Character and the Space of Clarel

Character and the Impersonal F rom Ahab to Bartleby, and Isabel to Billy Budd, Melville’s characters seem unmoored from personhood, cast into the “whelming sea” of the impersonal or the inhuman (NN Clarel 4.35.33).1 In Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, they are not so much characters in the traditional literary sense—that is, individual “persons” who move through settings and perform a set of characteristics—as they are a series of intertwined “personae” whose characteristics blur with the space of the poem. As in his other works, Melville’s characterization in Clarel is a process not of developing distinct persons but of opening a transactive space in which human characteristics can become unbound and thus permeable to the extra-personal. Yet in Clarel, given the symbolically charged landscape of the Holy Land, Melville’s emptying out of character also involves a forceful deromanticization of the landscape. Melville postulates a world in which traditional guarantees of human value are removed, and wherein the traditional barriers that divide self and nature and the human and inhuman are rendered inconsequential. Melville gestures past Romantic conceptions of landscape and self into an uncertain postDarwinian territory in which the sublime education is no longer an ecstatic self-abandonment but one of suspension and doubt. The dissolutions of the self into the Absolute in Moby-Dick—Ishmael melting into the universal “milk and sperm of kindness” (NN MD 416), the “absent minded young philosophers” becoming one with the “mystic ocean” (159)—and the transcendent “all” feeling which Melville circumspectly describes in his letter to Hawthorne (NN Corres 194) are instead in Clarel a mutual defacement of both the human visage and the face of the earth. Individual subjective characteristics are not fused into a cosmic unity but are erased or dispersed and thus freed to move past the