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Undoubtedly the most difficult book I have ever read "for pleasure,"
Herman Melville's "Clarel" is also quite possibly the least read major
imaginative work by any writer of the first rank. First published by G.
P. Putnam in 1876 at the expense of Melville's uncle Peter Gansevoort, it
was not reprinted for almost 50 years, and then only in an English
limited edition of the collected works. In 1960, 84 years after its
initial publication, Hendricks House of New York restored it to print as
a relatively compact hardback which nonetheless contains, in addition to
the 520 page poem itself, two hundred pages of critical and explanatory
material by Walter E. Bezanson. This edition has, to my knowledge, only
been reprinted once, in 1973, but is still in print and available at the
reasonable price of $29.95. (Northwestern University's newer edition, by
comparison, costs $24.95 in paperback, almost $90.00 in hardback, and is
dense enough to hammer horseshoes upon.)
 "Clarel"'s status as the terra incognita of Melville's works is
either reason enough to avoid it or to seek it out, depending upon one's
temperament; likewise, that it is written, for the most part, in rhyming
iambic tetrameter. A plot summary will equally divide prospective
readers. Written out of the same spirit of religious doubt and
scientific inquiry that occasioned Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," A. H.
Clough's "A New Decalogue," and sections of Alfred Tennyson's "In
Memoriam," "Clarel" is the tale of a pilgrimage in what was then Turkish
Palestine. Clarel is a twenty-something student in religious crisis, who
has come to the "Holy Land" to see the places of "faith." He falls in
love with a Jewish girl, whose American family has emigrated to
Palestine, and joins a group of travelers--the membership of which alters
throughout the tale--to journey from Jerusalem to Jericho, on to the
Dead Sea, to the monastery at Mar Saba, and back to Jerusalem via
Bethlehem. Along the way they visit historical and religious sites; meet
characters in various attitudes of faith or skepticism; discuss their
doubts and beliefs; observe a number of religious rituals, both Jewish
and Christian; and bury two co-travelers. Clarel ends in a deeper state
of uncertainty than that in which he began, though Melville's epilogue
holds out some hope for a recovery beyond death.
If none of that scares you off, then "Clarel" may indeed be the
book for you. But be warned: the gnarled nature of the sentence
structure makes for slow going, as does Melville's tendency throughout to
allow articles to drop out of sentences, apparently in the service of the
iamb. Although "easier" on the surface than much of the text that
follows, the opening of "Clarel" announces Melville's stylistic stance:
In chamber low and scored by time,
Masonry old, late washed with lime--
Much like a tomb new-cut in stone;
Elbow on knee, and brow sustained
All motionless on sidelong hand,
A student sits, and broods alone.
We have here poetic inversion ("masonry old"); missing articles ("In
chamber," "Elbow on knee"); missing preposition ("[of] masonry") or
implied clause ("[which was made of] masonry"); slant rhyme ("sustained /
hand"), and weighty simile ("like a tomb new-cut in stone"), not to
mention the far-ranging implication of that simile: if Jesus was laid to
rest in a tomb which had yet to hold a body, his wavering disciple
Clarel, wrestling with the doubts brought on by the scientific and
theological currents of the mid-nineteenth century, is living in such a
tomb. Or is he?
If you reread the first three lines, you will see that Melville
has "tricked" you. In point of fact, the only thing "new" about Clarel's
tomb-like hostel room is its fresh coat of lime--the room itself is
constructed of old masonry and is "scored by time." Which makes the
reader wonder exactly how deep Melville expected the reader's questioning
to plunge? If the new tomb of Clarel's doubts is actually just a newly
white-washed tomb, then what about the doubts themselves? Are they
perhaps simply a new casting of doubts about the claims of Christians
that go all the way back to that other new-cut tomb? Furthermore, is it
possible for a writer as knowledgeable about the Bible as "Clarel"
reveals Melville to be to construct a simile about a newly limed tomb
without also intending the reader to think of Jesus's comparison of
religious hypocrites to white-washed sepulchers and of St. Paul's
indictment of the Jewish high priest as a "whited wall"?
Assuming that Melville did indeed expect his readers to consider
at least the first of those ancient comparisons above, how are we to
"interpret" the connotation? Since Clarel is studying in the
white-washed tomb, should we understand Melville to mean that Clarel is
surrounded (or encased) in hypocrisy, that the men and the books to which
he looks for answers are themselves hypocritical? Is this heavy
beginning a warning about the speeches we will read as the characters
interact on their pilgrimage? Far be it from me to say. But it is worth
noting that all of these questions, implications, and connotations arise
from forty-eight syllables of verse. Not, to be sure, that all of
"Clarel" is so redolent. But much of it is convoluted enough, if only in
syntax, to force the reader to move slowly, to reread, to try--as it
were--to diagram the sentences in his mind, if only to make sure he has
the subject and verb down right.
An unsympathetic critic might note that this complexity is proof
that Melville was no poet. Another critic might claim, instead, that the
knottiness of the syntax is an emblem of the pilgrimage itself--that
Clarel, in trying to ferret out the "truth" about Jesus, has embarked
upon a quest whose ways and turnings are less likely to be unravelled (or
cut through) than any Gordian knot. And it is also worth pointing out,
in this context, the allegedly ungrammatical nature of "Clarel"'s
subtitle: "A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land." Unquestionably
Melville was adept enough with the English language to know what he was
doing, especially with something as straightforward as a subtitle. He
clearly intended us to understand that the poem is not simply about a
pilgrimage, but is itself a pilgrimage.
The reader who expects to make it through "Clarel" must approach
it with a pilgrim's earnestness and with the doggedness of the pilgrim's
burro. Otherwise he will set the book aside after a few cantos (although
Bezanson suggests that even a reader who makes it one hundred pages
before abandoning the journey is faint-hearted), and turn to something
"easy"--like "The Faerie Queene" or "Paradise Lost."
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