Subversive Designs in Clarel

Subversive Designs in Clarel BASEM L. RA’AD Al-Quds University, Jerusalem W ill Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land ever take its rightful place in the writings of the United States of America? Without understanding Clarel how could we appreciate Herman Melville’s career in any full way. Clarel may well be Melville’s most comprehensive book, one containing much from his other works, a summation and culmination if not a terminus, an expression of his most definitive philosophy and his aesthetics.1 The question of Clarel’s centrality was a major motive for holding the Melville Society’s seventh international conference—Melville and the Mediterranean—in Jerusalem on 17-21 June 2009. The conference, devoted in great measure to Melville’s massive narrative poem, explored Clarel’s relevance to Melville’s era, his career, and our present time. The present special issue of Leviathan assembles essays mostly derived from papers delivered at that conference as well as two solicited by the guest editors to add more discussion of Clarel. The essays, written by both younger and more seasoned scholars, follow various approaches relating Melville to his sources and his travels, and they explore the historical background, politics, aesthetics, and processes of his writing. And given the broader scope of the Mediterranean, they treat a range of texts, including Melville’s journals, Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, as well as other works, and, of course, Clarel. What draws us to Melville’s 150-canto epic, written in sometimes abstruse iambic tetrameter, published fourteen decades ago on the hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence? Clarel has a non-conventional and non-systemic, in effect a subversive, overall purpose. Right from the first canto, as young Clarel observes Old Jerusalem (or “Salem” as he calls it),2 he speaks of the process of his own “unlearning”—a concept repeated later as the narrator describes a “receptive” Clarel “Learning, unlearning, word for word” (NN Clarel 2.14.51-52). In Book 3, “the last thing [to be] learned of all” is associated with what a still troubled Clarel is taught by the posture of other characters, in this case Djalea’s existential repose (3.24.18-24). In the cantos preparing for the final scenes, Clarel is exposed to the thinking of individuals, both dark and light, which produces an “organic change” (4.26.313-15) that c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 6 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 S U B V E R S I V E D E S I G N S balances the notion, argued by some critics, that the ending is dominated by the tragic loss of Ruth. What is Clarel unlearning and learning? Clues to this process emerge in the pattern of cantos similar to the chapter clusters found in Melville’s earlier novels, interspersed with digressive episodes, which together constitute a kind of metaphysical “plot” (its “pilgrimage”) that runs above the poem’s journey or quest plot—similar to Moby-Dick’s “hunt.” The project of tracing these canto clusters and how they operate involves also the analysis of certain digressive cantos (“The Sepulcher,” “Of Rama,” “Of Deserts,” “Of Petra,” “Prelusive, “The Island,” and others). In the total pattern, they contribute to a journey of disentanglement or, rather, of de-indoctrination—worked through the dialogue and the progress of cantos across a landscape of disbelief and mounting doubts. Viewed this way, Clarel is, in fact, an anti-pilgrimage. This plot is punctuated throughout by a series of six deaths, starting with Celio’s and ending with Ruth’s—from a tortured Christ figure to a paradisiacal Eve type, a kind of reverse bible. It reinstates the barren desert, or sea, instead of verdant paradise, as the essence of existence. At completion, this hard pilgrimage is described as “Rounding the waste circumference” (NN Clarel 4.29.13). Prefigured by a “bier Armenian”—the prototype of which is a funeral procession in Istanbul (NN Journals 62)—these deaths are a necessary...