Projections of the Holy Land: Melville's Journal through a Dual Lens

Projections of the Holy Land: Melville’s Journal through a Dual Lens CAROLYN L. KARCHER Temple University, Emerita O n a dreary November day in 1856, while renewing his interrupted friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne in Liverpool, on the first leg of his pilgrimage to the Mediterranean and the Holy Land, Melville announced that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated” (NN Journals 628). Melville was referring most immediately to his loss of faith in the possibility of an afterlife, but the word “annihilated” conveys a more pervasive despair attributable to the failure of his once promising literary career, the deterioration of his marriage, the breakdown of his physical and mental health, and the threat of civil war that hovered over the nation. Capturing Melville’s psychological and spiritual state, Hawthorne described him as “wandering toand fro over deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sandhills” of the English beach on which the two men were sitting (qtd in NN Journals 628).1 Melville’s journal of his voyage projects his inner hopelessness onto the biblical landscape he crisscrosses as he seeks in vain to recover a sense of meaning, if not his belief, in texts that had fired his youthful imagination. Everywhere Melville goes, he finds “all barren”—a word he repeats, even devoting a heading to the topic “Barrenness of Judea” (NN Journals 82, 83). The Brook Kedron, he writes, is “black & funereal,” and where it “opens into [the] Plain of Jericho [it] looks like [the] Gate of Hell” (82, 83). The Valley of Jehoshaphat “grows more diabolical” as one nears the Dead Sea (82). The Mount of Temptation overlooking the Dead Sea is too “arid” to have tempted anybody (82). The Plain of Jericho may appear green as an orchard from a distance, but it proves “mouldy” when Melville rides over it, and the only trees to survive there bear nothing but apples of Sodom that turn to ashes in the mouth (82, 83). The waters of the Dead Sea encrust the beach like the “slaver of [a] mad dog” (83). Tasting them, Melville pronounces them “smarting bitter” and carries the bitterness in his “mouth all day.” They remind him of the “bitterness of life” and of “all bitter things”: “Bitter is it to be poor & bitter, to be reviled, & Oh bitter are these waters of Death, thought I” (83). Heading back up into the “barren” mountains, Melville notices a “[w]hitish mildew pervading whole tracts of landscape—bleached” as if with 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 135 C A R O L Y N L . K A R C H E R “leprosy” (NN Journals 83). Under his appalled gaze, the inanimate land now turns into the skeletal remains of a diseased body. The rocks resemble “bones . . . crunched, knawed, & mumbled—mere refuse & rubbish of creation .” The curse has infected even the “so-called Pool of Bethesda,” as Melville dismissively tags it, casting doubt on its authenticity: famous in biblical times for its healing virtues, the pool is now “full of rubbish” and exudes a “sooty look & smell” (91). The “rubbish” of Judea, Melville complains, lacks the “grace of decay” that imbues “other ruins” with romantic allure. It displays only the “unleavened nakedness of desolation” (83). Thus, he underscores, “No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine—particularly Jerusalem. To some the disappointment is heart sickening” (91). His own experience illustrates the point. Catching his first glimpse of Jerusalem while on his way to Bethlehem, Melville “could not have recognized it” without the help of a guide because it “looked exactly like arid rocks” (84). Nor does this impression change much on a closer approach: the “Hill-side view of Zion” reveals “loose stones & gravel as if shot down from carts” (85). The ubiquitous “Stones of Judea” and the perception that “Judea is one accumulation of stones” prompt Melville to ruminate on how frequently stones crop up in the Bible: “memorials are set up of stones...