6/14/2023 0 Comments Allegory of the cave drawingA primordial interior, the cave can either reveal or obscure truth. In his words, he prefers “to stay with the illusion.” The narrator’s piazza and Marianna’s windows are frames which flatten landscapes and phenomena onto surfaces. 4 At the story’s end, having traveled and confronted the real, the narrator prefers to retreat into his artificially lit “stage,” his piazza. In Melville’s story, however, this is reversed: it is sunlight that induces illusions and darkness that reveals the truth. For Plato, it is the artificiality of the light source that produces illusions. In the parable of Plato’s cave, the prisoner’s knowledge-or the origin of forms-is produced by an artificial source-fire-and not by the sun. Interiority here relates to the pursuit of knowledge: darkness and staying inside can reveal truth while venturing outside produces illusions. The transition from outside to inside helps him to develop a vision of truthful forms, and not idealized ones. When the story’s protagonist falls ill and thus becomes confined indoors, he finally manages to look closer and clearly into things. Sunlight coming from the window blinds her vision. She perceives these phenomena without looking outside. ![]() She spends her days looking at shadows projections of natural phenomena coming through her windows-clouds, a tree, a rock-which she imagines as creatures who become her companions. Along his way, he finds a house where a woman named Marianna lives alone. One day he sets out to discover a glowing spot that he noticed far away in the mountains. A lonely narrator speaks of his newly-found solace in mountain views he admires them from his home’s outdoor piazza. 3 It is a story about the peril of admiring the natural world from afar: perceiving it through frames, reflections, and surfaces. 2 Platonic elements of light, darkness, and shadow no longer signify truth, ignorance, and illusion instead, knowledge, distance, and vision are entangled. Herman Melville’s 1856 short story The Piazza reverses Plato’s cave metaphor of prisoners and their illusions. ![]() ![]() We are outfitted with senses that convey the surfaces of things…our ways of probing the viscera of the world is to turn them into yet more surfaces.
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