Contesting Otherness in H. Melville's Clarel : A Lacanian Reading

Herman Melville's (1819-1891) Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) is a representative American literary work of the nineteenth century, which anticipates much of the complex psychological insights of the legendary French psychologist Jacques Lacan (1901-1981); especially his highly controversial formulations on otherness. The poem is a playground for the numerous signifiers of difference, which interact with each other, but remain in a state of constant mutation so that it becomes impossible for the reader to obtain a solidified meaning out of the various encounters with the symptoms of difference (otherness)in the poem.