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Prologue

Timothy Marr University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Perhaps the most widely read of Herman Melville’s literary works today is “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, a sketch of an abortive attempt of a New York lawyer to make sense of an employee who “prefers not to” follow his requests. The story, subtitled “A Story of Wall Street”, is full of walls: the screens that sector the law office, the bricks that serve as the only view from its window, and the prison named the Tombs that immures the solitary copyist in which he dies in vagrancy. The narrator ends his story with the exclamation “Ah Bartleby, Ah humanity!”—in part a confession of his realization that the inside truths of all humans are heartbreakingly pent up in impenetrable isolation. However, this story of Wall Street paradoxically provides avenues of connection as well as impediments of occlusion. The same language that fails to account for the strange lot of the scrivener also expresses a universal yearning for intersubjective understanding. Melville suggests in “Bartleby” that the “dead letters” of words both embody the walls that tragically divide individuals even as they ironically intimate the potential for correspondence between writer and reader on gracious literary errands of life.

Some of the reasons for Melville’s centrality in the canon of great American authors are the diversity of his writings, the planetary reach of the settings of his literature, and his democratic inclusion of characters from all around the ambit of the world. This is part of the foundation upon which López builds her important interpretation of Melville’s art as a universalist project of literary production. Laura López Peña’s book explores the dynamic paradoxes of intersubjective universalism by assessing a broad range of recent critical theories of human community as well as exploring the sectarian problem of communitarian or sectarian exclusion. She then examines their operations in Melville’s first and most important published works of poetry, Clarel and Battle-Pieces.

López suggests that the longings of interhuman love are natural traces of the togetherness experienced between members of a diverse family to which all belong. This yearning, which she shares with Melville, embodies the political promise of democracy—a “common continent of men [sic] […] federated along one keel” that joins varied individuals in a multilogue that dissolves the distance of difference through intimate interaction. In such a pluralist world the intersubjectivity that she calls “human beings who are-with each other” (after Jean-Luc Nancy) bridges division by restoring a community of forbearance that is radical in its inclusive universalism.¹

“Bartleby, the Scrivener” dramatizes how this promise remains fleeting and utopian as it is confounded by the limited profession of the lawyer’s conventional charity to reach across and comprehend Bartleby’s traumatic aloneness. Melville often chafed against the cruelty of a fate that created humanity of the same kin yet ruptured the intimacy of community by a series of separations that set people against themselves. López argues that one force that sunders human society into “scattered subjectivities” is humanitarian cosmopolitanism itself through the partiality and privilege of its claims to “universalism” which simultaneously segregate others as outsiders, heathens, castaways, criminals, renegades, and exiles. Among the authorizing agencies that build walls between individuals are religious exclusiveness, racial supremacy, aristocratic elitism, national exceptionalism, and ethnic communitarianism. These provincializing ideologies render humans into what Melville calls “isolatos”, entities so removed from one another that they remain confined within the myopic boundaries into which their cultures have drawn them and by which their societies have defined them.

López has chosen one of Melville’s longest and least read works as the prism for examining the literary politics of his intersubjective universalism. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land was published in New York by Harpers in 1876, the year in which the United States celebrated its centennial. Clarel is comprised of over 17,000 lines of verse, making it one of the longest poems in the English language. However, in an age that craved the short lyric and invented shorthand, Melville’s strenuous pilgrimage in poetry was ignored. Less than three years after Clarel’s only printing of 350 copies, Melville gave permission for 224 of them to be pulped by his publisher. To Harvard professor Lawrence Buell the poem remains “the great white elephant, the great unread […] among all the major works of all the canonical nineteenth-century English-language authors”.² American writer and poet Robert Penn Warren acutely called it “a seismograph that no one looked at”.³

López’s careful examination of Clarel releases it from the “dead letter” walls of isolation that have impeded readers from accessing its artistic wisdom. Beyond the Walls thus contributes to the important process of resurrecting Melville’s career as a major poet, which lasted three times the length of the period in which he wrote his fiction, from “the pall of incomprehension” that Willard Thorp diagnosed in 1938 and under which his artistic achievements in verse have remained occluded for far too long.⁴ Her book reveals the biographical and historical circumstances that led to the composition of his opus in verse. López charts the twenty years of Melville’s career and literary production from his own journey to the Holy Land in 1856-7, following his completion of his last novel, to the publication of his poetic meditation on that journey in 1876. During that time he transformed himself into a poet, endured the national destruction of the Civil War, and accepted a job as a Customs Officer in New York City where he worked gathering revenue as an outdoor surveyor discharging cargo on the docks. While Melville was engaged in the compositional rigors of his poetic pilgrimage, he lived his daily life on the front line of the expansion of American capitalism, where he experienced both the burgeoning vigors of commerce as well as the squalid corruptions of greed, graft, and speculation. When Melville was walking to and from the wharves of Manhattan his creative mind was populating the Holy Land with a symposium of human characters for a circular pilgrimage together of descent and return that ends in loss and separation.

Beyond the Walls also offers original commentary on Melville’s prior book of Civil War poetry named Battle-Pieces, intersperses illuminating commentary from her thorough knowledge of Melville’s oeuvre, and engages in a dialogue with other scholars who have grappled with the artistic accomplishment of Clarel. One of the most original aspects of Beyond the Walls is López’s alignment of Melville’s themes with the transnational eclipse of democratic promise during the years of Reconstruction and the emergence of the “Gilded Age”. Melville transposes the social divisions within the United States along with European habits of imperialism and tyranny onto the Holy Land, which becomes localized as the symbolic stage for his meditations on the human drama he documents in Clarel of “the arrest of hope’s advance”.

Melville’s poem transcribes the tragic divide between the potential of intersubjective universalism and the actuality of human estrangement as partisanship divides communities and religious practice strays from its ethical core. Melville tests the integrity of his characters by dramatizing their lost opportunities to choose connection over convention and by honoring their fortitude to endure with neither reward nor certitude. The careful discipline of Melville’s metrical pilgrimage leads ultimately to the lesson that words cannot embody or replace the truths they hope to communicate, and instead form Babel-like partitions that piece humans apart and silence their conversations. Out of the loneliness of human suffering emerges a shared consolation, manifest within Melville’s art, through the voicing of an existential anguish that López calls a “universal existential wail” that evokes what Alphonso Lingis calls “the murmur of the world”.⁵ Melville challenges his readers to confront the sad and shared wisdom that “naught else abides on fickle earth but unkept promises of joy”.⁶

Beyond the Walls serves as a compelling introduction to the panoply of themes and characters in Clarel and the heritage of critical scholarship assessing its accomplishment. Newton Arvin celebrated Clarel’s “crowdedness of social landscape”, claiming that “[n]owhere else, not even in Moby-Dick does Melville fill the stage more populously, […] or succeed more brilliantly in giving vitality to secondary and even to incidental figures”.⁷ These characters include such diverse figures as a black Jew from southern India, an Albanian Muslim mercenary, a disillusioned Swedish idealist, a Jewish geologist, a Confederate veteran descended from Indians and Catholics, a Yankee convert to Zionism, and the only character given a full name: Señor Don Hannibal Rohon del Aquaviva, who lost a leg and an arm fighting in Mexico. López shows the restless but convivial American skeptic named Rolfe, a “messmate of the elements”, to be most representative of Melville’s philosophy of “manysidedness”. Rolfe embodies how the refractions of Melville’s polyphonic poetic voice musters a multifaceted meditation on human vagaries throughout the circuit of its “pilgrimage”. The genius of humanity is registered by practicing a genial forbearance that acknowledges an interiority to others while realizing that, though it cannot be seen, it but must be respected at the cost of being blind.

López shows Melville’s works and poetry, in particular Clarel, to be an ethical testing ground—between literary characters as well as between author and reader—that she calls “a space of political and ethical (im)probabilities”. The loquacity and persistence of Melville’s own literary voice, even when framed in the form of poetic verse, embodied his hope that diversity can be sustained in dialogue. However, the rigor of his poetic meter also challenges the reader’s access to its philosophical deliberations. Her study reveals Melville to be a sophisticated contemplator of political ethics in his dramatization that the creativity that connects people with each other in sustaining ways also figures forth the imagined fantasies through which their hopes for communion are frustrated.

The failure of Clarel to earn the readers it deserves is one measure of its aborted potentiality. Melville himself consigned Clarel to oblivion, claiming that it was “eminently adapted for unpopularity”, and it has repulsed or estranged audiences over the years.⁸ The fact that a young Spanish female scholar in the twenty-first century so intimately reengages this neglected poem by a nineteenth-century American male author is itself a tribute to the intersubjectivity of Melville’s universalist art. Beyond the Walls is also testimony to López’s own responsive struggle as a reader to surmount the silence of distance and remain open to the invitation of Melville’s verse and the human wisdom it communicates. López’s capacious sensitivity to the ways that Melville’s words invite empathic relations transacts the potential she finds at the core of its expressive labors. Her own writing carries forward this ethical responsibility to its readers as an integral part of its intellectual charge. The insurmountable challenge to the heart is to not become entranced by the dictates of culture so as to remain capable of being moved by feeling the call to join together across the chasms of conventions and of words.

López’s response to Melville’s literary expression embodies the “Humanities” in the way that dramatizes how the engagement of the reader bonds with the text to open the potential of its promise for intersubjective sharing. Helen Vendler, another Harvard professor of poetry, sensitively appraised Clarel as “one of the lasting documents of American culture” which “deserves to be better known”.⁹ Beyond the Walls helps us to know Clarel better by providing evidence for Robert Penn Warren’s assessment that Melville’s poem is “a fundamentally necessary document of our human experience”.¹⁰ Both Clarel and Beyond the Walls ultimately express how literature matters and why the humanities communicate lasting significance even through its tragic reminder of the intersubjective potential we fail to manifest.

¹ Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Eds. John Bryant and Haskell Springer (1851; New York: Pearson Longman, 2007), 123.

² Lawrence Buell, “Melville and the Question of American Decolonization”, American Literature 64 (1992): 230.

³ Robert Penn Warren, “Introduction” to Selected Poems of Herman Melville: A Reader’s Edition (New York: Random House, 1970), 46.

⁴ Quoted in Selected Poems of Herman Melville. Ed. Hennig Cohen (1964; New York: Fordham University Press, 1991), xii.

⁵ Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 69-106.

⁶ Herman Melville, “Sketch Eighth: Norfolk Isle and The Chola Widow” from “The Encantadas” in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839-1860 (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University and Newberry Library, 1995), 153.

⁷ Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York: William Sloan Associates, 1950), 276.

⁸ Herman Melville, Letter to James Billson, 10 October 1884, in Correspondence (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University and Newberry Library, 1993), 483.

⁹ Helen Vendler, “Desert Storm—A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land”, The New Republic (December 7, 1992): 42.

¹⁰ Warren, 12.