Character and the Space of Clarel

Character and the Space of Clarel MICHAEL JONIK Cornell University Needs be my soul, Purged by the desert’s subtle air From bookish vapors, now is heir To nature’s influx of control; (NN Clarel 1.1.67–70) Character and the Impersonal F rom Ahab to Bartleby, and Isabel to Billy Budd, Melville’s characters seem unmoored from personhood, cast into the “whelming sea” of the impersonal or the inhuman (NN Clarel 4.35.33).1 In Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, they are not so much characters in the traditional literary sense—that is, individual “persons” who move through settings and perform a set of characteristics—as they are a series of intertwined “personae” whose characteristics blur with the space of the poem. As in his other works, Melville’s characterization in Clarel is a process not of developing distinct persons but of opening a transactive space in which human characteristics can become unbound and thus permeable to the extra-personal. Yet in Clarel, given the symbolically charged landscape of the Holy Land, Melville’s emptying out of character also involves a forceful deromanticization of the landscape. Melville postulates a world in which traditional guarantees of human value are removed, and wherein the traditional barriers that divide self and nature and the human and inhuman are rendered inconsequential. Melville gestures past Romantic conceptions of landscape and self into an uncertain postDarwinian territory in which the sublime education is no longer an ecstatic self-abandonment but one of suspension and doubt. The dissolutions of the self into the Absolute in Moby-Dick—Ishmael melting into the universal “milk and sperm of kindness” (NN MD 416), the “absent minded young philosophers” becoming one with the “mystic ocean” (159)—and the transcendent “all” feeling which Melville circumspectly describes in his letter to Hawthorne (NN Corres 194) are instead in Clarel a mutual defacement of both the human visage and the face of the earth. Individual subjective characteristics are not fused into a cosmic unity but are erased or dispersed and thus freed to move past the 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 67 M I C H A E L J O N I K coordinates of the human and personal to transact with the varied non-human spaces of Melville’s Holy Land. Before exploring the relation between character and space in Clarel, however, we can first gain contingent footing by considering a striking description of impersonality in one of Melville’s lesser-known characters. In Moby-Dick, the Pequod’s carpenter is “singularly efficient” in addressing “all the thousand nameless mechanical emergencies recurring in a large ship” and, therefore, would “seem to argue some uncommon vivacity of intelligence” (NN MD 467). Yet, we soon learn, this is “not precisely so”: “For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity . . . impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinitude of things, that it seems one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world” (467). A proverbial rolling stone, the carpenter not only gathered no moss in the course of his world-wanderings but also “had rubbed off whatever small outward clingings might have originally pertained to him” (468). He becomes a departicularized figure, a proto-Bartleby, “stript abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born babe; living without premeditated reference to this world or next” (468). Shorn of the characteristics typical of a “person” or of a “human,” he is nonetheless not a “mere machine or automaton” but a “pure manipulator,” “omnitooled” (468) like a modern-day Swiss Army knife. “If he did not have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its duty . . . [an] unaccountable, cunning life-principle” (467–68). Melville’s description is remarkable insofar as it dissociates the character of the carpenter from the usual coordinates of personhood in favor of an “impersonal stolidity,” an impassivity not of reason...