Herman Melville, Mad Narcissus: The Image of Identity in “The Piazza.”

Abstract

“It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life,” Herman Melville writes in Moby Dick. Here, Melville taps into a discussion on the nature of images which has haunted western philosophy since its dawn. Images, the unnerving conclusion is, make things appear which do not exist. In the image, then, there is a divide between appearance and Being. A divide, furthermore, which allows for appearances to traverse our world with complete disregard for Being. Whatever appears as image, disappears as substance. And so, what appears as an image is not really there even if it seduces us to think it is. Within western philosophy, images have, therefore, often been seen as both seductive and deceitful. Plato, for example, saw the problematic of the image extend into language in poetry; poetry being the language of the imagination, showing us what is not there and diverting one’s mind from philosophical discourse which, supposedly, shows us what is there. And more recently, the confrontation with the mirror-image has been seen as leading to one’s departure from oneself in the psycho-analysis of Jacques Lacan. Taking up both of these accounts, this thesis seeks to explore these workings of the image within the poetics of Herman Melville, and more specifically, in the self-reflective short story “The Piazza” which he wrote towards the end of his career. Rather than simply seeing the image as a threat to subjectivity, however, this paper attempts to also read in Melville’s struggles with self-imagination a way that allows us to regard the image in another light. Drawing both from Melville’s encounter with early German romanticism as well as from post-structuralist theory, this paper suggests that Melville’s work gives us an occasion to think of the image as a place where we might encounter something other. Refusing to either grasp, or to let go of this disappearance concurrent to all imaginary appearance, Melville sustains it in its phantom-like strangeness.