Clarel - Origins

Origins

Melville had visited the Holy Land in the winter of 1856, and traveled along the route he describes in Clarel. The visit followed a trip to England on October of the same year, in which he met his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was working there. Melville gave Hawthorne his manuscript for The Confidence Man, essentially amounted to his 'farewell to prose.' Hawthorne later recorded his concern about Melville, noting how they

"took a pretty long walk together, and sat down in the hollow among the sand hills (sheltering ourselves from the high, cool wind) and smoked a cigar. Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists -- and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before -- in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. 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."

Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant, Melville's record of the winter voyage of 1856 (which took him five months and 15,000 miles), demonstrates that he did not leave behind his doubts or melancholy. Sailing through the Greek Islands, he became disillusioned with classical mythology. He was still in doubt following his time in Jerusalem. Passing Cyprus on the way home, he wrote: "From these waters rose Venus from the foam. Found it as hard to realize such a thing as to realize on Mt Olivet that from there Christ rose." (p. 164)

The poem expresses Melville's revisiting and exploring his realization that the Old World sites of religious pilgrimage are barren and meaningless in themselves. As he writes in the opening Canto:

"Like the ice-bastions round the Pole,
Thy blank, blank towers, Jerusalem!"

The modernist implication of these lines is striking, anticipating the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure (who graduated from university the year the poem was published). The "Signifier" of Jerusalem is revealed as a "blank", with the "Signified" of the physical "towers" failing to contain any sacred meaning.

Melville explored the divide between the preternatural, the religious, and historical reality; he also was influenced by the crisis faced by mid-19th century Christianity in the wake of the discoveries of Charles Darwin. Melville saw these scientific developments as simultaneously fascinating (cf. the focus on natural history in Moby-Dick) and terrifying, representing a challenge to traditional Christianity that was almost apocalyptic in its significance, especially when combined with the more theological attacks of Protestantism. As he writes in the troubled, and inconclusive, Epilogue to Clarel:

If Luther's day expand to Darwin's year,
Should that exclude the hope -- foreclose the fear?