Meaning and Transcendence: Melville, Douglass, and the Anxiety of Interpretation

Meaning and Transcendence: Melville, Douglass, and the Anxiety of Interpretation ROOSEVELT MONTÁS Columbia University Questions of interpretation pervade Melville’s fiction. Melville repeatedly examines—sometimes with obsessive persistence—the process whereby an individual constructs meaning from a given set of signs. This interest in interpretation is sometimes narrowly textual and at other times assumes metaphysical and ontological dimensions. Any reader of Melville can conjure up a range of examples of this ubiquitous thematic pulse. I will offer my own as a way of highlighting the fundamental questions of transcendence at stake in Melville’s preoccupation. Frederick Douglass, whose written output is overwhelmingly autobiographical and political, confronted similar problems, albeit in more pragmatic contexts: legal, cultural, and, almost always, explicitly personal. Melville and Douglass approached interpretation from strikingly different places in the American experience, yet, despite the incommensurability of their projects, they moved in a shared political and historical sphere and wrestled with analogous questions about the sources of legitimate interpretations. Indeed, their anxieties about how meaning emerges from a text have deep connections and are mutually elucidating. Without reducing either figure to a contrasting reflection of the other, I want to show that while Douglass came to embrace the concept of Liberty as the guiding principle of constitutional interpretation—something like a hermeneutic transcendent—Melville presented, by the end of his career, a heartbreaking picture of a world where transcendent values are inoperable guides to interpretation, and where formalist adherence to laws appears to be the only way of maintaining a stable, if arbitrary, order. When I speak of transcendence, I mean the metaphysical presupposition that our symbolic system is anchored to a pure reality independent of the web of signs in which we move and that by the act of communicating we refer to that extra-linguistic reality. In other words, transcendence assures us that phenomenal reality and the conceptual system through which we interact with it are not selfreferential ; that there is, as it were, an outside to the text. For Douglass, this “outside,” when it came to the Constitution and the American political system, C
2008 The Authors Journal compilation C
2008 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 69 R O O S E V E L T M O N T Á S was the concept of Liberty. He developed a way of reading the Constitution that, while responsive to practical realities, resolved interpretive questions with a moralist bias towards Natural Law, positing Liberty as the transcendent referent of all Constitutional meaning. In Melville’s later work, by contrast, we find a persistent metaphysical restiveness that is profoundly suspicious of any such impulse to reach for transcendent values in the interpretation of law. F rederick Douglass emerges most distinctly as a thinker about issues of textual interpretation in his evolving relationship to the American Constitution. This relationship unfolded in the public arena, first in his role as exponent of William Lloyd Garrison’s uncompromising rejection of the Union, and then, after a break with his Garrisonian mentors, in his public conversion into a distinctly proto-pragmatist reader of the Constitution, a shift which allowed him to treat it as an anti-slavery document and to see himself as a rightful citizen of the political Union that the Constitution brought into existence.1 Literacy was important for Douglass in paradigmatic ways. More than any other American figure, Douglass constructed his personal identity through acts of reading, writing, and interpreting. In a quite literal way, Douglass was a self-made man, and this self-making was, again and again, driven by his relationship to texts and by audacious acts of interpretation. Early in the Narrative (1845), he announced that his acquisition of literacy was “the pathway from slavery to freedom.”2 Beyond that, as a freeman, it was through an act of reading that Douglass transformed himself from a Garrisonian abolitionist who saw himself as irreparably outside the American national project, to a political activist who embraced and defended his own constitutional...