Magic spells again

[herm melville]

All,

   Hold on. We may be missing something of import.

    Magic spells are esoterica of which I know nothing, since I have regarded the subject not favorably. Of course, it matters not what I believe; what does Melville believe?

     In miscellaneous notes of Melville in the back of a Shakespeare volume, which I cannot find at the moment, Melville speaks of black and white magic, Goetic and Theurgic magic, if I have that right. He seems to prefer white magic. Is there any such thing in Clarel? I assume white magic would contain magic spells. This sort of topic is not too far fetched, since in The Confidence Man, he develops alchemy. See Dillingham.

    Melville has the habit of telling a story beneath a story. Take the Lyonese for example.  This is the prodigal Jew from Lyon, France. But Lyonesse, pronounced as 'lioness' , similar in print and in sound,  was in Arthurian legend a mythical country next to and west of Cornwall, England that sank beneath the sea. But Lyonesse is a mythical fantasy. I would think that anyone from this mythical place would be called a Lyonese.

    Then could Melville's Lyonese be a fantasy as well? I did write that the Lyonese sounded at one point like the fairy Puck from Midsummer Nights Dream. Magic and fairyland go together.

   Gnawing at me has been the word spell  in the third line of "By Parapet:"  "Such spell is given"---to the Lyonese.  And then in "David's Well," 

"Much too he dropped which quite bereaved

The Scripture of its Runic spell.

But Runic saidI? That's not well!

I alter sure."

I do not remember any magical inference given by anyone to Scripture.  Why introduce a magical element only to deny it? Walter J Ong, SJ,  Orality and Literacy: "The futhark or runic alphabet of medieval North Europe was commonly associated with magic."  But Melville may have used a magic spell to deliver a message, perhaps through the Lyonese, a non-sexual fairy.

   Magic spells are like magic squares..   John Gretchko

[Scott Norsworthy]

Thank you John for calling attention to magic and spells in Melville's writings. Since it's just the two of us now, I will confess to being a true believer there. Your framing is marvelously suggestive I think and well-matched, verbally, to key themes in the P-P cantos (Prodigal and Parapet). For example, when you say, "We may be missing something of import" you echo St. Bernard on Solomon's Song according to our favorite Bible student. Clarel, uncomfortable with the Prodigal's reading of a sacred text as soft porn, directs his and our attention to its "hid import":

"Saint Bernard, 'twas he of old
The song's hid import first unrolled--" (Part 4 Canto 26, The Prodigal)

https://books.google.com/books?id=BvRDAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA540&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

Indifferent to Bernard, your average male Prodigal wants to look at breasts, with or without metaphorical fawns and flowers:

"Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies."

https://biblehub.com/songs/4-5.htm

In this case, "hid import" offers a diversion away from literal meaning, of Scripture and Melville's verse paraphrase thereof. Clarel's attempted diversion threatens to wreck our enjoyment of eroticism in the Song of Solomon by giving it "mystic burden" on the authority of a famous Cistercian monk and mystic.

John, that right there is the "magical inference" (your words) applied to the Bible you were looking for. The "mystic burden" (Clarel's words) imposed by Bernard on the Song of Solomon provides the clearest instance in the Prodigal canto of a magic spell imputed to Scripture. Clarel himself, talking later with the Russian, called it "Runic" instead of "mystic" but then quickly retracted Runic as the wrong word. His calling Scripture Runic instead of mystic alerts eagle-eyed readers like us that Clarel feels the disturbing effects of his one night with the Prodigal. Runic conveys pagan associations that bother Clarel as "not well" in a sober Christian and divinity student. Unsettled, maybe under a different sort of spell, Clarel now is less sure about the import of Bernard's allegorical magic.

This could be the Lyonese-Lionesse effect you propose, working like magic pixie dust. Clarel's use and immediate retraction of "Runic" seems telling, however interpreted. I take it for a sign of the Prodigal's troubling influence, first and foremost. But the self-correction also points up the unreliability of memory--significant here because of how the Russian ignores Clarel's distress over the faultiness of his own reconstruction. Keen to detect secret meanings, without noticing Melville's carefully placed tell, the Russian discovers in Clarel's misreported conversation a positive ID of the Prodigal as a Jew. 

Reality check: a great deal of his supposed "Jewishness" has been loaded on the Prodigal by an alternately cocky and confused student and a fast-talking Russian. (And too readily embraced by Melville scholars under the influence of Bezanson's pioneering character sketches in the 1960 Hendricks House edition of Clarel.) Via the Russian Melville suggests this gorgeous and gifted merchant-singer might be Jewish but leaves more room for doubt than most academic commentators recognize.

Speaking of spells, you quoted Derwent's remark  in the Parapet canto as powerfully suggestive:

Clarel-Parapet-Spell.jpg

" Well may ye gaze! What 's good to see
Better than Adam's humanity
When genial lodged! Such spell is given,
It lured the staid grandees of heaven,
Though biased in their souls divine
Much to one side — the feminine. —
He is the pleasantest small fellow!" -- Clarel Part 4 Canto 27 By a Parapet

Beauty operates like a magic spell. Here the Prodigal's spell is generated by his physical attractiveness, magnified in song. When so delightfully "lodged" the beauty of one gifted individual exemplifies human nobility at its finest. By  "staid grandees" Melville means Angels, alluding to Genesis 6:2:

 "That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose."
https://biblehub.com/genesis/6-2.htm

So Derwent compares the Prodigal's allure to the "spell" put on the sons of God by beautiful women according to the Book of Genesis. 

Magic!

https://youtu.be/RYKYMUFestk