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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Herman Melville's Clarel (1876) has been ignored by criticism largely on the ground that it fails structurally. But the poem has an architectonic pattern that provides insight into Melville's lifelong philosophical problems. The work is developed tropologically, drawing its basic pattern from the gospels of Luke and Matthew. The poem is, however, an anti-gospel in which the questor-hero, Clarel, acts out his own “passion” in and around Jerusalem. Employing the motif of the three Magi with Christological and Zoroastrian star imagery, Melville carries his hero into a search for an existentially authentic faith. But Melville fails to find this faith, discovering instead through Clarel the ontological ground of existence itself. This discovery is brought about by a genuine awareness of the condition of death, a condition which destroys belief in absolutes. Death is the central theme of the poem and shapes the narrative and the characters' actions. The Epilogue presents, therefore, a forced and unconvincing affirmation of immortality, an affirmation belied by the poem s overwhelming thrust of existential despair.
1 The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1960), p. 133. Letter to Hawthorne, dated 29 June 1851.
2 The Spirit Above the Dust (London: J. Lehmann, 1951), p. 226.
3 “Introduction,” Clarel by Herman Melville (New York: Hendricks House, 1960), p. ix. For a historical summary of the criticism of Clarel see also pp. xxix-xlix. All references to the text of Clarel are to this edition.
4 “Melville's Clarel: Doubt and Belief,” Tulane Studies in English, 10 (1961), 103.
5 Nathalia Wright in her study, Melville's Use of the Bible (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1949), points out that Matthew and Luke were among the most frequently marked gospels in Melville's Bible. Matthew in particular contains 52 markings, second only to the Psalms with 77. See pp. 9–10, et passim.
6 In my use of the term “existentialism” I refer generally to the body of thought that has crystallized about such diverse figures as Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Rilke, Sartre, Camus, Jasper, Buber, Tillich, Maritain, Heidegger, and others. There are, of course, “religious” and atheistic existentialists who nevertheless share certain fundamental concerns in their work. William Barrett in Irrational Man (New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 8, enumerates them: “. . . anxiety, death, the conflict between the bogus and genuine self, the faceless man of the masses, the experience of the death of God.” For Walter Kaufmann “Existentialism is a timeless sensibility that can be discerned here and there in the past; but it is only in recent times that it has hardened into a sustained protest and preoccupation.” In Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, sel. and introd. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Meridian, 1956), p. 12. Clearly, Melville was not an existentialist in any academic or conscious sense. The very term was unknown to him. Yet his work embodies and dramatizes to an extraordinary degree existential attitudes and ideas. In addition, Melville takes an existential approach to his problems. In While-Jacket (Boston: Page, 1950), p. 35, Melville writes: “You cannot save a ship by working out a problem in the cabin; the deck is the field of action.”
7 Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter (New York: Washington Sq., 1941), p. 74.
8 Quoted in Jean Jacques Mayoux, Melville (New York: Evergreen, 1960), p. 123.
9 Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant: October 11, 1856-May 6, 1857, ed. Howard C. Horsford (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1955), pp. 79, 89, is the prime source of the poem as Melville constructed much of the detail and tone of Clarel from its materials. For a full analysis of Melville's interests and readings in the Near East, see Dorothee Metlitsky Finkelstein, Melville's Orienda (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1961).
10 Lyrical and Critical Essays. ed. and with notes by Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Knopf, 1968), p. 355. While Camus was specifically referring to Moby Dick, the description holds true in general. In his essay on Melville (pp. 288–94), Camus sees Melville's whole oeuvre as “This constantly rewritten book . . . this Odyssey beneath an empty sky. . . . But we must add immediately that his Ulysses never returns to Ithaca” (p. 291). See also Leon F. Seltzer, “Camus's Absurd and the World of Melville's Confidence-Man,” PMLA, 82 (1967), 14–27.
11 As Bezanson shows, Melville had always dreamed of making a trip to the Holy Land, and received his opportunity in 1856. The ostensible motive for the voyage was Melville's ill health which Bezanson feels was largely psychosomatic. Indeed, Melville's own family was fearful that he was losing his sanity. See Bezanson's “Introduction,” pp. xii–xiii ff. See also Leon Howard, Herman Melville: A Biography (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1958), Ch. x.
J. J. Boies, “Existential Nihilism and Herman Melville,” Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts and Letters, 50 (1961), 312, recognizes that Melville “is one of those supreme examples of a man continuously shuttling between . . . two possibilities—self-destruction and learning to live in a bitter world without hope.” The “risk,” then, is facing these possibilities without the aid of systems or absolutes, something Clarel and other Melvillean heroes must learn to do.
12 Finkelstein, pp. 148–49, points out that Melville frequently used the idea of the Magi because of his general interest in Babylonian and Chaldean history. According to Strabo (Bk. 15, Ch. iii, Secs. 13-15) the Magi were pyraethi or fire-lighters, votaries and priests of Zoroastrianism. With the impact of Babylonian astrological beliefs on this Persian faith, the Magi soon came to be associated with priests who understood the Cosmos through the stars, hence their reputation as “wise men” or astrologers in Matt. ii.1. In Acts viii. 9–11 and xiii.6 there is still the taint upon them as “sorcerers” or “magicians.” It is thought that the Magi believed the star they followed was the fravashi or counterpart to an angel or great man destined to be a savior. In using the Magi Luke and the author of Acts might well have had in mind Numbers xxiv.17: “I shall see him, but not now: I shall behold him, but not nigh: there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel.” Also, the litany of the Feast of the Epiphany (the Holy Day on which Clarel begins) refers to Isaiah lx.6: “. . . all they from Sheba shall come: they shall bring gold and incense; and they shall shew forth the praises of the Lord.” For a fuller discussion of the Magi and recent scholarship concerning their function in the gospels, see The Interpreter's Bible (New York: Abingdon, 1951), vii, 256–59. Melville uses the Magi both as symbols of Christian “wise men” and, occasionally (iv.xvi.208–16), as fire-worshipping priests. For Melville's interest in fireworship, see Thomas Vargish, “Gnostic Mythos in Moby-Dick,” PMLA, 81 (1966), 272-77, and Finkelstein, pp. 149–61 et passim.
13 S⊘en Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death (New York: Anchor Books, 1954). pp, 141–60. For Kierkegaard, despair causes an alienation within the individual so great that “death has become one's hope, [but] despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die” (p. 151). It is this condition that Kierkegaard specifically terms “the sickness unto death, this agonizing contradiction, this sickness in the self, everlastingly to die to die and yet not to die, to die the death” (p. 151).
14 For a historical and symbolical analysis of the disillusionment Melville and other nineteenth- century traveler: experienced in visiting Jerusalem, see James Baird, Ishmael. A Study of the Symbolic Mode in Primitivism (New York Harper, 1960), p. 391. Baird points out that “the City o Dis” generally describes Melville's reaction to the major cities which figure in his life and work: Liverpool, London Jerusalem, New York. Dis was the Roman god of the underworld also described by Dante in The Inferno, from whom Melville borrowed the image.
15 See Bezanson's note to ii, xxiv, 0, 603–04.“ Hail, Thou Star of the Ocean” was an important medieval hymn dedicated to Mary. The hymn is in seven parts and presents Mary as the gate of Heaven (caeti porta), a source of consolation, redemption, and as the means by which man will see Jesus (ut videntes Iesum). The singing of the hymn in this canto is also meant to function as a reminder of Ruth, who also represents salvation to Clarel. See iii.xxxi.3–8.
16 Horsford, Journal, p. 154.
17 Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1961), p. 48.
18 A Short History of Existentialism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), p. 15. See also Martin Heidegger, Existence and Being, introd. and analysis by Werner Brock (Chicago: Regnery, 1967), pp. 342–61.
19 For Melville's admiration and knowledge of Ecclesiastes, see Wright, pp. 10–11, 94, 95, 97–101. Camus's opening statement in The Myth of Sisyphus (New York: Random House, 1959), p. 4, is: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”
20 S⊘ren Kierkegaard, “Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments,” in A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed. Robert Bretall (New York: Modern Library, 1946), p. 203.
21 Ibid.
22 The basic existential attitude of being “anti-system” and hostile to rigid logical forms is by now commonplace knowledge. But see, e.g., A Kierkegaard Anthology, pp. 196 ff., and Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Dover, 1954), Ch. v, “The Rationalist Dissolution.”
23 For an excellent discussion of this scene see Merlin Bowen, The Long Encounter: Self and Experience in the Writings of Herman Melville (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 273 ff.
24 See Bezanson's note to m.xxxi.l, p. 631. The other two references to Mary are iii.xxviii.59, and iii.xxx.62.
25 Melville makes this abundantly clear in lv.xvi.95-102:
26 See Bezanson's note to iv.i.3, p. 362. The names that the Hebrews gave to the three unnamed wise men of Matthew (Appelius, Amerrius, Damasus) were taken by Melville from his reading in Mandeville.
27 For a drawing of this image, see Bezanson, p. 633.
28 Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1945), p. 219.
29 Hennig Cohen, ed., Selected Poems of Herman Melville (New York: Doubleday, 1964), p. 210, suggests this, and remarks that “the direction of the poem and its protagonists has been toward consolation.”
30 John Bernstein, Pacifism and Rebellion in the Writings of Herman Melville (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), p. 201.
31 Rainer Maria Rilke, “For Wolf Graf Von Kalckreuth,” in Requiem and Other Poems, translated from the German with a biographical and critical introduction and notes by J. B. Leishman (London: Hogarth, 1949), p. 141.
32 But during the 186O's and early 187O's Melville's experience of the deaths of many friends and relatives intensified this preoccupation. The deaths of Judge Shaw, his father-in-law, in 1861; his son Malcolm, by suicide, in 1867; his sister Agatha in 1876; and the sponsor of Clarel, Uncle Peter Gansevoort, in 1876, “threw massive shadows around Melville as he pondered and then set to work on Clarel” (Bezanson, p. xxxvii).
33 The English Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Randall Stewart (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962 [1941]), pp. 432–33. Hawthorne's entry date is 20 Nov. 1856. Melville, on his way to the Holy Land, had visited Hawthorne, who was American consul in Liverpool.
34 Heidegger's term for a true mode of Being. For Heidegger, traditional metaphysics has “concealed” Being, a situation which a recognition of Angst, death, and nothingness helps reverse, thus “unconcealing” Being. See “The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics,” in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, esp. pp. 210-11.