「超感生的表面」 梅爾維爾《皮耶》中的感官書寫

Abstract

During the early nineteenth century, especially since 1830s, with the rise of free press and the improvement of printing technology and book sales, the era witnessed the proliferation of popular subversive literature, including sensational, criminal, Romance-adventure, pseudo-scientific literature. These ”radical-democrat” works employ irrational plots and themes to expose how the republic deviates from the ideals of the founded nation. But major writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, problematize in various ways the ambiguity and paradox of reform spirit embedded in these popular literature. In Melville's Pierre: or its Ambiguity (1852), Pierre's experience can be regarded as the history of a young author who writes sensational literature during the nineteenth century. The novel consists of sentimental, sensational, romance-adventure elements filled with various deviated, ambiguous relationships, and exaggerated descriptions of sensual experiences. The writing of these sensual experiences not only constructs the fluid subjectivity, but also subverts the transcendentalist thought that privileges the power of sight. Despite this, the novel also points out the limitations of sensual writing because it can never penetrate the ”inscrutableness” of represented objects. For Melville, the world consists of ”superinduced superficies”; and behind them is just void. This pessimism is manifested when Pierre, in order to write a ”great book,” suffers from the derangement of senses that finally result in his tragic self-destruction. In other words, radical sensual experiences may cause the subject to fall into the abyss of the void.