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Chapter 2

Intersubjectivity and Universalism

in Herman Melville’s Oeuvre

A MANYSIDED “ELASTICITY OF MIND”

According to Hilton Obenzinger, Melville’s works display “elasticity of mind”, a characteristic the scholar defines as “the ability to cross over and entertain forbidden arguments, identities, and states of being; the persistence to ask ultimate questions; the compassion to reach out to fellow slaves, savages, renegades, isolatoes, common sailors, ‘Cross-bearers all’ who feel ‘the universal thump’” (“Wicked” 195). Melville’s texts constitute microcosms for the writer’s analyses of the potentiality of intersubjectivity to the creation, or absolute destruction, of more democratic human relationships and thinking parameters, in the midst of contexts of egocentric self-isolation, communitarian segregation, and inter-human divisions of diverse kinds (ethnic, cultural, religious, national, social, sexual). Melville did not vindicate an abstract kind of universalism in his texts, and he also parodied and denounced with great severity cosmopolitan appropriations and manipulations of Kant’s vision of the unity of mankind,¹ most remarkably in his last novel The Confidence Man (1857). Above all, Melville was well-aware of the dangers of imposing Kantianism as a vision of the world that neutralized, invalidated, and absorbed all others.² Instead, as Timothy Marr has noted in the following remarks on Moby-Dick: “By accentuating the worldly diversity of his crew, Melville ‘federated’ a broad latitude of literary characters that empowered his challenge to the ethnocentric claims of universality held by the supposedly civilized” (“Without” 136). It is in line with Marr’s argument that the present study conceives Melville’s universalist project in Clarel, the author’s most highly populated text according to Newton Arvin (276). Such universalism, Melville exposed, is as plural and imperfect as human beings—and, consequently, interpretations of reality—have existed, exist, or will exist on the earth.

Melville’s deep appreciation of plurality and respect for the ungraspable depths of the human soul is shown in his texts’ dignifying portrayals of characters representing those whom nineteenth-century average readers and society marginalized or simply dismissed as either mad or odd. Melville’s works connect multiple forms of existence and human emotions; they emphasize both the common characteristics of life “Or man or animal, […] / Cross-bearers all” (4.34.42-43) and the specificity of such existence and emotions to each individual, being always respectful of plurality and of the uniqueness of each person’s struggle and suffering. Melville’s texts bring together different perspectives in democratic conversations. At the same time, the author acknowledges and works with the difficulties and paradoxes posed by the efforts to trigger democratic dialogue and the willingness to give expression to such plurality of personalities, moods, and viewpoints. Insisting on the danger of universalizing a particular opinion or interpretation as Meaning, Melville’s works are critical of one-sided ways of thinking which admit no other views because of ignorance (“to the people of the Archipelago the map of Mardi was the map of the world. […] they had no certain knowledge of any isles but their own” [Mardi 838]), or because they constitute monomaniac assumptions. The Confidence-Man, for example, develops an intricate critique of one-sided thinking centered precisely on the character of the cosmopolitan itself. Ironically naming his cosmopolitan Frank Goodman, Melville sarcastically portrays the paradox between the cosmopolitan’s guiding principle “I will not prescribe my nature as the law to other natures” (1029), and his efforts to convert to his “philanthropic” philosophy those fellow travelers he conceives as misled in their beliefs (“Now let me set you on the right track; let me restore you to trust in human nature” [1091-1092]). Most importantly, in his preachings for fraternal love and universal communion, the cosmopolitan is actually a trickster who exploits the love of humanity he vindicates, in order to manipulate and swindle the confidence of his fellow mortals. Actually, Frank Goodman’s speeches take such inflated tone and wordings that they immediate provoke the readers’ critical distance from the very philanthropy they profess:

Is the sight of humanity so very disagreeable to you then? Ah, I may be foolish but for my part, in all its aspects, I love it. Served up à la Pole, or à la Moor, à la Ladrone, or à la Yankee, that good dish, man, still delights me; or rather is man a wine I never weary of comparing and sipping; wherefore I am a pledged cosmopolitan […], a taster of races; in all his vintages, smacking my lips over this racy creature, man, continually. (Confidence-Man 982)

Melville’s description of cannibalistic philanthropy in the previous passage is fitting to the whole novel, as Goodman “devours” like a predator the confidence his fellow travelers deposit on him. Through Goodman, Melville analyzes how the confidence-man blends within the cosmopolitan type. As John Bryant has argued, Melville studied that the cosmopolitan’s rootless, traveling, and apparently charitable nature could be the potential for trickery and cheat (“Nowhere” 289).

Laying bare this discourse of philanthropy and denouncing the exploitation of philanthropy for negative ends, the novel’s critique of cosmopolitanism is similar to Judith Butler’s claim that presenting Kantian cosmopolitanism as the only possible way to articulate universality is already a cultural imposition (“Universality” 52). This cultural imposition defeats the very purpose of plurality upon which cosmopolitanism is apparently rooted, because it implies clinging to a parochial conception of the universal and imposing such parochial conception as the only valid way to think universality. Butler’s claim is that the meaning of universality cannot be anticipated prior to its creation because universalism may only start being created through a questioning of its already existing formulation (48): “A universality that is yet to be articulated […] one for which we have no ready concept, one whose articulations will only follow, if they do, from a contestation of universality at its already imagined borders” (49). Comparable to Butler’s line of thought is the critique of one-sided universalisms in Melville’s literary production, and its articulation of a conception of universalism based on the diversity and the common humanity of human beings in their vulnerability and suffering condition, which exposes the inseparability of the local and the global, the particular and the universal. The superb yet tragic vision, described by the narrator in Israel Potter, of human beings as bricks that are part of, and molded in order to fit within, an aggregate, may be said to expose Melville’s concern that the individual be not absorbed within a particular identity or community: “Are not men built into communities just like bricks into a wall?” (Israel Potter 601). This looks like a frightening image where the individuality of each brick is lost to the immensity of the wall, their “ragged edges” (Billy Budd 517) polished in order to fit within the homogeneous and homogenizing whole. Moreover, it also seems to anticipate the author’s affirmation in his 1858 lecture “Traveling” that communities “shut” human beings away “from the outer world” (421). The narrator underlines the singular character of each brick in the passage, which he enumerates, in the same way that he has created a narrative dedicated to one of these anonymous “brick-men”, and, in doing so, rescued the individuality of the neglected and forgotten Israel by the act of telling his story. Images of walls permeate not only Israel Potter but Melville’s literary production in general, especially Clarel. It is indeed significant that characters such as Bartleby, in the story with the same title, and Celio, in Clarel, should die with their eyes fixed on stony walls. These walls evoke the interpersonal obstacles these characters encountered in life, and which led them to their tragic endings alone and rejected. It seems also important that Pierre would “dash[…] himself in blind fury and swift madness against the wall, and fell dabbling in the vomit of his loathed identity” (Pierre 203), as he struggled against his inherited aristocratic social role. In these different texts, walls constitute separating barriers: the image of the bricks in Israel Potter comes to mind when readers contemplate Pierre’s abandonment of the social class and role-model into which, as a brick within a wall, he had been polished to fit since childhood; and, on the other hand, both Celio and Bartleby resist being molded into a particular community-wall. The multiple walls these characters find—or, in the case of Pierre Glendinning, erect—as they try to develop any intersubjective connection with fellow human beings, condemn them to their castaway status and, eventually, to their forlorn death, rejected and abandoned by human society.

The previous instances already illustrate how Melville places intersubjectivity, both its potentiality and the destruction of this potentiality, at the center of his works. Intersubjectivity, therefore, is inseparable from Melville’s articulation of universalism as a process conditioned by its own imperfect nature and lack of wholeness, and even exposed to being dismantled in the dialogue by which it may be created through the contact, negotiation and contestation of different worldviews. Melville’s oeuvre constructs universalist contexts which expose, bring to dialogue, and evaluate interpretations of reality as varied and diverse as each of the characters inhabiting the texts: Taji and his fellow travelers’ multiple encounters throughout the different isles they explore in Mardi; the diversity in national origin of the sailors aboard the Pequod in Moby-Dick and the Neversink in White-Jacket; the variety of passengers on board the Fidèle in The Confidence-Man; the plurality of (even antagonistic) perspectives in Melville’s Civil War poems in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War; the global microcosm of Jerusalem and the Holy Land in Clarel; the different stories of sailors in John Marr and Other Sailors; the telling of the story of Bartleby in “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, of the slave revolt in “Benito Cereno”, of the Portuguese sailors in “The ’Gees”, or of the pale maids at the paper mill in “Tartarus of Maids”, among many other instances. Taken as a whole, Melville’s literary production is polyphonic in the diversity of voices and worldviews it gives expression to: slave-owners, lawyers and representatives of the upper classes (the lawyer in “Bartleby”, the bachelors in “The Paradise of Bachelors”, Glaucon and the Banker in Clarel); representatives of law and order (Captain Vere in Billy Budd, Sailor, Captain Claret in White-Jacket, the Union government in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, King Charles III in Israel Potter, the kings in the isles of the Mardian archipelago in Mardi); philosophers, preachers, religious leaders and representatives, intellectual charlatans (Plotinus Plinlimmon and Reverend Mr. Falsgrave in Pierre, the Rabbi in Clarel, the Chaplain in White-Jacket, Father Mapple in Moby-Dick, the cosmopolitan in The Confidence-Man); maniacs and “mad” men (Ahab, Cyril, Habbibi, Nathan); national icons and anonymous fighters (Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones or Ethan Allen, and Israel in Israel Potter; Grant, McClellan, Mosby, Sherman or Stonewall Jackson and the anonymous Confederate and Union soldiers in Battle-Pieces); Arab, Polynesian, African, Native American, mixed-race characters (Abdon, Belex, or Djalea in Clarel, Annatoo or Samoa in Mardi, Queequeg, Pip, Fedallah, etc. in Moby-Dick, the Portuguese sailors in “The ’Gees”, Hunilla in “The Chola Widow”, Babo or Atufal in “Benito Cereno”, Delly in Pierre, etc.); slaves (Babo, Atufal and the rest of the unnamed slaves in “Benito Cereno”, Jane Jackson in Battle-Pieces); socially oppressed individuals, outcasts, exiles, loners, and above all, human endurers (Israel Potter, Bartleby, Hunilla, Marianna in “The Piazza”, White-Jacket, anonymous crowds [e.g. the London crowds in Israel Potter] and maids [“The Tartarus of Maids”], John Marr in John Marr and Other Sailors, Billy in Billy Budd, Sailor, Celio, Agath, Ungar, Mortmain, Don Hannibal, Nehemiah, etc. in Clarel, Isabel, Lucy and Pierre Glendinning in Pierre, Ishmael, the Pequod sailors, and even Ahab in Moby-Dick; animal endurers [Hunilla’s dogs, Nehemiah’s donkey, Glaucon’s horse, the tortoises in the island described by Agath]), are perhaps the most representative of the previous unfinished listings within categories clearly prone to overlapping. This diversity of characters populating Melville’s works, representative of the diversity of the “human stock” the writer nourished himself with and resolved to fictionalize, constitutes a fundamental basis to the author’s creation of universalist contexts. These contexts confront readers with the inevitable partiality, provisionality of meaning, as well as with its lack of totality (and perhaps permanent vacancy). That is, if the construction of dialogue in Melville’s ouvre is based on an understanding that a person’s access to different versions of reality will always remain incomplete and partial, and that final Meanings may not exist, it also underscores that any universalist dialogue will never be fully universalist, because it will always be, inevitably, both enriched and limited by those who construct it. It will also, Melville’s works emphasize, be always consequently exposed to the possibility of being neutralized due to the inexorable intermingling of good and evil within human nature. Above all, Melville’s plural dialogic contexts enable the author to juxtapose and place under evaluation the worldviews embodied by characters, as well as to underline the manysidedness of humanity and, yet, the interconnected vulnerability and suffering condition of such vast diversity of human beings.

Melville locates humanity in anonymous, rejected, forgotten, and unhomely rovers who suffer and are, alone, at a loss: “Humanity, thou strong thing, I worship thee, not in the laurelled victor, but in this vanquished one”, exclaims the narrator of “The Chola Widow” (127). The universalist understanding of humanity in Melville’s works emphasizes connectedness in separation, transcending, even destabilizing, the traditional divide between the local and the particular, as well as the global and the universal. At the same time, Melville’s works (some of which would themselves become “dead letters” in their times) rescue from oblivion the “Dead letters” of humanity in a project of individualization and remembrance which shows an extraordinary concern for individuals who are victims of the sociopolitical, economic, religious, and also national(ist) apparatuses which both generate and perpetuate human segregation and social injustice. Yet, at the same time that they analyze the complex singularities of the characters they construct, writing literary monuments honoring individualities violently obliterated or even sacrificed by oppressive forces,³ Melville’s works connect these characters to a universal community of grievers. As Michael Jonik notes in his discussion of Clarel, the population of pilgrims-travelers in the poem is not much different from that of Melville’s other works:

Much like the “mariners, renegades, and castaways” who are “federated along the keel” of the Pequod (NN MD 117), Clarel’s cavalcade is another “wrangling crew” (NN Clarel 1.44.27), a reprise of the Anacharsis Clootz procession of universal humanity but with its attendant animals. In “Via Crucis”, the collective form of the Whitsuntide procession allows for a blurring of the human and animal […]. (72-73)

Even if Melville’s works engage in the task of doing justice to a representative group of those oppressed and forgotten, “Or man or animal” (4.34.42), at the same time, the author’s understanding of the impossibility to know his own characters is humble: respectful of his characters’ privacy, the author acknowledges the impossibility of putting in words the complexities of the human heart, and he offers instead sketchy portrayals of the personalities of the characters inhabiting his works. A number of texts, written at different stages throughout Melville’s career, illustrate this point, for example Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855), the narrative of an ex-revolutionary hero who dies forgotten and neglected by his country and compatriots. Despite its nationalist plot, Israel Potter displays a global narrative consciousness that transcends the boundaries of time and space, and points to a conception of the world beyond the nation-state. In the same way that Billy in the novella Billy Budd, Sailor—written over thirty years later and which, left unfinished in the author’s desk at his death, was not published until 1924—Israel is a subject shaped by, and entangled within, nationalist forces which he can neither control nor escape. Despite presenting the life-story of a particular individual, in the same way that “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) or “The Chola Widow”, to mention but a few, the story fuses the particular with the global, as the narrator emphasizes, at many moments throughout the narrative, Israel’s existence within a larger human context that transcends nation-state boundaries. The novel, thus, points to a universalist conception of humankind, as contextualized and specific (the particular case of Israel, or Bartleby, or Hunilla, or Ishmael, or Clarel, in the present moment) as it is transnational and even transhistorical: “Here, in this very darkness, centuries ago, hearts, human as his [Israel’s], had mildewed in despair; limbs, robust as his own, had stiffened in immovable torpor” (505). These passages from Israel Potter anticipate the universal yearning and human cries Melville gives expression to in Clarel. They also resemble the human tide Clarel joins at the end of the poem-pilgrimage, and which connects the young student’s particular pain to a universal grief that evokes the human wail of souls “in endless dearth” described earlier in the poem (Clarel 1.24.87). Also in Israel Potter, Israel’s individual status as a marginalized, even invisible, outcast is connected to the fate of “tormented humanity” (604), as well as to the biblical narrative of the Israelites’ wandering the desert, seeking the promised land after having escaped bondage in Egypt (the name of the protagonist evidently bears ironic echoes of the mythical “chosen people” and “promised land” of the Bible). Like Clarel’s, Israel’s suffering is not exceptional: “Neither was our adventurer the least among the sufferers” but one among “this sudden influx of rivals, destitute, honest men like himself” (607). Like he does to Clarel, Melville elevates and individualizes Israel at the same time that he keeps him connected to his suffering fellow mortals, some of whom Melville, in turn, individualizes in other works. This prevents, thus, characters such as Clarel, Bartleby, Hunilla, Billy Budd, Ishmael, Babo, Queequeg, John Marr, Marianna, etc. from being forgotten within a sea of dead letters constituting irrecoverable losses to humanity. It is indeed significant to underline that many of Melville’s works end with images of grieving individuals joining a more global procession of sufferers: Clarel’s joining the heterogeneous crowd of “Cross-bearers” in the Via Crucis, at the end of the poem, mounted on Nehemiah’s donkey; Hunilla’s disappearance into Payta (Peru) also riding a donkey; Israel’s becoming part of the London masses, a “gulf-stream of humanity—which, for continuous centuries, has never ceased pouring, like an endless shoal of herring, over London Bridge” (603). In this respect, it is relevant that Melville had Ishmael assert in Moby-Dick that “[t]he truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows” (376). Also significantly, Melville’s suffering characters often seek the ocean or the desert as spaces of refuge and meditation:

a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous distressed. The ocean brims with natural griefs and tragedies; and into that watery immensity of terror, man’s private grief is lost like a drop. (Israel Potter 437)

Man sprang from deserts: at the touch

Of grief or trial overmuch,

On deserts he falls back at need;

Yes, ’tis the bare abandoned home

Recalleth then. (Rolfe in Clarel 2.16.106-110)

Oceans, deserts, and also crowds pull every private grief within a universal wail. Melville’s project is to engage in the individualization of the uniqueness of each wail, without cutting their connection to a universal grief. The well-known lamentation of the narrator at the end of “Bartleby, the Scrivener”—“Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” (98)—may be said to capture the intermingling of both individual and universal grieving cries; while Hunilla’s empathic capacity to incorporate the pain of other beings into her own, out of the love she feels for her fellow creatures, fuses these different experiences of pain within a universal continuum that is, at the same time, part of the individual: “To Hunilla, pain seemed so necessary, that pain in other beings, though by love and sympathy made her own, was unrepiningly to be borne. A heart of yearning in a frame of steel. A heart of earthly yearning, frozen by the frost which falleth from the sky” (“Chola” 133).

Yet, at the same time that Melville emphasizes the interconnection of the particular and the universal, he also reflects characters’ impossibility to conceive such interconnection. Pointing to the democratizing potentiality of universalism to human relationships, Melville portrays the eventual withdrawal of most of his characters within their respective individual subjectivities, specific communities, and one-sided ways of thinking. This attitude perpetuates a reality of disconnection, reinforcing separation between different human beings and groups who cling to monolithic perspectives and dividing conceptions of humanity. Consequently, although Melville’s texts point to the democratizing potentiality of intersubjectivity and the real universality of human beings, visions of interpersonal separation impose themselves recurrently and harshly in Melville’s works. An example of this is how, in The Confidence-Man, the crew of the Fidèle, first an indistinguishable whole, is split into groups, pairs, and single individuals in merely a few lines: “the crowd, as is usual, began in all parts to break up from a concourse into various clusters or squads, which in some cases disintegrated again into quartettes, trios, and couples, or even solitaires; involuntarily submitting to that natural law which ordains dissolution equally to the mass, in time to the member” (847). This dissolution may be read positively, as a process by which the different individual parts that are invisible within the crowd are given visibility, yet also as an image of human segregation, maybe evoking the national divisions of antebellum U.S. merely four years before the Civil War, at the time The Confidence-Man was written and published. Similar to this image of intersubjective separation, yet in a reverse way, is the individual’s efforts to seek the sociality of other individuals and join in the couples, trios, quartets and larger units of the crowd. This process is parodied in Israel Potter’s attempts, in the homonymous novel, to join the different societies on board the English ship where he unexpectedly finds himself after equivocally jumping off the Ariel: “‘Boys, is this the way you treat a watch-mate’, demanded Israel reproachfully, ‘[…] Come, let’s be sociable. Spin us a yarn, one of ye. Meantime, rub my back for me, another’, and very confidently he leaned against his neighbor. ‘Lean off me, will ye?’ roared his friend, shoving him away” (579). Although Israel’s efforts to fraternize are portrayed in a comical way, the rejection of his interpersonal advances to join the different societies in the ship may be said to perform how the possibility to develop intersubjectivity (and, therefore, to develop universalism) is resisted by characters who withdraw to their own private societies and selves. This is a recurrent motif in Herman Melville’s writings, of which Clarel, in its portrayal of characters who fence up their egos and minds within hermetic walls that prevent any possibility of developing an intersubjective relationship with other characters, proves a good example. The potentiality of intersubjectivity, in such cases, remains undeveloped, and so does the possibility of plural thinking and democratic relationships. Despite such containment, however, the potentiality is not eliminated but persists. As anticipated earlier, Melville exposes the democratizing effects of such potentiality in works like Moby-Dick, where Ishmael and Queequeg’s intersubjectivity abolishes the (racial, religious, cultural) barriers by which the characters had initially felt separated, and enables a process by which Ishmael, first repulsed by the “savage” Queequeg, is eventually capable of regarding him as his equal and Queequeg’s worldviews as equivalent to his own. It is relevant that Melville rescues only Ishmael and Queequeg’s friendship from the self-destructive crusade of the Pequod; Queequeg’s coffin being the only thing Ishmael can hold on to by the end of the novel and which preserves Ishmael’s life. Thus, despite the fact that Queequeg dies at the end of Moby-Dick, it is relevant that he should posthumously emerge from the sea in the form of his coffin in order to save Ishmael, as if fulfilling his nuptial promise to “gladly die for me [Ishmael], if need should be” (63). This will be an important difference with the final image of the swimmer rising from the deep in Clarel, as the young student will be grieving utterly alone, with nobody to help him endure the hardships of existence.

In fact, most Melvillean characters die alone and rejected, the victims of the thick walls they either encounter in their efforts to “fraternize” or which they erect against other characters’ efforts to establish an intersubjective relationship with them. Pointing to the potentially democratizing effects of intersubjectivity, Melville places in interpersonal relationships the possibility of universalism, at the same time that he shows how this potentiality is continuously canceled. Aware of both the possibilities and the difficulties, of the constructive potentiality of innate humanity and the destructive potentiality of innate depravity, Melville provides no magical recipe to the eliciting of democratic relationships and thinking. However, the fact that the author exposed himself and readers to a continuous analysis of both the possibility and the impossibility of human togetherness in texts as reflexive of monologic worldviews and depositions as they are encouraging of plural thinking, may be taken as indicative of the author’s persistence in the transformative effects of such project despite his pessimism. As I analyzed from a theoretical perspective, intersubjective universalism opens up the way for more democratic ethical possibilities in interpersonal relationships. The present study interprets the ethics Melville’s project points to as secular.

TOWARD A SECULAR ETHICS

As a subject central to Clarel it is necessary to consider Melville’s religiosity or attitude toward religion before elaborating my interpretation of the poem. The reason for this detour is that, despite not addressing religion and religiosity directly in the way other scholars have done,⁴ this study focuses on Clarel’s analysis of one-sided thinking, within which religious manias are particularly emphasized, together with the exclusive (and excluding) character of religious communities, the questioning of dogma, and the exploration of faith, spirituality, sincere devotion, doubt and unbelief.

A number of studies have analyzed Melville’s relationship with religion and the influence of the Bible on his works.⁵ Nonetheless, Melville’s religiosity, if any, continues to inspire much debate and disagreement. As Roland A. Sherrill has remarked, Melville has been named “a mystic, a savvy kind of Calvinist, a Christian existentialist, a primitive pagan, a Romantic theologian, a Protestant prophet, an atheist, and a nihilist” (481). Hilton Obenzinger’s consideration of Melville as an agnostic (“Wicked” 195), also shared by Robert Milder (Exiled 219), is closer to this volume’s views on the author’s religiosity and informing to its interpretation of Clarel. And, yet, it is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of Melville after the two friends met in Liverpool when the would-be author of Clarel was on his way to Palestine in November 1856, which may be said to capture one of the most accurate portrayals of Melville’s questioning nature:

It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to-and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us. (qtd. in Bezanson “Historical” 511)

Melville’s attitude toward God and religion, belief and unbelief, faith and dogma, was a restless one throughout the author’s life, not exempt from anxiety and grief. Born to a Calvinist mother and a Unitarian father, and reared in a devout Calvinist family, Melville received a Calvinist education and was raised as a member of the Dutch Reformed Church since his earliest childhood, being a usual attendant at church with his family. The young Melville, however, would soon find in travel and in the contact with human beings and societies who were different to his a way to de-transcendentalize the cultural and religious “Truths” into which he had been indoctrinated since childhood. In particular, it was his experiences at sea, first in merchant ships and later as a common sailor on board whalers, that exposed him to a representative plurality of human beings, cultural practices, and religious beliefs by peoples whom his culture had taught him to consider “savages”. These voyages would also bring him face to face with the violent practices Christian missionaries were carrying out in the Pacific, which Melville condemned in his first two bestselling novels Typee and Omoo. This way, early in life would Melville learn the no-line between savagery and civilization, as well as the hypocrisy of Christian morality and the failure of Christians to be Christians. He would also conceive different religious thinking parameters as equivalent to one another in their different interpretations of human beings’ relationship to God. As Hilton Obenzinger has remarked, in Clarel “[a]ll religions are explored with a clear sense of their underlying unity, that in their essence they all attempt to address the same ultimate questions, recognize the common bond of suffering, and worship the divine” (“Wicked” 191). As a matter of fact, Melville’s views on religion and humanity point beyond a mere cosmopolitan system of (religious) equivalences: the author challenges dogma and transcendental Truths as much as he problematizes nation/ality, race, or culture, and puts forward fluid conceptions of sexuality. While the 1876 Clarel holds a great deal of the (non-)religious views professed by the thirty-year-old Melville of Mardi or Mody-Dick, this poem also conveys a more markedly disillusioned, even nihilistic, viewpoint. Quoting Obenzinger: Clarel “does not find that any one faith, including Christianity, can resolve uncertainty, relieve the burden of doubt. The spiritual exercise of considering each one—as rich and beautiful as the dialogues may be—ends with no revelation. The poem, as Charles Olson observes, is a ‘rosary of doubt’ (99)” (“Wicked” 191). Also indicative of spiritual barrenness is the portrayal of the Holy Land as a land of desolation where no God is present (not even hidden, as Stan Goldman claims). This problematization of religious Truths, which includes even the ultimate religious Truth (i.e. God), is constant in the author’s literary career.

Also constant is Melville’s condemnation of religious fundamentalism of any kind as leading to one-sidedness, intolerance, and violence. In Clarel, Melville analyzes religious mania, particularly through Nathan, a representative of spiritual doubt who eventually clings to religious fervor in the form of Zionism, and also through Nehemiah, in connection to millennialist movements. Above all, the poem foregrounds the religious confrontations and intolerances between different major religious communities in Jerusalem/Palestine. This condemnation of religious fundamentalism is not exclusive to Clarel, but is already explicit in Melville’s earlier works. The 1851 Moby-Dick constitutes a good example:

I have no objection to any person’s religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don’t believe it also. But when a man’s religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him. (92)

Melville’s works predicate religious tolerance while exposing a conception of the equivalential relationship of different religious systems of interpretation of reality and God. In Moby-Dick, for instance, Melville makes Ishmael an example of religious sympathy which transcends mere tolerance, as he not only respects Queequeg and leaves him to his beliefs, but actually accompanies his new friend in his adoration of the little idol Yojo. Ishmael justifies this gesture through an ironic reasoning which proclaims that a “good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church” (63), like himself, must paradoxically “turn idolator” in order to follow God’s dictates of universal fraternal love:

Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth—pagans and all included—can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?—to do the will of God—that is worship. And what is the will of God?—to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me—that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. (63)

The religious opinions Ishmael expresses in Moby-Dick are not endorsed from a cultural supremacist point of view: he does not regard other religious interpretations as deviant from the Christian “Truth” or as wrong. Instead, Ishmael contemplates religion as a culturally molded human fabrication to give explanation to the inexplicable; he conceives each religious construct in relation to others that have been differently articulated by different peoples and at different times. Ishmael understands the importance of religious belief to those who profess it, yet detaches himself from dogma and feels certainly estranged from religious practices even if he jokingly admits that “I cherish the greatest respect toward everybody’s religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool” (Moby-Dick 89). Not only Queequeg’s veneration of Yojo in Moby-Dick, but also Mardians’ polytheistic adoration in Mardi, and Catholics’ worshipping of Jesus’s tomb and the Holy Sepulcher, Jews’ adoration of the Western Wall, or geologists’ adoration of stones and fossils, in Clarel, constitute equivalent examples of such “congregation[s] of ants” at different stages of Melville’s literary production. On the other hand, a respect for sincere believers who can find peace in their different forms of faith is also characteristic of Clarel. As Hilton Obenzinger has noted, “[d]espite this sense of Deus abscondus, Clarel and the narrator regard heartfelt believers with great respect, no matter the tradition: Abdon, the black Jew from India, Djalea, the stoic Druze guide, and Catholic priests and Mar Saba monks are all comfortable and at peace in their faiths. But the other seekers are more troubled or troubling” (“Wicked” 192).

Melville’s (lack of) religion and religiosity, as expressed in his works, seem to partake of a universalist conception of humanity—“pagans and all included” (Moby-Dick 63)—for, as Ishmael claims, we are all members of “the same ancient Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there, and Queequeg here, and all of us, and every mother’s son and soul of us belong; the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshipping world; we all belong to that […]” (95). As Braswell notes, Melville’s life-long doubting nature was exceptional among the literary figures of the times:

None of the English men of letters affected by the skepticism of the time, such as Clough and Arnold, were hit quite so hard by their disillusionment. And in comparison with Melville, most of the eminent American authors of his day found happy answers to their questions. Emerson and Thoreau, with their transcendental theories, and Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes, with their Unitarian views, were relatively contented and optimistic. Whittier was a good Quaker. Whitman’s worship of the universe buoyed him. Even Hawthorne, often morose on the problem of sin, was contented enough in his beliefs to pity Melville. (Braswell 3-4)

Melville was particularly critical of religious institutions and representatives who hypocritically promoted brotherhood and devotion by actually imposing dogma and neutralizing free thinking. When it comes to the author’s belief in God, William Braswell has no doubts about it, yet he adds that “it is not so easy to say just what he believed in regard to the nature of the Deity” (24). Other critics have followed Lawrance Thompson’s thesis that Melville was a rebel to the Calvinist God of his ancestors. These scholars have identified the author with Ahab’s revolt against the malevolent divinity, claiming that Melville’s quarrel with God was actually a lover’s quarrel (Thompson Quarrel 30). Following Thompson, and similar to Stan Goldman’s arguments on the hiddenness of the divinity, Daniel Paliwoda confuses Ahab’s passionate arguments against God in Moby-Dick with Melville’s, arguing that such rage ultimately reveals a devotion to God that demonstrates that Melville was not an atheist: “If an atheist, why shout against God? […] If one does not believe, why invest so much energy toward a nonexisting entity? It indicates the possibility that Melville wanted to believe, but could not find a satisfactory way of doing so” (104). Contrarily to Paliwoda, I contend that the fact that Melville constantly analyzed religion and God in his works is not necessarily a conclusive proof that he was a believer, since it was Melville’s permanent doubting nature, and not his belief in God, that led him to the “dismal deserts” which Hawthorne described in his account of the 1856 Melville he met in Liverpool. In Clarel, as a matter of fact, the Holy Land is constructed as a place with no God and where faith fails to provide that needed relief to the young seeker and many of his companions. Doubt and nothingness is actually what pervade at the end of the poem-pilgrimage. On Clarel’s ending, James E. Miller has claimed that Melville proposes a balance between doubt and faith, without championing conventional Christian faith (217): “Melville does not seem to accept faith to the exclusion of doubt, but rather he advises Clarel (and surely himself) to reconcile heart (where faith and hope reside) and mind (where live doubt and despair), and to hold them in a balance of sanity. […] This is the advice that, heeded, could have saved Taji, Ahab, Pierre, and Mortmain from catastrophe and death” (216-217). While I mostly agree with Miller’s argument that Clarel is eventually advised to find a balance between doubt and hope that may keep him from reproducing the self-destructive madness that characterizes many of his companions in the poem (as well as his predecessors in other Melvillean works), in my opinion the young seeker moves away from religious faith at the end of his journey and is left, instead, with dislocation and spiritual barrenness after the death of his beloved Ruth. Believer or, in my opinion, non-believer, the only “truth” revealed to Clarel, although it is made ambiguous whether he is able to reach full awareness of it or remains unaware, is not his bond to God but his connection with humanity, “Cross-bearers all”, humans and animals, who “follow, slowly follow on” (4.34.43, 44).

Whether we consider him a believer or an atheist, still today, Melville continues resisting any impulse to categorize him within one group or the other. Neither is there just one Melville to categorize; as Babbalanja would claim in Mardi: “in one life-time we live a hundred lives” (1112), “though I have now been upon terms of close companionship with myself for nigh five hundred moons, I have not yet been able to decide who or what I am” (1111). If at other moments of his literary career Melville was able to cling to his faith and/or to God, Clarel reflects a much bleaker, if not completely nihilistic, sense of religious belief. Thus, Melville’s exploration of God and religion might have moved closer to unbelief in the latter decades of his life. This is latent in works such as Clarel—the poem’s portrayal of the Holy Land, not as the mystical place of a hidden God, as Goldman maintains, but as a no-God place where religion provides no consolation to characters who dive, and where no Divinity is eventually felt by these characters in the midst of their agony (both personal and global, as captured in the image of the Via Crucis and the [comm]union of universal “wail[s]”), against which each individual struggles in the most utter aloneness. Clarel presents a universalist understanding of the interconnectedness of individual pain as experienced by each different “form[…] of fate” (Clarel 4.34.41). Obenzinger summarizes this interpretation, arguing that “[t]he final vision of multiplicity and unity deepens Clarel’s understanding of the common bond of suffering. Those he watches passing by, man or animal, become ‘Cross-bearers all’ (4.34.43), and he too joins the procession, despite the fact that the stones of Jerusalem remain blank” (“Wicked” 193).

Reflecting on the writer, Melville’s grand-daughter Eleanor Melville Metcalf asserted that “[f]rom the eighteen-fifties on […], he seldom went to church […]. He would on rare occasions go to All Souls’ Church in Fourth Avenue [a Unitarian Universalist Church in New York City founded in 1819], but for many years during the latter part of his life he did not do even this” (qtd. in Braswell 7). Whereas Elizabeth Melville was an active member in All Saints’ Church and a devout Unitarian, Herman Melville’s relationship with this Church seems to have been looser, and the part that he may have played within the congregation, which he joined in 1884, is unknown. Equally mysterious are the reasons why he decided to become a member in the first place.⁶ Defining itself as supporting a “‘non-creedal’ religion”, All Souls’ states today, that “[w]e believe that personal experience, conscience and reason should be the final authorities in religion, and that in the end religious authority lies not in a book or person or institution, but in ourselves” (Rankin). These major principles were foundational to the community when Melville became a member. As a matter of fact, Minister emeritus of New York’s Unitarian Church of All Souls’ Walter D. Kring has argued that, by joining All Souls’, Melville “bound himself to no hierarchy, no creed, Christian or otherwise. He simply agreed to search for the truth and to adopt whatever he believed to be the truth for his own use” (130). The difference between All Souls’ quest for “the truth” and Melville’s possibly being that Melville was well aware that there might be no “truth” at all.

By rejecting any form of institutionalized religion and dogma, Melville seems to suggest that the fraternal love and forbearance promoted—yet sometimes not practiced—by religious institutions need to emerge from individuals, within themselves lying the potentiality of being at peace (or at war) with the world and with themselves in an Ishmael-Queequeg-like way. This moves closer to a secular rather than religious view of morality that is based on the fact of being, conceived not only as our own individual lives but also as our existence in the world, and therefore our being-with others. As early as in April 1851, Melville would write to Hawthorne: “As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam. Yes, that word is the hangman”, adding that God should be taken out of the dictionary in order to be present in the street (Correspondence 186). Alfred Kazin has noted that “[w]hat he [Melville] finally come [sic] out with is that God is not a single entity to be taken seriously. It is not in ‘God’ that we are immersed, but being, the actual flux and storm. We kill ourselves when we try to turn ‘God’ from a word into an absolute separate power and then try to figure Him out” (255). It is in line with this secular conception of being and ethics that the present volume interprets Melville’s universalist project in Clarel, where the author would moreover expose a bleaker awareness of the difficulties, even impossibility, of individuals to develop such potentiality and be at peace with themselves and others.

¹ The use of the term “mankind” at this point is intended to reflect the sexism in Kant’s thinking, which, together with the philosopher’s racism, permeates his cosmopolitan theorizations.

² In her volume Melville’s Art of Democracy (1995), Nancy Fredricks acknowledges that there is no record of Melville’s having read Kant’s philosophical works. However, she notes that Melville was familiar with Kant’s thinking, as proved by six references to Kant in Melville’s novels Mardi (1849), Moby-Dick (1851), and Pierre (1852), and by the fact that the author seems to have engaged in discussions of Kant and orther German philosophers with German scholar George Adler during his 1849 trip to England (Fredricks 14). Fredricks analyzes these six references and discussion with Adler in the chapter “Melville’s Kant”, in her volume.

³ It is possible to interpret these texts as dedications to the characters that are drawn in the narratives and which, very often, the very titles to these pieces already honor.

⁴ Regarding Clarel, it is important to highlight, for example, Stan Goldman’s (1993) study of the poem as exemplifying what the scholar terms Melville’s “Protest Theism”, and William Potter’s (2004) analysis of Clarel, from the perspective of comparative religion, as an exercise in what Potter calls “intersympathy of creeds”. Complementing Potter’s analysis, moreover, Basem Ra’ad has claimed that “Melville engaged in something more profound than making ‘comparative’ points: he systematically explored various mythological systems, including the beliefs of Judaism and Christianity” (“Ancient” 138), among others. I agree with Ra’ad’s remark, and believe that Melville’s life-long exploration of religion was always enriched by his critical approach.

⁵ Some of these works include, among others, William Braswell’s Melville’s Religious Thought: An Essay in Interpretation (1943), Natalia Wright’s Melville’s Use of the Bible (1949), Lawrance Thompson’s Melville’s Quarrel with God (1952), Bruce Franklin’s In the Wake of the God’s: Melville’s Mythology (1963), T. Walter Herbert’s Moby-Dick and Calvinism: A World Dismantled (1977), James Duban’s Melville’s Major Fiction: Politics, Theology, and Imagination (1983), Stan Goldman’s Melville’s Protest Theism (1993), Walter Donald Kring’s Melville’s Religious Journey (1997), Peter Stallybrass’s “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible” (2002), Gail Coffler’s Melville’s Allusions to Religion (2004), and Ilana Pardes’s Melville’s Bibles (2008).

⁶ William Potter has explained that Melville and Lizzie together belonged consecutively to two Unitarian Churches in New York at different moments of their lives, the Church of the Divine Unity, before moving to Pittsfield in 1850, and All Souls’ Church, after returning from Pittsfield in 1863 (205).