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contrast between the languages used by Ishmael and Ahab: Ishmael's
rhetoric is on the plane of simile, imaginative approximation, whereas
Ahab's is on the order of metaphor, in that his "imaginative perceptions
of the world become the reality of the world."
If
the play of these
antithetical languages leads to Ahab's failure (implying Melville's judg–
ment on the metaphorical imagination), it is the vehicle of the novel's
success: its creation of a central impenetrability which makes the reader
feel that a "dumb blankness" is "full of meaning."
We move to the "suggestive and futile approximations" of Marlow
in "Heart of Darkness," which more radically suggest the limitations
within language and an inability to penetrate to any "ineffable"; and to
the "extended similes" of the narrators of
Absalom, Absalom!,
where the
tension between language and a nonlinguistic reality becomes an insoluble
tension within language itself, where the central problem is the narrators'
efforts to compose a narra tive reality, an effort which ends in defeat,
and the paradox that a successful presentation of the imaginative problem
the book considers can only be demonstrated in the failure to create
any story at all. We are left with sheer verbal disorder, and the assertion
that this is the result of trying to apprehend a "darkness" that cannot
be made to exist in language.
Absalom, Absalom!
is to Guetti
the most thoroughgoing of those works of fiction that call into
question the possibilities of language and meaning; as an immense
display of fallen language and as a revelation of the nature of this
language, it seems unparalleled. In it Faulkner insists that, as
Sutpen's active force and Quentin's imaginative vitality arise from
and are exhibited in their failure, the greatest success of language
itself is to create a potential of meaning that must remain unrealized,
a tension between order and disorder that cannot be resolved but
only repeated, and repeated. Language may be defined in this
way, however, only because no meaning is ever achieved, because
no metaphor is ever constructed.
Such observations open into Guetti's final chapter on "The Instability
of Metaphor." This instability is inherent: to pursue the potential unity
implied by a metaphor is to assure that metaphor's collapse, the
en~
of its role as an ordering relation of two kinds of experience. Hence
metaphor creates "pseudosignificances," expectations of meanings beyond
words that can be neither satisfied nor sustained because the expectations
can never be followed to resolution. This is the realization of Ishmael,
of Ike McCaslin, of one half of Marlow's and Quentin's minds; whereas
the other half, like Ahab, believes in the pursuit of meaning, to destruc–
tion. The idea of the wilderness - the sea, the jungle, the forest–
allegorizes the situation of
langua~e:
order is shown to be unsatisfying
