Paradiso Terrestre: America\'s Displaced Wilderness in Melville\'s Clarel

Paradiso Terrestre: America’s Displaced Wilderness in Melville’s Clarel TIM WOOD Nassau Community College His terror had to blow itself quite out To let him see it; but it was the gale had blown him Past the Cape Horn of sensible success Which cries: “This rock is Eden. Shipwreck here.” —W. H. Auden, “Herman Melville”

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s early as Emerson, America anticipated its national poem—its epic— in terms of its geography. In “The Poet” (1844), Emerson opines that “We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials . . . . Yet America is a poem in our eyes, its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres” (Emerson 465). Then there is Whitman’s famous declaration in the preface to Leaves of Grass (1855): “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” (Whitman 5). In The Necessary Angel (1951), Wallace Stevens, awaiting the next thing after The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, echoes Emerson: “The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of the earth remains to be written” (Stevens 142). Charles Olson, whose Maximus Poems is one of the more ambitious modernist epics, rivals Whitman’s enthusiasm; in Call Me Ishmael (1947), he writes: “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy. It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning” (Olson 17). All of these writers are searching for the American epic and expect that it will be about the land. Melville’s centennial poem Clarel is the American epic about geography, the land, and SPACE. The poem is 18,000 lines, composed almost entirely in iambic tetrameter, most of it in rhyme. It is about a young theological student named Clarel taking a pilgrimage in the Holy Land. While Clarel debates major philosophical and religious questions with a coterie of eclectic companions, he traverses a sacred landscape and explores sites saturated with the fundamental myths upon which much of Western civilization is based. Comprised in large part of dialogic treatises that gain significance from the holy sites in which c 2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 

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they occur, the plot of the poem may seem flimsy. But Clarel is not about what happens as much as it is about the landscape. Published in a highly limited run, the poem was barely reviewed. Neither Emerson nor Whitman mentioned Clarel. Nor did Stevens. Olson dismissed it as “that rosary of doubt” (Olson 89) where “Christ had contracted [Melville’s] vision” (86). According to him, Clarel, one of the longest poems in American literature, atrophies Melville’s imagination with its astringent religious undertones. Nevertheless, as the poem that traverses the ground of America’s literary imagination, Clarel is the kind of poem these writers seek. Not surprisingly, none of these writers identifies Clarel as an American epic. The desert outside Jerusalem is an odd setting and obscures an underlying American geography. Nevertheless, the poem is about American empire, and the Palestinian desert in Clarel is the specter of an American wilderness where, as Richard Slotkin notes, “the landscape of the Puritan mind replaces the real wilderness” (Slotkin 99). This imagined Puritan landscape is a sacred geography directly linked to but always separate from the biblical Jerusalem and its surrounding desert. As Basem Ra’ad explains, “the phenomenon of sacred geography—as it showed itself during the nineteenth century—had more alien roots in a theological typology most fully expressed in the fundamentalist forms of Protestantism, Puritanism in particular” (Ra’ad, “Sacred Topography” 256). So Melville brings this Puritan transplantation of a biblical landscape—America’s new “New Jerusalem”—back to its land of origin, fusing the imagined Jerusalem with the actual Jerusalem where America’s sacred construct short-circuits. The landscape is never separate from what the characters imagine it to be, and many of the most significant characters, like Clarel himself, are American or have ties to America. In a review of the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Clarel, Helen Vendler argues that the “succession of landscapes” is the greater of “two principal inventions” in the poem, the other being “the concentric clusters of ideologically determined personages” (Vendler 41). I would go further and say that the “succession of landscapes” and “ideologically determined personages” together comprise a singular invention, since the landscapes, which are just as “ideologically determined,” are indistinguishable from the characters. Ra’ad similarly argues in “Ancient Lands” that “landscape often becomes a protagonist” and that characters are often “expressed in terms of landscape as a factor of consciousness” (Ra’ad, “Ancient Lands” 142). For Ra’ad, the interchangeable characters and landscape remain separate and distinct. But if pushed further, Ra’ad’s insight suggests that the characters and the landscape are in fact indistinguishable. Ra’ad’s idea of “landscape as a factor of consciousness” intimates that the landscape in Clarel—whether it is the 86

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American wilderness or the Palestinian desert—is a landscape of the imagination, one mediated by an archetypal biblical narrative that the characters project onto real ground. The landscape serves as a text to be read by characters searching for signs that tautologically confirm a projected Christian narrative of promise and redemption. In toggling between the American wilderness and the Palestinian desert, Melville shows this vision to be a collective act of the imagination that is as inescapable as it is portable. Even worse, while the characters search for answers and redemption, they are unwittingly bound to a Christian narrative that can only lead to their dismay or their destruction. Underlying the philosophical discourse and the pilgrims’ various perceptions of the sacred landscape is Melville’s darker version of the Edenic fall in Milton’s Paradise Lost. While the characters may not be aware of it, they are left in the desert to rehearse this catastrophic and irremediable loss. The actions of and relationship between Nehemiah and Nathan, two seemingly minor characters, reveal the biblical narrative that girds the sacred landscape and display the most extreme consequences of playing out this story. Both are caught in a web of textual allusions and narrative entanglements that, like nearly all the characters, hem them in, even in the desert’s vast expanse. Both characters are ultimately destroyed by their excessive attempts to literalize a sacred narrative on a landscape where the promise of paradise proves painfully illusory. By the time we reach the canto titled “A Halt” halfway through Part 2 (“The Wilderness”), the connection between the Palestinian desert and the American wilderness has become obvious. But here, the indelible link between these landscapes becomes undeniable. In the canto, Nehemiah, whom Walter Bezanson calls “the aged American millennialist” (Bezanson 629) and whom the other pilgrims consider both “crazy” and “a saint” (NN Clarel 2.10.18889), starts “flinging aside stone after stone . . . to mend the way [for the Lord]” (2.10.190-98). A millenarian who seeks the fulfillment of Christ’s promise of paradise by bringing about the end of the world, Nehemiah tries to fulfill the prognostications of the Old Testament by making manifest the words of Isaiah: “Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God” (Isaiah 40:3). The word “halt,” denoting a temporary stop and even a sense of urgent resistance (“halt!”), conveys the immediate response the other pilgrims have to Nehemiah as they look on stunned and alarmed. With its additional sense of “falter,” the word implicitly critiques Nehemiah’s effort to pave the way for the coming Christ by casting aside stones in the desert. Nehemiah’s actions may seem ridiculous, but the impulse behind them is not. Encapsulating both unwavering belief and mindless conformity, A JOURNAL OF MELVILLE STUDIES

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Nehemiah begins his task “feebly” in a condition of physical, mental, and even moral weakness: Yet feebly, nathless as he wrought In charge imposed though not unloved (NN Clarel 2.10.191-92)

The line beginning with “feebly” and ending with “wrought” shows Nehemiah to be as tenacious as he is weak. “Wrought” even lends Nehemiah’s pyrrhic act of displacement an ironic sense of fashioning or creating. By opposing itself, the line brings the conflicting aspects of Nehemiah together and reveals the contradictions inherent in the charge he embodies. Etymologically, “feeble” is rooted in the verb “to weep, ” and the sense of weeping connects Nehemiah’s efforts back to “the wall of wail” (1.16.196), a crucial feature of the landscape that appears as Nehemiah tells Clarel the story of Nathan, a figure that haunts Nehemiah and the landscape he desperately wants to transform: “Tell, friend,” said Clarel eagerly, As from the wall of wail they passed; “Father and daughter? Who may be That strange pervert?” No willing haste The mentor showed; awhile he fed On anxious thoughts; (1.16.195-200)

The story of Nathan provokes “anxious thoughts,” an ominous beginning to the tale. But the presence of the Wailing Wall is even more ominous. The “wall of wail,” a remnant of Solomon’s twice-destroyed temple, memorializes the fall of the temple and in the context of the poem suggests the inevitable end of Christianity’s mythic paradigms. But equally important, the second destruction represents a beginning, since it corresponds with the First Jewish-Roman War (70 C.E.), which occurs around the time that the Gospels were first recorded. The Wailing Wall is a metonym for a structure built on the rubble and displacement of past empires. The image connects Rome and Jerusalem to America as a trio of synoptic territories all brought to one state of ruin or another. In Clarel, Jerusalem serves as an estranged epicenter, an anachronistic hinge in the progress from the fall of Rome to an American empire rent asunder by the Civil War. The Northwestern Newberry editors’ commentary on the cry “America!” (NN Clarel 4.21.140) attends to this nationalistic conflation. They offer two interpretations: “this anomalously isolated exclamation seems best construed as the collective thought of Rolfe, Vine, and Clarel in response to Ungar’s tirade. . . . Alternatively, the exclamation may be taken as the storyteller’s reflection” (NN Clarel 833). Either reading suggests that the exclamation comes out of the poem’s collective consciousness. This climactic 88

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renaming attaches “America!” to the derisive references to Rome as a “botcher of a crumbling tomb” (NN Clarel 2.26.5) and to “Jerusalem!” wherein its obliterating trenches “Egyptian, Mede, Greek, Arab, Turk, / Roman, and Frank, beleaguering lurk” (3.19.32-34). America repeats the destructive impulses of empire as a “new confirmation of the fall / Of Adam” (4.21.124-25). But America is not an apotheosis. The storyteller admits that “sequel may ensue” (NN Clarel 4.21.125); yet, any sequel will merely present “Myriads playing pygmy parts— / Debased into equality” (4.21.127-28). America is just the most recent version of Jerusalem’s “vague heap” piled on a “Stony metropolis of stones” (4.2.10, 12). Melville conjures up Milton’s prototypical vision of Hell’s “thick swarmed . . . pygmean race . . . that infernal court” (Paradise Lost 1.767-92) as the prototype for the “Dark Ages of Democracy” (NN Clarel 4.21.138) that America hauls out of the ruins of Rome and deposits on an already displaced Jerusalem landscape. Not only Melville’s play with etymology but also his deft use of distressed diction links Nehemiah’s Sisyphean labor back to the story he tells about Nathan’s self-destructive mission. The line “Yet feebly, nathless as he wrought” (NN Clarel 2.10.191) pivots on the conspicuous yet seemingly insubstantial term “nathless.” Serving as a metrical hinge in the line, “nathless” is a prime example of Melville’s use of Spenserian antiquarianism and recalls the poetic polysemy in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Melville’s use of epic diction makes “nathless” into a contraction for “Nathanless.” Nathan appears early on in the poem in the long and crucial canto titled “Nathan.” Bezanson neatly sums him up as “An American Gentile Zionist farmer, the father of Ruth . . . primarily a case history in AMERICAN DOUBT AND BELIEF” (Bezanson 628). Nathan is the son of a staunch Puritan patriarch who immigrates to America and then moves his family deeper into the woods to remain uncorrupted by the burgeoning American settlements. Nathan grows up in that wilderness haunted by his father, who is buried amid “Three Indian mounds” (NN Clarel 1.17.56). His mother raises him under a strict religious dispensation that Nathan resents but conforms to for his mother’s sake. His uncle, a paternal figure after his father dies, is killed in a landslide that leaves Nathan “unhinged” (1.17.99). This leveling of the landscape precipitates his crisis of faith. Nathan’s family represents paradoxical Puritan attitudes articulated by writers like Mather and Rowlandson in which “the vast and desolate wilderness” is both evil and divinely purified; it remains a place for the individual who, resisting temptation, “shall be raised incorruptible” (1 Corinthians 15:52). The wilderness is a postlapsarian world that needs to be restored to achieve God’s Edenic promise and the wreckage of this imagined terrain sends Nathan’s religious doubts spiraling out of control. After the landslide, A JOURNAL OF MELVILLE STUDIES

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he quests heedlessly and, in hindsight, inevitably toward Jerusalem. After exploring the poles of pagan belief and extreme Christian sectarianism (NN Clarel 1.17.133-200), Nathan’s quest for faith climaxes when he meets Agar, a Jewish immigrant, falls in love, converts to Judaism, and raises a family with two children, Ruth and “a young child” (1.17.288) who is not named. But his religious doubt redounds as a religious zeal that compels him to move his family to Palestine with a plan to restore Jerusalem. He dies outside the walls of the city attacking the local tribes in an effort to “purify” the land. From the beginning, and even after his conversion and move to Jerusalem, Nathan’s identity is inseparable from a prototypically sacralized vision of America’s Puritan wilderness. His struggle for religious certainty leads Nathan to an untenable faith, which also turns out to be the basis for what Nehemiah displays in “A Halt.” Nathan is, as Robert Milder puts it, “narratively aborted” (Milder 195) and dead by the time of “A Halt,” leaving the poem “nathless”; nevertheless, Nathan has colonized Nehemiah’s imagination. The alliterative and associative relationship of their names, like the names of Clarel and Celio, who are also thematically tied, reinforces the sense that, in effect, Nehemiah functions as Nathan’s doppelganger. The relationship between Nathan and Nehemiah is based on more than a few deft puns. After all, Nehemiah introduces Clarel to Nathan’s daughter, Ruth, Clarel’s love interest and motivation for taking the pilgrimage. More importantly, Nathan, although real, essentially exists in the narrative as a figment of Nehemiah’s imagination. Nathan appears initially in passing. He substantively enters the poem only when Nehemiah tells his story, having befriended Clarel, who inquires after Nathan and Ruth as they walk by. By telling Nathan’s story, Nehemiah absorbs this sense of a sacred geography that comes with it. The narrative pertains to him just as much as it does to Nathan, and Nehemiah unwittingly lives out the story by attempting to restore the Promised Land. The description of Nehemiah beginning his tale about Nathan brings together references to “Father and daughter” and “that strange pervert” (NN Clarel 1.16.197-98). The combination evokes the moment Satan meets his estranged daughter Sin at the gates of hell as he travels toward “this pendant world” (Paradise Lost 2.1052). When Satan fails to recognize his daughter, Sin reprimands him by reminding Satan of her birth from his head (2.747-61). Already figuring Nathan and his project to restore paradise in Jerusalem as misguided, the echo recalls the Satanic idea that “the mind is its own place and in itself” (1.254) and that the attempt to “make a Heaven of hell, a hell of Heaven” (1.255) can never succeed. Nathan has invaded the head of Nehemiah with “anxious thoughts,” and as Ra’ad puts it with regard to the affects of 90

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this “invented geography” on the actual Palestine, “a landscape of belief has colonized the mind” (Ra’ad, Hidden Histories 87). In telling Nathan’s story, Nehemiah is, like Satan, myopically literalizing, unable to see the larger story of which his narrative is a part: then grievingly The story gave—a tangled thread, Which, cleared from snarl and ordered so, Follows transferred, with interflow Of much Nehemiah scarce might add. (NN Clarel 1.16.200-4)

The story, told “grievingly” at the “wall of wail,” is indeed a “tangled thread,” part of a network of stories that binds the characters together and confines the heterogeneous bunch to a single, predetermined fate. Like Adam and Eve cast out at the end of Paradise Lost (12.645), they can do little more than weep. We glimpse the skein holding these threads together when the story about Nathan ostensibly told by Nehemiah gets transposed into the voice of the storyteller. The transfer implicates Nehemiah in the same “tangled thread” that he tries to unravel. The storyteller is left to contribute what Nehemiah “scarce might add.” The oxymoronic phrase “scarce might add,” recalling other such phrases in the poem like “ampler dearth” (NN Clarel 2.13.119), suggests that there are additions to the story that the characters cannot know but will nevertheless play out. As the storyteller declares at the end of the Nathan canto, “Events shall speak” (NN Clarel 1.17.342), and so the story of Nathan is both a tale Nehemiah tells and a narrative within which he is embedded. The storyteller ends the Nathan canto by announcing Nathan’s impending death before the storyteller abruptly cuts himself off.1 The storyteller’s words give way to the delta of the “unsaid / That steep toward which the current led” (1.17. 340-41). Like the colon that ends the first of Pound’s Cantos, the Nathan canto becomes an initiating narrative that the rest of the poem tends to elaborate. By embodying those “events,” Nehemiah continues Nathan’s mission, subsumed in the settler-colonial-elsewhere made permanent as “the undiscovered country from whose bourn / no traveller returns” (Hamlet 3.1.81-82). In “flinging stones,” Nehemiah exposes the logic of Nathan’s self-exile in Jerusalem, where the redemptive promise is endlessly deferred, making any attempt at restoration nothing more than a continuous act of removal. Nehemiah, “the guide / who did in sketch this tale begin” (NN Clarel 1.17.343-44), takes up the “charge.” He continues Nathan’s quixotic quest born out of a profound commitment to a transportable Christian narrative that transmogrifies any landscape into its myopic vision of the world. As such, the underlying biblical narrative that these two characters live out A JOURNAL OF MELVILLE STUDIES

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gets unmoored from time and place. The poetic logic of the poem makes the apocalyptic slide in the White Hills that kills Nathan’s uncle an antecedent for the stony rubble of the Palestinian desert that Nehemiah feels compelled to clear away by “flinging aside stone after stone” (2.10.190). From both a chronological and geographical standpoint, this notion of causation is certainly questionable. Along with the obvious problem of the stony rubble’s displacement, a sense of anachronism emerges from a chronology where Nathan’s story precedes Nehemiah’s, and so an event in the American wilderness becomes a catalyst for an attempt to fulfill an Old Testament command in the Palestinian desert. The warped chronology girding this effort to redeem the Puritan promise in the American wilderness by paving a way for Christ’s return to Jerusalem is an obvious critique of America’s colonial ambitions since the attempt to take over other lands becomes shamefully self-justified. But beyond that, the causal connection between the two landscapes reveals Melville’s darker purpose and discloses the pervasive Miltonic narrative that underlies these disparate attempts to redeem a ruined landscape. Melville redacts Milton’s Paradise Lost, a prototype and precursor of Clarel, by extending Milton’s thematic logic to America but without the redemptive possibility Milton implies. In particular, Melville applies the temporal structure of Paradise Lost that Milton derives from biblical history to what Obenzinger calls a “prototypical story of spiritual quest across America’s religious landscape” (Obenzinger 84). Like Milton, Melville bends what Edward Tayler calls “the model of the straight line that implies Moses lived before Christ and that the Second Coming postdates the Incarnation” (14) into a circuitous series of repetitions and, as Tayler puts it, “moves straight through history in a circle” (Tayler 14). For Milton, the future is foreclosed and the redemption of the world—from a divine perspective anyway—has always already happened. However, for Melville, who takes away the promise of redemption, each attempt to achieve the promised end merely rehearses the inevitable and irrevocable fall. Where Milton maintains a distinction between the prelapsarian and postlapsarian landscapes, Melville collapses them. In Milton, moving “straight through history in a circle” eventually brings us back to paradise. Melville, on the other hand, applies the Miltonic sense of circular history—a pattern reinforced in Clarel by the circuitous path that the pilgrims trudge— to an actual landscape, an inherently fallen world and, what’s more, a ruin. In doing so, Melville turns the literal ground into a literary set of tropes and signs that can never be fulfilled. Where Milton holds out the promise of an eventual return to paradise, Melville repeats its ruin with a devastating determinism. 92

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Nehemiah etherizes Nathan’s vision of the Holy Land as a castle in the air floating above the Dead Sea. In this sense, his casting aside stones undermines the foundation that establishes the air beneath his utopian edifice: While every stone that he removed Laid bare but more. The student sighed, So well he kenned his ways distraught At influx of his eldritch tide. (NN Clarel 2.10.193-96)

Reinforcing the unremitting repetition, the adjective “eldritch” recapitulates and revises the “eventide” that ends the “Nathan” canto. As the adjective “eldritch” suggests with its connotations of exile as well as the foreign, strange, and otherworldly, Nathan’s religious romanticism and utopian nostalgia is a desire for an origin that never was. The American exile’s search for a sacred home requires an idealizing and thus mythologizing of the past that Nehemiah attempts to force upon the future. In this case, however, Nehemiah’s pursuit of his vision causes him to drown while sleepwalking, chasing a castle in the air. No better image for this type of “restoration” exists than Nehemiah’s dream of the city of God rising as an ephemeral cloud forming out of the evaporation from the Dead Sea (2.38.15-18). Even in this timeless desertscape, the words of T. S. Eliot’s contagious twentieth-century clairvoyant hold true: “Fear death by water.” The drowning, along with “eldritch tide,” brings us back to the end of the Nathan canto and the multiple puns on the word “eventide.” The word briefly becalms the “interflow” with an “even-tide.” It also evokes the continual evening imagery that starts in the canto with the “prairie twilight” and echoes all the way to an attendant passage in the canto titled “Twilight” in Part 4: And legends, floating came that air From one invisible in shade Singing and lightly sauntering on Toward the cloisters. (NN Clarel 4.24.16-19)

The lines describe the Prodigal who passes “as might a wave / Rippling” and leaves Clarel “Unkenned!” by the “tropic song” (4.24.22-26). The imagery shadows that of Nathan and Nehemiah. The Prodigal’s song reconfigures Nehemiah’s “wilder legend thrill” where “Dream merged in dream: the city rose— / Shrouded, it went up from the wave” (2.38.4, 15-16); Clarel’s response echoes Nehemiah’s quixotic labor when “The student sighed / So well he kenned his ways distraught” (2.10.194-95). In a sense, the eventide not only anticipates the waters that will eventually drown Nehemiah but names the irreconcilable condition between faith and doubt in which all of the pilgrims remain “held in solution” (1.17.196). A JOURNAL OF MELVILLE STUDIES

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The play between “eventide” and “twilight” also recalls patterns involving the word “twilight” in Milton (Parker 329 ff.). As in Milton, the words “eventide” and “twilight” both connote a pendulous moment where the tide is between ebb and flow, the time between day and night, and the fate of the characters is for the moment uncertain. Yet, although the use of “eventide” and “twilight” in Clarel conform to the logic of Paradise Lost, they turn out to be far more foreboding. In Milton, “twilight” and “evening” hold out the promise of “eve” becoming “morning” (which also transforms Eve’s “mourning” to Eve’s “morning”). Melville, on the other hand, elides any such hope. Melville replaces Milton’s chiasmus that reverses “day to night” and turns it into “night to day” with a static progression from “prairie twilight” to “eventide” to “Night.” This pattern persists throughout Clarel and is recapitulated near the end by “Twilight” and “The Night Ride,” the only temporal titles in Part 4. As the poem moves away from the “wall of wail,” it progresses from grief to grief as Nehemiah’s dream gives way to a devastating reality. In Paradise Lost, the idea of evening as twilight directs the relationship between Satan and Eve as Satan invades Eve’s consciousness through dream. We have seen how Melville recapitulates this type of psychic invasion in Nehemiah, but he goes further. The implications of Nehemiah’s accidental drowning in the Dead Sea are far worse than those for Milton’s Eve. In Milton, the dream that leads to the fall holds the promise of redemption. In Melville, the promise of redemption becomes indistinguishable from the false promise of the fruit from “the tree of interdicted knowledge” (Paradise Lost 5.51-52). As with Eve, Nehemiah’s “dream merged in dream” (NN Clarel 2.38.15); however, Nehemiah dreams of “the New Jerusalem” (2.38.42). The temptation is no longer the “interdicted tree” that can be retracted by the Son’s sacrifice but rather a nightmare vision of “the earth” when it “shall all be Paradise, far happier place / Than this of Eden” (Paradise Lost 12.463-65). It is the promised end that “beckoned, beckoned him away” and to which “In sleep he rose” (NN Clarel 2.38.48-50). Nehemiah awakens into a hallucination that resembles Michael’s proleptic vision of a heavenly earth administered in Book 12 of Paradise Lost. However, it is hardly a moment of prophetic fulfillment. In rising to pursue his reverie, Nehemiah drowns, and “vanished this somnambulist” (NN Clarel 2.38.50). The drowning in the desert epitomizes the paradox woven throughout Clarel of the desert as sea. A blind optimism born of a landscape replaces visions with mirages. The real water—much as in Eliot’s The Waste Land or, more aptly, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Milton’s Lycidas—is conjured by Rolfe’s analogy between Nehemiah and the doomed seafarer (NN Clarel 1.37). Nehemiah represents a panoply of figures who are tormented by 94

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the unacknowledged fact that “the promised end”—the resolution to events and stories that the pilgrims anticipate as “yet to come”—has already taken place. There is never any real hope for restoration. Instead, the past offers a vision of the future that makes the present a matter of circuitous wandering. Clarel proves Augustine’s view that “the beginning . . . somehow contains the ending, the ending the beginning” (Tayler 13-14). The future forecloses a predetermined mythic past and the present consists of a ruin where one can rehearse a fallen condition, either like Nathan who displaces an imagined landscape onto a sacred elsewhere or Nehemiah attempting to create that image by “flinging aside stone after stone” (NN Clarel 2.10.190). These acts of displacement and removal, deemed futile, hubristic, and even crazy by the more philosophical characters in the poem, turn out to be the only logical responses to the conditions that the landscape provides. Conjured from a network of narratives told by an unnamed storyteller, the characters reenact myths that conform to Bakhtin’s sense of epic as “absolutely completed and finished . . . [and] whose constitutive feature is the transferal of the world it describes to an absolute past of national beginnings and peak times” (Bakhtin 15). Rather than proving its obsolescence as Bakhtin might predict, Clarel shows the continuance of an absolute past and the horrible consequences once the past is imagined as “absolutely completed and finished.” Nehemiah may be “nathless,” but, like Nathan, his actions channel a divine command “in charge imposed though not unloved” (NN Clarel 2.10.192). Along with a connotation of enduring suffering, “imposed” carries a sense of fraudulence and of being an obstacle to others. What is more interesting, though, is the word’s use in printing, where “impose” means to lay type or to prepare a stone for print. This meaning of the word underscores the textuality of Nehemiah’s charge and makes Nehemiah’s activity emblematic of Melville’s own endeavor to write “a metrical affair, a pilgrimage or what not, of several thousand lines, eminently adapted for unpopularity” (qtd in Kenny 219). Of course, the landscape through which the characters travel is made of words. Words litter the landscape as perplexities etched into caves or as obfuscating graffiti scrawled on grotto walls. Just the same, the landscape also litters the words as the subtext which posits paradise as a discoverable place that can never actually be found. Bezanson, citing Melville’s journal, points out that “Melville thought the nineteenth-century Zionist movement ‘preposterous’ and ‘half melancholy, half farcical”’ (Bezanson 629). However, in the personages of Nathan and Nehemiah, Melville offers a serious and sustained vision of the Miltonic landscape both literalized and Americanized. The epic is based on a fantastic and fanatic landscape, the wrecked Eden of a Christian imagination, upon which A JOURNAL OF MELVILLE STUDIES

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the pilgrims travel. In Nathan’s misplaced attempt to restore what is already a displaced ruin, the events become transferable rather than locatable, leeched of their specific historical and geographical references. Attending to Christianity’s sacred landscape, place becomes a matter of allusive yet elusive symbols and types that relate just as much to an event occurring in Palestine in the mists of biblical time as to an eighteenth-century occurrence in the temperate, semicultivated wilds of New Hampshire. The landscape in Clarel superimposes these geographies on one another and gives us a map of a colonized and fallen world.

Note 1 The term “storyteller,” borrowed from Walter Benjamin in his treatment of epic narrators in his essay “The Storyteller,” intends both to identify a narrator who, while separate from the author, exists outside the text and to distinguish him from the types of narrators most often associated with novels who exist within the fictive frame of the text.

Works Cited Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 83-109. Bezanson, Walter E. “Historical and Critical Note.” NN Clarel 505-637. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays & Lectures. New York: The Library of America, 1983. Kenny, Vincent. Herman Melville’s Clarel: A Spiritual Autobiography. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1973. Melville, Herman. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern UP and The Newberry Library, 1991. Cited in the text as NN Clarel. Milder, Robert. Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. David Scott Kastan. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2005. Cited in the text as PL. Obenzinger, Hilton. American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999. Olson, Charles. Collected Prose. Ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Parker, Patricia. “Eve, Evening, and the Labor of Reading in Paradise Lost.” English Literary Renaissance 9 (1979): 319-42. Web. 1 December 2010. Ra’ad, Basem L. “Ancient Lands.” A Companion to Herman Melville. Ed. Wyn Kelley. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. 129-45. ———. “Construction of Sacred Topography: The Nineteenth Century and Today.” NineteenthCentury Contexts 29.2 (2007): 251-69. ———. Hidden Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean. London: Pluto Press, 2010. Rowlandson, Mary. The Narrative of the Captivity and the Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Web. 10 December 2010. Shakespeare, William. “Hamlet.” The Norton Shakespeare. 2 ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. 10671168. Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860. Norman, Oklahoma: U of Oklahoma P, 1973.

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Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1951. Tayler, Edward. Milton’s Poetry: Its Development in Time. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1979. Vendler, Helen. “Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land.” New Republic 207.24 (7 Dec. 1992): 39-42. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York: W.W. Norton, 1973.

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