You, Me, and the Lee: Meaning in Melville

Suggested Reading:

Moby-Dick, or the Whale, by Herman Melville... of course.


Outline of the Argument:

Part I: The Whale

Key word: wonder

I. Opaque/Oblique Meaning

            Opaque: aware of meaning without comprehending

            Oblique: indicates presence of opaque by recreating feeling of wonder

                        Metaphor achieves this: Moby-Dick contains massive metaphor

                        Whale = oblique meaning, indicating opaque.                                   

II. Melville digressions.  He does not digress; he simply sees meaning in everything!

            Imagine monuments in his novel to everything he observes, and its meaning.

                        Ahab’s battle against the whale, Moby Dick.

                       

III. Center of novel: contrast between Ahab and Ishmael

            “Call me Ishmael:” Ishmael is not his name.

                        He’s an allegory for wanderer, for no one.

                        He might as well be Ishmael, the banished son of Abraham, the Not-Isaac

            “Ahab was a crowned king:” he is more than other men

                        A representation of human greatness.

                        Ahab is in a position to know, to comprehend, to be included; yet still isn’t.

                                    This is why he hunts Moby Dick.

IV. The whale = Stonehenge.  Meaning withheld; we can’t encompass it, yet it is. 

            Melville’s digression is a product of his wonder.

Play with Words

o.paque adj not transparent; not see-through

o.blique adj indirectly expressed; not straightforward

There exists already a rather ostentatious list of literary terms to which I have no desire to add.  Rather, I want to illustrate how fiction conveys meaning to a reader.  I want to draw attention to the relationship between the two words defined above, and to how they relate to our lives.

By opaque meaning, I refer to that in life which eludes our understanding yet still elicits our attention.  We can know certain things bear significance without fully comprehending their meaning.  Death is one example (a favorite of Poe’s).  What happens in death matters to us in life—it does not seem to matter to animals—even though we know its darkness is almost complete.  The presence of God, the forces guiding human affairs, the chances of weather: these things have meaning beyond the compass of our human intellect.

Knowledge is more limited than imagination.

By oblique meaning, I refer to the figurative, illustrative manner by which literature conveys its own meaning.  One of the most truly legitimate questions we can ask of literature is why its made-up stories should matter to us.  Part of understanding literature involves knowing why fiction is necessary to convey certain ideas.  True, stories move us emotionally, helping to soften our intellects to the seeds they sow—this is, of course, one reason to use fiction.  But why do we find stories so intriguing?  Why are we open to them in the first place? 

Because we live in a meaningful world.  Figurative circumstances found in literature, when carefully crafted by an author and carefully considered by a reader, reflect the more elusive meaning we are aware of in life.  Fiction distills the massive-mundane meaning in everyday life, if only by showing us accessible meaning.  Its initial indirection directs our attention toward the greater significance of being human.   

Oblique meaning in literature indicates and illustrates opaque meaning in life.

Read Shakespeare’s King Lear.  Look for the word indirection; it appears significantly in the play.  But most of all, turn your attention fully on the hero of the drama: Edgar. 

…Incidentally, keep in mind the fact that Shakespeare, as a person, is an opaque meaning, while the significance of the play he wrote is oblique.  We cannot know him, but only his play…

Always fond of a play-within-the-play (so his play is a play-within-real-life), Shakespeare portrays the redemption of Gloucester—that is, the return of meaning to his life—as accomplished through fiction.  Edgar convinces his blind, despairing father that his life has been miraculously spared after a fall from a cliff.  In truth, he has not fallen from a cliff, but Gloucester swears henceforth to endure all suffering.  The reader, sensitive to this oblique meaning, learns to not despair on account of suffering.  Yet if this notion can be applied to real life, it must assume the miracle. 

Later in the play, as the final tragedy unfurls, Edgar utters this cryptic line:

“Ripeness is all.”

That is, wait!, and allow every circumstance to come to its fruition.  Know that you do not know what the outcome will be.  Why does Shakespeare advocate this?  He cannot know what fruit our lives will bear?  No, but he is aware they will bear fruit.  He nods toward opaque meaning.  As an author of a terribly tragic play, he seems still confident in the miraculous.  He has made his readers aware of something he himself cannot comprehend.

The Stonehenge in Literature

Suggested Reading:

“Ulalume,” by Edgar Allan Poe

“The Domain of Arnheim,” by Edgar Allan Poe

Read Poe's poem "Ulalume."  It first gave me the idea of what Poe was trying to say, at least in the vast majority of his work.  His Psyche pacified, the narrator of the poem attempts to forget tragedy and pass by the place of its burial, but he is "stopped by the door of a tomb."  He cannot become unaware of death.  Notice, however, its meaning--that is, the history of his loss and its significance, which (one would think) ought to be conveyed to the reader--is opaque, left out of the poem.  Poe is not interested in the details of the dramatic episode, but rather in the narrator's reaction at having been made aware of this significance.  He draws attention to the universality of this feeling, in this case, through the absence of a story, which, I think, is the only way to account for its absence in this poem.

Like Stonehenge, the absence of meaning becomes meaningful in itself, and really ends in validating meaning and how much it matters to us as readers. 

 

Outline of the Argument:

I.  Introduction:

            A. Teaching people to know what they read

            B. Why is great literature great?

Great literature makes us feel small.

II. Edgar Allan Poe: ghosts, crime, and landscape gardening?

            A. Poe portrays the boundary of human knowledge. 

                        1. Opaque meaning: we are aware of meaning we cannot comprehend.

                                    o.paque: not transparent; not see-through.

                        2. Death, for Poe (and us), is opaque meaning.

            B. This notion unifies his writing around a central focus.

                        1. Ghosts and crime.

                        2. Landscape gardening: artistic design + nature.

            C. Poe writes about that which makes us feel small.

III. Stonehenge makes us feel small.

            A. It captures something in human existence and human nature.

            B. Inspires wonder, pursuit of knowledge, and creative imitation.

            C. Our attempts; successes and failures to know = literature.