Pierre and the Non-Transparencies of Figuration

Abstract

" Pierre and the Non-Transparences of Figuration" argues that many critical readings of Herman Melville's 1852 novel depend on a non-necessary subordination of Pierre 's extravagant style to questions of characterology and plot to which the text seems at best ancillary and nonconventionally attached. My essay suggests that characterological volatility or depletion might more profitably be understood in terms of Melville's own movement away from imagining characters as mimetic instantiations of persons, and toward an account of aesthetic personhood resonant with recent psychoanalytic and queer-theoretical investigations of ontology itself as a particularly aesthetic phenomenon and predicament.