Melville's Process: Writing as Performing

Melville’s Process: Writing as Performing RUGGERO BIANCHI University of Turin L ike most of Melville’s novels, Clarel is a work-in-progress whose open structure aims at being a metaphor for the notion that life itself has to be lived as a work-in-progress. It is a writing-in-progress for a livingin -progress; a poem and a pilgrimage, and a pilgrimage in language. Writing is a journey across, within, and into language; a coping through words requiring a descent into existence. In Clarel, a journey ends in anti-climax with its hero’s unexpected and yet daring decision to live an anonymous life as a man-inthe -crowd, without fighting anymore against a pre-determined reality—be it Chance or Necessity, Nature or God, Summum Bonum or Summum Malum, Darwin or Luther—but also live with the final and full understanding that, to borrow from “Bartleby,” “in errands of life . . . letters speed to death.” “Dead letters! Does it not sound like dead men?” It is a conclusion already secretly anticipated in the first two cantos of the poem, “The Hostel” and “Abdon.” The point is that language itself is a mystery. It may have something important to say, but it is often unable to communicate it and to answer to the needs of both the writer and the reader. Worst of all, it tends, especially in modern times, to be a form of violence (as in The Confidence-Man), and as such it may lead to silence: “‘They wire the world—far under sea / They talk; but never comes to me / A message from beneath the stone’” (Clarel 4.34.51-53). From the beginning, Clarel’s thoughts are “dumb” (1.7.49), so that he usually keeps silent when first meeting people to whom in one way or another he feels drawn. And for this same reason, as in other Melville’s works, the narrator tends to disappear and let other voices speak in his place: Taji (and Lombardo) in Mardi, for instance, or Ishmael, or Vivia (and Plotinus Plinlimmon) in Pierre. As with the first-person speaker in Moby-Dick, Clarel’s omniscient narrator chooses to be superimposed by the contradictory voices of his characters or to force conversations, dialogues, and even monologues into a theatrical structure. The narrator becomes an Ishmael: A writer-in-the-crowd for a manin -the-crowd or a man-in-the-crew. To borrow a term from Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative that appears throughout Clarel, Melville’s final “remove”—as in “Brief term of days, c  2011 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 63 R U G G E R O B I A N C H I but a profound remove” (NN Clarel 1.44.50)—betrays his persuasion that humanity’s only possible choice is a kind of existence where the beat and pulse of Nature (which includes Time and Space) are consciously and willingly followed: one removal after another. But there is no forgetting the specificity of human nature, the peculiar quality of human suffering and aching, different from that of other animals and creatures. In Clarel, surprisingly enough, the literate and cultivated young seeker behaves exactly the same way as Billy Budd, Israel Potter, Bartleby, and Ishmael himself, without caring about coffins and tombs/Tombs, potter’s fields, and men-of-war bellies; they are rooms without view, and benches of boors. The deepest connection is between Clarel and Billy. Their final choices make of them—to use Faulkner’s words in The Unvanquished—“the two supreme undefeated.” Billy “ascends” after his “crucifixion”; Clarel reappears with his cross, to disappear again, at “Whitsuntide.” In both cases, as in Melville’s last poems and fragments, silence or idle and private talking takes the place of action and writing. The perfect way of living is leaving no traces: “Holding to now, swearing by here, / His course conducting by no keen / Observance of the stellar sphere” (NN Clarel 1.13.39-4l...