Anne-Claire Le Reste
Université Paris Nanterre
Anne-Claire Le Reste is an associate professor in American literature at Paris Nanterre University. She has published articles on Henry James, and is a member of the editorial board of the French Review of American Studies (RFEA).
Anne-Claire Le Reste (Université Paris Nanterre), "Weather Degree Zero: on Trances of Mildness in Pierre or The Ambiguities"
This proposal is part of a project attempting to reflect on the poetics of mildness in the nineteenth century, the first stage of which centers on Melville’s dissonant use of the notion. Whether it be the “abhorrent mildness” imparted by the whale’s whiteness, or Bartleby’s “mild effrontery” (akin to the shark’s “mild deadliness” in Moby Dick), something disquieting lurks in Melville’s use of the term, signalling an unusual power to disrupt – not only because of the reversal whereby disruption comes to be associated, oxymoronically, with a value conveying meekness and submission, but also because it manages to disrupt disruption itself. In Pierre the notion appears to be particularly clima(c)tic. The opening scene is conspicuously steeped in mildness, but in keeping with Melville’s strategy of discordance, the weather is said to be “trance-like”. Pierre – the author of a piece entitled “The Weather: A Thought”, we learn incidentally – is repeatedly assessed in terms of his mildness, as both a damning and a redeeming quality. If winter is “the time of story-telling”, as Alexandra Harris writes in Weatherland, what then to make of mild weather? Mildness is a condition that can affect all four seasons, but it is most often shrugged off as a non-event. Using Roland Barthes’s conceptualization of the “Neutral” as that which eludes the binary oppositions that structure and produce meaning, I would like to show how, far from signifying merely “the calm before the storm”, mildness reverberates throughout the narrative, and is built into its most tantalizing “ambiguities”.
