The logical extension of Melville's corrosive irony toward fame would treat being a star as the same thing as being American, only more so: we're all looked at, we're all mediated, we're all spectacularly reproduced, and the lifestyles of the rich and famous are nothing more than variations on everyday modern life in general, pitched at the level of allegory and dressed up to show a little, or sometimes a lot of, class. And America is a kind of native land for any celebrity, a place where they are all at home, no matter where they might come from. Stars constitute a whole category of extravagantly mediated personhood, a whole species that is at home in the artificial worlds of publicity that have come to surround those technologies, film most of all, that amplified fame and its effects out of all historical proportion in the twentieth century. This it seemed was one of the privileges for which the American Revolution was fought." The overstatement is only partly rhetorical. "America," writes Leo Braudy, "pioneered in the implicit democratic and modern assumption that everyone could and should be looked at. Melville thus assaults an American culture of celebrity in a highly precocious way, identifying at this early moment that what is most strangely compelling about stardom has less to do with its scarcity and considerably more with its proliferation and promiscuity. For Pierre, to sit for a daguerreotype, to be "dayalized a dunce"-where once a "faithful portrait" marked the "immortalizing a genius"-is to lose oneself within a democracy of mercenary and formulaic distinction (297) so we might say that for Melville, the mediating discourses and material emanations of fame work contrary to their own clamor, permitting not the apotheosis of the singular individual but the replication of a standardized type of celebrity, famous like most people aren't, but also famous exactly like others already are. Then again, as he is molested from the start by the uncanny likeness of his father's image and the "ineffable correlativeness" it suggests, it is perhaps not out of character for Pierre to be worried, above all, about anything that might render him just a version of someone else. Disinherited, estranged from family and fiancée, impoverished, abandoned in urban squalor, incestuously in love with his mother, his sister, or both -becoming famous would seem the least of Pierre's problems. The travesty of literary celebrity that Melville undertakes when the action of Pierre moves from the country to the city is as savage as it is, from young Mr.
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