The muteness of humanity: Ineffability and identity in Melville's "Mardi", "Moby-Dick" and "Pierre".
Item
-
Title
-
The muteness of humanity: Ineffability and identity in Melville's "Mardi", "Moby-Dick" and "Pierre".
-
Identifier
-
AAI9510638
-
identifier
-
9510638
-
Creator
-
Brown, William Lansing.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: David S. Reynolds
-
Date
-
1994
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, American | Psychology, General
-
Abstract
-
This dissertation on Herman Melville's writings is foremost and essentially a study of ineffability in his works: symbolic silences; character-muteness; narrational indirections, and discursive indeterminacy--all of which bespeak, in an author given at so many moments to passages of unsurpassed eloquence and verbal reach, a persistent and oftentimes disturbing obsession with the failure of discourse and the futility of words. This paradoxical sense of failure is seen on many levels in Melville's works. It is evidenced in his major tales, sketches and poetry, as a sometimes despairing record of his own feelings of defeat as a writer. In another light it evokes the sense of cultural failure--religious, political, familial--that Melville as an author responding deeply to his times internalized. The more one probes the voided word and the problem of silence in Melville, the more the problem of "voided identity," or dissociation of personality, becomes evident. The ineffability problem in Melville seems to reside foremost in the tension between his will to discourse as an author, and his innate capacities as a symbolist, wherein the deeper, figurative, and largely unformulatable questions are brought into play. The moments of highest symbolic import in Melville's writings, moreover, are also paradoxically those when verbal effusion, lofty eloquence or frenzied prolixity come to the fore in the context of imminent identity-loss. Shifting narrational strategies, experimentation with form, and the raising of symbolic meaning over vocative statement, all give evidence to Melville's ambivalent sense of self and word.;The introduction sets forth the outlines of this study, which is essentially a merging of psychologistic and textual approaches. Chapters one, two and four look at ineffability in the light of Melville's inscribed sense of interiority in Mardi, and a Voyage Thither, Moby-Dick and Pierre, or the Ambiguities, drawing upon perspectives from modern depth psychology. The Jungian engagement with the anima archetype is seen as a paradigm of Melville's feminine projections within these novels, and as a crucial component of his will to creativity. Chapters three and five introduce James Hillman's imaginal archetypal psychology as a mode of visionary poetics within which to view, more specifically, those same phenomena. Chapter six concludes the study with a look at Gnosticism as an informing principle in Melville's identity-making novels. Throughout, Melville is seen as inscribing an agon in which silence and identity-loss are borne out of the encounter with the self.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
