The Otherness of the Real in Herman Melville’s Clarel

Abstract

Herman Melville’s (1819–1891) 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 Lacan’s 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 significance 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.