Melville's Wired World: Media, Fact, and Faith in Clarel

Melville’s Wired World: Media, Fact, and Faith in Clarel THOMAS D. ZLATIC St. Louis College of Pharmacy A t the end of Clarel, before disappearing into the “obscurer town,” Clarel reveals his frame of mind through an analogy to the transatlantic electric telegraph: “‘They wire the world—far under sea / They talk; but never comes to me / A message from beneath the stone’ ” (NN Clarel 4.34.51-53). Twice, earlier in the poem, the electric telegraph has been mentioned. Margoth horrifies Rolfe by proposing that railroad stations and telegraph lines be established within the Holy Land, with a stop in Gethsemane (2.20.92-94).1 And the poet portrays Mortmain’s consciousness and nervous system in terms of telegraphic submarine cables: “Like wire under wave to furthest beach” (2.34.19). Critics acknowledge the impact of history and geography on Melville’s ideas about faith in Clarel.2 Less understood is how nineteenth-century media environments influenced the formulation and structure of those ideas. Knowledge management tools and communications technologies such as the telegraph condition many of the poem’s arguments as they not only allowed more rapid production and wider circulation of ever-increasing bodies of knowledge but also influenced paradigms of thinking and the temporal-spatial contexts in which that thinking was done. An investigation of Clarel in relation to these media environments can provide a broader perspective from which to analyze the characters’ struggles to reconcile faith and fact. Elsewhere, I have analyzed Melville’s Civil War poem “Donelson” in light of Daniel Walker Howe’s claim that, given the advances in communications technology at that time, “The Age of Jacksonian Democracy” should be relabeled “The Age of Communication Revolution” (Howe 5), an era in which oral modes of thought and communication steadily eroded, reading patterns changed, and individuals increasingly relied on the visual processing of information (Zlatic, “Horned Perplexities”). The telegraph was a highly visible symbol of this revolution. Though various optic, acoustic, and even electrical forms of telegraphy existed from at least 1791, Samuel Morse’s 1844 invention helped to accelerate this revolution in communication and social structures. 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 115 T H O M A S D . Z L A T I C As Melville sailed home from the Levant in 1857, the first transatlantic cable was being laid. The electric telegraph was hailed as a breakthrough not only in human technology but also in human consciousness; an enthralled public fantasized about the elimination of space and time, and anticipated ineluctable economic prosperity, international unity, and world peace. The mysterious web of electrical signals became for scientists a metaphor if not blue-print for the workings of the human nervous system, and the quasi-ethereal nature of electrical transmission of “intelligence” lent credence to pseudo-sciences such as mesmerism, mental telegraphy, and spirit-rapping. Scriptural texts were cited to demonstrate that the telegraph fulfilled biblical prophecy. Ubiquitous popular adulation was matched by testimonials from noted scientists and from literary writers, including Walt Whitman who in “Years of the Modern” asked, “Are all nations communing? is there going to be but one heart to the globe? / Is humanity forming, en-masse?” (Whitman 402). Not all were optimistic. Matthew Arnold’s flippant description of the telegraph as “Oh yes, that great rope, with a Philistine at each end of it, talking inutilities” (Arnold 54) paralleled Melville’s skepticism: the telegraph was another example of mechanistic technology that merely masqueraded as real human progress. Melville’s sarcasm toward utilitarian science and technology in such poems as “A Rail Road Cutting Near Alexandria in 1855” and “The New Ancient of Days” is also displayed in his 1871 annotation to an Arnold poem: “Damn [T]he ‘volumes’ exclaims the Western critic.—‘What could a sage of the Nineteenth Century teach Socrates? Why, nothing more than something about Cyrus Feilds [sic], and the ocean telegraph, and the Sewing Machine &c.’” (Norberg).3 Despite Melville’s misgivings, the...