Clarel's Epilogue
Hardeman
Clarel’s Epilogue leaves me with a feeling of irresolution, unlike Moby Dick’s authorative and satisfying culmination. Melville chides with a feeble affirmation “Then keep thy heart , though yet but ill - resigned Clarel , thy heart, the issues there but mind.” One is condemned to “prove that death but routs life into victory” rather than be uplifted by life routing death through the heart's courage.
Melville had previously written the classic portrayal of the negative aspects of a heart driven by an afflicted mind. The narcissistic penchant to project the sources of our emotions onto externally compelling graspable images has ironic reflections and tragic consequences when we grapple as Ahab did “from hell’s heart.” As a universal icon, a driven Ahab teaches me the ungraspable phantom he would kill reveals a hint into Melville’s own inner conflict. “[N]ow I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. “For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.”
Consider that someone who associates their “greatness” with ultimate suffering is driven by their inner conflict to project its unidentified source into an external image. A “deeper [ ] 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” has fixed consequences. One who is unable to name (grasp) the inner drive that motivates the Self and make it conscious, Melville offers us Ahab whose “fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.”
“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.” Not all projections come from hate, fear, and vengeance. Love and admiration are also mirrored in bosom friends and heroic images, acting as keys for social survival and assuring some form of continuing harmony with otherwise potentially antisocial human individuality. Since Melville’s epoch, for those willing to investigate their own minds, several models have evolved to helpfully illustrate how the ungraspable phantom can at least be named and, for some, integrated into consciousness. For in the ability to name the disease a deep diver into the mind relieves the fear and anxiety of the unknown. It is called the Rumpelstiltskin principle understood by some physicians.
https://www.sjaakvandergeest.socsci.uva.nl/pdf/anthropology_and_literature/rumpelskin.pdf
In Melville’s case it appears he projected his inner conflict with his feelings identified with women that he was compelled to name without any supporting rational model (Hautia and Yillah) If Jung’s model had been available to the deep-diving Melville, he might have discovered a way to understand his conflict as the repression of his Anima and its consequences.
The narrator tells an emotionally immature Clarel that his intellectual search had exposed his ungraspable phantom as unnamed yet even more emotionally provocative
“Degrees we know, unknown in days before ;
The light is greater, hence the shadow more
And tantalized and apprehensive Man
Appealing — Wherefore ripen us to pain?
Seems there the spokesman of dumb Nature's train.”
In Jung’s model of the psyche, the Anima is that psychopomp (spokesman) for man’s unconscious “Nature’s train.” She is the feeling connection between his conscious ego and the emotional forces that motivate him. She must be integrated without one’s consciousness becoming possessed, as for example in narcissism. The Anima by “degrees we know” brings the shadow self into the light, where she functions as the medium between the conscious ego and the unconscious feelings.
]Hawthorne’s insight into Melville’s wrestling with his art is as close as anyone in their time could comprehend the man. “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief, and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.” For myself, I examine his text for psychological patterns, mythological comparisons, and originality in order to uncover our shared perspectives of life. It appears he was still working on those shadow-feeling complexes to the very end replacing Yillah and Hautia with Billy Budd and Claggart.
