Herman Melville's Clarel: Faith, Doubt, and the Holy Land

Introduction

Herman Melville is typically best known for his novel Moby-Dick, but the prose writer turned to poetry in his later years after his subsequent novels failed to become bestsellers. Poetry, it was thought, would serve as a creative outlet that would refresh his audience and spark new life into his readership. The attempt failed to produce much in the way of literary recognition at the time. Nevertheless, Melville produced the longest American epic poem ever written — Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) — a work of 18,000 lines, making it longer than Paradise Lost, the Iliad, or the Aeneid.

The subject of Clarel is a metaphysical one, like so many of Melville's works. Even when rooted in a specific time, place, conflict, plot, and arc, his works tend to have a metaphysical backdrop that tells the story behind the story — the spiritual conflict inherent in the secular one. Melville's own move from prose to poetry signals his inward turn toward the lofty. With Clarel, he united themes of pessimism evident in his earlier writings, such as Pierre and Bartleby (Stempel & Stillians, 1972; Tally, Jr., 2009), with themes of soulful entreaty and a desire to understand the mind of God. As Short (1979) noted, just over a century after Clarel was published, the poem represented Melville's "spiritual quest for the meaning of existence" (p. 554). This paper provides biographical and contextual information about Melville and how his life influenced his work, along with a brief analysis of Clarel showing how it ties into the poet's life, background, experience, politics, and sense of the spiritual.

Melville's Background and Religious Struggles

Melville was born in 1819 in New York City to a prominent, well-to-do family. His grandfathers had both served nobly in the Revolutionary War and fought to secure the nation's independence from England. The family lived beyond its means, however, and before long they were forced to relocate from New York City to Albany, where expenses were less considerable (Parker, 1996). Melville was deeply influenced by ideas of nobility, honor, integrity, independence, and free will. Baptized as an infant into the South Reformed Dutch Church, he learned his Scripture thoroughly and knew the Bible intimately — as is evident in Moby-Dick, where Biblical themes and concepts are woven throughout the work from beginning to end.

Melville was never fully satisfied with his religion, however, and felt something extraordinarily off-putting about the Protestant, Calvinist doctrines so prevalent in New England society. He struggled throughout his life to reconcile the message of Christ — the Word of God — with the limitations of Calvinism. His journey to the Holy Land as an adult was conducted in part to give him a first-hand glimpse of the place where Christ had walked and spoken, and to see whether he could reconcile his pessimism regarding Calvinist doctrine with his admiration for the Christian ideal (Flibbert, 1981).

Melville found early success as a writer by drawing on his own experiences aboard various sea vessels in both the whaling industry and the U.S. Navy. His time at sea was rich with adventure, but it also shaped his inner life in ways that would later be manifested in his writings. As Milder (1988) points out, Melville's time at sea likely resulted in a kind of spiritual estrangement that he spent the rest of his life attempting to resolve. The central question on his mind was whether men possessed any real free will — a concern connected to his revulsion at the notion of a God heartless enough to create men simply to watch them suffer and spend eternity in damnation. Yet his experiences did not empty him of spiritual belief. Instead, they turned him against the restrictiveness of Calvinist doctrine.

As Melville (1851) wrote to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne: "I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head! I had rather be a fool with a heart, than Jupiter Olympus with his head. The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch." Melville rejected the idea that God arbitrarily destined some souls for Paradise and others for Hell. He viewed God as possessing more heart than that — if He existed at all — and held that the great struggle of human existence lay in deciding whether one wished to move toward Him or away from Him. But simply understanding God was the first challenge — and to pursue that understanding, Melville wanted to go to the Holy Land.

Once established as a writer through his early adventure books, Melville grew more ambitious and began reflecting his spiritual, religious, and social views in his fiction. This tendency began in earnest with Moby-Dick and continued through Bartleby, The Confidence Man, Pierre, and Billy Budd. When these works produced dwindling returns, Melville turned to poetry. By that time, America stood on the verge of Civil War, and Melville captured the national mood in his first poetry collection, published after the war's conclusion. Having visited the Holy Land in the interim, he began composing the longest epic in American poetry — Clarel.

Overview of Clarel

Clarel is an ambitious work centered on its title character, a young student of theology. Clarel has traveled to the Holy Land — much like Melville himself — to see first-hand the land where Christ lived and died. He expects to find a spirit that will animate his faith, which he feels is slipping. What he encounters in Jerusalem, however, is chaos rather than the stillness and reverence he anticipated. The city teems with people of many different faiths: Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and more. While he appreciates that they all possess some sense of the divine, Clarel seeks something more explicit — something that can restore his confidence in faith. He briefly senses a kinship with a Catholic named Celio, but Celio soon dies, and Clarel bitterly regrets not having pursued the friendship and its spiritual possibilities.

Melville describes Clarel's mood in the opening canto:

Our New World's worldly wit so shrewd / Lacks the Semitic reverent mood, / Unworldly — hardly may confer / Fitness for just interpreter / Of Palestine. Forego the state / Of local minds inveterate, / Tied to one poor and casual form. / To avoid the deep saves not from storm (Melville, 1876, Canto 1, ln. 92–99).

What Melville describes is a young man who somewhat naively laments the worldliness surrounding him. He is inspired by the Scriptures and the story of Christ but disheartened by those around him who do not share his inspiration. He reasons that if the Biblical stories are true, everyone ought to be more concerned with living as a Christian. Finding no such spiritual earnestness in his own New World (America), he travels to the Holy Land hoping to find it there. This mirrors Melville's own experience — his scorn for the materialistic concerns and worldly ways of his contemporaries, and his drive to understand why Christianity was so often proclaimed yet so often neglected. It was a theme he explored in detail in The Confidence Man, a novel about a con artist aboard a ship who observes that the ordinary men and women around him are con artists too — not for money, but in their performances of virtue and good will.

Conclusion

Melville believed in the heart. His life was a rich, hearty adventure, and his writings reflected as much. His epic poem is a journey of the heart — a spiritual pilgrimage intended to move toward God but ultimately left at the door of the aching heart, where it remains. Yet Melville insists that it must remain there in good hope and faith. This conviction is one he maintained consistently throughout his life, and it can be found across his body of work, from Bartleby to Billy Budd. In all his writings, Melville identified the need for heart — just as he expressed in 1851 when writing to Hawthorne. In a world made turbulent by materialism and factionalism, the heart could discern the true path to lasting happiness, so long as it did not grow bitter with resentment toward one's fellows.

References

Flibbert, J. (1981). The dream and religious faith in Herman Melville's Clarel. ATQ, 50, 129.

Melville, H. (1851). Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Retrieved from http://www.melville.org/letter3.htm

Milder, R. (1988). Herman Melville. New York: Columbia University Press.

Parker, D. (1996). Herman Melville, 1819–1851. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Short, B. C. (1979). Form as vision in Herman Melville's Clarel. American Literature, 553–569.

Stempel, D., & Stillians, B. M. (1972). Bartleby the Scrivener: A parable of pessimism. Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 27(3), 268–282.

Tally Jr., R. T. (2009). Bartleby, the Scrivener. In Bloom's literary themes: Alienation. New York, NY: InfoBase Publishing.