Breaking the spell
Hardeman
One might consider Clarel as Melville’s great effort to break the spell that dominated his life.
Henry A. Murray’s insightful Introduction to the Henricks House 1946 Pierre edition explores in great detail Melville’s wrestling with the spell that he would later confront in Clarel.
“By placing his highest value (God) in the emotional forces of the unconscious, instead of in a vision of an ideal whole — a synthetic work of art, a usable philosophy, a creative relationship — Melville made astounding discoveries in uncharted regions of the mind and experienced a rapid and portentous enlargement of the imagination; but for this superlative, one-sided development he paid, as we shall see, the supreme price.” xxvii of the Introduction
John and Scott addressed the spell that the Prodigal posed for Clarel in “Magic Spells Again.” Scott concluded “the Prodigal's allure to the "spell" put on the sons of God by beautiful women according to the Book of Genesis.” One might call this the “Patriarchal perspective” for Murray’s “emotional forces of the unconscious” since Melville was writing before the general acceptance of the term “unconscious anima”.
This spell was not Clarel’s swaying between the positions of his previous fellow pilgrims. It was a confrontation with his core belief that feelings must submit to God’s will worshipped as some kind of “vision of an Ideal whole.”
Clarel's personification for being true to God was Jephthah who vowed after a victory that he would offer the first thing that came out of his house as a burnt offering to Yahweh. To his horror, his own child was the one to come out and he did choose to sacrifice her as subservient to his idea of God.
Clarel pleads with the easygoing Prodigal to buoy up his faith
“I pray, Confess to Judah's mournful sway.”
"'Tis Jephthah's daughter holds the hight; She, she's the muse here.”
Clarel who wants reassurance for his faith but is challenged in the Prodigal’s parting song
"Rules, who rules?
Fools the wise, makes wise the fools--
Every ruling overrules?
Who the dame that keeps the house,
Provides the diet, and oh, so quiet,
Brings all to pass, the slyest mouse?
Tell, tell it me:
Signora Nature, who but she!"
This “she” who rules through his own unconscious is a phantom that he fears. Lacking an authoritative conception of her in his mind, he projects her effect as anxiety into his unseen God.
Murray’s “supreme price” that Melville paid may be best understood metaphorically in Clarel’s confrontation with the Prodigal and physically in his feelings for Agar and Ruth.
Hardeman
Scott Norsworthy
Scott Norsworthy
Hardeman
Dear Scott,
Even spells eventually require a decision by either mind or body.
One might name the statue you propose for love “Decision time” not unlike Canto 4-30
Call me Melville, “It was the whiteness [of your sculpture] that above all things appalled me.”
“Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.”
“What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men—has no substantive deformity—and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?”
“Now it is that blackness in Hawthorne, of which I have spoken, that so fixes and fascinates me. "
"But however this may be, this blackness it is that furnishes the infinite obscure of his background,--that background, against which Shakespeare plays his grandest conceits . . . as the profoundest of thinkers. “
“Symbolize whatever grand or gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized apparition to the soul.
“the mind so acts upon the body, that if the one have no confidence, neither has the other.”
“aye, my hearties all round; it was [a] Moby Dick that dismasted me;”
Scott Norsworthy
Hardeman
Dear Scott,
You are the first person I have encountered who has read Pierre and used a quote from it to depict idealized love (even that of angels). If the murder/suicide of the lovers is not sufficient to enlighten one, the introduction exposes the destructive illusions of infantile love.
You relate Pierre’s infantile understanding of love in “reference to these same love-smitten angels as ‘staid grandees’ in ‘By Parapet.’” Clarel Canto 4.27
As an octogenarian, I have had relationships with men and women in many countries some of whom were love-smitten including priests. In “By Parapet” (a low protective wall along the edge of danger) this priest is lust-smitten after meeting the carefree Prodigal unencumbered with any “solemnity of Judah's glade” bias. The priest assumes Clarel may be the same so he suggestively reminds him of the Greek pederasty followed by classic pick up lines “Come, What's in your thoughts, pray? Wherefore mum?”
“Clarel declining to be led
Or cheered. Nor less in covert way
That talk might have an after-sway
Beyond the revery which ran
Half-heeded now or dim: This man--
May Christian true such temper wish?
His happiness seems paganish”
Your confidence in love-smitten staid grandees means you will pass over and not address the blindness that such a bias dictates.
Even a caring atheist may agree with Jesus's advice; “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves”
Knowing the difference between love and lust as well as aspiration and greed are first truths that must be learned through experience.
Perhaps you had better wait for another guide for I am nothing special.
Hardeman