Пьер, или Амбивалентность: Роман Германа Мелвилла

Novel by Herman Melville

Pierre; or, The Ambiguities is the seventh book by American writer Herman Melville, first published in New York in 1852. The novel, which uses many conventions of Gothic fiction, develops the psychological, sexual, and family tensions between Pierre Glendinning; his widowed mother; Glendinning Stanley, his cousin; Lucy Tartan, his fiancée; and Isabel Banford, who is revealed to be his half sister. According to scholar Henry A. Murray, in writing Pierre Melville "purposed to write his spiritual autobiography in the form of a novel" rather than to experiment and incidentally work some personal experience into the novel. Published after the lukewarm reaction to Moby Dick, Pierre was a critical and financial disaster. Reviewers universally condemned its morals and its style. More recent critics have shown greater sympathy toward the book, seeing it as a "psychological novel – a study of the moods, thought processes, and perceptions of his hero". "The book which was most potent in fashioning Melville's ideal and thus indirectly affecting his personality and his writings", Murray suggests, was Thomas Moore's Life of Byron. Second to Byron only, "though ahead of him as a source for the first two acts of Pierre", Disraeli—himself a Byronist—was another major influence of Melville's early ideal self conception, and hence Pierre's personality. Melville developed the characterization of Pierre further with William Makepeace Thackeray's Pendennis and William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, though the spirit of Shakespeare's play pervades only the early chapters, later giving way to Hamlet's spirit. As stated in Book IX of Pierre, "Dante had made him fierce, and Hamlet had insinuated that there was no one to strike". The chapter arrangement, by contrast, with each chapter called "Book" and sub divided into short numbered sections, seems to aim for a clear structure that for critic Warner Berthoff helps "to salvage some degree of organization and pace from the chaos of Melville's purposes."

In a letter from February 1852, now lost, Melville proposed to Richard Bentley, the publisher of his previous five books in Britain, to publish Pierre, then still unfinished. On March 4, Bentley replied and offered to publish the new work without an advance sum, citing the poor sales of Melville's previous books as the reason for his proposal. On April 16, Melville sent the proofs of Pierre, together with a reply letter rejecting Bentley's offer. Melville's counteroffer for the book was £100, and he added that the finished book was 150 pages longer than he had anticipated when he first wrote about it. Having written the book with a feminine audience in mind, he further thought that "it might not prove unadvisable to publish this present book anonymously, or under an assumed name:–' By a Vermonter ' say", or, he wrote in a footnote, "By Guy Winthrop". When it was published in July 1852, it bore the author's real name and was immediately met with negative critical response. One review which ran in the New York Day Book bore the title "Herman Melville Crazy" while the American Whig Review wrote that Melville's "fancy is diseased". Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker characterize the novel as "an ambitious experiment in psychological fiction" whose primary focus is the "complex workings of the human psyche", especially the "tortuous processes of distortion and self deception involved in fervid states of mind combining religious exaltation and sexual arousal." They comment that the novel also draws on the conventions of Gothic fiction. Andrew Delbanco added that Pierre long suffered from being in the shadow of Moby Dick, but that "with its themes of sexual confusion and transgression" it now seems "fresh and urgent". Delbanco argues that Melville anticipates Sigmund Freud's assertion that the sexual behavior of each human being transgresses "the standard of normality" to some extent. The novel, Delbanco feels, is ambivalent in dealing with the "rather too loving" supervision of his mother and his "ardent sentiment" for Glen, the young man who is his cousin, with whom he explored "the preliminary love friendship of boys." Yet, continues Delbanco, it is hard to know whether critics who now see Melville as a homosexual are simply making a long overdue acknowledgment, whether gay readers are projecting their own feelings onto Melville, or both. The novel is subtitled "The Ambiguities". Delbanco concludes that "the quest for a private Melville has usually led to a dead end, and we are not likely to fare better by speculating about his tastes in bed or bunk." Readers, says Parker, have long been puzzled and critics bothered by the inconsistencies between the character of Pierre in the beginning of the novel and his suddenly becoming an author in later chapters. Parker argues that the reason for this change is biographical, not artistic. He deduces that Melville took a far shorter manuscript to New York for delivery to Harper & Brothers publishing house. The publisher was not pleased to see a psychological novel that delivered sexual and literary shocks and threatened to damage its audience. In any case, the Harper brothers offered a contract so unfavorable that it may actually have been meant as a rejection. This fueled Melville's ire—as did his reading of the negative reviews of Moby Dick while he was in New York. Parker believes that Melville may have shown the original, shorter manuscript to Everett Duyckinck, who condemned the sexual content as immoral. In frustration and retaliation, Parker concludes, Melville, perhaps in two or three batches, may only then have added the sections dealing with Pierre's literary career, especially the chapter "Young America in Literature", which describes publishers and critics in scathing terms. These additions undermined the structure of the novel and muddied the characterization of Pierre, whom Melville had not originally intended to be an author. In 1995, Parker published (with HarperCollins) an edition of Pierre that demonstrates what the original might have been like by removing the sections which present Pierre as an author, notably the entirety of Books XVII, XVIII, XXII and passages from other books.

Walter Leyden Brown directed a theatrical adaptation of the book at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in Manhattan's East Village in 1974. The book was the source for the 1999 French film Pola X and its extended cut for television, Pierre ou, Les ambiguïtés, both directed by Leos Carax. The Denver Center Theatre Company developed and produced the world premiere of Pierre in 2002, a stage play written by Jeffrey Hatcher, and directed by Bruce K. Sevy. The cast included Christopher Kelly as Pierre Glendinning and Morgan Hallett as Isabel Banford. American composer Richard Beaudoin wrote an opera based on the book; Act I was staged in August 2007 at London's Arcola Theatre.