Name: Dan Clinton

Title: ‘Incestuous Aesthetics’ or ‘The Sister Arts in Pierre’

Abstract: Despite attracting a steady trickle of critical attention since its rediscovery in the 1920s, in some part for its status as the reigning oddity in the curiosity cabinet of American literature, Herman Melville’s Pierre still possesses largely untapped value as an account of art and mass-media in the 1850s. In every conceivable sense, Pierre is a novel preoccupied with illegitimate reproduction, such that the identity of the hero’s half-sister must be gleaned from heirlooms of an equally uncertain origin, including an unauthorized portrait of their mutual father and even a stray handkerchief. The disruption of genealogy that motivates the novel’s tragic plot becomes intertwined with the uncertain status of aesthetic objects. In the course of this plot, the regulatory power of hereditary artifacts gives way to the allure of unreliable and free-floating texts, those empty of traditional authority and so available to the changeable impulses of the unconscious. Meanwhile, the novel routes its fascination with incest through its engagement with the more conventional sister arts, to the point of housing the poet Pierre alongside two sister artists, guitarist and portraitist, one his half-sister and the other his jilted fiancé. Suffice it to say, for the moment, that the instability of this household bodes ill for the related aesthetic triad of melos, opsis, and lexis. My paper will address some of this.