Revolutionary Time and the Future of Democracy in Melville's

Pierre

Dominic Mastroianni

ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Volume 56, Number 4, 2011

(Nos. 221 O.S.), pp. 391-423 (Article)

Published by Washington State University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esq.2011.0004

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/426589

Access provided by Universitaetsbibliothek Frankfurt a.M (12 Jun 2017 13:12 GMT)
 Revolutionary Time and the
Future of Democracy in Melvilles Pierre

dominic mastroianni

In March and April of 1848, members of the United States

Congress engaged in an intense debate over a resolution
congratulating France on its recent revolution.1 Punctuated
by heated arguments about slavery, the debate was colored by
the same preoccupation with permanence and stability that
Hannah Arendt finds running like a red thread through the
[U.S.] constitutional debates.2 For example, Representative
Henry W. Hilliard of Alabama worried that the revolution
would not result in any permanent good for France. Hilliards
argument for deferring congratulations stressed the difficulty
of determining the final outcome of a revolutionary event:
The convulsion which exhibits a form so attractive to-day,
may yet upturn the foundations of society, and result in the
wildest anarchy. While Representative John D. Cummins of
Ohio urged against delaying congratulations, he asserted that
if France should deviate from the model of the United States
by consolidating all legislative power in a central body, it would
thereby form a government whose construction was incompat-
ible with permanencya government which could not exist.3
For Cummins, the very existence of a government depended
on the possibility of its enduring permanently. A real democ-
racy, Cummins suggested, has to be constituted in a way that
precludes the possibility of further revolutionary upheavals.
Cummins implied that Hilliards uncertainty concerning the
final results of revolutions could be resolved by founding the

esq | v. 56 | 4th quarter | 2010 391

Scne de barricade, Paris, Juin 1848, by Adolphe Hervier.
From Album Hervier (L. Joly, 1888).
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs
Division, LC-USZ62-79527.
 revolutionary time

right form of government: a government that terminates the

force of a revolutionary event.
This essay seeks answers to the questions that Cummins
and Hilliard raised in what might seem an unlikely place:
Herman Melvilles novel of family and artistic drama, Pierre; or,
The Ambiguities (1852). I find running through Pierre a thread of
political allegory whose central concern is whether a potentially
permanent democracy can result from revolution. While recent
work on Pierre tends to focus on its stances toward authorship,
the late antebellum literary marketplace, and popular genres
of fiction, a significant subset of critics discerns in Melvilles
book a political allegory that interests itself in matters of na-
tion and revolution, whether by assessing the predicament of
the postrevolutionary generation in the United States or by
commenting on the French revolutions from 1789 through
1848. The latter set of readings, however, does not adequately
account for the novels preoccupation with the time of revolu-
tion and thereby dissipates the political force generated in
Melvilles development of a relation between democracy and the
possibility of its historical transformation. Pierre does nothing
less than to take the difficulty of knowing when a revolution-
ary event has lost its vitality and install this uncertainty at the
heart of democracy.
Therefore, and contrary to what is sometimes claimed,
Pierre does not offer a conservative or counter-revolutionary
response to the American or French revolutions.4 Melvilles
novel is more a conceptualization of the importance of revo-
lutionary time to democracy than an argument for or against
revolution or democracy. Without directly advocating revo-
lution, the novel asserts the untenability of the conservative
position that a democracy can last forever. Pierre maintains that
it is impossible for a revolution to found a revolution-proof
state. Moreover, the novel makes the more general claim that
any democratic organization must endlessly destabilize itself by
threatening itself with revolution. My reading of the political
allegorical dimension of Pierre differs from others inasmuch as I
draw out previously undetected claims that Melville makes about
revolution: that a revolutionary event tears the fabric of his-
tory enough to allow something entirely new to emerge; that a
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dominic mastroianni

revolutionary event occurs in a moment of passivity rather than

heroic action; that democracy itself tends to call for revolutions
that threaten its own continued existence; and that a desire for
equality can drive revolutions at least as forcefully as a demand
for freedom can. And centrally, I show that the character of
Isabel is far more important to the novels political thinking
than has been recognized, a point that asks us to reconsider
the notion that Melvilles political thought is predominantly
homosocial.5 In sum, while Pierre neither celebrates nor con-
demns revolution, no work in Melvilles time or since, I would
argue, offers a more thrilling or thought-provoking account
of the time of revolution.
This essay is divided into three sections. The first shows how
Pierres allegory of revolutionary time upsets a critical tradition
of attributing to the text a symmetrical and teleological narrative
form.6 In doing so, Melvilles novel claims that a revolutionary
event cuts the future free from history, while simultaneously
electrifying the present moment with the force of the past. The
second section examines Pierres contention that a revolutionary
event always involves a moment of foundation, but that such an
event founds a new order only by damaging an old foundation
that remains surprisingly lively, returning to haunt the pres-
ent. Melvilles account of the time of revolutionary foundation
complicates the familiar account of Pierre as a story of the post-
revolutionary decline of the United States from the greatness
of the revolutionary founders. In the third section, I show how
Pierre theorizes revolution as a mechanical process of event pro-
duction that threatens to repeat itself infinitely, doing violence
to a political body that suffers passively. For Pierre, democracy
requires a susceptibility to revolution, a structural imperma-
nence driven by a call for social and economic equality. In the
novel this call for equality is feminine, a demand for sisterhood
that does not accord perfectly with the calls for fraternity that
resounded in 1848. The novels figures of incestuous sister-
hood and brotherhood demand a politics of uncomfortable
intimacy and upset the notion that Melvilles political thought
is simply or predominantly homosocial. In Pierre, democratic
institutions elicit unheard of desires, erotic and political, that
tend to corrode their apparently firm foundations.
394
 revolutionary time

zzz

Pierre allegorizes a theory of revolution by telling the story of

Pierres great life-revolution, the receipt of Isabels letter.7
The aforementioned Pierre is Pierre Glendinning, a young
man born into the landed gentry of the northeastern United
States. His revolutionary letter arrives from Isabel Banford, a
poor and friendless orphan whose mother appears to have
been an aristocratic French emigrant to the United States
following the Revolution of 1789 (227). In the letter, Isabel
claims to be Pierres illegitimate half-sister. In an apparent
effort to preserve his dead fathers memory from allegations
of immorality, Pierre tells the world that Isabel is his secretly
married wife; in doing so, he breaks off his engagement to the
wealthy, luminous Lucy Tartan, and provokes his mother, Mary
Glendinning, to disinherit him. Many critics divide Pierre into
two stylistically distinct parts, separated by Pierres move from
Saddle Meadows, the country estate he expects to inherit, to a
New York City apartment he shares with three outcast women:
Isabel, Delly Ulver (an unwed mother of a recently deceased
infant), and eventually his former fiance Lucy, who comes
to Pierre on the pretext of being his nun-like cousinand
is disowned by her mother for it (310). By the conclusion
of Melvilles narrative, the house of Glendinning has fallen.
Before dying of an inconsolable grief that becomes insan-
ity, Mary wills the Glendinning fortune to Pierres cousin
Glendinning Stanly, who remains the only unoutlawed human
being by the name of Glendinning until Pierre fatally shoots
him (285, 360).
Other critics who attribute a dimension of political allegory
to Melvilles novel note that Pierres ancestry includes high-
ranking military figures who are well regarded for their roles in
the Indian and Revolutionary wars.8 The Glendinning family
history figures the history of the Anglo-American conquest of
the territory that became the United States. The story of the
Glendinnings is the story of how the land was won, as Sacvan
Bercovitch puts it.9 Pierre represents the United States, accord-
ing to some accounts, and in particular a postrevolutionary
United States suffering from what Bercovitch calls the anxiety

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of succession.10 Pierre seems to be the heir of an American

Revolution that, in Myra Jehlens words, left its children no
future but the fulfillment of the founding vision, and thus
left no way for future generations to define themselves through
the difference they made.11 Pierres political allegory includes
the French Revolution as well as the American, according to
both Bercovitch and another key reader of the novel, Michael
Rogin: both take the French Revolution to signify the failure
of revolution in general. For example, Bercovitch claims that
Isabel figures a catastrophic model of history in which repub-
licanism necessarily self-destructs; this explains her links to the
French Revolution of 1789 and the Terror, which Bercovitch
calls the major modern precedent for a failed republic.12
The best-known and most sustained work on Pierre and
revolution is found in Rogins Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and
Art of Herman Melville (1983), which reads the novel as a history
of the French Revolution of 1848. According to Rogin, Pierre
recounts a history of revolutionary failure allegorically by
telling a story in which Pierre tries to break away from his family
but finds himself unable to escape the determining power of
his ancestry.13 While it offers valuable insights and a compel-
ling narrative, Rogins reading partially misunderstands the
novels theory of revolution, first by taking revolution to be
primarily a matter of liberty and self-liberation, and second by
assuming that a revolutionary event is to be achieved through
action and agency. Pierre, on the contrary, portrays revolution
as an experience of passivity, defining the event as a moment
of powerlessness in which violence is suffered in the name,
not of liberty, but of equality. If the chains of history are to be
broken, Melvilles novel suggests, it will be through the gentle
force of a piercing cry for equality, rather than any heroic at-
tempt at self-liberation.
Rogin arrives at his interpretation of revolution as the
active pursuit of freedom only at the cost of overlooking the
centrality of Isabel to the novels theory of revolutionary time.
In Rogins account of Pierre, Isabel is absorbed into Pierre. Rogin
portrays Isabel as either created by Pierre, or already a part of
him. But contrary to what Rogin asserts, I suggest Pierre does
not conjure up Isabel, and Isabel is not Pierres homeless
396
 revolutionary time

soul.14 Melville insists on an absolute separation between Pierre

and Isabel. If Isabel were part of Pierre, or merely his creation,
her effect on him would represent nothing unprecedented or
wholly strange, as Melville puts it (45). The novelty of Isabels
effect on Pierre is a way of figuring, in temporal terms, her
complete separateness from him. The novel uses this separa-
tion between Isabel and Pierre as a figure for the absolute break
between the future a revolutionary event makes possible and
the past such an event leaves behind.
Rogin asserts that Pierre, along with everything Melville
wrote after it, claims to know what the future of democracy
will be: Melvilles fiction after Moby-Dick found slavery every-
where in the democratic future.15 But Pierre suggests that the
future of democracy is wholly unknown in the way that death
is unknown. Democracy, Melville insists, tends to generate
unforeseeable futures that break sharply with the past. The
novels refusal to predict the future is an important political
and philosophical gesture. Rather than simply maintaining
what one reader calls Melvilles conservative response to the
French revolution, Pierre attacks the conservative notion that
a revolution can produce a democracy capable of permanence,
without indicating that democratic energies should or can be
finally suppressed.16
Neither Rogin nor other astute readers address the compli-
cated theoretical work on the relationship between revolution
and time that Pierre figures through its most dramatic emotional
events. Critics have recognized the importance of one such
eventPierres reception of Isabels revolution-provoking
letterat least since Henry A. Murray, in his influential in-
troduction to the 1949 edition, made it the pivot between the
first two of the three acts into which he divided Pierre.17 More
recently, Priscilla Wald has argued that the mere delivery of the
letter, not any revelations it conveys, sets off Pierres crisis.
A stranger in the night gives Pierre the letter as he arrives at
the door of the house where Lucy is staying, intending to set
their wedding date. According to Wald, Pierre responds to this
strange delivery with a striking intensity because it allows him
to avoid fixing the date that would solidify his pathway toward

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inheriting the Glendinning estate, with its associated duties,

and becoming an American man.18
Wald is right to distinguish between Pierres reception of the
letter and his reading of its contents. But the intensity of his re-
ception has a source that she leaves unconsidered. After noting
how Pierre, upon receiving the letter, returns home, looks in
a mirror, sees himself transformed, and finds himself pos-
sessed by an incomprehensible power (62), Wald concludes
that he has a predisposition to melodrama: Pierres appar-
ent self-possession is readily overturned, and his uncanniness
as readily established.19 Walds reading, like every reading of
which I am aware, overlooks the signal fact that Pierres response
to Isabels letter repeats an earlier scene, just as they are about
to meet, in which his heart is pierced by her shriek. Melville
figures the letter both as a sign of Isabels ruptured heart and
as a blade that pierces Pierres: This letter . . . indeed seemed
the fit scroll of a torn, as well as bleeding heart. . . . [Pierres]
hand, clutching the letter, was pressed against his heart, as if
some assassin had stabbed him and fled; and Pierre was now
holding the dagger in the wound, to stanch the outgushing of
the blood (6465). In both respects the letter is identical to
Isabels shriek, which had seemed to split its way clean through
[Pierres] heart and followed a piercing of her own heart,
as we later learn when Isabel tells Pierre: Quietly I sat there
sewing, when I heard the announcing words . . . Ah, dames,
dames, Madame Glendinning,Master Pierre Glendinning.
Instantly, my sharp needle went through my side and stitched
my heart; the flannel dropt from my hand; thou heardst my
shriek (45, 158).
Isabels letter reinjures Pierres heart, exacerbating the
damage her shriek has inflicted. This prior wounding makes
possible the intensity of Pierres reception of the letter. I
imagine an objection that the fact that Pierres heart could
be split by a strangers shriek does evince his predisposition
for melodrama. But this diagnosis presupposes that in Pierres
characters Melville attempts psychological verisimilitude. Un-
derstanding Pierre as an allegorical work of political philosophy
not a perfect allegory, but a text in which political allegory is

398
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one thread among othersauthorizes readers to suspend the

assumption of accurate or coherent psychological representa-
tion. Although Isabels letter figures as a heart-piercing dagger
only after Pierre has read it, his striking response beforehand
demonstrates that in Pierre the structure of receiving a letter,
above and beyond its contents, involves a necessary wounding.
Melville carries this point to the limit when Pierre later returns
a hateful letter from his cousin Glen and Lucys brother Fred
by using it as wadding for the pistols with which he kills Glen:
Ill send em back their lie, and plant it scorching in their
brains! (358). Glen does not need to read the letter to be
wounded by it. The prior wounding of Pierres heart by Isabels
shriek, echoed in Pierres great life-revolution, allegorically
formulates a structure of the event at the core of Pierres theory
of revolution.
The story of Pierres revolution is a story of his heart;
the story of his heart is an allegory concerning the heart of a
republic, where mighty lordships such as the Glendinning
estate somehow surviv[e], like Indian mounds, the Revolu-
tionary flood (11). In the third of Pierres twenty-six books,
Pierre and his mother arrive at the home of the Miss Pennies,
where a group of women are making clothing for necessitous
emigrants who have recently come to the area (44). As Pierre
and his mother enter the house, their names are announced:
Almost immediately following this sound, there came a sud-
den, long-drawn, unearthly, girlish shriek, from the further
corner of the long, double room. Never had human voice so
affected Pierre before. Though he saw not the person from
whom it came, and though the voice was wholly strange to him,
yet the sudden shriek seemed to split its way clean through his
heart, and leave a yawning gap there (45). This figure of heart
piercing, the first of many in Pierre, gives us the key traits of the
revolutionary event. Such an event arrives suddenly, without
warning, before one is prepared to receive it; the narrator twice
calls Isabels shriek sudden. Because it comes suddenly, it does
not flow out of or overlap with the past: it breaks with temporal
continuity. The revolutionary event comes as an affection by
an other whose alterity is absolute but paradoxically familiar,
like a voice wholly strange yet somehow human. The event
399
From A Treatise on Diseases of the Heart and Great Vessels . . . , by
James Hope (London: John Churchill, 1839).
Courtesy of Historical Collections and Archives, Oregon Health
and Science University.
 revolutionary time

is figured as sonic, tactile, and invisible; Pierre hears and is

violently touched by the shriek, while he s[ees] not its source.
During the moment in which he experiences this event, Pierre
lacks the comprehending grasp that Pierre regularly associates
with light and vision.20 The violence of the revolutionary event
is path-breaking or way-making: the shriek appears to split
its way through Pierres heart. This way-cutting is unprec-
edented; it repeats no past event: Never had human voice
so affected Pierre before. The shriek passes through Pierres
heart clean[ly]: no part of it remains lodged there, as if no
act of memory could recall it to presence. All that remains in
Pierres heart is the open space of a wound, a yawning gap.
The revolutionary event comes suddenly and unrecognizably
to wound a heart in an unprecedented way, in a movement that
produces a new pathway.
A revolution-centered reading of Pierre makes it impossible
to see the text moving from a bucolic, idealized (however ironi-
cally) pastoral setting to harsh urban realities. Pierre is not a story
of a fall from innocence; it does not begin in Eden. The first
page of Pierre puts us in medias res, beginning chronologically
after its most important event, the splitting of Pierres heart at
the home of the Miss Pennies. This belated beginning upsets
not only the story of Pierre as a fall from innocence but also the
contention that it has two halves. While the notion that Melville
portrays Saddle Meadows as a place of innocence has been ques-
tioned, the appropriateness of dividing Pierre into two or three
parts, as far as I can find, has not.21 But Pierre does not consist
of two parts or halves, as Bercovitch and Rogin respectively
have it, or even three acts, as Murray has it.22 Because the text
begins after its central eventan event narrated in both books
3 and 8 it has a lopsidedness or asymmetry inconsistent with
any neat division into two parts separated by Pierres departure
for or arrival in New York City.
There is something dissatisfying in the notion that Pierre has
two parts; it gives the text too simple a structure and makes it
too easy to read Pierre as a story about failure or fall. Clearly this
division has satisfied others, perhaps because it allows one to
believe that Melville anticipated or even precipitated the books
critical, commercial, and alleged aesthetic failures. But the
401
dominic mastroianni

two-part structure ascribes symmetry to a book that is about the

impossibility of symmetry in the wake of a revolutionary event.
The revolutionary piercing of Pierres heart by Isabels shriek,
for example, upsets Pierres engagement to Lucy, destroying any
chance for Pierre and Lucy to realize the symmetrical, reciprocal,
complete revelation of secrets she wants to exist between them
(37, 40).23 I suggest that we do not know how many parts there
are to Pierre. The book is structured more like a textile punctured
by many irregularly spaced needle stitches than like two halves
balanced by a fulcrum. Pierre asks us to think of its texture in the
way it thinks of history: as a weave of force-conducting threads.
In Pierre, connections between the past and anticipations of
the future (presentiments) are accomplished by threads that
transmit electrical impulses by piercing hearts.24 In other words,
Pierre figures the revolutionary event both as opening a breach
between the past and the future and as energizing the present
moment with the force of the past. Revolutionary time is bet-
ter understood as a pattern of electrifying temporal ruptures
and unexpected links between past, present, and future than as
any comprehensively directed march toward completion or the
realization of an ideal.
Rather than dividing Pierre into starkly different halves, Mel-
ville defines the major events of the novels later books as repeti-
tions of Pierres great life-revolution, the receipt of Isabels let-
ter, an event with which the early books are preoccupied (225).
Late in the novel Melville explicitly posits a parallel between
Pierres revolutionary reception of Isabels letter and his later
struggle to complete his book. Pierres troubled efforts to finish
the book resemble his exposure to Isabels letter inasmuch as both
consign his soul to a painful independence: the letter severs his
connection to humanity, while writing his book releases him
from the care of the paternal gods. This latter independence
is accompanied by Pierres shrieksthe very sort of emission
that initially cut through his heart after passing from Isabels lips.
Melville figures Pierres soul learn[ing] to stand independent
as a toddler whose parents let go of its hands:

When at Saddle Meadows, Pierre had waivered

and trembled in those first wretched hours
402
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ensuing upon the receipt of Isabels letter;

then humanity had let go the hand of Pierre,
and therefore his cry; but when at last inured
to this, Pierre was seated at his book, willing
that humanity should desert him, so long as
he thought he felt a far higher support; then,
ere long, he began to feel the utter loss of that
other support, too; ay, even the paternal gods
themselves did now desert Pierre; the toddler
was toddling entirely alone, and not without
shrieks. (296, emphasis added)

Pierres independence is accomplished not by the force

of his will or of his actions but rather in the passivity of aban-
donment. Crucially, when Pierre finds himself left alone to
independence, he imitates or traumatically repeats Isabels
sudden, long-drawn, unearthly, girlish shriek: the source
of his life-revolution (45, 225). Melville does show Pierre
experiencing a revolution that leads to a kind of independence,
but this process hardly takes the form of self-liberation that
readers like Rogin expect. Revolutionary independence is por-
trayed, rather, as a traumatic abandonment to an unknown,
unsheltered future. Melville suggests that Pierres great book,
his revolutionary project, falls victim to disruptive repetitions
of the event that made the book possible in the first place.
Pierres formal structure consists of a series of disruptive
events that reconfigure relations between characters. This
structure models the books theory of revolutionary time,
which is formulated explicitly in a passage concerning the
constitution of the present and the future in the wake of a
revolutionary event. In book 5, Pierre resolves to keep secret
from his mother Isabels claim to be his sister but decides to
defer further thought on the matter until an upcoming meeting
with Isabel sharpens his purposes. Melvilles narrator explains
this deferral by describing a general relation between revolu-
tionary events and what follows them in time: When suddenly
encountering the shock of new and unanswerable revelations,
which he feels must revolutionize all the circumstances of his
life, man, at first, ever seeks to shun all conscious definitive-

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ness in his thoughts and purposes; as assured, that the lines

that shall precisely define his present misery, and thereby lay
out his future path; these can only be defined by sharp stakes
that cut into his heart (92). The revelations in this passage
accord with the texts model of the revolutionary event: they
are sudden, shocking, and new. The passage adds to Pierres
definition of the revolutionary event that it is unanswerable:
no response is commensurable with it. Nothing Pierre can do,
after the event, will be of the same order as the event itself. As
others have noted, Pierres inability to respond adequately to
his life-revolution figures the predicament of the postrevolu-
tionary generation in nineteenth-century America. The above
passage moves from Pierre to the general level of manthus
affirming that the political allegory of Pierre cannot simply be
confined to national limitsand suggests that in the wake of a
revolutionary event, the construction of a stable present and a
path toward the future can only be achieved by further revolu-
tionary events: by violent ruptures that threaten, immediately,
to break up the stability of the precisely define[d] present
and future path. Stabilizing lineswhether figurative lines that
describe the present and future path like geometrical figures, or
literal lines like those of the U.S. Constitutionare inscribed
with a revolutionary violence that threatens to destroy the newly
constituted order. In Pierre, the relation between the setting of
limits and the revolutionary rupture of those limits plays out
most intensely in Melvilles depiction of the effects of Isabels
face on Pierre.

zzz

This essays guiding question is whether, for Pierre, the

revolutionary event is compatible with the constitution of a
potentially permanent democracy. This question will always
be important for a state, like the United States, that calls itself
democratic and claims a revolutionary originat least if that
state dreams of existing forever. A question looms before any
such state: what is the future of a revolutionary event? Accord-
ing to Hannah Arendt, the proper end and culmination of
revolution is the constitution of new sources of power and law.

404
 revolutionary time

This creation of foundations gives political form to the present

and lays out a regulated path into the future. Arendt claims
that the American Revolution is unique among revolutions in
having arrived at this proper end.25 However, she qualifies this
judgment by asserting that even the American Revolution failed
to provide a lasting institution to protect the revolutionary
spirit, a spirit that could be kept alive only if each postrevolu-
tionary citizen were allowed to experience political freedom,
that is, to be a participator in government.26 In this respect,
Arendt tells a story of decline: while the revolutionary genera-
tion participated in government, subsequent generations have
been unable to do so.
Pierre is commonly thought to tell a similar story of decline
from revolutionary greatness. This interpretation attributes to
Melvilles novel a sense that revolution is a thing of the past,
doomed to fail if attempted by members of postrevolution-
ary generations. However, the remainder of my essay shows
how the novel portrays the postrevolutionary United States as
exposed, at every moment, to fresh outbursts of revolutionary
violence. Moreover, Melville suggests that the impossibility of
being finished with revolution is established from the start,
from the moment of foundation. The following section of my
essay sketches out the theory of revolutionary foundation that
Melville articulates allegorically in Pierre, in order to explain
why the novels concept of revolutionary time is concerned less
with the nations failure to live up to founding promises than
with its exposure to an unpredictable series of events that draw
force from the past and open the present to the possibility of
new political formations.27
In Pierre, as in Arendts On Revolution, the revolutionary event
requires a moment of foundation. The task of Pierre is to think
through what Arendt calls the perplexities of beginning as
they appear in the very act of foundation.28 Melville develops
a complicated relation between foundation and revolutionary
time by describing the effects of Isabels face on Pierre, and in
doing so, allegorically theorizing how a revolutionary event is
produced, and how it founds. For two days following his first
encounter with Isabel, Pierre is haunted by her face. According
to the narrator, Isabels face affects Pierre in two ways: general
405
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and special. The general effect of her face is to attract Pierre

to its beauty and suffering.29 According to the narrator: The
terrors of the face were not those of Gorgon; not by repelling
hideousness did it smite [Pierre] so; but bewilderingly allured
him, by its nameless beauty, and its long-suffering, hopeless
anguish. But he was sensible that this general effect on him,
was also special (49). The attractive suffering of Isabels face
resembles what the narrator later calls the povertiresque: an
aestheticization of poverty, which I discuss later (276).
The special effect of Isabels face on Pierre is special in
two senses. Melville continues: The face somehow mystically
appeal[ed] to his own private and individual affections; and by
a silent and tyrannic call, challenging him in his deepest moral
being, and summoning Truth, Love, Pity, Conscience, to the
stand (49). Most obviously, Isabels face has a special effect
on Pierre inasmuch as it calls upon him in particular, resonat-
ing with his own private and individual affections. This effect
singles out Pierre, summoning Truth, Love, Pity, Conscience,
to the stand to accuse him of some unknown crime. However,
Melvilles ambiguous phrasing suggests that the concepts of
truth, love, pity, and conscience are themselves accused and
called into question: their very generality or ideality renders
them suspect. General effects of attraction are general in
the sense that they pass through concepts such as truth, love,
pity, and conscience. These concepts, whether moral or epis-
temological, install a mediating distance between Pierre and
Isabels face, even as they attract Pierre to it. The special effect
of Isabels face is to annul this distance.
The paragraph following the one I have been discussing
suggests that revolutionary events are produced when a cer-
tain emotion takes control of thought and thereby converts
general or concept-mediated effects into special, unmediated
effects. Melville writes, What of general enchantment lurked
in [Pierres] strange sensations, seemed concentringly con-
densed, and pointed to a spear-head, that pierced his heart
with an inexplicable pang, whenever the specializing emotionto
call it soseized the possession of his thoughts (50, emphasis
added). I note three features of the specialization of general
enchantment. First, this process produces a sharp point, as
406
 revolutionary time

what is diffuse thickens by gathering toward a center. Melvilles

use of concentringly rather than concentratingly to de-
scribe the condensation of general enchantment emphasizes
the embedded word center. The center toward which general
enchantment draws becomes, as if reverting to its Greek root,
a kentron: a sharp point capable of wounding by penetrating.
Second, I underscore that this center-point or kentron pierces
Pierres heart. In other words, one center pierces another, one
heart plunges into another: the spearhead and Pierres heart
are the same kind of thing. The revolutionary event violently
introduces one center or heart into another. To translate this
into a language of foundations: while the revolutionary event
should found a wholly new order, it can only damage the old
foundation (here, Pierres heart) without completely destroy-
ing it. The revolutionary event does not completely clear the
ground before laying down a new foundation. It builds on
the ruins of the past; but in Pierre these ruins are unexpectedly
lively. My third point is that the revolutionary event is ac-
complished as an ascendance of feeling over thought. Pierres
heart is wounded whenever the specializing emotionto call
it soseize[s] the possession of his thoughts. The specializ-
ing emotion functions in a manner one expects of conceptual
thought: it grasps, like a thinking that comprehends. In Pierre,
there could be no revolution without the upsurge of an emo-
tion that violently alters thoughts. This emotion comes to the
field of general concepts from somewhere elseit does not
pass through concepts, but it works on them. The specializing
emotion is special in the sense that it remains external to and
hostile toward any commonality or community founded on
concepts: whether concepts of truth, love, pity, and conscience;
or life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The specializing emotion pierces Pierres heart repeat-
edly, whenever it appropriates his thoughts. This means that
Pierres revolutionary reception of Isabels letter is preceded
by not just one revolutionary event (Isabels shriek splitting
his heart) but many. In Pierre, revolutionary events are not only
repeatable; they are veritable engines of repetition. Yet Pierre
also claims that each event must be unprecedented. Melvilles
text places this contradiction between the repeatable and the
407
dominic mastroianni

absolutely new at the heart, the foundation, of democracy.

Like Arendt, Melville sees revolution as a way of founding
a governing body. Arendt claims that most postrevolutionary
U.S. citizens have been excluded from government, in what
amounts to a failure of the American revolution to repeat it-
self. Arendt attributes this failure to the founders inability or
unwillingness to assure the survival of the spirit out of which
the act of foundation sprang.30 For Melville, by contrast, the
way that revolution founds virtually guarantees the survival of
a different kind of revolutionary spirit: a dangerous ghost who
returns to unsettle the present moment and open new ways
into the future.

zzz

While Pierres story of revolutionary time is concerned

primarily with states that are founded in revolution, the novel
implies that the temporality of revolution might take hold of
any state that is, or aspires to be, democratic. Democracy itself,
in Melvilles account, seems to call forth revolutionary ener-
gies. The call for revolution is exemplified in Pierre by Isabels
heart-piercing shriek, which draws attention to the neglected
needs and desires suggested by her status as an orphan, an im-
poverished worker, and a woman. The centrality of Isabel to the
novels allegory of revolutionary time is noteworthy because it
takes Melvilles political thought beyond the homosocial worlds
of Moby-Dick, Bartleby, and Billy Budd, offering a serious in-
quiry into the political significance of femininity, sisterhood,
heterosexuality, and incest.
The theory of revolutionary time that Pierre articulates in a
language of punctured hearts and flowing blood is anticipated
by the novels early statement about the democratic element
at work in the United States. Melvilles narrator claims that
this democratic element acts like a corrosive acid that creates
by destroying: For indeed the democratic element operates as
a subtile acid among us; forever producing new things by cor-
roding the old. The narrator compares American political
institutions to verdigris, the primitive material of one kind
of green paint, [which] is produced by grape-vinegar poured

408
 revolutionary time

upon copper plates. From the partial destruction of copper

comes a new substance whose greenness gives the appearance
of rebirth. Thus, the narrator concludes, in America po-
litical institutions . . . seem to possess the divine virtue of a
natural law; for the most mighty of natures laws is this, that
out of Death she brings Life (9). Although Pierre compares
democratic action to the production of paint, the novel warns
against hastily concluding that democratizing forces can only
produce revolutions that are superficial and therefore not
real. Pierre never allows us to forget that things assumed upon
the surface, at last strike in (177). As we will see, the novel
conceives of revolutionary time as a series of events whereby
Death itself becomes transmuted into Life (9). Pierre makes
democracy itself a revolutionary force, asserting that the basic
function of democracythe work of its elemental stuffis to
generate revolutionary events.
Melvilles democratic element always threatens to turn its
destructive force against the new sources of power and law to
which it gave rise, and which, for Arendt, are the final results
of revolution. Inasmuch as they are democratic, Pierre suggests,
governments and societies are necessarily impermanent, since
the democratic element itself tends to undermine them. To
the extent that it remains true to its theory of revolutionary
time, Pierre offers no prescription for postrevolutionary life in
the United States. The novel instead claims that American life
is not yet, and perhaps never will be, postrevolutionary, since
its foundation seethes with revolutionary energies that always
might be unleashed.
Pierres suggestion that democratic governmentsespecially
those founded by revolutionsare necessarily unstable has to
do with the unexpected repeatability of revolutionary events.
Pierre defines this kind of event as unprecedented and wholly
strange, a clean break from the past. Yet Pierres great life-
revolution figures as a repetition of a prior event. Clearly, an
absolutely novel event should not repeat something that has
already happened. Pierre does not resolve its aporia of revolu-
tion, the notion that a revolutionary event must be both un-
precedented and repeatable. However, the text offers a hint as
to the mechanism by which such events repeat themselves. After
409
dominic mastroianni

Pierre reads Isabels letter and runs out of his house at the end
of book 3, book 4 offers some random hints concerning the
source of the tumultuous mood into which the letter has put
him (68). In an important passage, the narrator discusses the
way Isabels letter changes Pierres relationship with his fathers
memory. As in the passage concerning the specialization of the
general effects of Isabels face, it is again a matter of a blade
and a wound. This time the sharp point and its incision figure
an effect not of Isabels face but of her revolution-provoking
letter to Pierre. The narrator tells us that Pierres memory of
his father was once imbued with a romantic mystery. The nar-
rator continues: But now, now!Isabels letter read: swift as
the first light that slides from the sun, Pierre saw all preceding
ambiguities, all mysteries ripped open as if with a keen sword,
and forth trooped thickening phantoms of an infinite gloom
(85, emphasis original). Whereas in the earlier passage Pierres
heart is pierced repeatedly by a special effect of Isabels face, in
the later passage a mystery concerning Pierres father is cut open
by Isabels letter. This mystery is a kind of heart: an essence.
Pierres image of his father had once been invest[ed] . . . with a
fine, legendary romance; the essence whereof was that very mystery,
which at other times was so subtly and evilly significant (85,
emphasis added). Isabels letter acts as a sword cutting through
the ambiguous mystery at the heart of Pierres representation
of his father. While the figure of a sword cutting into mysteries
and ambiguities is not identical to that of a spearhead cutting
into Pierres heart, both figures make Isabel the source of a
cutting. Even if the mystery-essence is not quite a heart, it acts
like a heart by bleeding when cut: the phantoms issuing from
the pierced mysteries are thickening, like blood that clots as
it flows from a wound. This thickening recalls the process of
specialization by which general enchantment is concentringly
condensed, and pointed to a spear-head that cuts Pierres
heart (50).
Following the logic of the specialization of the general
formulated in the second part of this essay, the thickening
phantoms would condense into a sharp point, like a spear-
head or sword, capable of inflicting further wounds. That is,
one revolutionary event unleashes the potential to produce
410
 revolutionary time

further such events. Our two passages, taken together, result

in a mechanics of the revolutionary event. According to this
mechanics, a general order is exposed to a specializing emo-
tion that thickens it to sharp point. This point pierces a heart
or essence, and the blood issuing from the cut concentringly
condense[s] into a new cutting point or center: a new heart
capable of plunging into, wounding, and perhaps supplant-
ing an existing heart. The coagulating blood or thickening
phantoms produce a revolutionary event, through a process
that threatens to repeat itself infinitely, each wound releas-
ing phantoms capable of condensing into a new cutting edge.
Revolutionary events seem to be produced by an automatic
mechanical process, except that each event comes as a shock-
ing surprise, an unprecedented interruption of the generality
that governs all mechanical, predictable processes. If events are
produced by a process, the word process must not suggest
continuity in time, since the revolutionary event comes with
a never before, even when it subsequently appears to have
been a repetition, an echo of a prior shock. In any event, the
echo makes a new shock.
As we have seen, Pierre claims that the democratic ele-
ment destroys political institutions gradually, like a subtile
acid wearing away a copper plate. This figure of continuous
corrosion is at odds with the novels conception of a punctual
revolutionary event that shears through time, inflicting its
violence in one stroke. Melville attempts to reconcile these
competing ideas of democratic destructiveness by insisting that
revolutionary events repeat themselves, and thereby suggesting
that change wrought by a sequence of discontinuous events can
appear to be continuous. A cascade of revolutionary events
can produce the effect of corrosion: what looks like a gradual
process of deterioration might be caused by an irregular series
of singular events. Similarly, to borrow the novels figure of
time as a textile, a series of discrete stitches in a piece of fabric
might resemble a continuous line when viewed from a suf-
ficient distance.
Pierre suggests that democracy changes not so much through
the consciously willed actions of political agents as through the
mechanical operations of something like corrosive acid, or
411
dominic mastroianni

blood that attacks its own heart in a feedback loop that evades
subjective control. In Pierre, an unknown sisters shriek cuts
through Pierres heart and thereby provokes a process by which
he comes under attack. That is, Pierres great life-revolution
begins when his own blood turns against him. Pierres exposure to
the heart-wounding shriek and letter of Isabelpresumably
his sister, his own blood, as one says of those to whom one
is related naturallyinduces a reaction or response that
results in a series of wounding events that could be called self-
perpetuating if each event did not injure and even kill the self
it afflicted. Revolutionary violence, Pierre suggests, can be deadly
to the political body it pierces, just as a sufficiently severe wound
will end the biological life of a heart. One might say that after
the splitting of Pierres heart by Isabels shriek Pierre has died;
his life thenceforth is an afterlife. The weak but paradoxically
overwhelming force of Isabel, a poor and friendless orphan,
converts Pierre into a phantom.31 She instigates a process by
which Pierres own blood becomes a phantom energy that turns
against him. Thus Melville allegorically theorizes the way revo-
lution transforms the lifeblood of a republic into a threatening
army of ghosts issuing from its own heart.32
Pierre makes its mechanics of revolutionary event-produc-
tion central to democracy, suggesting that democracy has no
chance without it. Melville makes this move in a passage in
which his narrator calls death a democrat, a name he has pre-
pared us to accept by claiming early on that the democratic
element . . . produc[es] new things by corroding the old (9).
The passage begins by describing the impoverished life and
death of old farmer Millthorpe, a tenant of the Glendinnings
and the father of Charles Millthorpe, a boyhood acquaintance
of Pierres. We have been told that the Millthorpes moved
from their ample farm to a small plot of land inadequate to
their needs, due to their inability to pay the rent demanded
by the Glendinnings (275, 276). Anticipating the chronologi-
cally later piercing of Pierres heart by Isabels shriek, farmer
Millthorpe affects Pierre aurally and invisibly: Pierre hears him
without seeing him. Like Isabel, Millthorpe affects Pierre in a
way that moves beyond generality. It is in relation to Millthorpe
that Pierre first gains a sense of poverty beyond the povertiresque,
412
 revolutionary time

the narrators term for an aestheticization of poverty he associ-

ates with the followers of Emerson (amiable philosophers of
either the Compensation, or Optimist school) and with
Pierres mother. The povertiresque is to the social landscape
what the picturesque is to the natural landscape: the povertir-
esque reduces poverty to the way it appears in a general picture
constituted by an aestheticizing eye (276, 277). The groans
of an unseen Millthorpe signal for young Pierre a poverty and
suffering irreducible to phenomena mediated by a concept
of the povertiresque. When visiting Charles and stopping at the
threshold of his house, Pierre would catch low, aged, life-weary
groans from a recess out of sight from the door; then would
Pierre have some boyish inklings of something else than the
pure povertiresque in poverty: some inklings of what it might be,
to be old, and poor, and worn, and rheumatic, with shivering
death drawing nigh (277).
After linking farmer Millthorpe with the revolutionary af-
fection of Pierre by Isabel, the narrator describes Millthorpes
death in terms that anticipate the death of the title character
in Melvilles next published work, Bartleby, the Scrivener
(1853). Near the end of that story, when asked if the dead
Bartleby is sleeping, the narrator answers, with kings and
counsellors, quoting from the biblical Book of Job: For now
should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then
had I been at rest, With kings and counsellors of the earth,
which built desolate places for themselves.33 The narrator of
Pierre seems to recall these verses when he writes of Millthorpes
death: Oh, softest and daintiest of Holland linen is the moth-
erly earth! There, beneath the sublime tester of the infinite sky,
like emperors and kings, sleep, in grand state, the beggars and
paupers of earth! (278). In both cases, the notion that death
levels the widest differences of political and economic power
is coupled with an interpretation of death as a peaceful sleep
that grants freedom from suffering.
The narrator immediately goes on to declare, I joy that
Death is this Democrat; and hopeless of all other real and
permanent democracies, still hug the thought, that though in
life some heads are crowned with gold, and some bound round
with thorns, yet chisel them how they will, head-stones are all
413
dominic mastroianni

alike (278). Here, the narrator suggests that only in death can
there be an actual and enduring democracy, or the promise
of one. By placing this claim after the suggestion that poverty
and the high rent charged by the Glendinnings precipitated
Millthorpes death, the narrator puts the figure of death as
a democrat into relation with what Hannah Arendt (among
others) calls the social question: the problem posed by abject
poverty and its relation to governmental forms and interven-
tions, as well as to the meanings and mechanisms of revolu-
tion.34 Although rumors attribute Millthorpes death to alcohol
abuse, the narrator suggests that the rumors are unfounded and
that he was killed by poverty. The equality of those who are all
alike only in death is social and economic, and not merely the
equality of citizens who enjoy the same rights. Melville suggests
that the constitution of political equality remains inseparable
from questions of social and economic equality, and that no
real and permanent democracy can be realized until social and
economic equality has been achieved.35
Pierre ends with the terrifying unknown of a democracy of
death, rather than any gesture toward a sustainable or poten-
tially permanent democracy. The final chapters are riddled with
deaths. First, Pierre kills Glen, his cousin and new heir to the
Glendinning fortune; then Lucy dies when she hears Isabel call
Pierre brother; finally, Pierre and Isabel kill themselves by
ingesting poison. While the novels final events suggest a grim
view of the fruits of revolution and democracy, they do not simply
sentence democracy to death. In the penultimate chapter, an
imprisoned Pierre claims to want to leave behind a body marked
and dishonored by a blow from Glens cowhide, and to prevent
his executioners from killing him: I long and long to die, to be
rid of this dishonored cheek. Hung by the neck till thou be dead.Not if
I forestall you, though! Pierre complicates his suicidal desire by
inverting life and death, exclaiming, Oh now to live is death,
and now to die is life; now, to my soul, were a sword my midwife!
(360). There is a dizzying irony in the paradox by which a self (a
soul) can be produced only in the act of destroying itself, or at
the least, destroying its condition of possibility (a body). Pierre
imagines seizing revolutionary force only at the cost of ending
the life that such force might be used to free.
414
 revolutionary time

Such a revolutionary suicide seems to be an act of futility.

And yet we cannot simply dismiss Pierres claim that to die is
life. In a strange way, the deaths of the final chapters evoke a
life or a future for equality and democracy, for the all alike
belonging exclusively to the democracy of death. The multipli-
cation of deaths in the books final chapters, like a revolution-
ary event, leaves no horizon for a future, and therefore leaves an
opening for a future whose coming is not anticipated: a truly
revolutionary future. The final book of Pierre reinscribes, with
dead characters rather than pierced hearts, the notion that
revolution does not merge with or flow continuously into a
future. Instead, Melville suggests, revolution violently opens
a space for the new life of a future that approaches invisibly,
thwarting every attempt to foresee it.
According to Pierre, the revolutionary break from the past
is a profoundly democratic gesture, the work of the Radical
democrat. Melville asserts that radical democracy dissolves
family ties, presumably because such ties tend to concentrate
wealth and power in the hands of a few. If radical democracy
destroys the power of family historythe basis of monarchy
and aristocracythen it also destroys the prohibition of incest,
which cannot exist without knowing and valuing lineage. Early
in Pierre the narrator warns us that we might find Pierre too
Radical a Democrat, and this warning can only be based on
the incestuous nature of Pierres relationship with Isabel. After
discussing Pierres pride in his ancestors and acknowledging
that readers might find it undemocratic, Melville assures us
that we will eventually think Pierre altogether too democratic:
If you tell me that this sort of thing in him [his very proud,
elated sort of way of recalling his heroic ancestors] showed
him no sterling Democrat, and that a truly noble man should
never brag of any arm but his own; . . . believe me you will
pronounce Pierre a thorough-going Democrat in time; per-
haps a little too Radical altogether to your fancy (13). In the
context of his discussion of Pierres family pride, Melvilles
warning clearly refers to Pierres subsequent commission of
incesthis disregarding of family historyas a species of radi-
cally democratic action (12).36
The drastically democratic relationship between Pierre
415
dominic mastroianni

and Isabel leads us to ponder ways in which Melvilles political

thought extends beyond the homosocial. If Isabel is a figure of
the French Revolution, as Bercovitch claims, or of something
or someone excluded or orphaned by the Revolutionnamely
the sister, who cannot fit easily into a scheme of universal
fraternitythen the question of Pierres own[ing] of Isabel
asks Americans to come to terms with an intimate and unset-
tling relation to the French Revolutions, and to what the latter
failed to imagine or to realize (170).37 Pierres attempt to own
Isabel asks what it would mean to own a revolutionary history,
or a relation between revolution and historys orphans. This
history of revolutions, or series of revolutionary ruptures in
history, destabilizes the present; but more to the point, it puts
in question the very possibility of constituting a form of gov-
ernment that could continue forever, a government consistent
with permanence.
Pierre asks Americans to acknowledge their indebtedness
to, or their being called upon by, a concept of fraternity that
imposes unrealistic obligations. Fraternity, associated with
the French Revolution of 1848, would oblige Americans to
ameliorate or equalize the social and economic circumstances
of everyone living in America.38 Fraternity poses the social
question, the question of social inequalities that could be seen
as ruining or destabilizing the political work of the American
Revolutionthat is, the constitution of a republican form of
government stabilized by a separation of legislative, executive,
and judicial powers. The figure of Isabel, the sister who may
or may not share Pierres blood, calls upon the equalizing
force of fraternity while putting into question that concepts
privileging of brothers.39 Fraternitys equalizing force can,
when drawn to radically democratic extremes, render relation-
ships of familial blood irrelevant, without diminishing the
political importance of sanguine passions, whether amorous
or murderous. Pierres erotically charged relationship between
brother and sister suggests not only that political fraternity and
sorority are inextricable from sexual passion but also that they
are, in a sense, incestuous, inasmuch as they demand norm-
breaching experiences of uncomfortable interconnectedness.
In the U.S. Congressional debates concerning a resolution
416
 revolutionary time

to congratulate the people of France for effecting the Revolu-

tion of 1848, fraternity was seen as a force that leveled social and
political differences and inequalities. Senator Stephen Douglas
of Illinois spoke of the fact that [the people of France] have
been enabled . . . to combine all classes, parties, and factions
in Francethe church, the army, the navyin one bond of
brotherhood, acting in concert and with unanimity in support
of the common cause. While Douglas claimed that this fact
inspire[d] great confidence in the success of the movement,
not everyone in Congress shared his feeling. Representative
Henry W. Hilliard worried that the Provisional Government of
France ha[d] promised more than it [could] redeem, and he
linked this excessive promise to fraternity: The fraternity which
has been adopted may not be consistent with regulated liberty;
it may be the dream of idealists, and not the conception of a
philosophical statesman. For Hilliard, fraternity connoted
a desire to implement labor reforms in order to address social
inequalities. Immediately after calling fraternity an idealist
dream, he stated: The measure, too, which has been adopted
in regard to the labor and wages of operatives, doubling their
compensation, and undertaking to employ them on the part of
the Government, is a very unsafe one. Every one accustomed
to the order of well-regulated liberty must see the danger of
such legislation.40 Hilliards contention that both fraternity
and labor reforms threatened regulated liberty implies that
social and economic equality are incompatible with a freedom
restricted or constituted by laws, norms, or other codes of
conduct.
To acknowledge a shared inheritance with the French
Revolutions and their outcasts, and to do so as a U.S. citizen
or nation-state enjoying manifold social, economic, and
political advantages, one would have to expose oneself to the
threat of violent upheaval, of socially driven revolutions, and
to some sort of acceptance of an affinity between attempting
to establish a democratic form of government and risking that
governments dissolution. It would mean acknowledging or
owning up to the fact that the American Revolution could not
successfully evade the social question, as Arendt thinks it did.41
Or rather, even if the American Revolution was not driven by
417
dominic mastroianni

the social question, the threat and promise of another Ameri-

can revolution, encroaching on the present like a specter of
the French Revolution and a presentiment of servile warlike
the prophetical ghost of Melvilles next novelhad intruded
into U.S. politics in the midnineteenth century.42

Clemson University

Notes

I would like to thank Michael A. Elliott and Benjamin Reiss for the care and
intelligence with which they responded to multiple drafts of this essay.
1. For discussion of this debate, and of American opposition to the 1848
Revolution, see Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Liter-
ary Renaissance (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1988), 1618; and Richard
C. Rohrs, American Critics of the French Revolution of 1848, Journal
of the Early Republic 14, no. 3 (1994): 35977.
2. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, Viking Compass ed. (New York: Viking,
1965; London: Penguin, 1990), 231.
3. Representative Henry W. Hilliard and Representative John D. Cum-
mins, Congressional Globe, 30th Cong., 1st sess., 1848, 37:572, 576.
4. See, for example, Reynoldss characterizations of Melvilles conserva-
tive response to the French Revolution of 1848 (European Revolutions,
99, 108, 194 n. 69).
5. On the roles of women and femininity in Melvilles work and life, see
Elizabeth Schultz and Haskell Springer, eds., Melville and Women (Kent:
Kent State Univ. Press, 2006).
6. Even the tendency to view Pierre as a hash attributes to the book an initial
coherence whose mangled survival allows the supposedly extraneous
parts to be identified as such. For example, Hershel Parker claims that
material Melville added during or after a trip to New York City renders
Pierre much less unified than it would have been if [he] had retained
his initial purpose and intensity of concentration (Why Pierre Went
Wrong, Studies in the Novel 8, no. 2 [1976]: 19).
7. Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel
Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, vol. 7 of The Writings of Herman Melville
(Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and the Newberry

418
 revolutionary time

Library, 1971), 225; hereafter cited parenthetically.

8. See Michael Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville
(New York: Knopf, 1983), 162; Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent:
Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge,
1993), 29394; and Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety
and Narrative Form (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1995), 108.
9. Bercovitch, Rites of Assent, 293. See also John Carlos Rowe, At Emersons
Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature (New York: Columbia Univ.
Press, 1997), 91.
10. Bercovitch, Rites of Assent, 289, 293.
11. Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), 198. In a similar vein, Wald
claims that Pierres story is that of the fate of the national subject,
who finds himself unable to assume possession of the nation or suc-
cessfully declare his independence, due to his prescriptedness or
susceptibility to an internalized scriptthe prewritten manuscript of
his life (Constituting Americans, 108, 133, 138). See also Eric Sundquist,
Slavery, Revolution, and the American Renaissance, in The American
Renaissance Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 198283, ed.
Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 1985), 56.
12. Bercovitch, Rites of Assent, 292, 29697; emphasis original.
13. Rogin, Subversive Genealogy, 186, 16970.
14. Rogin, Subversive Genealogy, 165, 175.
15. Rogin, Subversive Genealogy, 151.
16. Reynolds, European Revolutions, 99.
17. Henry A. Murray, introduction to Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, by Herman
Melville (New York: Hendricks House, 1949), xxxiii, xliv. Murrays
account is, to my knowledge, the only one that attributes three parts
to Pierre.
18. Wald, Constituting Americans, 134; emphasis original.
19. Wald, Constituting Americans, 134.
20. See, for example, the speech Pierre addresses to a hallucinatory image
of Isabels face, where his desire to know the secret of the face is coupled
with his demand to see it: I must see it face to face (41).
21. See Samuel Otter, Melvilles Anatomies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ.
of California Press, 1999), 174, 305 n. 4.
22. See Rogin, Subversive Genealogies, 177; Bercovitch, Rites of Assent, 255n;
Richard H. Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (Chicago: Univ. of

419
dominic mastroianni

Chicago Press, 1976), 183; and Carol Colatrella, Literature and Moral Re-
form: Melville and the Discipline of Reading (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida,
2002), 189.
23. Wai Chee Dimock claims that when Lucy insists Pierre be wholly a
disclosed secret to her (37), he is unable to do so because he already
enjoys an exclusive relation of total self-revelation with his mother
(Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism [Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1989], 15152). Dimock seems to overlook the fact that
some weeks previous to the moment when Lucy makes her demand,
Pierre has already return[ed] something alarmingly like a fib, to an
explicit question put to him by his mother (43, 50).
24. Melville links the poniarded heart to the reception of electric pre-
sentiments communicated by the Fates threads (70).
25. Arendt writes: Clearly, the true objective of the American Consti-
tution was not to limit power but to create more power, actually to
establish and duly constitute an entirely new power centre. . . . The
American Constitution finally consolidated the power of the Revolu-
tion. For Arendt, constitutions are the end product and also the end
of revolutions, and the American Revolution was unique in treating
constitution-making . . . as the foremost and the noblest of all revo-
lutionary deeds (On Revolution, 154, 159, 158).
26. Arendt, On Revolution, 232, 218.
27. Pierre challenges the idea that revolutionary time protects existing politi-
cal bodies, as it is said to do in Sundquists important essay Slavery,
Revolution, and the American Renaissance. Drawing on the work of
historian David Brion Davis, Sundquist writes of a temporal chasm
extending between the moment when the United States was founded
(what Davis calls the transcendent moment of rebirth) and a series
of temporally disruptive rediscoveries of the nations sinful accep-
tance of slavery. In Sundquists account, it was a sense of continuing
Revolutionary time that kept the chasm from swallowing up the nation
during the early national and antebellum periods (9; quoting Davis,
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 17701823 [New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1999], 307). Pierre depicts the persistence of revolutionary
time not as an agent of political stability but as a powerful threat to it.
For Melville the act of founding itself fractures time and imperils the
political order that it has constituted.
28. Arendt, On Revolution, 206.

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29. Beauty and suffering are said to converge in Isabels face at least six
times (47, 49, 54, 107, 112).
30. Arendt, On Revolution, 126.
31. William Spanos dismisses the power that Isabels face has over Pierre:
The face he has seen earlier haunts Pierre and his Edenic environs,
but the truth discourse of this post-Revolutionary moment of American
history is so deeply inscribed in his consciousness that he can easily
dismiss it as simply an irrational apparition, a nothing that his world
will have nothing to do with (Pierres Extraordinary Emergency:
Melville and the Voice of Silence, Part 1, boundary 2, 28 [Summer
2001]: 108). But Melvilles novel makes it clear that Pierre cannot
easily dismiss Isabels face: The face had not perplexed [Pierre]
for a few speculative minutes, and then glided from him, to return
no more. It stayed close by him; onlyand not invariablycould he
repel it, by the exertion of all his resolution and self-will (4950).
Melvilles innovative theory of revolution becomes legible only after
one acknowledges the sustained, sometimes overwhelming, challenge
Isabel presents to Pierre. Isabels coupling of weakness with surpris-
ing power allows the novel to generate an alternative to the masculine
model of revolution as heroic self-liberation.
32. If I had the space to do so, I would compare this aspect of Pierre to the
thinking that Jacques Derrida places under the heading of auto-
immunity, as early as Specters of Marx, and especially in the discussions
of autoimmunity and democracy in Rogues. See Specters of Marx: The State
of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf
(New York: Routledge, 1994); and Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans.
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,
2005). For more on blood in Pierre see Otter, Melvilles Anatomies, esp.
24649; and Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-
Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004),
esp. 18182.
33. Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall-Street, in
The Piazza Tales, and Other Prose Pieces, 18391860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma
A. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle, and others, vol. 9 of The Writings of
Herman Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and the
Newberry Library, 1987), 45; Job 3:1314 (King James Version).
34. For Arendt the social question names what we may better and more
simply call the existence of poverty. She defines poverty as a condition

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that puts men under the absolute dictate of their bodies (On Revolution,
60).
35. Melvilles next novel, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855), is likewise
concerned with the significance of the social question in the wake of
revolution. Unlike Pierre, Potter is a war veteran, a father rather
than a child of the Revolution. Potters long poverty-induced exile
culminates when his child, the U.S. government, denies his request for
a pension and thereby refuses to recognize his role in creating the na-
tion. While in Pierre poverty keeps revolution alive as a persistent threat
to political stability, in Israel Potter poverty kills revolution by emptying
revolutionary freedom of its value, keeping poor Americans like Pot-
ter from enjoying it (Herman Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile,
ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, vol.
8 of The Writings of Herman Melville [Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern
Univ. Press and the Newberry Library, 1982], 169).
36. While Rogin sees incest as a barrier to Pierres revolution, I argue
that Melville places incest at the heart of revolution. Rogin asserts that
Pierre fails to liberate himself because he capitulates to an incest taboo
figured by Mt. Greylock: Pierre cannot stand, unambiguously, for
liberation, since he has connected that freedom to incest. . . . Pierre has
overthrown his parents only in the service of a deeper oppression. That
oppressive force is Mount Greylock; it is the incest taboo. According
to Rogin, Pierre never commits incest: because he was castrated . . .
before his crime, Pierre is an innocent to the end (Subversive Geneal-
ogy, 169, 181, 182). However, Melville strongly suggests that Pierre and
Isabel have consummated their incestuous desires, when he claims that
the intense procreative enthusiasm that once drove Pierres think-
ing about Isabel is no longer so all-potential with him as of yore
(353).
37. Bercovitch, Rites of Assent, 29697.
38. See A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. Franois Furet and Mona
Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,
Belknap Press, 1989), s.v. Fraternity.
39. Even in the moment when Pierre most intensely doubts that Isabel is
a blood relative, he only briefly refuses her the name sister. In the
throes of sexual desire for Isabel, Pierre tells her: Call me brother
no more! . . . I am Pierre, and thou Isabel, wide brother and sister in
the common humanity,no more (273). Melville thus suggests that
the revolutionary relationship between Pierre and Isabel might hold

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for all who are wide brother and sister in the common humanity.
40. Senator Stephen Douglas and Representative Henry W. Hilliard, Con-
gressional Globe, 569, 572; emphasis original.
41. While Arendt insists that the social question played no part in the
American Revolution, she qualifies this claim: The absence of the
social question from the American scene was, after all, quite deceptive,
and . . . abject and degrading misery was present everywhere in the
form of slavery and Negro labour. Arendt suggests that with slavery
the social question might have been hidden in darkness, although it
was non-existent for all practical purposes (On Revolution, 70, 72).
42. Israel Potter describes John Paul Jones as a jaunty barbarian in broad-
cloth; a sort of prophetical ghost, glimmering in anticipation upon the
advent of those tragic scenes of the French Revolution which levelled
the exquisite refinement of Paris with the blood-thirsty ferocity of
Borneo (63).

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