Simultaneous Scales, Incommensurate Standards in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

Abstract

As he claims to make up for his father’s sins, Pierre Glendinning acts as a self-appointed Archangel and measures up to the Hidden God. He feels justified by Plotinus Plinlimmon’s pamphlet which highlights the discrepancy between human values that are bound to be relative and Divine Justice that is absolute and yet posits that no matter how local time may differ from universal time, there must needs be a single standard, the equivalent of Greenwich Mean Time. And yet, far from leading to a final conclusive revelation that might serve as a cornerstone, our latter-day Pierre is ultimately faced with an entangled maze of merely partial and transient perspectives.

Keywords

• Melville
• Pierre
• angels
• angles
• perspectives
• vortex