SOURCE: "The Writer's Procreative Urge in Pierre: Fictional Freedom or Convoluted Incest?" in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XI, No. 4, Winter, 1979, pp. 416-30.

In the essay that follows, Thomas studies the significance of human procreation as a figure for writing in Melville's Pierre; the title character's unsuccessful attempt to free himself of his family's past reveals the extent to which the authority of a text's author is fictional.

One need not subscribe to Edward Said's implied historical schema, which seeks to establish the possibility for a new beginning because of, rather than in spite of, a doubt about origins, to agree with him that much narrative fiction in the nineteenth century is linked intimately with an attempt to reproduce in language the mysteries of human procreation. By no means does Said argue that the attempted metaphoric link between human and artistic procreation is confined to either the novel...