Beyond the Walls. E-Book

Laura López Peña

• Herausgeber: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Biblioteca Javier Coy d'Estudis Nord-Americans
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 613

Beschreibung

The present volume analyzes the political project manifested in the narrative poem by Melville 'Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land'. Published in 1876, this work is centered on the necessities, the possibilities and the difficulties of intersubjectivity as a means to transcend the obstacles posed by individualism and traditional communities.

Leseprobe

BEYOND THE WALLS

BEING WITH EACH OTHERIN HERMAN MELVILLE’S CLAREL

Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americanshttp://www.uv.es/bibjcoy

DirectoraCarme Manuel

BEYOND THE WALLS

BEING WITH EACH OTHERIN HERMAN MELVILLE’S CLAREL

Laura López Peña

Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americansUniversitat de València

Beyond the Walls: Being with Each Other in Herman Melville’s Clarel

© Laura López Peña

1ª edición de 2015

Reservados todos los derechos

Prohibida su reproducción total o parcial

ISBN: 978-84-9134-168-0

Imagen de la cubierta: Laura López Peña

Diseño de la cubierta: Celso Hernández de la Figuera

Publicacions de la Universitat de València

http://puv.uv.es

[email protected]

A Rodrigo

A mi familia

Acknowledgements

To Cristina Alsina, Constante González Groba, Michael Jonik, and Bill Phillips, for their dedication to reading this work in earlier stages and providing important questions and comments.

To Marta Segarra, for making possible an academic context where I could develop my own investigation on Herman Melville’s Clarel within the research project “Literatura y comunidades: una visión desde el género” (Plan Nacional de I+D+i [2008-2011], Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, ref. FEM 2011-23808 [2012-2014]). My analysis of community is also indebted to a previous research project led by Marta Segarra: “Representaciones de la comunidad en las escritoras y cineastas de la posmodernidad” (Plan Nacional de Investigación Científica, Desarrollo e Innovación Tecnológica, D.G.I., Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, ref. FFI 2008-03621/FILO [2009-2011]). My gratefulness also goes to Helena González Fernández, for incorporating me as postdoctoral researcher at the Centre Dona i Literatura, Universitat de Barcelona.

To the Melville Society, for many years of encouragement of my work on Clarel, and for allowing me to do research in their Archive in New Bedford, MA, as their Melville Society Archive Fellow in January 2011. To John Bryant, for hosting me during my research visit to New York in February 2011, and to Wyn Kelley, for her generosity during my research trip to Cambridge, MA, in January-February 2011.

To Carme Manuel, for enthusiastically embracing this project. For her endless energy, encouragement, feedback, and flexibility in the process of writing this volume. For making working with her such an easy and pleasant experience, and for a life of important contributions to both American Studies and Melville Studies in Spain, thanks to which volumes such as this one have been possible.

To Tim Marr, for his always enormous generosity and support, on a both personal and academic level, since 2009, and, most specially, during my two research stays in Chapel Hill, NC, in the spring of 2012 and 2013, respectively. For his sharp questions and insightful comments, and for dedicating time he did not have to reading my work at different stages.

A mis amigos y amigas, por su paciencia y comprensión a lo largo de los años.

A mi familia, sin el apoyo y el amor de la cual nada en la vida sería posible.

A Rodrigo Andrés, por muchísimo más de lo que nunca podré expresarle. Por dar origen a mi amor por Melville y por darme libertad para encontrar a mi propio Melville. Por su dedicación a este trabajo en todas y cada una de sus etapas y por estar presente en cada página de él. Por su profesionalidad, amistad y por formar parte de mi vida. Con mucho amor, infinito agradecimiento, y redoblada admiración. De corazón.

Contents

PROLOGUE by Timothy Marr

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1Intersubjective Universalism: A Theoretical Articulation

CHAPTER 2Intersubjectivity and Universalism in Herman Melville’s Oeuvre

CHAPTER 3Writing Clarel

CHAPTER 4The Politics of Clarel: “Without the Walls”

CHAPTER 5Clarel: Poem and Pilgrimage

CHAPTER 6Resonant Contexts: The Holy Land and the United States

CHAPTER 7“Separate thyself from me”: Inter-community Walls

CHAPTER 8Aborted Potentialities: Inter-personal Walls

CHAPTER 9Impossible Intersubjectivity: Impracticable Universalism

CONCLUSIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Prologue

Timothy MarrUniversity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Perhaps the most widely read of Herman Melville’s literary works today is “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, a sketch of an abortive attempt of a New York lawyer to make sense of an employee who “prefers not to” follow his requests. The story, subtitled “A Story of Wall Street”, is full of walls: the screens that sector the law office, the bricks that serve as the only view from its window, and the prison named the Tombs that immures the solitary copyist in which he dies in vagrancy. The narrator ends his story with the exclamation “Ah Bartleby, Ah humanity!”—in part a confession of his realization that the inside truths of all humans are heartbreakingly pent up in impenetrable isolation. However, this story of Wall Street paradoxically provides avenues of connection as well as impediments of occlusion. The same language that fails to account for the strange lot of the scrivener also expresses a universal yearning for intersubjective understanding. Melville suggests in “Bartleby” that the “dead letters” of words both embody the walls that tragically divide individuals even as they ironically intimate the potential for correspondence between writer and reader on gracious literary errands of life.

Some of the reasons for Melville’s centrality in the canon of great American authors are the diversity of his writings, the planetary reach of the settings of his literature, and his democratic inclusion of characters from all around the ambit of the world. This is part of the foundation upon which López builds her important interpretation of Melville’s art as a universalist project of literary production. Laura López Peña’s book explores the dynamic paradoxes of intersubjective universalism by assessing a broad range of recent critical theories of human community as well as exploring the sectarian problem of communitarian or sectarian exclusion. She then examines their operations in Melville’s first and most important published works of poetry, Clarel and Battle-Pieces.

López suggests that the longings of interhuman love are natural traces of the togetherness experienced between members of a diverse family to which all belong. This yearning, which she shares with Melville, embodies the political promise of democracy—a “common continent of men [sic] […] federated along one keel” that joins varied individuals in a multilogue that dissolves the distance of difference through intimate interaction. In such a pluralist world the intersubjectivity that she calls “human beings who are-with each other” (after Jean-Luc Nancy) bridges division by restoring a community of forbearance that is radical in its inclusive universalism.1

“Bartleby, the Scrivener” dramatizes how this promise remains fleeting and utopian as it is confounded by the limited profession of the lawyer’s conventional charity to reach across and comprehend Bartleby’s traumatic aloneness. Melville often chafed against the cruelty of a fate that created humanity of the same kin yet ruptured the intimacy of community by a series of separations that set people against themselves. López argues that one force that sunders human society into “scattered subjectivities” is humanitarian cosmopolitanism itself through the partiality and privilege of its claims to “universalism” which simultaneously segregate others as outsiders, heathens, castaways, criminals, renegades, and exiles. Among the authorizing agencies that build walls between individuals are religious exclusiveness, racial supremacy, aristocratic elitism, national exceptionalism, and ethnic communitarianism. These provincializing ideologies render humans into what Melville calls “isolatos”, entities so removed from one another that they remain confined within the myopic boundaries into which their cultures have drawn them and by which their societies have defined them.

López has chosen one of Melville’s longest and least read works as the prism for examining the literary politics of his intersubjective universalism. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land was published in New York by Harpers in 1876, the year in which the United States celebrated its centennial. Clarel is comprised of over 17,000 lines of verse, making it one of the longest poems in the English language. However, in an age that craved the short lyric and invented shorthand, Melville’s strenuous pilgrimage in poetry was ignored. Less than three years after Clarel’s only printing of 350 copies, Melville gave permission for 224 of them to be pulped by his publisher. To Harvard professor Lawrence Buell the poem remains “the great white elephant, the great unread […] among all the major works of all the canonical nineteenth-century English-language authors”.2 American writer and poet Robert Penn Warren acutely called it “a seismograph that no one looked at”.3

López’s careful examination of Clarel releases it from the “dead letter” walls of isolation that have impeded readers from accessing its artistic wisdom. Beyond the Walls thus contributes to the important process of resurrecting Melville’s career as a major poet, which lasted three times the length of the period in which he wrote his fiction, from “the pall of incomprehension” that Willard Thorp diagnosed in 1938 and under which his artistic achievements in verse have remained occluded for far too long.4 Her book reveals the biographical and historical circumstances that led to the composition of his opus in verse. López charts the twenty years of Melville’s career and literary production from his own journey to the Holy Land in 1856-7, following his completion of his last novel, to the publication of his poetic meditation on that journey in 1876. During that time he transformed himself into a poet, endured the national destruction of the Civil War, and accepted a job as a Customs Officer in New York City where he worked gathering revenue as an outdoor surveyor discharging cargo on the docks. While Melville was engaged in the compositional rigors of his poetic pilgrimage, he lived his daily life on the front line of the expansion of American capitalism, where he experienced both the burgeoning vigors of commerce as well as the squalid corruptions of greed, graft, and speculation. When Melville was walking to and from the wharves of Manhattan his creative mind was populating the Holy Land with a symposium of human characters for a circular pilgrimage together of descent and return that ends in loss and separation.

Beyond the Walls also offers original commentary on Melville’s prior book of Civil War poetry named Battle-Pieces, intersperses illuminating commentary from her thorough knowledge of Melville’s oeuvre, and engages in a dialogue with other scholars who have grappled with the artistic accomplishment of Clarel. One of the most original aspects of Beyond the Walls is López’s alignment of Melville’s themes with the transnational eclipse of democratic promise during the years of Reconstruction and the emergence of the “Gilded Age”. Melville transposes the social divisions within the United States along with European habits of imperialism and tyranny onto the Holy Land, which becomes localized as the symbolic stage for his meditations on the human drama he documents in Clarel of “the arrest of hope’s advance”.

Melville’s poem transcribes the tragic divide between the potential of intersubjective universalism and the actuality of human estrangement as partisanship divides communities and religious practice strays from its ethical core. Melville tests the integrity of his characters by dramatizing their lost opportunities to choose connection over convention and by honoring their fortitude to endure with neither reward nor certitude. The careful discipline of Melville’s metrical pilgrimage leads ultimately to the lesson that words cannot embody or replace the truths they hope to communicate, and instead form Babel-like partitions that piece humans apart and silence their conversations. Out of the loneliness of human suffering emerges a shared consolation, manifest within Melville’s art, through the voicing of an existential anguish that López calls a “universal existential wail” that evokes what Alphonso Lingis calls “the murmur of the world”.5 Melville challenges his readers to confront the sad and shared wisdom that “naught else abides on fickle earth but unkept promises of joy”.6

Beyond the Walls serves as a compelling introduction to the panoply of themes and characters in Clarel and the heritage of critical scholarship assessing its accomplishment. Newton Arvin celebrated Clarel’s “crowdedness of social landscape”, claiming that “[n]owhere else, not even in Moby-Dick does Melville fill the stage more populously, […] or succeed more brilliantly in giving vitality to secondary and even to incidental figures”.7 These characters include such diverse figures as a black Jew from southern India, an Albanian Muslim mercenary, a disillusioned Swedish idealist, a Jewish geologist, a Confederate veteran descended from Indians and Catholics, a Yankee convert to Zionism, and the only character given a full name: Señor Don Hannibal Rohon del Aquaviva, who lost a leg and an arm fighting in Mexico. López shows the restless but convivial American skeptic named Rolfe, a “messmate of the elements”, to be most representative of Melville’s philosophy of “manysidedness”. Rolfe embodies how the refractions of Melville’s polyphonic poetic voice musters a multifaceted meditation on human vagaries throughout the circuit of its “pilgrimage”. The genius of humanity is registered by practicing a genial forbearance that acknowledges an interiority to others while realizing that, though it cannot be seen, it but must be respected at the cost of being blind.

López shows Melville’s works and poetry, in particular Clarel, to be an ethical testing ground—between literary characters as well as between author and reader—that she calls “a space of political and ethical (im)probabilities”. The loquacity and persistence of Melville’s own literary voice, even when framed in the form of poetic verse, embodied his hope that diversity can be sustained in dialogue. However, the rigor of his poetic meter also challenges the reader’s access to its philosophical deliberations. Her study reveals Melville to be a sophisticated contemplator of political ethics in his dramatization that the creativity that connects people with each other in sustaining ways also figures forth the imagined fantasies through which their hopes for communion are frustrated.

The failure of Clarel to earn the readers it deserves is one measure of its aborted potentiality. Melville himself consigned Clarel to oblivion, claiming that it was “eminently adapted for unpopularity”, and it has repulsed or estranged audiences over the years.8 The fact that a young Spanish female scholar in the twenty-first century so intimately reengages this neglected poem by a nineteenth-century American male author is itself a tribute to the intersubjectivity of Melville’s universalist art. Beyond the Walls is also testimony to López’s own responsive struggle as a reader to surmount the silence of distance and remain open to the invitation of Melville’s verse and the human wisdom it communicates. López’s capacious sensitivity to the ways that Melville’s words invite empathic relations transacts the potential she finds at the core of its expressive labors. Her own writing carries forward this ethical responsibility to its readers as an integral part of its intellectual charge. The insurmountable challenge to the heart is to not become entranced by the dictates of culture so as to remain capable of being moved by feeling the call to join together across the chasms of conventions and of words.

López’s response to Melville’s literary expression embodies the “Humanities” in the way that dramatizes how the engagement of the reader bonds with the text to open the potential of its promise for intersubjective sharing. Helen Vendler, another Harvard professor of poetry, sensitively appraised Clarel as “one of the lasting documents of American culture” which “deserves to be better known”.9Beyond the Walls helps us to know Clarel better by providing evidence for Robert Penn Warren’s assessment that Melville’s poem is “a fundamentally necessary document of our human experience”.10 Both Clarel and Beyond the Walls ultimately express how literature matters and why the humanities communicate lasting significance even through its tragic reminder of the intersubjective potential we fail to manifest.

1 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Eds. John Bryant and Haskell Springer (1851; New York: Pearson Longman, 2007), 123.

2 Lawrence Buell, “Melville and the Question of American Decolonization”, American Literature 64 (1992): 230.

3 Robert Penn Warren, “Introduction” to Selected Poems of Herman Melville: A Reader’s Edition (New York: Random House, 1970), 46.

4 Quoted in Selected Poems of Herman Melville. Ed. Hennig Cohen (1964; New York: Fordham University Press, 1991), xii.

5 Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 69-106.

6 Herman Melville, “Sketch Eighth: Norfolk Isle and The Chola Widow” from “The Encantadas” in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839-1860 (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University and Newberry Library, 1995), 153.

7 Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York: William Sloan Associates, 1950), 276.

8 Herman Melville, Letter to James Billson, 10 October 1884, in Correspondence (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University and Newberry Library, 1993), 483.

9 Helen Vendler, “Desert Storm—A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land”, The New Republic (December 7, 1992): 42.

10 Warren, 12.

Introduction

They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

The present volume claims intersubjective universalism as the ethico-political project articulated in Herman Melville’s 1876 narrative poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. It follows studies on Melville’s global consciousness analyzing the capacity of the author’s works to reflect a democratic understanding of humanity beyond the dividing parameters of nation/ality, ethnicity, social class, religious beliefs, cultural background, gender, and orthodox definitions of sexuality. To name a few, some of these studies are: Grejda’s The Common Continent of Men (1974), Hamilton’s “On ‘Live in the All’ Once Again” (1983), Bryant’s “‘Nowhere a Stranger’” (1984) and “Citizens of a World to Come” (1987), Sten’s “Melville’s Cosmopolitanism” (2001), Marr’s “Without the Pale” (2005), Waugh’s “‘We are not a nation, so much as a world’” (2005), Gibian’s “Cosmopolitanism and Traveling Culture” (2006), Lyons’s “Global Melville” (2006), Kaplan’s “Transnational Melville” (2010), and Obenzinger’s “Herman Melville Returns to Jerusalem” (2010). These excellent examinations of the egalitarian (Grejda), cosmopolitan (Bryant, Gibian, Marr, Sten), transnational (Kaplan), global (Hamilton, Lyons), or globally conscious (Waugh) aspects of Melville’s works have been enabling to this volume’s analysis of Melville’s Clarel as universalist. So have been existing studies exclusively dedicated to the lengthy and complex Clarel, a poem which continues to be one of the most unanalyzed of Melville’s texts despite growing interest in Melville’s poetry recently: Knapp’s Tortured Synthesis (1971), Kenny’s Herman Melville’s Clarel (1973), Short’s “Form as Vision in Herman Melville’s Clarel” (1979), Hayford, MacDougall, Parker, and Tanselle’s critical study in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Clarel (1991), Goldman’s Melville’s Protest Theism (1993), Obenzinger’s American Palestine (1999), and Potter’s Melville’s Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds (2004). Walter Bezanson’s work on Clarel deserves a separate mention, as it is perhaps the most important foundation to all scholars who have ventured into the poem.

Unlike many of the previous studies, however, this volume moves away from a conception of Melville’s global project as cosmopolitan or internationalist, in that, both cosmopolitanism and internationalism endorse a vision of world community which, despite being grounded on a global affiliation with “the world” and “humanity”, also retains a strong adherence to nationalism and patriotism, on the other hand restrictive of such global feeling. Thus, my critical regard adds to those of scholars who have considered that cosmopolitanism and internationalism continue endorsing a nationalist agenda that does not dismantle but, on the contrary, upholds—in the same way that multiculturalism—the very powerstructures of the nation-state which have recurrently been oppressing to certain groups of citizens and non-citizens, at different times in history, and continue to be so in the present. Martin Heidegger best exposed this paradox when he claimed that “[n]ationalism is not overcome through mere internationalism; it is rather expanded and elevated thereby into a system” (244). In our present day and age, the result of this cosmopolitan/internationalist outlook has consisted of little more than supranational institutions, internationalist in scope but deeply grounded on, and protective of, national interests. These institutions have so far been fruitless in their efforts to grant basic international human rights in face of particular nation-states’ abuse of power and violation of human rights (I write this introduction as a new military incursion into Gaza is being carried out by Israeli military forces, who have already killed over 600 Palestinians in less than a week, the majority of them civilians, while the UN and the rest of the world remain impassive, and while not even borders have been opened to allow refugees out of Gaza). In front of this present situation, it is important to turn to Herman Melville’s work. Living and writing in a large part of the nineteenth century (he was born in 1819 and died in 1891), a period of growing nationalisms, “nation” and “nationhood” construction, and of the sovereignty of the nation-state,1 Melville was critical of nationalisms and even exposed a global consciousness transcending cosmopolitanism or internationalism. This consciousness is already present in early novels such as Mardi (1849): “Take all Mardi for thy home. Nations are but names; and continents but shifting sands” (1300). Melville’s critical regard for cosmopolitanism is most evident in his last published novel The Confidence-Man (1857). This global consciousness, in my view beyond cosmopolitanism and internationalism, is constant in Melville’s oeuvre, including his late poetry, which transcends notions of identitarian and/or communitarian, even nationalist, parameters often undermining the very global claims both cosmopolitanism and internationalism profess.

This study aims to demonstrate that the 17,863 line-long2Clarel articulates a universalist project that breaks through the inter-human walls (im)posed both by individualism and by traditional forms of communitarianism based on rigid conceptions of identity (e.g. nation-state, ethnicity, culture, class, religious affiliation, gender, sexuality) which enforce one-sided thinking and monologic views of the world. In a special way, it analyzes the ethical and political potentiality of intersubjectivity to abridge (or not) inter-personal separation and develop (or not) more democratic human relationships. Recurrently, Melville placed the possibility or impossibility of universalism in the possibility or impossibility of intersubjectivity, yet, far from falling into an idealism which the author himself criticized as naïve in some of the characters he created, Melville’s exploration was permanently torn between the democratizing potentiality the author located in interpersonal relationships, and the bleak realization that human beings might never materialize such democratic project. The thesis of this study, thus, is that Clarel is a universalist poem which investigates not only the necessity and potentialities, but also, and most importantly, the challenges, difficulties, and obstacles preventing the actual development of intersubjectivity and, consequently, of universalism. In this respect, I claim that Clarel gives continuity to Melville’s recurrent exploration throughout his literary production of the possibility and the impossibility of democratic human relationships, and of the dangers, beauties, and interconnection of intersubjectivity, universalism, and democracy.

This volume’s approach to Clarel is determined by a conception of Melville’s texts that is influenced by Mikhail Bakhtin’s notions of polyphony, heteroglossia and dialogism. Although Bakhtin refers specifically to the novel (and, more specifically, to Dostoevsky’s novels) in his articulation of polyphony and heteroglossia, and despite the fact that Clarel is a poem, Bakhtin’s theorizations of polyphony and fiction can be applied to the analysis of Melville’s 1876 text. As a matter of fact, Bakhtin himself acknowledges that the significance of polyphonic thinking “extends far beyond the limits of the novel alone” (3). Bakhtin associates polyphony to multivoicedness, defining polyphony as “[a] plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses” (6), and connecting it to dialogism: “The polyphonic novel is dialogic through and through” (40).3 He conceives signification as a dialogic process that emerges from the interactions of the author, text, and reader, each of them inscribed within their particular social and historical contexts. In this process, Bakhtin claims, the author is not a “monologic” (88) source of meaning but “acts as an organizer and participant in the dialogue without retaining for himself the final word” (72). Bakhtin’s dialogism may be connected to Melville’s “Manysidedness” (Clarel 3.16.236), a Melvillean term denoting a capacity for plural thinking that stems from the dialogic exposure to, and interaction with, a multiplicity of human beings and/or the worldviews these represent, and which is directly connected to the universalism the poem articulates.

In this respect, Clarel’s universalism emphasizes the plurality by which it is itself necessarily constructed, as well as the mutual constituency, mutual dependency, and actual inseparability of the particular and the global, blending at the interpersonal level. It is actually at the intersubjective level that the particular and the universal merge by the getting together of two or more individuals who are necessarily different. The difference of these individuals not only lies in their diverse, specific, life-experiences, sociopolitical and economic contexts, and maybe national, ethnic, sexual, etc. identities, but also, and most importantly, in the fact that they constitute different and unique complex subjectivities irreducible to such contexts and identities: both representatives of their particular singularity and complexities and, at the same time, of the larger picture of humanity. Melville’s articulation of universalism is, hence, grounded on intersubjectivity, seemingly in tune with Hannah Arendt’s 1955 remark that “the world […] can form only in the interspaces between men in all their variety” (30-31). The present volume, thus, analyzes how Clarel sets off to portray the democratizing possibilities of this intersubjective creation of “the world” triggering the development of a plural thinking that breaks through the rigid frontiers of one-sided4 imaginations and community-based worldviews. It is at this interpersonal level, Clarel shows, that ways of thinking and relating, both transcending and challenging egocentric mindsets and behaviors, as well as rigid conceptions of community, might be either developed or completely cancelled.

Also influenced by Bakhtin’s view is the approach to literature of this volume, based on the belief in the necessity to consider literary artifacts as both products of those human beings who created them and of the contexts in which they were produced. This study, therefore, highlights the importance of examining the authorial dimension and the material conditions of literary texts, for, as Dennis Berthold has noted on Melville’s 1876 poem, “Clarel exists in a particular time and place in its genesis, composition and setting” (American 231). So are characters “contingent individuals” (232) in that they address issues determined by particular historical, political, social, economic, and personal contexts. This volume, then, considers Melville himself, in his capacity as creator of literary polyphonic spaces, as well as the context in which Clarel is inscribed, valuable sources of information, which are enabling, not limiting, to readerly interpretations past and present. It conceives the reading process as an intersubjective relationship between author, text, and reader (and of readers with other readers), texts themselves “never speaking unless spoken to” (Melville “A Thought” 238).

The present study’s analysis of Clarel is preceded by considerations which are of importance to my interpretation of the poem. Chapter 1 provides an articulation of Melville’s intersubjective universalism from a theoretical perspective. This theoretical articulation is based, on the one hand, on the theoretical possibilities opened up by poststructuralism in its rethinking of individual and collective identities, its problematization of monolithic Meanings, and its avowal of more fluid and plural forms of conceiving human subjectivity and human relationships; and, on the other hand, on the theorizations on community, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, universalism, politics, and ethics by contemporary thinkers such as Arendt, Bauman, Buber, Butler, Derrida, Laclau, Levinas, Nancy, Spivak, or Zerilli, among others. Chapter 2, in turn, offers an analytical overview of Melville’s rejection of cosmopolitanism in his literary production. Most importantly, it exposes Melville’s works’ constant exploration of the potentiality of intersubjectivity to the creation of democratic relationships beyond the walls of individualism and communitarianism, yet the neutralization of such potentiality by human beings determined by their fears, egocentric behaviors, one-sided thinking parameters, and, ultimately, their imperfect natures in which, as Rolfe notes in Clarel, “Evil and good they braided play / Into one cord” (4.4.27-28). The chapter also joins the debate on Melville’s (non-)religiosity or religious views, examining the representation of religious dogma, God and religious feeling in Melville’s works, which, I argue, moves away from a religious view of morality toward a secular conception of ethics. Chapter 3 constitutes an introductory chapter to the book’s analysis of Clarel. It exposes the material conditions in which Clarel was created, together with the significance of Melville’s 1856-57 travel journal for the 1876 Clarel, and the critical reception the poem elicited both at the time of its publication and throughout the 20th century to the present.

After these initial considerations, the volume proceeds to analyze the political dimension of Melville’s 1876 poem. Intended as a general description of Clarel’s universalist project, Chapter 4 provides an overview of the poem’s recurrent images of human beings that are part of larger or smaller crowds yet whose individuality and specificity the text likewise emphasizes and struggles to retain. This chapter also notes Clarel’s use of walls—both physical and psychological—as central motifs, arguing that the poem moves beyond these dividing barriers so as to articulate a universalist understanding of human beings and humanity that escapes the parameters of community and identity. Chapter 5 turns to the notion of “pilgrimage” for the analysis of Melville’s explicit connection of form and content in the very subtitle of the poem. Examining Clarel’s depiction of a journey of unlearning by means of the poem’s problematization of fix Meanings, the chapter studies Clarel’s careful construction of dialogism and plural thinking as mechanisms that develop its universalist project, and how the poem proposes different levels of pilgrimage and pilgrimaging which serve the unlearning journey as they foster independent critical thinking. A central section of Chapter 5 centers on dialogism and the role of dialogue construction (or destruction) in the (non-)de-transcendalization of monologic “Truths” and creation of plural thinking. In particular, I defend the character of Rolfe as an example of a manysided nature, since, unlike other characters, he is capable of continuously intermingling opposites and of an unremitting critical thinking without taking up a (self-)destructive mania. Besides Rolfe, the plural thinker and diver5 in the poem, the chapter also approaches textual mechanisms by which such plural thinking is constructed (the palm cantos in Part 3) or not developed (the conviviality cantos also in Part 3 of the poem). Eventually, it analyzes how poetics is placed at the service of Melville’s universalist project in Clarel. The following chapter, Chapter 6, provides a more sociopolitical and historical approach to the poem in relation to the particular context of postbellum United States, a context which, I argue, Clarel evokes and evaluates with severity. In this respect, the chapter turns to Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, the volume of poems on the U.S. Civil War Melville published in 1866, at the close of the conflict. It claims Battle-Pieces as a continuation of Melville’s universalist project and as a political text conveying some moderate hopes at the close of the war which are completely vanished in Clarel. Thus, the chapter analyzes Clarel as expressive of the disillusionment with postbellum U.S. Melville may have accumulated in the ten years separating the publication of Battle-Pieces and that of Clarel. It regards the poem as a ferocious critique of postbellum American democracy which is interestingly connected to a more global critique of democracy and progress. In this respect, the chapter claims that the poem turns Jerusalem and Palestine into contexts with both specific and global resonances serving Melville’s literary analysis. It also defends that the U.S. is echoed in the Holy Land: Melville exploits the mythical connection between America and the Holy Land only to offer a fierce critique of the myth of exceptionalism, question the construction of both Palestine and the United States as “exceptional” lands favored by the divinity, and problematize the conception of America as “promised land”. The following two chapters center on walls and separation, both physical and psychological, as established by communitarian identity-based formations (Chapter 7) or by individuals (Chapter 8). Focusing on inter- (and also intra-) community divisions, Chapter 7, thus, emphasizes how Palestine acts in the poem as a scenario that serves the purpose of, on the one hand, analyzing segregationism, and, on the other hand, investigating the necessity yet difficulty of transcending such sectarianianism. This chapter particularly approaches religious communities and also nationalism (frequently connected with religion) and gender submission, as well as the suppression of the individual within the community. The chapter ends with an analysis of the poem’s emphasis on gates as connecting spaces, yet also as potential massy walls, and its portrayal of a universal human cry that transcends any existing walls aiming to confine it. Moving from community to inter-personal walls, Chapter 8 analyzes Clarel’s pilgrimage as an exploration of the possibility or impossibility of interpersonal relationships, and the potentiality of intersubjectivity for the creation of more responsible and democratic interpersonal relationships. Analyzing different instances of egocentrism, monomania and one-sidedness, the chapter focuses on how characters defeat the possibility of intersubjectivity at the very door of togetherness, choosing instead to remain locked in their egocentric natures and, frequently, often (self-)destructive, one-sided, monologic thinking parameters. Finally, Chapter 9 is intended as a conclusion to the volume’s analysis of Clarel. Particularly focused on the final cantos of the poem, the chapter defends that Clarel expresses a painful lament at humans’ failure to materialize universalism and transcend segregationism, individualism, and interpersonal walls. Clarel moves characters (and readers) beyond the oppressive walls of Jerusalem, a city that in the poem becomes symbolic of inter-human walls, and embarks the young Clarel and his fellow travelers (readers included) in a journey through sandy deserts. Also significantly, Melville eventually returns his characters to the oppressive and violently divided walled city of Jerusalem. This decision to end the pilgrimage in Jerusalem may perhaps be indicative of Melville’s painful realization that the interpersonal walls blocking the potentiality of universalism are too well-interiorized by human beings, who continuously undermine their own possibilities of togetherness and perhaps also happiness. By Part 4, the desert has invaded the global city of Jerusalem, now a scenario of universal pain and a city of separate human wails whose actors are deaf to one another’s, of aloneness, and of interpersonal gulfs without bridges. This painful conclusion, however, does not necessarily mean the end of Melville’s belief in the potentiality of intersubjective universalism, which human beings, Melville laments, are too limited, imperfect, selfish, to bring to reality. Despite the difficulty of the task, Melville seems to indicate that the incapacity to participate in its construction neutralizes neither the importance of intersubjective universalism nor its democratizing potentiality. Clarel is an important work to unfold Melville’s lifelong political project, and to give expression to the political voice of the so-called “late Melville”, often considered—when considered—as having no political voice at all.

Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, 2009Dennis Berthold

1 See Hobsbawm 1990.

2 This is the result of my own counting of the lines of the poem: 4,783 lines for Part 1, “Jerusalem”; 4,627 for Part 2, “The Wilderness”; 4,267 for Part 3, “Mar Saba”; and 4,186 for Part 4, “Bethlehem”.

3 Unless otherwise specified, italics in all citations correspond to the original.

4 Melville uses the terms “one-sided” or “one-sidedness” recurrently, for example, in The Confidence-Man (1857). He generally makes use of the dash in the word “one-sidedness” but not in the term “manysidedness”. The present volume follows Melville’s criterion, interpreting his use or non-use of the dash as a willingness to reinforce the adherence to monologic meaning, and, therefore, imposition of thinking barriers, denoted by the term “one-sidedness” and its derivates, on the one hand, and the dialogism, connective nature and transcendence of thinking barriers emphasized by “manysidedness”. A similar criterion has been adopted when using the terms “inter(-)personal”, “inter(-)human”, and “inter(-)subjective”, which are written both with and without a dash at different moments of this study. This is aimed to emphasize the walls between individuals (with a dash), on the one hand, or the transcendence of such walls and relational conception of being (without a dash), on the other.

5 The reference to diving finds its origins in a letter to Evert A. Duyckinck, dated March 3, 1849, in which Melville wrote: “I love all men who dive” (Correspondence 121).

Chapter 1

Intersubjective Universalism:A Theoretical Articulation

AGAINST THE WALLS

How to generate a form of togetherness that does not entail the sacrifice of the individual within the collective is one of the most central, difficult, challenging, and recurrent concerns in the history of humanity. Thinkers of all times have examined the advantages and limitations of different local and global allegiances by which human beings are inserted into communities or assembling categories such as patriotism and the nation-state, ethnicity, religious belief, social class, culture, political ideologies, gender, or sexual identities. From the second half of the twentieth century, a number of philosophers, sociologists, academics, and artists have excelled in their investigations of the difficulties and risks, yet necessity, of transcending these traditional forms of communitarian belonging in order to imagine more fluid ways of conceiving interpersonal relationships beyond the binary Us/Them that communitarianism inevitably generates. These theoretical contributions are enabling to articulate from a theoretical perspective the political project in Melville’s Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, which this study interprets in the light of intersubjectivity and universalism.

This volume’s articulation of universalism, however, starts by acknowledging the urgency of moving away from the traditional construction of universalism, particularly since the Enlightenment, based on a monolithic “Universal” imposing European culture with colonialist, homogenizing, even violent ends. As a consequence of this imperialist universalization of a particular made dominant, it is not at all surprising that universalism has had so many detractors. As a sociopolitical project, universalism continues to be negatively associated with neutralization of difference and homogenization; it is considered a project aiming to absorb the plurality of humanity within a monolithic One. In fact, detractors of universalism accuse this project of being anchored in an old-fashioned, restrictive—racist, patriarchal, heteronormative, Christian—notion of the human subject that is evidently hierarchical, dangerously neutralizing, and ultimately totalitarian, exclusive, and even inhuman, in that it does not represent the characteristic plurality constituting humanity. Due to this negative reputation, indigenous and non-Western intellectuals (from Africa, Asia, South America, as well as from the religious point of view of Islam), on the one hand, and, identity-based groups within the West, on the other hand, have long disregarded universalism as a valid political movement for the construction of democratic societies, since each of these groups have for a long time been actual victims of the deeply marginalizing traditional Universal. Due to the negative reputation it has been made to earn, it is no wonder, then, that universalism is conceived as a dangerously totalitarian and homogenizing enterprise still in the twenty-first century.

Herman Melville’s oeuvre is expressive of a recurrent and profound critique against this negative universalism. Already in the nineteenth century, Melville rejected the premises upon which traditional universalism, in its vindication of the universalization of certain particulars over others, was being constructed and often imposed. Unlike other writers of his time such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman (the latter Melville’s full contemporary), Melville was skeptical of universalizing certain temporary feelings or mindsets. Attracted as he was by Emerson’s pantheistic defense of the individual merging within “the currents of the Universal Being” through nature (Emerson “Nature” 10), Melville would confess that “there is some truth” in this “all feeling”, at the same time that he would warn that “what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion” (Correspondence 194). Melville’s conception of universalism, as expressed in his writings, is based on a belief in the humanity of all human beings, as well as in the necessary specificity and individualization of the human in order not to fall into abstract, and therefore paradoxically dehumanizing, categorizations. Deeply sensitive and respectful of the extraordinary plurality of humanity, and of the fact that plurality itself is the very trait defining humanity, Melville was critical of discourses, projects, and powerstructures neutralizing human plurality and individuals’ singularity within a collective Unum in their attempt to empower a specific particular. Instead, Melville’s construction of universalism is closer to what Linda Zerilli has defined as a “site of multiple significations” (8), since it underscores the dialogic and permanently imperfect nature of any form of knowledge, and, consequently, the fallacy of monologic Truths. In the 1876 Clarel, Melville emphasized the inevitable partiality of any interpretation of reality, as well as the narrowness, authoritarianism, and (self-)destructive dangers of clinging to monolithic conceptions and, frequently, impositions, of “Meaning”. Melville exposed and denounced monologic thinking in his texts. He both defended and created literary contexts encouraging plural thinking whereby different, and often radically opposed, conceptions of the world are juxtaposed, laid open, tested, critically assessed, and, many times, as with those worldviews that violate the plurality of humanity by upholding supremacist assumptions, eventually rejected. Melville’s universalist conception of humanity never falls into idealism. Depicting Jerusalem, in particular, and Palestine, in general, as contexts of division and inter-human hatreds which may be read as resonant of the inter-human divisions of postbellum U.S., in Clarel, instead of celebrating the multicultural character of the so-called Holy Land, the author analyzes the fact that innate depravity most often than not cancels out innate humanity. Realizing the necessity of universalism, thus, Melville at the same time acknowledged its unfeasibility, a pessimism which undoubtedly suffuses both the yearning and the lament for universalism he articulates. Yet, on the other hand, the fact that he is not complicit in the bleak pessimism, even nihilism, which he makes some of his characters representative of, together with his insistent analysis and articulation of universalism throughout his entire—very prolific—literary production may be indicative of the significance Melville placed on the project despite being aware that the very human nature that might give it force made it, at the same time, largely impracticable.

On a more specific level, Clarel provides mechanisms to discharge universalism from its traditionally negative association with homogenization and colonialism, in order to reevaluate its validity, and urgency, in a world of deep inter-human divisions. The first condition for this dissociation is the need to rethink universalism so as to make it expressive of the plurality by which it is constituted, since, as Hannah Arendt noted in 1958, “[p]lurality is the condition of human actions because we are the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives or will live” (8). Since its emergence in the 1960s, poststructuralist theory has developed into a determining turning point for the rethinking of subjectivity, community, and human relationships, which became particularly relevant after the proliferation of identity politics movements in that decade. Radically questioning the very notion of identity, and stressing what it criticized as both the homogenizing and the constraining essentialism of identity-based groups and communitarian formations, poststructuralism has introduced ways to think subjectivity beyond identity and other historical grands récits. In the twenty-first century, poststructuralism has pervaded the fields of social sciences, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, sociology, anthropology, and, of course, literature, opening up theoretical possibilities and new conceptual spaces which situate difference, plurality, and hybridity at the core of contemporary debates on politics, subjectivity, and human relationships. Owing to this fact, political activism has been freed from rigid conceptions of (inter)subjectivity and communitarianism, thus encouraging fluid standpoints from which to imagine more plural and decentralized—and, therefore, less hierarchical and oppressive—interpersonal ways of relating. Nonetheless, even if the deconstructionist importance of poststructuralism to problematize monolithic Meanings and essentialist conceptions of Truth has been deeply influential and widely acknowledged, some theorists have also critized the celebrative attitude of poststructuralism in front of such deconstructionism. These thinkers have pointed out as well the political paralysis at the heart of poststructuralism in its failure to construct a political project from its theoretical premises that is based on plurality and social justice. Such are the objections of Linda M. G. Zerilli and Ernesto Laclau:

Now that “we” all know and agree that poststructuralism is critically valuable but politically bankrupt; now that we all know and agree that the “old universal” was indeed a “pseudo-universal”, so the homecoming narrative goes; we can get on with the project of constructing a “new universal”. (Zerilli 3-4)

The correct question, therefore, is not so much which is the politics of poststructuralism, but rather what are the possibilities a poststructuralist theoretical perspective opens for the deepening of those political practices that go in the direction of a “radical democracy”. (Laclau New Reflections 191)

Deeply influenced by poststructuralism, yet facing what they consider its political failure, both Zerilli and Laclau do acknowledge the rich theoretical possibilities poststructuralism provides for political thinking. Actually, although the two thinkers turn to universalism as a political project that may be validly democratic, they carry out a rethinking of universalism out of its negative neutralizing reputation that is enabled by the theoretical tools of poststructuralism. Indeed, poststructuralism constitutes one crucial perspective to rethink universalism since, as Étienne Balibar has noted, “no discussion about universality […] can usefully proceed with a ‘univocal’ concept of ‘the Universal’” (48).

While the theoretical possibilities offered by poststructuralism illuminate Melville’s literary critique of communitarianisms and of monolithic conceptions of identity and Meaning, the author in no case provides a celebrative portrayal of the end of grand narratives of the kind poststructuralism vindicates. On the contrary. At the same time that he emphasized the destructive dangers of clinging to one-sided views of the world and monologic Truths, Melville set off to record the suffering, anxiety, alienation, and even destructive and self-annihilating tendencies caused by the sense of emptiness and uncertainty after realizing the lack of certainties. Restlessly oscillating between nihilism and the daring necessity to live searchingly (“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”, commented Nathaniel Hawthorne of his friend as Melville was on his way to Palestine [qtd. in Bezanson “Historical” 511]), the author analyzed the, both positive and harmful, potentiality of intersubjectivity upon human relationships, beyond the divides that segregate human beings within separate identity-based groups. The present book interprets this necessity to live seachingly as an existential need to explore the potentiality of intersubjectivity to develop dialogic thinking and knock down inter-personal walls. Moving away from homogenizing conceptions of the “Universal”, Melville persisted in analyzing the sociopolitical and ethical implications of a plural universalism grounded on intersubjectivity. This intersubjective universalism—as the present volume names it—can be best articulated, from a theoretical perspective, through the arguments on subjectivity, interpersonal relationships, human vulnerability, unchosen vicinities, and global ethics posed by contemporary thinkers Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Judith Butler, Zygmunt Bauman, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others. The following sections make use of these theorizations, not only from the perspective of poststructuralist theory but also from the perspectives of sociology, philosophy, ethics, and political science, in order to theoretically articulate the political and ethical possibilities of Melville’s literary project.

THE INTERPERSONAL IS POLITICAL

The claim that the interpersonal is political may look like an obvious one, especially after decades of identity politics movements stressing the politics of the personal. Nonetheless, in the present-day society of individualisms and well-interiorized inter-human divisions, both psychological and physical, it is important to lay emphasis on the potentiality of intersubjectivity for the development of relationships and thinking beyond such separation. This volume conceives intersubjectivity as a space of “shared understanding” (SAGE 468 and Encyclopedia 402) between individuals, in their difference, which enables the circulation of “meaning[s] between subjects” (Blackwell 161) as these subjects engage in collaborative negotiation and co-creation of signification by means of their interactions. In other words, intersubjectivity is the process created by and between individuals—necessarily and inevitably different—when they set on a dialogue of reciprocal recognition of one another’s difference and yet common human condition. Herman Melville best portrays intersubjectivity when he narrates the development of Ishmael and Queequeg’s feelings of togetherness in the first chapters of Moby-Dick, from Ishmael’s first fearful encounter of the unknown “Other” in Queequeg (a pagan Polynesian cannibal with yellowish skin and huge tattoos over his body) to the American’s realization not only of Queequeg’s noble nature but also of the redeeming power his friendship with Queequeg has upon himself:

I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me. (62)

It is only through sharing—both of a physical space (a room and a bed) and of their respective beings and cultural practices (Ishmael joins Queequeg in his prayers to the little idol Yojo, while Queequeg attends with Ishmael the Bethel where Father Mapple delivers his sermon)—by means of constant interaction (verbal and non-verbal, for Queequeg communicates with Ishmael through gestures and sentences in broken English), that the bond between Ishmael and Queequeg is developed. This intersubjective union is eventually materialized in the symbolic wedding of the two men’s hearts, which has the power of giving peace to both Ishmael and Queequeg, and of stretching their thinking parameters in order to encompass those thinking paramenters of the other as well. Even though this study shall analyze particular instances of intersubjectivity, and of the failure of intersubjectivity, in the 1876 Clarel in future chapters, I find it important to anticipate at this point a Melvillean instance of intersubjectivity that may better enable an understanding of the ways the present volume appropriates the concept in its theoretical articulation of Melville’s intersubjective universalism. What derives from the previous Moby-Dick example, thus, is a conception of intersubjectivity which implies neither the fusion of individuals nor the colonial act of appropriating the other and neutralizing his or her difference so as to make the other less strange, and therefore less different, to ourselves. In a way similar to the Derridean notion of hospitality, intersubjectivity does not assimilate the other in one’s space but opens up one’s space to incorporate the other as other. Similarly, Martin Buber uses the image of the double cry to illustrate his understanding of intersubjectivity. The philosopher describes two cries that (cor)respond to each other, modifying one another yet without merging into an identical voice:

But then, somewhere, far away, another cry moves towards me, another which is the same, the same cry uttered or sung by another voice. Yet it is not the same cry, certainly no “echo” of my cry but rather its true rejoinder, tone for tone not repeating mine, not even in a weakened form, but corresponding to mine, answering its tones—so much so, that mine, which at first had to my own ear no sound or questioning at all, now appears as questions, as a long series of questions, which now all receive a response. The response is no more capable of interpretation than the question. And yet the cries that meet the one cry that is the same do not seem to be the same as one another. Each time the voice is new. (“Nature” 42)

Buber notes that intersubjectivity does not always necessitate language to become possible: “If I were to report with what I heard it [the cry] I should have to say ‘with every pore of my body’” (43).

Another important theorization of subjectivity as intersubjectivity is Jean-Luc Nancy’s conception of Being as being-with. Moving away from the notion of community, which the philosopher himself had contributed to articulate in earlier works such as The Inoperative Community (1983), in the 1996 Being Singular Plural, Nancy theorizes a relational ontology: he argues that meaning is the very sharing of Being, and Being—and therefore meaning—is nothing but being withothers. Consequently, Nancy explains, Meaning is not communicated but “put into play” (27) as and in the “with” of Being; it is exposed and reformulated through the act of dialogue every time Being is enacted and shared. Nancy’s relational conception of existence is enabling to rethinking interpersonal relationships, interpersonal bonds, and interpersonal responsibility beyond egocentrisms and communitarian forms of identification, including nationality and the nation-state. Nancy’s being-with may also be connected to Agamben’s concept of the “coming community” formed by “whatever singularities” that constitute enemies of the State due to their rejection of identity and of traditional forms of belonging. According to this, Agamben develops the notion of adjacency, which the philosopher defines as “exiling oneself to the other as he or she is” (23). This is disruptive of conceptions of a common identity and sameness upon which communities have traditionally been built. Agamben’s adjacency might be taken as equivalent to Nancy’s being-with as well as to Derrida’s hospitality, in that it constitutes an intersubjective space of possibility by which different singularities make contact with one another, without affirming an identity. The potentiality of this exile into, or reception of, the other may be a development of a sense of belonging together beyond identities or communities, which opens up new relational spaces and possibilities for plural thinking. In a darker light, however, intersubjective contact may also lead to violent consequences when such openness to the other is not produced.

Similarly to Nancy, Agamben, and Derrida, Martin Buber has theorized a conception of community that turns away from identitarian and community-based models. This philosopher argues that community not only encloses and contains the existence of each individual within that of the group, but also hinders individual relationships among its members, even suppressing the personal for the collective (“Social” 68). Instead, Buber locates community not in a uniting feature but in the communal disposition of the individual: “a people is community to the extent that it is communally disposed” (“Community” 99). It is, therefore, in this communal disposition, in the interpersonal or intersubjective, that bonds may be formed between people, without limiting such bonds to identitarian commonalities or questions of sameness. Buber’s notion of community understood as communal disposition facilitates the conception of universalism as a process grounded on the very plurality by which it is constituted. This plural universalism is created intersubjectively, as individuals who are necessarily different (not only because they are representative of certain racial, ethnic, national, religious, sexual, identities, but because they constitute complex subjectivities, inevitably different from one another) negotiate meanings by means of dialogic encounters. The positive potentiality of this dialogic process is abridging inter-human divisions posed by the nation-state and other forms of communitarian affiliation that obscure human connectedness and pose inter-personal walls as natural. This dialogic process may also enable the potentiality for global spaces that are more ethically and politically democratic than community-based ones.

As S. N. Eisenstadt has noted, intersubjectivity is rooted in social interaction and a continuous dialogue (27) by which meaning may be seeked out, explored, challenged, deconstructed, made anew. According to Hannah Arendt, dialogue is the instrument through which human beings make sense of their experiences of the world to others: “whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about. […] Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves” (Human 4). It is also the instrument by which human beings make sense of their experience of the world to themselves, since Arendt also emphasizes the “being-with-myself” that takes places within the individual, which she names “solitude”:

To be with myself and to judge by myself is articulated and actualized in the processes of thought, and every thought process is an activity in which I speak with myself about whatever happens to concern me. The mode of existence present in this silent dialogue of myself with myself, I now shall call solitude. Hence, solitude is more than, and different from, other modes of being alone, particularly and most importantly loneliness and isolation. Solitude means that though alone, I am together with somebody (myself, that is). It means that I am two-in-one, whereas loneliness as well as isolation do not know this kind of schism, this inner dichotomy in which I can ask questions of myself and receive answers. (“Some Questions” 97-98)

By making sense of the world, according to Arendt, human beings “humanize” reality: “We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human” (“Humanity” 25). In this process of interpretation and consequent humanization, Arendt vindicates openness to others as the conditio sine qua non of humanity (15). In a similar way to Derrida and Buber, Arendt locates in interpersonal relationships, particularly in friendship, a fundamental political potentiality, defending that dialogue may restore human beings’ relationship with the world and with other human beings. As Arendt and other philosophers conceive it, therefore, dialogue is central to intersubjectivity, since it is the process by which bonds between individuals (an inter-human space of negotiation and possibility) may be developed. The development of such space, through dialogue, gradually enables the development of plural thinking as well, which, in turn, makes possible a questioning and transcendence of monologic conceptions of Meaning: “as soon as it is uttered”, Arendt claims, truth “is immediately transformed into one opinion among many”, which is immediately and inevitably “contested, reformulated, reduced to one subject of discourse among others” (27). Projects that uphold a single Truth, Arendt argues, are consequently “inhuman” because “a single truth, could there have been one, […] would have spelled the end of humanity” (27). For Arendt, even Kant’s cosmopolitan project is one among those that reinforce a particular Truth, since she claims that “[w]hatever the merits of their arguments, the inhumanity of Kant’s moral philosophy is undeniable” due to the fact that his philosophical teachings are based on the premise that an absolute Truth exists, and Kant imposes his Truth about interhuman relationships as an absolute (27). In her articulation of dialogue as a space of plural thinking and possibility, Arendt uses the phrase “critical judgment”, explaining that critical judgment stimulates the development of an “enlarged mentality” (241), because it places different individuals and their worldviews in conversation with one another in an intersubjective engagement that enables a negotiation of meaning. Critical judgment, therefore, as Arendt considers it, is the seed enabling politics and democratic political thought:

Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy […] nor of counting noses and joining a majority, but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not. The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion. (It is this capacity for an “enlarged mentality” that enables men to judge; as such, it was discovered by Kant in the first part of his Critique of Judgment—who, however, did not recognize the political and moral implications of his discovery). (241)

Arendt emphasizes the ethical and political implications of the exercise in critical judgment she describes, which is important to this study’s analysis of Melville’s project in Clarel. Furthermore, Arendt’s notion of critical judgment can be connected to Ernesto Laclau’s theory of “hegemony” in his articulation of universalism, which, revising Gramscian genealogy of this concept, Laclau defines as the relationship that emerges from the dialogic interaction of different particulars, in which each individual element can temporarily occupy the space of the “empty signifier” of the universal. Most importantly, Arendt’s critical judgment can also be related to the dialogism and construction of “Manysidedness” (