The present is social: this is the central claim of Chapter 5, the book’s final chapter, which reads Herman Melville’s novel Israel Potter (1855). Formally peculiar, the novel’s erratic telling of history thus mirrors Israel’s wanderings. Both are, as the narrator says at one point of Israel, “repeatedly and rapidly …planted, torn up, transplanted, and dropped again, hither and thither.” My reading proceeds by way of an exploration of the novel’s varying uses of narrative prolepsis, its movement away from a foreshadowing that knows that is certain, and toward one that doesn’t, but that hopes. Alongside its critique of nationalist posturing, Israel Potter imagines the conditions for a kind of hopefulness, which it glimpses in forms of sociality that reside in an unspecified, perhaps even queer, “as yet.” In doing so, it anticipates the possibility of a renovated and renewed social world.
Broken Hearths: Melville's Israel Potter and the Bunker Hill Monument
