Beyond the walls–potentiality aborted. The politics of intersubjective universalism in Herman Melville’s Clarel

Abstract

In 1876, U.S. writer Herman Melville published a volume of poetry named Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, which, later in life, he would describe to his English admirer James Billson as "a metrical affair, a pilgrimage or what not, of several thousand lines, eminently adapted for unpopularity" (10 October 1884, Correspondence 483). Based on his trip to Palestine in January 1857, Clarel narrates the encounter of multiple characters -representative of different worldviews, vital energies, and ways of facing, enjoying, suffering, or enduring existence- in a context that human beings have, for centuries, constructed as a scenario of projected hopes and even foundational myths. Clarel takes its name from the main character, a young American student recently arrived in Jerusalem victim of his own theological, existential, crises. Both narrator and readers accompany the young Clarel and his fellow pilgrims/travelers in a journey through thorny questions and sandy deserts, which takes Clarel on a gradual process of unlearning. This trip brings the student and his companions out of the walled Jerusalem in order to explore the surrounding spaces of the Brook of Kedron, Jericho, the Jordan river, the Dead Sea, the monastery of Mar Saba, and Bethlehem. The pleasures of Clarel are many, yet also its pains as a text which incorporates readers into a severe analysis of the human condition in a Holy Land context carrying both local and global resonances.This study regards Clarel as a text that gives continuity to Melville's recurrent exploration of the dangers, beauties, (im)possibilities, and interconnection of intersubjectivity, universalism, and democracy. This exploration was always torn between the democratizing potentiality the author located in interpersonal relationships and the bleak realization that human beings -in the hearts of whom "Evil and good […] braided play / Into one cord" (Clarel 4.4.27---28)-might never materialize such democratic project. The dissertation defends that Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land is a universalist poem which analyzes the necessity, ethical potentiality, political possibilities, and challenges of intersubjectivity for the creation of more democratic human relationships beyond the inter---human walls posed by communitarianisms of different kinds (e.g. nation---state, ethnicity, religion, culture, gender, sexual identity), which human beings have interiorized as "naturally" existing between them, as well as by individualistic -what Melville termed "one---sided"- attitudes and monologic thinking parameters. Focusing on Clarel as continuing the project of Melville's other works, my argument is that Clarel conceives what the dissertation names intersubjective universalism as an