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Neophilologus (2016) 100:677693
DOI 10.1007/s11061-016-9484-6
Norah Ahmed Al-Malki1
Published online: 14 May 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016
Abstract Herman Melvilles (18191891) epic poem, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) demonstrates what post-structuralism would later discuss as the indeterminacy of meaning. The 18.000 line poem lends itself, we believe, to a literary reading which highlights what Jacques Lacan calls the polyphony of poetry, its Real otherness. Basically, this article, using Lacans theory of the Real, will investigate how Clarel attempts to depict Real otherness, the inaccessible dimension of human experience; and how it, as all human productions, succeeded only in hinting at its presence. The article will consider, as well, the signicance of gaps whether physical or linguistic in demonstrating the impossibility of comprehending the Real. Additionally, it draws on possible interpretations of the various instances of silence in the poem, and how these instances of the unspoken highlight the dumbness of the Real and its threatening nature.
Keywords Herman Melville Lacan Clarel Real otherness Nineteenth-century
poetry
The meaning of a text can never be determinate, though it is by no means arbitrary. The experience of understanding a meaning can be validated, but the meaning can never be exhausted because every new interpretation is a new fusion of differing horizons. (Alexander 1981: 288).
In his The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious, Jacques Lacan discusses the impossibility of determining meaning, and he cites poetry as a genre, where one can hear a true polyphony emerge (2006: 419). Poetry, he contends, demonstrates how the play of signiers never stops, so that one might start to hear
& Norah Ahmed Al-Malki
1 Department of European Languages, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
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voices of contrasting natures speaking through the verse. This poetic polyphony bars accessing the Real of human experience because it never ceases to regenerate various interpretations of this experience.
Lacans view bears resemblance to Herman Melvilles (18191891) conception of poetry. In the preface to Battle Pieces, Melville writes: I seem, in most of these verses, to have but placed a harp in a window, and noted the...