Traces and Origins, Signs and Meanings: Analogy and the Thaumatrope in Melville’s Pierre, Or, the Ambiguities

Melville’s Pierre deals with the aftermath of the splintering of the master narrative of the Classical Episteme. The relation between individual elements in a system becomes the focus of the new epistemological paradigm that appears according to Michel Foucault in the disciplines of Biology, Philology and Political Economy. Melville’s Pierre represents a similar concern with the epistemological purport of the dichotomy fragmentation/unity, modern/classical age. It engages with the complexity of modernity and the challenges it poses to traditional epistemic schemes and forms of representation by concentrating on the experiential, unmediated level of visual perception marked by the modern age. While still profoundly interested in testing the possibility for a system of knowledge based on the centuries-old principle of analogy, and on the thaumatrope-effect of a kinetic vision that reconciles seemingly irreconcilable opposites, Melville resists any systematic organising principle precisely by means of a constant interrogation of the ambiguities that contemporary reality discloses and reproduces.