Paradiso Terrestre: America's Displaced Wilderness in Melville's Clarel

Paradiso Terrestre: America’s Displaced Wilderness in Melville’s Clarel TIM WOOD Nassau Community College His terror had to blow itself quite out To let him see it; but it was the gale had blown him Past the Cape Horn of sensible success Which cries: “This rock is Eden. Shipwreck here.” —W. H. Auden, “Herman Melville” A s early as Emerson, America anticipated its national poem—its epic— in terms of its geography. In “The Poet” (1844), Emerson opines that “We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials . . . . Yet America is a poem in our eyes, its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres” (Emerson 465). Then there is Whitman’s famous declaration in the preface to Leaves of Grass (1855): “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” (Whitman 5). In The Necessary Angel (1951), Wallace Stevens, awaiting the next thing after The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, echoes Emerson: “The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of the earth remains to be written” (Stevens 142). Charles Olson, whose Maximus Poems is one of the more ambitious modernist epics, rivals Whitman’s enthusiasm; in Call Me Ishmael (1947), he writes: “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy. It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning” (Olson 17). All of these writers are searching for the American epic and expect that it will be about the land. Melville’s centennial poem Clarel is the American epic about geography, the land, and SPACE. The poem is 18,000 lines, composed almost entirely in iambic tetrameter, most of it in rhyme. It is about a young theological student named Clarel taking a pilgrimage in the Holy Land. While Clarel debates major philosophical and religious questions with a coterie of eclectic companions, he traverses a sacred landscape and explores sites saturated with the fundamental myths upon which much of Western civilization is based. Comprised in large part of dialogic treatises that gain significance from the holy sites in which 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 85 T I M W O O D they occur, the plot of the poem may seem flimsy. But Clarel is not about what happens as much as it is about the landscape. Published in a highly limited run, the poem was barely reviewed. Neither Emerson nor Whitman mentioned Clarel. Nor did Stevens. Olson dismissed it as “that rosary of doubt” (Olson 89) where “Christ had contracted [Melville’s] vision” (86). According to him, Clarel, one of the longest poems in American literature, atrophies Melville’s imagination with its astringent religious undertones. Nevertheless, as the poem that traverses the ground of America’s literary imagination, Clarel is the kind of poem these writers seek. Not surprisingly, none of these writers identifies Clarel as an American epic. The desert outside Jerusalem is an odd setting and obscures an underlying American geography. Nevertheless, the poem is about American empire, and the Palestinian desert in Clarel is the specter of an American wilderness where, as Richard Slotkin notes, “the landscape of the Puritan mind replaces the real wilderness” (Slotkin 99). This imagined Puritan landscape is a sacred geography directly linked to but always separate from the biblical Jerusalem and its surrounding desert. As Basem Ra’ad explains, “the phenomenon of sacred geography—as it showed itself during the nineteenth century—had more alien roots in a theological typology most fully expressed in the fundamentalist forms of Protestantism, Puritanism in particular” (Ra’ad, “Sacred Topography” 256). So Melville brings this Puritan transplantation of a biblical landscape—America’s new “New Jerusalem”—back to its land of origin, fusing the imagined Jerusalem with the actual Jerusalem where America’s sacred construct short...