Hershel parker melville5/29/2023 What also speaks for that project, however, is an intimation offered by the narrator of Melville’s 1852 novel, Pierre. ‘I am intent upon the essence of things,’ he has one of his characters announce in his third novel, Mardi, ‘the mystery that lies beyond … that which is beneath the seeming.’ That speaks for Melville’s own artistic project. Melville could not resign himself to doubt, or to a placid acceptance of the surfaces of experience. ‘Nothing exists by itself.’ And those contraries were no more evident, he felt, than within each human being, as they struggled to find a basis for truth or faith, something that would really make life worth living. ‘There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contraries,’ the narrator declares in Moby-Dick. ‘He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief,’ Nathaniel Hawthorne once observed of his friend, neighbour and fellow novelist, Herman Melville, ‘and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.’ For Melville, human experience was ruled by contraries.
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