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Herman Melville. Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. The Kraken Edition. Ed. Hershel Parker. Pictures by Maurice Sendak. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. xlvi + 449 pages. $30.00.
Herman Melville. Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. 1971. Rpt. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995. xii + 435 pages. $14.95 (paper).
Having withstood certain canon wars, Melville has proved to be just as postmodern as he always was. Perhaps his persistence stems from his ability to arouse fascinating debates, not only about race, gender, and politics, but about the very nature of the printed word. He gets under our skin and inspires other artists, even editors, to be "bad" and take some dives. Now, two different versions of his challenging and yet resilient novel Pierre have emerged, setting the stage for more debate about the author and the writing process itself. Reprinted in a handsome student edition is the now-standard Northwestern-Newberry (NN) critical edition, first assembled in 1971 by three pre-eminent scholars: Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Such a reprint by itself would be unremarkable except for the event that occasioned it, the publication of a new textual rival, HarperCollins's Kraken Edition, edited by Hershel Parker and illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Taken together, these two versions of Pierre not only rejuvenate interest in Melville's novel about a disillusioned young aristocrat turned writer; they also pose substantial questions about the writer-reader enterprise: How does a text emerge from the writer's pen? What shape should it take in print? And how do editors and illustrators define our reading experience?
Purists will complain about the Kraken Pierre. It's not what Melville first printed, and its pictures push the envelope. But it is "bad" for all the right reasons and belongs on your bookshelf.
The principal controversy surrounding the volume is that Hershel Parker, a contributor to the more conventional NN edition of Pierre, has created an unconventional, shorter version of the novel. On the basis of Melville's contract with his publishers, two letters, and some cagey guessing, Parker argues that the author was so angered by negative reviews of Moby-Dick and the insulting royalty terms proposed for Pierre that he inserted into his work in progress an aesthetically ruinous, satiric attack on the...