Stage Props, Distorting Mirrors, and the Aesthetics of Incompletion: Metafictional Turns in Pierre and Mardi

Save for his letters and the review/essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Herman Melville left behind no manifesto. He all but entrusted the principles of his ars poetica to characters and narrators. His body of work is rife with speakers questioning the possibilities of craft. It is as if Melville would split himself into a host of voices and personae, entrusting projections of himself with the task of judging others. This article deals with two of such occurrences: 1) Pierre’s chapters on Pierre-as-writer, in which we see an artist-figure (the narrator) chronicling the failure of another (Pierre); 2) Mardi’s Chapter 180, in which a philosopher (Babbalanja) narrates the deeds of a poet (Lombardo). In both instances, Melville presents the reader with a book-within-the-book whose plot details are kept deliberately vague. Both Pierre’s manuscript and Lombardo’s national epic, the Koztanza, are described only in the most general of ways. They are not two texts-within-the-text as much as two stage props charged with ritual significance but left without any real content. This article argues that Melville intentionally withholds information from the reader regarding these fictive oeuvres. Pierre’s and Mardi’s plot-absences thus become textual mirrors reflecting changing attitudes towards the creative process during two distinct stages of Melville’s career.