SOURCE: “Herman Melville: The Subversive Lie of Expedient Truth in Pierre: Or, the Ambiguities,” in Pious Impostures and Unproven Words: The Romance of Deconstruction in Nineteenth-Century America, University Press of America, 1990, pp. 67-94.

In the following excerpt, Scheer examines the relationship between Pierre and the narrator of Pierre and explores the nature of self-knowledge and virtue.

1. the Epistemological Ground: Or, the Expedient Lie

“… a most singular act of pious imposture”

Because it traces the causes and effects of the inscription of this chapter, Melville's Pierre (1852) is perhaps the most openly deconstructive work under consideration in this book. Its “thematics” of reading and writing anticipate a number of Freudian, Nietzschean, and Derridean insights: the sublimation of repressed sexuality, the illusory nature of human “truths,” and the fiction of a stable center or origin. Its basic structure is also reminiscent of biblical genetics, the loss of an always already lost...