Richard Poirier

Melville began writing Pierre, or The Ambiguities in August 1851; he had just turned 33 and was already the author of six books. The most recent of these, Moby-Dick, was about to be published, and reviews of it, largely negative in the United States and somewhat less so in England, would begin appearing while he was working on the new novel and negotiating the terms for its publication. Of the books already in print, only the first two, Typee and Omoo, had had much commercial success, and even Typee, which made him for a time a minor celebrity, had been criticised, as nearly all his works would be, for blasphemy and untruth, prompting his publishers to ask him to revise for the second printing, adding some assertions as to the veracity of the story and cutting some unflattering references to Christian missionaries.

From the beginning of his distinguished career, with his influential The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature, on to the more recent Adultery and the Novel and his fluently recondite Venice Desired, on the literary figurations of that city since the 18th century, Tony Tanner has shown a rare degree of excitement and curiosity about the workings of literary style, the way words come to life in response to the performative presence within them of a novelist or a poet.

There is a species of literary criticism now flying high in the academy which should eventually come to roost in the Food and Drugs Administration. The FDA is that part of the United States Government charged with the labelling of products. Do they meet the minimum daily requirements of things that are good for you? Are there infectious ingredients, additives or local colourings that need to be exposed by analysis? Just the sort of thing students are being encouraged these days to ask of the literature they read. Criticism in the spirit of the FDA is intended to reduce your tolerance for golden oldies, to reveal consumer fraud going on in books that for these many years have had a reputation for supplying hard-to-get nutrients.

‘I think, therefore I am’ was not supposed by Descartes to apply only to those for whom thinking is a line of work. That would appear to be the operating assumption, however, of the celebrated French sociologist-philosopher Jean Baudrillard in America, the latest of his works translated into English. At first the reader might wonder why a prose as dense as his should be made more so by having it stretched across pages of a width and gloss more appropriate to an otherwise agreeably produced and illustrated coffee-table book. But if not actually initiated by the author, the design must have been done to please him, intent as he is on the primacy of the visual image. The design is meant to be a comeuppance, I suspect, for any credulous intellectualists, American or Parisian, who might harbour a sentimental preference (actually the in petto preference of the author himself) for the cultural supremacy of the printed word. At several points these intellectualists are objects of the author’s scorn for not having yet achieved his own fascinated horror and elation in response to America, ‘the great hologram’ where ‘cinema is true because it is the whole of space, the whole way of life that are cinematic.’ In this ‘tactile, fragile, mobile, superficial culture’ he wants to discover the destiny that lies in wait for Europe.