Melville's Metaphysics from Nobody in Particular
Hardeman
When Melville’s art of telling the truth alludes to one of his self-evident truths that makes his reader uncomfortable, we usually attempt to find an association with authority outside ourselves for reassurance. When he dives into an authorial exposition of his metaphysics, a reader is confronted with a direct confrontation with his own values that may have never been considered before. If the narrator’s proposition is too challenging, an inner veto suppresses the concept and we read on without a conscious response.
We all have metaphysical "first principles" that unconsciously dictate how we understand reality. For example, scientists have faith that natural laws exist that command reality and believe humans are able to comprehend and prove those laws with observations. Without that first principle, scientific theories are merely myths.
Since Melville has been very open to illustrating his metaphysics and outlined them in Mardi. A serious reader needs to be aware of his own metaphysics in order to grasp Melville’s “first truths.” as well as any meaning the reader discovers in his art.
With Clarel Melville's authorial exposition placed Canto 1.32 Of Rama after Canto Rolfe in a “niche” immediately following the pilgrim’s dialog about gods replacing gods. Rama is a key to Melville’s metaphysics that places universal consciousness as the first principle of individual life. There is only one “I am” eternal consciousness and every individual ”I am” lives in universal consciousness but knows it not.
Rama is the archetype of Melville’s self-conception collectively inherited and unconsciously present universally in every individual psyche as “A god he was, but knew it not.” Eternal universal consciousness is present in every individual as the “I am” behind the various masks an individual presents to the world.
This follows a pattern introduced in Mardi and used in all his later novels of the narrator speaking as present without and within multiple characters. He explains this first principle of his metaphysics for his willingly unbiased reader in Chapter XCVII Faith and Knowledge. He places this authorial exposition after the introduction to Samoa’s story but before the story.
“A thing incredible is about to be related; but a thing may be incredible and still be true; sometimes it is incredible because it is true. And many infidels but disbelieve the least incredible things; and many bigots reject the most obvious. . .”
“In some universe-old truths, all mankind are disbelievers. Do you believe that you lived three thousand years ago? That you were at the taking of Tyre, were overwhelmed in Gomorrah? No. But for me, I was at the subsiding of the Deluge, and helped swab the ground, and build the first house. With the Israelites, I fainted in the wilderness; was in court, when Solomon outdid all the judges before him. I, it was, who suppressed the lost work of Manetho, on the Egyptian theology, as containing mysteries not to be revealed to posterity, and things at war with the canonical scriptures; I, who originated the conspiracy against that purple murderer, Domitian; I, who in the senate moved, that great and good Aurelian be emperor. I instigated the abdication of Diocletian, and Charles the Fifth; I touched Isabella’s heart, that she hearkened to Columbus. I am he, that from the king’s minions hid the Charter in the old oak at Hartford; I harbored Goffe and Whalley: I am the leader of the Mohawk masks, who in the Old Commonwealth’s harbor, overboard threw the East India Company’s Souchong; I am the Vailed Persian Prophet; I, the man in the iron mask; I, Junius.”
In this, his early rendition of “telling truth” before Hawthorne’s influence, Melville uses humor to lessen his reader’s intransigence. He returns to Samoa’s story about a wounded warrior who had part of his brain replaced with a pig’s live brain.
“This man died not, but lived. But from being a warrior of great sense and spirit, he became a perverse-minded and piggish fellow, showing many of the characteristics of his swinish grafting.”
In this crude metaphor, he personifies how belief as things changes the mask one presents to the world but the living “I am” remains the same.
Call Thyself Melville and look about you and see all who look but do not feel “I am” one in consciousness with their fellow man. If you have the courage and confidence in the light that animates Rama even paling, you may get a glimpse of truth in Thyself
Scott Norsworthy
Hardeman
Great Scott, You did it but you seem to “know it not,”.
You were able to combine the uncomfortable reaction to a metaphysical confrontation with Melville’s “mystic burden” about women.
He allotted that burden to Clarel who “heeded not” Rama’s light nor Rachel’s example as he heads for his expected love, Ruth, in The Night Ride Canto
You were able to allot the “mystic burden” to a wrong number, not the expected loving mother but instead his alienated wife.
Hats off, you have called Thyself Melville by rephrasing his woman dilemma from his Mardi days.
“Art still bent on finding evil for thy good?” cried Mohi.—“How can Yillah harbor here?—Beware!—Let not Hautia so enthrall thee.”
“What, Hautia,—is it thou?—Oh vipress, I could slay thee!”
Let get back to the poem and see what Clarel discovers. The magic of literature gives the reader an open portal to another being wherein we share intimately. If we have confidence in our mystical communion in words with another human, we have a mirror for who the masks hide.
W Long
Hardeman
In perhaps his most famous authorial exposition, Melville stated “still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life, and this is the key to it all.”
The reflection seen in the water is the emotional component of the mind’s conception returned by the unconscious.. For a man this unconscious affect is feminine and emotional and depending on his cultural values may be suppressed and therefore feared or if respected, the emotion will be praised or even worshipped. For Melville, the female reflections were feared and all his female characters from Fayaway, Yillah, Hautia, Pierre’s mother, Isabel, Lucy to Goneril were tainted with anxiety. In Clarel he assigned this anxiety to the character of Mortmain who projected his distrust into Tofana, Medea--O soft man-eater, and furry-fine Jael, Leah--Unfathomably shallow.
Melville wrote his first male/female relations not dominated by anxiety Into the character with the Hebrew name for Hagar, the mother of the outcast Ishmael.
Melville placed
“In Agar's frank demeanor kind,
What charm to woman may belong.
When by a natural bent inclined
To goodness in domestic play:
On earth no better thing than this.”
In Ruth, recalling the Biblical loyal friend to her mother-in-law who was rewarded with a good husband, Melville finally characterized a woman who
“Clarel, when in her presence, strove
The unrest to hide which still could blend
With all the endearings of their love”
So why does Melville kill them off after Clarel gave up his vow not to abandon them?
Hardeman
W Long
I will reply in another post as the response is off topic.
Hardeman
In a thread suggesting an imaginary masquerade to create in Thyself a meaningful response using Melville’s text to form conceptions for “I am,” you instead chose a response “off topic.” Well said if you cannot momentarily put aside your TPUsher mask. who “loved to dust off his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.”
However, the hypothesis that one of Melville’s first truths, the “I am,” behind every one of our masks is a god but knows it not, requires the god-like ability to imagine and feel the part.
Imagination is a quality all humans share and goes far deeper than etymology, allegorical devices, or authorial expositions.
So I do not resonate with your “The allegorical device of the text itself demands Melville ‘kill them off.”’ Because there is no you in that response to Clarel’s Agar/Ruth significance to Melville, I gain no further insight into his text. Clearly, you are sensitive to the sad poignancy mirrored by your unconscious but you only acknowledge it in your suffering as an author. You do share your need for your own recognition as an author and the emotions linked to that unfulfilled desire but perhaps you should consider Melville’s own unfulfilled life as an author before claiming knowledge of truths secreted in his writing.
Everything Melville wrote may have been a stream of consciousness "In me divine maganimities are spontaneous and instantaneous -- catch them while you can. The world goes round, and the other side comes up. So now I can't write what I felt. But I felt pantheistic then -- your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God's” he wrote to Hawthorne.
As for the truths we may see in his spontaneous divine words, he was unaware of all the significance or the intention until others brought them to his attention. He wrote to Sophia Hawthorne; “since you, with your spiritualizing nature, see more things than other people, and by the same process, refine all you see, so that they are not the same things that other people see, but things which while you think you but humbly discover them, you do in fact create them for yourself -- Therefore, upon the whole, I do not so much marvel at your expressions concerning Moby Dick. At any rate, your allusion for example to the "Spirit Spout" first showed to me that there was a subtile significance in that thing -- but I did not, in that case, mean it. I had some vague idea while writing it, that the whole book was susceptible of an allegoric construction, & also that parts of it were -- but the speciality of many of the particular subordinate allegories, were first revealed to me, after reading Mr Hawthorne's letter, which, without citing any particular examples, yet intimated the part-&-parcel allegoricalness of the whole.”
Those who would find meaning in Melville need to remember who does the creation.
Hardeman
Hardeman
When Melville felt “Call me poet,” he suggested he might be Of Rama.
In the act of writing poetically, he could masquerade in imagination as an innocent lawless “I am” personifying the hidden complexes that affected his life. This method of reading Clarel makes the poem his self-revelation rather than a tour of his sources and rehashing our common heritage. Scholarship explains the heritage's images in detail but meaning is experienced in resonating with the poet.
In poetry, Melville would hold no traditional spiritual beliefs.
“A fugitive without redress,
He never the Holy Spirit grieved,
Nor the divine in him bereaved,
Though what that was he might not guess.”
In this uninformed freedom poetic imagination knows the real self
“Live they who, like to Rama, led
Unspotted from the world aside.”
“The innocent if lawless elf,
Ethereal in virginity,
Retains the consciousness of self”
The narrator poses a question about who this “elf-self” may be.
“Was ever earth-born wight like this?
Ay--in the verse, may be, he is.”
In this state of verse Melville could become “Familiar with strange things that dwell repressed in mortals” who animate his unconscious. His poetic characters create interactions that reveal to his consciousness those forces that motivate him and depress him. For us, as readers to grasp his meaning, we may use our own imagination to resonate with his words.
Those of us who have participated in psycho dramas might be open to a request to “Call Thyself Melville” and dialog with a group to experience what it is like behind the mask and words of someone else. One who would personify the author needs to have confidence in our shared god-like ability to experience concepts emanating from someone else’s words but conceived with the feeling of knowing in our mind in a recognition of the mutual eternal consciousness we share.
Even materialist science is now curious about what Melville suggested but for which he had few socially accepted conceptions to support his speculation. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/a-super-simple-non-quantum-theory-of-eternal-consciousness/
Scott Norsworthy
And heaven's good name? Tis these shall make
Revolt there, and the gloss disclaim.
They con the page kept down with those
Which Adam's secret frame disclose,
And Eve's ; nor dare dissent from truth
Although disreputable, sooth."
- the human skeleton, literally, and fact of death, metaphorically? Revealing or "disclosing"
- kinship with animals and far more ancient origin than usually admitted in Bible-based history, according to then-recent findings of evolutionary science, Darwin?
- Desires, repressed or otherwise hidden?
- Original Sin? (essential wickedness of human nature)
Stephen Hoy
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Scott Norsworthy
Though yielding easy rein, indeed,
To impulse which the fibers breed,
Nor quarreling with indolence;
Indolence is heaven's ally here,
Scott Norsworthy
Hardeman
Dear Scott and Stephen,
Melville defines “frame” in Nathan’s discontent with his futile laboring based upon the curse as “Adam’s frame” [the concept of the fall of man from God’s grace]
“An altered earth
Sullen he tilled, in Adam's frame
When thrust from Eden out to dearth
And blest no more, and wise in shame. 1, 17; 144-8 Nathan
“Mince ye some matter for faith's sake
And heaven's good name? 'Tis these shall make
Revolt there, and the gloss disclaim.”
[Cutting up some conception to support one’s faith reveals knowledge of negative suppressed elements that revolt against heaven’s good intentions]
“They con the page kept down with those”
[The suppressed words persuade someone to do or believe something by hiding the truth with confidence in authoritative beliefs]
“Which Adam's secret frame disclose,
And Eve's;”
[Perhaps the secret associated with the curse was death and suffering associated with the fear/anxiety that did not exist in the Garden for Adam and Eve before tasting knowledge of good and evil]
“nor dare dissent from truth
Although disreputable, sooth” [ truth that is not trusted or respected is true just the same]
Gnostics believed a savior would lead to another world as this world was hopelessly dedicated to the devil so they saw knowledge of evil as necessary for salvation.
Hardeman
PS; Our government’s “Adam and Eve’s Secret” frame not unlike your NYTimes crossword coincidence. https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/about/cryptologic-heritage/historical-figures-publications/publications/wwii/secret-adam-eve.pdf