Signs and Meanings in Hawthorne and Melville
Anton PokrivčákHawthorne's and Melville´s work reveals a deep ontological anxiety. They were writers who displayed both a great intensity of feeling for this world and an obsession with what transcends it. Their works are manifestations of a conflict between the experience and expression, an implicit sense and an explicit form, a sensed transcendental world and its closeness to a perceiving human mind, life and death. The conflict is expressed through a peculiar use of allegory and causes a deep existential trauma. The writers´handling of signs is compared with the postmodern turn to the ontological dominant as occurring in current literary studies. The most recent significant discussion of the semiotic nature of literary meaning has occurred during the period loosely referred to as postmodernism. The discussion was initiated by various kinds of post-structural discourses responding to an excessive preoccupation with objectivity, universal truth, as well as to other modernist claims. In this article I will take a brief look at two writers for whom signs played equally important role, and then compare their handling of allegory, as a primary device they used in their works, with the present, postmodern understanding of signifying processes. The Colonial Period occupies a significant place in the history of American civilisation because its standards significantly contributed to the formation of what was referred to as American national traits. The first bearers of these traits were Puritans with their unique blend of religion, ethics and metaphysics that made them constantly search for the signs of the transcendent, divine world. 1 One of the most important authors who put the theme of Puritanism under the most intensive artistic scrutiny of all American writers was Nathaniel Hawthorne who recognised the importance of signs for Puritans as fundamental compositional parts of their construction of reality. Moreover, signs became a kind of prism through which the writer himself saw the world, which was causing him great intellectual 2 , aesthetic and religious sufferings. 3 To overcome the generic, structural conflict of allegory 4 , to attribute the empty material signifiers with a profound meaning has become the substance of Hawthorne´s artistic principle, of his ―tropological suffering‖, causing on one hand deep doubts about his artistic powers, and on the other one making the portrayed characters (as result of theses doubts) more truthful in their power of representation. This is made possible by his peculiar handling of the power of signs – in which the proximity of the material to the ideal does not result in servitude of the former to the latter, as one would expect from a traditionally understood allegorical imagination, but in the origin, at least in Hawthorne's skilful handling, of a ―full-fledged‖ existential situation, which hangs over most of his characters. There are some which are really unforgettable, evoking readersínterest and sympathy, despite the fact that they are in fact allegories, not undergoing significant changes during the course of the story (the most famous one being undoubtedly Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter). They seem to become powerful because they become allegorical, for allegory here, in addition to its semiotic structuring of meaning, also "enacts a wish that determines its progress". 5 The wish, distance, loss, lack – these are features which have power to inscribe existential trauma, anxiety, tragedy. A good example of a skilful handling of the allegory's existential and ontological dimensions can be found in Hawthorne‗s masterpiece-The Scarlet Letter. While in the short stories he capitalises on the representational force of just a few allegorical images, the novel is much more complex, supporting the primary semiotic nature of the characters (Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth) with other signs. Thus in addition to the letter "A" as a primary emblematic image of the story, Hawthorne, as Ruland and Bradbury put it, 1 For more on Puritansúnderstanding of the role of signs in everyday life, see P. Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province
