, most critics felt Melville wound up on
the wrong side. In a review appearing in Paris in 1849 and reprinted in Evert
Duyckinck’s The Literary World, Philarète Chasles critiques Melville’s attempt
to create novelty through hybridity. Chasles complains that Mardi commences
“as a novel, turning into a fairy tale, and availing itself of allegory to reach
the satirical after passing through the elegy, the drama and the burlesque.”14
For Chasles, “Nothing is so fatiguing as this mingling of the pompous and the
vulgar, of the common place and the unintelligible” (132). Chasles highlights
what readers might have seen as Melville’s irremediable shortcoming: his
insistence on “mingling” genres and attempts to create through combination.
(That valorization of pastiche helped make Melville an icon for modernists.
Ironically, Melville’s preoccupation with hybrid genres might appear to us as a
harbinger of poststructuralist alienation from formalism).
We next encounter a problem of categorization, as if Melville’s fictions
were Mary Douglas’s liminal mixtures, neither fish nor mammal, high nor
13 John Evelev, Tolerable Entertainment: Herman Melville and Professionalism in Antebellum New
York (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 80, 115 (emphasis mine). For others,
the crossing of lines involves a blurring of categories. Assessing Melville’s dialogical double-talk,
Carolyn Porter remarks that “because he had blurred the line between the civilized and the savage,
Melville was accused of violating that between fact and fiction.” See “Call Me Ishmael, or How
to Make Double-Talk Speak,” New Essays on Moby-Dick, ed. Richard H. Brodhead (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 91.
14 Philarète Chasles, “The Actual and Fantastical Voyages of Herman Melville,” The Literary World
(Aug. 4 and 11, 1849), 131, 132; rpt. in Higgins 244–48. Chasles’s description is echoed by The
London Spectator’s assertion that Moby-Dick “continually violates another [rule], by beginning in
the autobiographical form and changing ad libitum into the narrative” (October 25, 1851; Higgins
360).

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low.15 Melville was fascinated by such “monstrous” genre- and taxonomical-

hybridity. In “The Encantadas,” he describes disproportionately limbed pen-
guins as “hardly as symmetrical” as men, “grotesquely misshapen,” and “seem-
ingly legless; while the members at their sides are neither fin, nor wing, nor
arm,” they are “the most ambiguous” creature ever discovered, “neither fish,
flesh, nor fowl.”16 Their ambiguity reflects a hybrid’s failure to fit into classi-
fications, a crossing of categorical lines. One might say, augmenting Chasles’s
assessments, that the penguin begins as an ambiguous hybrid, turning into
a mammal, and availing itself of fins to reach fishhood after passing through
various stages of proto-evolutionary development. Afflicted by a form of genre-
hybridity, the penguin could not be described or “read” properly. Or as The
Confidence-Man contends, “When the duck-billed beaver of Australia was first
brought stuffed to England, the naturalists, appealing to their classifications,
maintained that there was, in reality, no such creature” (70). Such imputed
non-existence was the fate of some of Melville’s hybrid “novels”—and the
white whale itself—for many years.
Melville’s obsession with unclassifiability is most evident in Moby-
Dick, whose tail was often reproved in terms of its hybrid status or rank
unclassifiability. The Boston Daily Traveller took issue with Moby-Dick as a
gender- and genre-bending text, calling it “a sort of hermaphrodite craft—
half fact, half fiction,” full of “caricature and exaggeration mixed with what
may be facts . . . ” (Higgins 375). Such indiscriminate mixture of fact and
fiction, flesh and fowl, generated greatest consternation with Melville’s earlier
travel narratives, most notably with Typee, which did not subside until after
Moby-Dick. On October 25, 1851, The London Athenaeum labeled it “an ill-
compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact,” also noting its “second
title,” like a second book, suggesting that even before Pierre, two books were
already being writ (356). On the same day, The London Spectator asserted that
Moby-Dick remained truthful and interesting “so far as the nautical parts are
appropriate and unmixed” (359). The Boston Post also began its review by
quoting The London Athenaeum’s pronouncement that Melville’s novel was an
“ill-compounded mixture” (378). Ill-mixture of fact and fiction, ambiguity
and hybridity, became the touchstone of Melville’s “ill-iteration” until his
twentieth-century revival (when Moby-Dick as anatomy came to represent the
apotheosis of laudable Melvillean synthesis). The Washington National Era

15See Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Boston: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1980).
16 “The Encantadas,” The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, ed. Harrison Hayford Hershel
Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The
Newberry Library, 1987), 135.

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described Pierre as an unfortunate “mass of incongruities, ‘ambiguities,’ [and]

heterogeneities” (426). These critics likely would not have appreciated The
Confidence-Man, which they might have erroneously seen as “incongruous in
its parts, as the flying squirrel . . .” (NN CM 70).
It is as if Melville, in perverse and accelerated fashion, seized on all
the allegedly incongruous qualities that made him unpopular with critics
and redoubled his efforts to make them seem foundational to his fiction. He
literally compounded his problems. Effectively boasting about his own designs,
Melville asserts, “Let nature, to the perplexity of the naturalists, produce her
duck-billed beavers as she may, lesser authors . . . have no business to be
perplexing readers with duck-billed characters” (NN CM 70). But Melville was
no lesser author, and if he had few readers to confuse by this point, he made
perplexing characters his business. It seems fitting that Melville would willfully
subtitle one of his least ambiguous texts “Or, The Ambiguities.”
When Melville’s novels were published, little differentiated the less than
“mixed” reviews of Melville’s eventually popular works from his endemically
unpopular ones. And even relatively favorable reviews typically drew attention
to inappropriate combination; the Duyckincks’ Cyclopaedia associated Pierre
with “the worst school of the mixed French and German melodramatic.”17 Put-
nam’s Monthly called The Confidence-Man a “Rabelaisian piece of patchwork. . .”
(Higgins 494). The Boston Post reproved Melville’s switch from “truth which
was believed to be fiction” to “a romance . . . [that might] be received as a
verity”; it similarly complained twice that Mardi “becomes mere hodge-podge
. . . unreadable” (212). The London Morning Chronicle designated Mardi an “un-
readable compound” (229). (Elizabeth Renker notes that from the start, critics
also called The Confidence-Man “an unreadable book”).18 Both hybridity and
ambiguity made works unreadable. Reviewing the allegedly shapeless excess
of Mardi, R. George Ripley acknowledges the virtues of Melville’s previous
novels, but promises to “express [himself] unambiguously”: it is “a monstrous
compound,” and even its language “is a hybrid between poetry and prose”
(226). In “The Hall of Fantasy,” Hawthorne predicted that such hybridities
and “peculiarities, a wilder mixture of styles than even an American architect
usually recognizes as allowable,” would dissipate works of art in the new
world.19

17 See Merton M. Sealts, Jr., The Early Lives of Melville (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1974), 11, 94.
18 Elizabeth Renker, “Unreadability in The Confidence-Man,” The Cambridge Companion, 114.
19 Mosses From an Old Manse, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. 10,
ed. William Charvat, et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), 172.

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 R I C H A R D H A R D A C K

In light of such patchwork mixtures and hermaphrodite heterogeneities,

I venture that Melville pursues a hybridity different from that proposed by
Post-Lauria, who argues that some “less cultivated” readers did favor Melville’s
mixture of “sentimental and sensational elements” and poetry and prose styles
(76–79, 126). Melville is always interested in mixtures, but his later nov-
els treat them as baleful certainties, not playful ambiguities. The hybridities
Melville considered intriguing possibilities in other cultures or species come
to be pernicious dead-ends in his own. Melville increasingly associates this
language of mixture with specious transcendental ambiguity, as when he
ascribes to Pierre a set of “uncertain” and contradictory traits: “there had been
born from the organic blended heavenliness and earthiness of Pierre, another
mixed, uncertain, heaven-aspiring, but still not wholly earth-emancipated
mood” (NN Pierre 347). Such mixture becomes dangerously destabilizing:
Pierre’s father’s portrait is “strangely translated, and intermarryingly blended
with some before unknown, foreign feminineness” (112, my emphasis). In
that context, Isabel represents not just ambiguity, but incongruous hybrid-
ity, incarnate—she is, like the Cenci, a product of “foreignness,” a “fanci-
ful anomaly” (351). The painting is the focal point for the novel’s rhetoric
of ambiguity, but incest—suggesting the manner in which “intermarrying”
here becomes intra-marrying—remains its primary emblem of “mixing” and
“unmixing”: it represents the transgressive nature of internal, rather than
external, hybridity (194, 5). In Pierre, inter-hybridity—the combination of
external or “dialogical” difference—begins to be displaced by intra-hybridty, or
self-difference.
The root word “certain” in Pierre is pivotal, since the text punningly
and repeatedly ascribes “certain fictitious-ness” to its ambiguities: for example,
“The certain fictitiousness of the closest domestic relations of life” marks the
family as a deception (NN Pierre 176). The “certain”—simultaneously peculiar
as well as definite, and therefore already uncertain—fictitiousness of relations
also marks the turn where fiction becomes nearly equivalent to falsehood for
Melville. When Pierre thinks he is without a sister, “Nor could the fictitious
title, which he so often lavished upon his mother, at all supply the absent
reality. . . . For much that goes to make up the deliciousness of a wife, already
lies in the sister” (advancing another pun that suggests no “certainty” resides
in relations but lies/fictions (7). In Pierre, ambiguity is also rendered fictitious,
replaced by troubling certainties. The seemingly unexpected “certainty” that
further demarcates The Confidence-Man is codified in its attacks on fiction,
and its staging of puns as another form of repetition: “I meant a certain
loss. You understand, a CERTAIN loss; that is to say, a certain loss” (NN CM
237). Like most retellings in Pierre, this tautology iterates putatively discrete,

18 LEVIATHAN
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“mysterious” elaborations that reflexively mean the same thing as a result of

the repetition.
Not surprisingly, the inconsistency of animal taxonomy for Melville
dovetails with the inconsistencies of genre and identity. But Melville’s most un-
popular works are not hybrids of genres (intermarriages), but internal hybrids
(intra-marriages)—that is, they propose that the self is hybridized, not without,
but within. In this apparent paradox, we differ from ourselves ontologically,
by definition; no “external” mixture is necessary (or finally possible). By The
Confidence-Man, Melville is fully narrativizing his long-developing proposition
that the same “chrysalid” man differs from himself more than from other men:
the difference between men “is not so great as the difference between what the
same man be to-day and what he may be in days to come” (NN CM 222). An-
ticipating Slavoj Žižek—who contends that “radical difference is the difference
of the One with regard to itself, the noncoincidence of the one with itself”—
Melville redefines the self as a mixture of incongruous parts.20 Internally-
hybrid species—these once Emersonian, then Mephistophelean caterpillars
and butterflies (NN CM 70, 124)—serve first as emblems of protean possibility,
and finally of disillusionment with transcendental idealism. Melville’s works
became genre-defying, flightless birds, ill-compounded mixtures that some
wanted to burn or hunt to extinction, that later readers could redeem primarily
through utilitarian application to some ulterior purpose.

Two books are being writ; of which the world shall only see one, and
that the bungled one. The larger book, and the infinitely
better one, is for Pierre’s own private shelf.
NN Pierre 30421

Adapting to Unpopularity:
A Theory of Unusability or Misreading

I
want now to relate the hybridity associated with Melville’s texts to their
ambiguities, a correlation that begins in Mardi, mutates in Moby-Dick,
and becomes a dead line by The Confidence-Man. Melville’s characters and
narrators increasingly become ciphers, or as Dylan might say, “masked and
anonymous” observers. As the most accessible example, the self-designated
20 Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 2003), 24.
21 The assertion of Pierre’s narrator has ironic resonance given Charles Olson’s conclusion that
“Moby-Dick was two books,” a hybridized text that brought together Ahab and Moby Dick from
separate drafts. See Call Me Ishmael (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947). See also “Historical
Note” in NN MD 653.

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 R I C H A R D H A R D A C K

Ishmael—the novel’s only survivor and extant voice in a tale that a skeptic
would put no joint-stock in—is an all-seeing eye who conceals his history
far more than the merely anonymous White Jacket. In Moby-Dick, disguise
becomes the entry to representation as Melville moves toward his final novels.
As such, to read Melville is by necessity to misread him: to engage in the
attempts at unmasking at which his characters, if not his books, may be said
to fail. Ahab can never strike through the pasteboard mask; Bartleby and Babo
wear indecipherable masks; Pierre cannot pierce the veils of families; and The
Confidence-Man is one uninterrupted meditation regarding masks, beginning
with its subtitle. But ambiguity in Pierre and The Confidence-Man has morphed
into something different from its earlier manifestations, offering not a choice
of readings, but the unlikely coupling of absolute (though often inaccessible)
determinacy with a loss of authority. That determinacy does not bolster an
established order or agenda, but collapses on itself, destabilizing meaning. In
other words, Melville increasingly feigns ambiguity to make his works appear
indeterminate, a strategy that allows him to neutralize the reader. This attack
on ambiguity not only becomes “anti-professional” in Evelev’s terms, it also
leaves little space for readers to interpret; it is as if their rejection of earlier
works has called forth texts in a closed universe where the reader’s every
response is anticipated, and the masquerade is the pretense that change (let
alone popularity) is still possible.
Melville’s later texts tend to frame putative ambiguities, questions whose
answers are intentionally unverifiable, or would change nothing, leaving us
with a false uncertainty that is itself the determinate meaning. For example,
the racial and ethnic “meanings” surrounding the Pequod, Ishmael’s veiled
past, and the doubloon are predicated on the validity of multiple perspectives.
Even when incommensurate, such perspectives do not invalidate the prospect
of interpretation. Ishmael, for example, especially treats the idea of transcen-
dental reverie—when squeezing sperm, or on the masthead—as profound and
genuine, as well as unsustainable and illusory (an ongoing dialectic regarding
the “all feeling” that Melville also enacts in his letters to Hawthorne).22 Both
assessments are valid when taken together; neither is sufficient alone. Initially,
the Confidence Man’s guises also seem subject to viable multiple interpreta-
tions; but because they represent too many irreconcilable, incommensurate
things, they collapse into the same thing. No one could be behind this
mask. As Victoria Nelson suggests, in such works every possible interpretation

22Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and
The Newberry Library, 1987), 193–4, 191; hereafter cited as NN Corres.

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“is rational, up to a point, but what happens when they are all put together as
coequal alternatives is not.”23
I come to some initial conclusions by connecting Melville’s unpopularity
to a different aspect of unreadability—unusable determinacy. Much of the most
familiar Melville has become popular because it can be used to construct a
compelling narrative or promote an agenda that partly belies the structure of
the text from which it is taken. Moby-Dick, for example, lends itself to such in-
appropriation by presenting many faces and facets of every issue, from religious
belief to the value of phrenology, and inviting (or forcing) readers to choose
one to make coherent claims about it. As Howard P. Vincent noted, Moby-
Dick could as justifiably be interpreted as, among scores of things, a satire
of antebellum capitalism, a biblical allegory, a dramatic sea narrative, a satire
of transcendentalism, a critique of American materialism, or a vindication of
man’s ethical character.24
By contrast, Pierre and The Confidence-Man resist such use because they
present one, increasingly gorgon-like face, which cannot be turned any way
but toward itself. Ironically, they are Melville’s least ambiguous texts, most
determinate in their assertions about fiction and lies. Pierre’s narrator tellingly
discloses that, in effect, he seeks to “make one pervading ambiguity the only
possible explanation for all [its] ambiguous details,” a prospect that overtakes
the novel as a whole (NN Pierre 224, my emphasis). That message is that
ambiguities are feints, lies or non-existent. If, at the other end of this spectrum,
Mardi functions like a sprawling, atheist’s catechism, venturing questions and
assaying all answers as plausible, The Confidence-Man is a static catechism
without questions. But neither can be put to popular uses. To put it in
Bakhtinian terms, contrary to appearances, Mardi and Moby-Dick primarily
probe; Pierre and The Confidence-Man almost attack with answers. Melville
restages the open-ended ambiguities of Moby-Dick as the closed repetitions
of Pierre and The Confidence-Man, in which ambiguity becomes the snare
for univocality. It is as if, after delivering Moby-Dick, perfectly poised in its
ambiguities, Melville can only offer an assault on readers camouflaged as
ambiguity. John Bryant describes this muting of the dialogue between author
and reader as another way to explain the trajectory of Melville’s career: “In
earlier days, Melville encouraged readers to become what Wolfgang Iser calls
‘partners in a process of communication.’ . . . But this symbiotic partnership
between text and reader erodes almost entirely in The Confidence-Man.” As
if reneging on the partnership he felt already annulled, “Melville does not

23 The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 209.
24 The Trying Out of Moby-Dick (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1980), 8–9.

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 R I C H A R D H A R D A C K

invite us to supply a ‘copestone’ to his fiction. We are not partners with [that]
text. Like the chorus in chapter 18, we are victims.”25 The Confidence-Man
(along with Pierre, I would claim) is no longer dialogical, not just in failing
to narrativize authentically multiple perspectives that are not undermined, but
in cutting off the exchange between text and reader regarding ambiguity.
The review George Washington Peck gave Pierre in 1852 was accurate
in complaining that Melville had misnamed his “absurd” novel “The Ambigui-
ties.” Hybrids are two often ambiguous, possibly contradictory things at once.
But, contrary to appearances, there is almost nothing ambiguous about Pierre
or The Confidence-Man: they do not leave metaphysical queries in suspension,
as Ishmael does, or combine genres in the way of Mardi or Moby-Dick. To the
extent it incorporates genres—which is different from mixing them—Pierre
parodies and implodes them. But unlike Moby-Dick, which internalizes the
forms it experiments with, Pierre remains impervious to the forms it merely
ventriloquizes. These late novels contain few uncertainties, and seem to aim
for a relentless line of narrative “development” that veers ever closer to pure
repetition.26
For example, while many critics would claim that Isabel’s status as
Pierre’s sister is a hallmark of the text’s unresolved ambiguities, her actual
status could not change anything. It is, like the many “devouring mysteries”
of the text, another feint (315). Pierre already has a sibling in the mother
he calls only sister and Mary; Isabel’s appearance as a Cenci is already over-
determined. As Cindy Weinstein proposes, Isabel’s designation as authentic
sister is “irrelative” (NN Pierre 244) or inconsequential to the role she plays for
Pierre.27 As with her clouded origins, what matters is the idea of her mixture,
the impossibility and irrelevance of certainty, and the determinacy attached to
those conditions. The text’s seeming “ambiguities” are largely immaterial, and
an attempt to ascertain their truths leads us further into the text’s structural
trap. The book’s apparent choices, dramatized in its repeated, agitated calls to
“elect!”—the choice Isabel gives Pierre between wife and sister (314), or the
choice the narrator gives him between having an effeminate soul and robust
body (261)—are dramatically false, and that is its grim message. While Pierre
stresses the iterated “Mystery! Mystery! Mystery of Isabel!” the novel operates

25 John Bryant, Melville and Repose: the Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), 233–34.
26 As Charlie asseverates on several levels in The Confidence-Man, “I will hear nothing of that fine
babble about development and its laws; there is no development” (222). In the text’s taxonomical
terms, the novel itself is an impossible form of original development.
27Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 171.

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like a “certain” murder-mystery where no one actually dies (126). Perhaps after
Poe, it hides its lack of mystery in plain sight.
With a dramatically ironic pun, Pierre claims that in the metaphysical
duel (dual) he fights, “all seconds are forbid” (NN CM 349). (In early works,
Melville’s puns zeugmatically jump registers between the literal and figurative,
and offer a dialogical rebuke to determinism and authority. In later Melville,
they become bleak reminders of the impossibility of escaping such determin-
ism, of crossing those lines). But all representation in Pierre reflects a specious
election between dualities: we read, for example, of the dual books being writ
in blood and ink (304); “glad truth, or sad truth” (65); good angel or bad;
chronometricals and horologicals; “the two separate beds—the real one and
the reflected one” (39); and the two paintings of Pierre’s father that “may make
only one”—one pervading ambiguity (83).
What matters in Pierre are not the choices between putative opposites,
which Pierre seems to manufacture himself, but the text’s polarizing structures,
its relentless staging of such false choices. The novel instead suggests all
these imagined transcendental ambiguities resolve into the same thing. These
alternatives are framed in connection to their false appearance of mixture;
the novel’s final false election, between love and death, “makes of earth one
mold”—only one (197). Because the double-beds, paintings, and relations
are all the same underneath, we end not with escalating ambiguity, but the
constriction of possibilities. As Michael Rogin contends, “doubled characters
or double-sketches dominate . . . [Melville’s works beginning] with Pierre, [in
which] the twinning between characters intensifies, but it dissolves identities
instead of sustaining them.”28
The Confidence-Man completes that dissolution. It takes place on the
Mississippi, “which, uniting the streams of the most distant and opposite
zones, pours them, helter-skelter along in one cosmopolitan and confident
tide”—only one (NN CM 9). As false ambiguity is replaced by false confidence,
the choice between opposite meanings and “disguises,” interpretation itself,
is shut down. Already anticipating Billy Budd, a tragedy riven of free will,
Pierre is fatalistic not about what it says, but how things can be said. Pierre’s
narrative voice is certain that ambiguities are also lies denied: as the narrative
tells us of Pierre’s fantasy of Isabel, “a smile is the chosen vehicle of all
ambiguities, Pierre. When we would deceive, we smile” (84). (In a kind of style
indirect libre, the narrator simultaneously tells us what Pierre “thought” while
reminding him that the deception is covered by the smile that denies it, that

28 Michael Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1983), 159.

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 R I C H A R D H A R D A C K

solicits trust). An ambiguity is no longer a multivalent semantic unit subject

to interpretation, but a lie—which usually can be expressed in a thousand
variations, but conveys only one meaning, even if it has many explanations,
contexts, or causes. Lies, like possible interpretations of The Confidence-Man,
are infinite, especially if no truth resides behind them. As suggested, Pierre’s
rhetorical strategy is to bring readers into a false experience of ambiguity. This
pattern becomes more pronounced in The Confidence-Man, which can be read
as a dare to see if the reader will attempt to figure out which characters transfer
which traits of the novel’s titular protagonist. Pierre and The Confidence-Man
seem designed to generate endless interpretation, but only one unambiguous
reading of their claims regarding meaning, which leads readers on a not so
merry chase.
While one cannot perfectly map Melville’s contemporary or subsequent
popularity onto his use of hybridity, a decrease in a certain kind of am-
biguity might help explicate the particular unpopularity of Pierre and The
Confidence-Man. Uncertainties in Pierre are revealed as what they have always
implicitly been for Melville—“all ambiguities, all transcendentals” (NN Pierre
262). I cannot address his disillusionment with Emersonian idealism here,
but Melville’s treatment of ambiguity paces his attitude toward transcenden-
talism.29 In early Melville, transcendental inconsistency, closely related to hy-
bridity and ambiguity, tends to be only playfully chided: in Mardi, Babbalanja
is “not inconsistent, for the sum of [his] inconsistencies makes up [his] con-
sistency. . . . Common consistency implies unchangeableness, but much of the
wisdom here below lives in a state of transition.”30 The sum of transcendental
inconsistencies can still make up a consistency in Mardi, but in Pierre self-
consistency is categorically renounced; here, “lies only never vary: look for no
invariableness in Pierre” (NN Pierre 337). There is effectively no longer any
“below” to contrast, and change collapses into repetition, variability into rep-
resentation: representation becomes, in the transcendental terms Melville in-
creasingly renounces, demonological. With The Confidence-Man—which is as
episodic as Mardi, but almost entirely static—we encounter “an inconsistency
that amazes and shocks” (NN CM 222): the possibility of wearing any smile
has evaporated. I am of course not suggesting that The Confidence-Man could
only “mean” one thing, but that it intimates that ambiguity is the handmaid of
29 I argue elsewhere that Melville’s rejection of transcendental pantheism culminates in the dark
transformations of self-representation one can track from Moby-Dick to The Confidence-Man. See,
for example, “‘Infinitely Repellent Orbs’: Visions of the Self in the American Renaissance,” in
Languages of Visuality, ed. Beate Allert (Wayne State University Press, 1996), 89–110.
30Mardi, and a Voyage Thither, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle
(Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1970), 459
(my emphases).

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confidence, of misreading. Here, “the common occurrences of life could never

. . . steadily look one way and tell one story, as flags in the trade wind” (66).
Representation remains a game of cosmopolitan confidence, but self-difference
becomes determinate. What shocks is no longer inconsistency, but repetition.
It is the nature of things to be repetitively self-contradictory, not in the fashion
of transcendental fantasies of harmony, but their opposites: in Melville’s final
version of Emersonian cogito, dialogism is ventriloquism, and we must “stand
self-contradicted,” internally-hybrid (228). Consistency is “untrue to reality,”
while inconsistency turns “out to be [character’s] good keeping” (70): the
self is not simply constantly shifting, but a fiction constituted by the shifts.
Ambiguity is redundant in a system of inconsistencies (that turns out to hide
crushing repetition or certainty—reflected, for example, in the permutations
of the Confidence Man).
To get an overview of my argument, it might be helpful to revisit the
subtitles of Melville’s novels discussed earlier, which reflect the second text
always being written. As intimated, we move from “or the whale” to “or, the
ambiguities”; here the first “or” allows us to identify the two halves of the title,
whereas the second “or” presents us with what turns out to be another false
choice. In simpler terms, the alleged elaboration in the subtitle is rendered
increasingly suspect in the progression of Melville’s novels.
Starting with the double “or” of what Arthur Stedman called Typee’s
“long and cumbrous sub-title”—“Or, A Narrative of a Four Months’ Residence
Among the Natives of a Valley of the Marquesas Islands; Or, A Peep at Polyne-
sian Life ” (Sealts 53)—the titles of Melville’s novels—partly by design, partly
by the intervention of British publishers and possibly chance—seem to provide
either direct elaboration or some ulterior explanation to clarify some supposed
ambiguity.31 For Omoo we are given A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas;
Mardi, and a Voyage Thither; the beggarly Redburn gets His First Voyage, being
the Sailor-boy Confessions (etc.); White-Jacket, or the World in a Man-of-War;
Moby-Dick, or The Whale; Pierre, or the Ambiguities; The Confidence-Man: His
Masquerade; even Israel Potter is augmented by His Fifty Years of Exile. Putting
aside the admittedly anomalous Clarel, we are given for Typee, Omoo, Redburn,
Mardi, The Confidence-Man, and Israel Potter putative elaboration, a colon and
a squib. For the others, not “and” but “or”; the subtitles offer not equivalents,
but purported alternatives, second books.

31 Regarding the history of Moby-Dick’s titles, see NN MD 670–73. That one should perhaps not
make too much of the significance of Moby-Dick’s hysteron proteron title, especially since we
cannot know precisely why it was changed, is suggested by the fact that the first volume (only) of
the English edition “has a half [i.e. extra] title [that reads] ‘The Whale; or, Moby Dick’” (672).

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That list would just be a fanciful recitation of Melville’s titles were

it not for the implicit exegesis Melville offers. To that list, we might note
that the titles of Pierre Glendinning’s proposed Works call out for a kind
of mock, self-imposed colon-oscopy: “‘The Tropical Summer: a Sonnet’: ‘The
Weather: a Thought’: ‘Life: an Impromptu’: ‘The late Reverend Mark Graceman:
an Obituary’: ‘Honor: a Stanza’: “‘Beauty: an Acrostic’: ‘Edgar: an Anagram’:
. . . &c. . .” (247). The idiotic, repetitive reflexiveness of these titles suggests
Melville’s dismissal of his own works, a late-period sabotage by a writer who
was once not above reviewing those works favorably and anonymously. The
titles most of all provide a likely counterpoint to the switch to the false “or” in
Pierre’s title. By Pierre, Melville has decided that his own ands, or colons, have
become ors, but ors that smile at us. Pierre’s colons are mocked because they
function as colons: Pierre’s “or” mocks the trusting reader because it functions
as an unequal sign.
The “Bibliographico-Solicito Circular” titles of Pierre’s juvenilia are
transmuted into the equally reflexive but hardly comic titles of many chapters
of The Confidence-Man: “Only a page or so”; “Worth the consideration of those
to whom it may prove worth considering”; “Which may pass for whatever
it may prove to be worth”; and the like. These tautologies contrast sharply
with Moby-Dick’s playful repetition of “Knights and Squires.” Literally and
figuratively, chapters in The Confidence-Man periodically begin with the last
words of the previous section, again suggesting it is a kind of auto-da-fé whose
routes of passage are circular, closed and self-referential. Unpopular Melville
becomes retropeptic, swallowing its own tale; it exists in a closed universe in
which the reader is a hostile intruder. What kind of work could be written after
texts whose colons/titles set up an infinite loop of mirrors?
Billy Budd, a painfully deterministic text that still lends itself to useful
and new critical and new historical extrapolations, whose discovery served
as a catalyst in reviving Melville’s dormant popularity, represents a return to
useful ambiguity. But there is little hybridity about it. By its time, the tail of
the whale had long been cooked. I conclude, then, by noting that The Whale,
taxonomically as well as legally, was neither a fast nor a loose fish, but that
Melville was ever popular at all was in some ways a complete fluke.

26 LEVIATHAN