Clarel's walking dead catharsis
Hardeman
If one accepts the hypothesis that Melville wrote Clarel as a therapy for his suffering, his vision of the walking dead appears to be his catharsis. In his recognition of the forces causing his emotional suffering and bringing them to consciousness and giving them expression, Melville seeks an atonement with his inner God.
Like Job, Clarel as the poet’s consciousness confronts his many interlocutors representing various beliefs and opinions that mirror Melville’s own inner conflicts. In the act of poetic creation, Melville projects into these images his own emotional reactions to the conflicts that create his suffering. When uncomfortably confronted by a complex, he has Clarel suppress it or fail to respond. When a character dies the poet imagines he can remove the source of his anxiety. However, in Clarel’s vision, the unconscious mind reasserts its suppressed demands.
One’s source of suffering often appears in dreams, and illusions, as well as in one’s artistic creations. In the Canto Passion Week Clarel sees the exhalations of several of Melville’s “dead” complexes. Though dead to consciousness they still haunt Clarel as resurrected shadows or archetypes.
“What exhalations met his sight:
Illusion of grief's wakeful doom:
The dead walked.”
“There, amid the train,
Wan Nehemiah he saw again”
Thought dead, a shadow who believed truth can be found in words in a book still breathed.
“Celio passed
As in a dampened mirror glassed”
“This world clean fails me: still I yearn.
Me then it surely does concern
Some other world to find. But where?
In creed? I do not find it there.” 1 Canto 12; 97-100
Thought dead, a shadow of one deformed, without faith or confidence, is seen in a fogged resurrection.
“Gleamed Mortmain, pallid as wolf-bone
Which bleaches where no man hath gone”
Thought dead, a shadow misanthrope who distrusted women and was dedicated to the search for that “uncreated good...whose absence is the cause of creeds and Atheists, mobs and laws” still demanded his recognition.
.
“And Nathan in his murdered guise”
Thought dead, a shadow who would remake himself in past beliefs was resurrected.
“Poor Agar, with such wandering mien”
Thought dead, the motherly provider of nourishment, security, and love [Jung’s anima Eve] still demanded recognition as a universal unconscious archetype.
“But Ruth--ah, how estranged in face!
He knew her by no earthly grace:
Nor might he reach to her in place.”
Thought dead, his Image of female companionship, whom he never really knew and failed to support in life, still haunted him out of reach in his unconscious as an archetype.
These unconscious intrusions into Melville's writing began in Mardi and were restated in all his efforts at truth-telling. They still dominated him in Clarel.
“Where, where now He who helpeth us, The Comforter?”
No Holy Spirit sent by Christ. Instead, his truth-telling sees only death as relief for his suffering. “Tell, Erebus!”
Is there something further to follow these Masquerades?
Scott Norsworthy
Why, lads, so silent here to me,
Hardeman
Scot
I agree that Melville’s past suffering contributed to his suffering in writing Clarel because he never completed the natural grieving process for his emotional pains. We especially need to consider Melville’s existential suffering as a failed author as even more painful than his family's deaths. In writing Clarel, all of his sufferings contributed to his need for atonement with his unconscious unrealized idealized self.
Grief is not suffering. Knowing the difference is to be free of the residual pain that the mind continually recreates when the natural grieving process is incomplete.
“For howsoe'er in words of man
The word and will of God be feigned,
No incompletion's heaven ordained.”
Grief is a natural process wherein one heals a loss by passing through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance to regain normal confidence in life. The strength of the pain is directly proportional to the emotional meaning (conscious or unconscious) of the object one has lost. Grief and other emotional pains are perpetuated by choosing to suffer which resists passing through the progressive stages by playing the victim and blaming a cause that cannot relieve the emotion. Knowing how to accept the pain or any emotion, although difficult, creates a will free from suffering caused by their unconscious source
Clarel is a character representing consciousness without confidence in his emotions. In Clarel’s hesitation to act with Celio and Agar/Ruth, his suppressed emotional attraction created a conflict. The Jungian model describes this process as the relation of consciousness with the anima, an unconscious mysterious female source of emotions in a man. I find the model explains how Melville’s female characters represent his stunted emotional growth that found a mirror in Hawthorne's darkness. However, one does not need Jung to explain what Melville himself repeatedly illustrated in his own characters. https://frithluton.com/articles/anima/
Melville has Clarel feigning emotional pain to justify his suppressed joy in his attractions. The dirge to a pagan spirit of death and the inability to share in the Christian pageants meant to aid the grieving process is evidence of Clarel’s choice to suffer as a martyr or at least a victim to justify his sacrifice of joy to his idealized self-image. He did get a hint reflecting on the Prodigal’s freedom compared to his own hesitancy.
“The student faltered--felt annoy:
Absorbed in problems ill-defined,
Am I too curious in my mind;
And, baffled in the vain employ,
Foregoing many an easy joy?
That thought he hurried from”
Whether or not Melville could differentiate his personal suffering as perpetuating his fear of his own emotions, he clearly understood the difference in Benito Cereno.
[Delano] “Yes, all is owing to Providence, I know: but the temper of my mind that morning was more than commonly pleasant, while the sight of so much suffering, more apparent than real, added to my good-nature, compassion, and charity, happily interweaving the three. Had it been otherwise, doubtless, as you hint, some of my interferences might have ended unhappily enough. Besides, those feelings I spoke of enabled me to get the better of momentary distrust . . ."
“You are saved,” cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; “you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?”
“The negro.”
A belief in negro inferiority was an unquestioned existential belief they both shared. The terror of his experience so undermined Benito’s confidence in his belief that his will to exist was completely undermined. Without confidence in that belief, his suffering constantly recreated his fear that would have faded naturally with space and time.
Unless you can find some reconciliation in the last three Cantos, for Clarel and his creator it appears his suffering has blocked any atonement with his God (Pagan, Christian or unconscious anima). Harold Bloom sees in Hamlet what Melville only glimpsed in Bulkington, a recognition of his unconscious truth.
“"Hamlet … is not going to heaven, hell, purgatory, or limbo, or to any other theological fantasy. He has been there, done that, in his exhaustive drama. … For Hamlet himself, death is not tragic but an apotheosis."
https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0305/hamlet.html
Up from the spray of my own ocean-perishing
Scott Norsworthy
CLAREL Part 4 - Bethlehem
Canto 30 The Valley of Decision = DENIAL + ANGER
*Delay!
*Conviction is not gone / Though faith's gone: that which shall not be
It ought to be!*take my curse!-- / O blind, blind, barren universe!
*Amain / Did Clarel push him; and, in hiss...
Canto 31 Dirge = BARGAINING
*And if, ere yet the lover's free,
Some added dusk thy rule decree
That shadow only let it be
Thrown in the moon-glade by the palm.
Canto 32 Passion Week = DEPRESSION
Why linger where no hope can be?
Ask grief, love ask...
*But unto Clarel that bright view / Into a dusk reminder grew:
*What exhalations met his sight:
Illusion of grief's wakeful doom....
Canto 33 Easter = DEPRESSION, CONT.
*But heart bereft is unrepaid
Though Thammuz' spring in Thammuz' glade
Invite; then how in Joel's glen?
Canto 34 Via Crucis = ACCEPTANCE
Cross-bearers all, alike they tend
And follow, slowly follow on....
*Dusked Olivet he leaves behind,
And, taking now a slender wynd,
Vanishes in the obscurer town.
As presented in the Canto 34 Via Crucis, existential suffering is the normal condition of life on earth for all created beings, dumb beasts as well as humans. Without evaluating or ranking the different causes of their pain, Melville figures individual sufferers as "Cross-bearers all" and thus unites them under the sign of the Cross. Heretofore, as you (Hardeman) rightly observe, Clarel has displayed a marked "inability to share in the Christian pageants." For example, confronted on Palm Sunday with cheerful Armenian worshippers in festive dress, he did not even know what day it was. Finally, however, in the last 2 of some 18,000 lines, Clarel descends from the heady spiritual height and rejoins his fellow mortals. Late in the day, yes, but you know what they say. There's your acceptance! And confidence! Even if Jerusalem be darker than already "dusked Olivet," Clarel will follow the train of fellow Cross-bearers back to "the obscurer town." Like good heroes do (medieval or modern) Clarel chooses the narrow alleyway or "wynd" (h/t Stephen Hoy!!!). Taking his Cross with him, necessarily.
https://youtu.be/oZnm_s3wZeo