Now, how does that famous New Testament hymn of praise go about faith, hope, and love -- with its concomitant enthusiasms and manias being the greatest ingredient in one's life and labor? Melville may never quite have got the faith part straight (the head in his terminology), but as an elder he surely appears to have labored in love with all his heart in writing his long centennial poem Clarel.
A digression is in order here for me to explain further the points I have just made in the two preceding paragraphs. My favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) of Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri.
In Ong's 1958 essay "Voice as Summons for Belief: Literature, Faith, and the Divided Self," he works with a distinction that he borrows from Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973): belief "that" (a propositional statement is true) and belief "in" (a person, human or divine). So the nineteenth-century faith-doubt literature involves belief "that" - in Melville's terminology the head. But Melville strikingly sketches persons in his centennial poem to serves as concrete exemplars for the young and impressionable Clarel - to attract him through appealing to his capacity for belief "in" a person (or perhaps more than one person).
Ong's 1958 essay is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (2002, pages 259-275).
For further discussion of Ong's thought with respect to Melville's 1857 novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, see Thomas D. Zlatic's essay "Faith in Pretext: An Ongian Context for The Confidence-Man" in the book Of Ong and Media Ecology (2012, pages 241-280). End of digression.
Now, first, Kenny briefly states each of the eight possibilities on pages 151-152, and then in subsequent pages, he discusses each one in some detail:
(1) "Can he [Clarel] accept the orthodox Western religion expressed in the [admittedly diverse] words and lives of Nehemiah, the Dominican, the Coptic monks, and the Franciscan?" (discussed on pages 153-157).
(2) "If orthodox religion [in one form or another] is unworkable for him [Clarel], why not accept the modern substitutions of business, progress, science, and humanitarianism, as practiced by the Banker, the Presbyterian Elder, Margoth, and Derwent, the spokesmen for the New World?" (discussed on pages 157-177).
(3) "Why not bolt from reason and gratify his [Clarel's] sensual desires, as Glaucon and the Prodigal do?" (discussed on pages 177-182).
(4) "Romantic love and maternal nourishment in Ruth [Clarel's love-interest] and Agar [Ruth's mother] can provide immediate surcease, but can they sustain the 'traveler' [Clarel] for a lifetime?" (discussed on pages 182-186).
(5) "If all three [possibilities] - religion, the New World, and romance - are without meaning [for Clarel], why not cast himself outside their influence and join the [the admittedly diverse] misanthropes, Celio, Mortmain, and Ungar?" (discussed on pages 186-198).
(6) "Since such antisocial attacks [voiced by the misanthropes] avail no happiness, perhaps it is better [for Clarel] to avoid society and its sorrow and imitate Vine and Agath?" (discussed on pages 199-203).
(7) "Perhaps no one answer can be found [by Clarel], no one way of life is best [for him at his age]. Therefore, is not Rolfe correct [for young Clarel at his age?] in an eclectic approach to life, his endless questions complementing continuous participation?" (discussed on pages 203-208).
(8) "No answer can be found [for Clarel]. It rests only with Allah, as the Druze says on the pilgrimage. One survives. Nothing else matters - questions [esp. from Rolfe], harangues [from others], cajoling - for man cannot change the inexorable movement of fate [why no question here, eh, Kenny?]" (discussed on pages 208-218).
In the short run, young Clarel is going to be preoccupied with mourning the deaths of Ruth and Agar. However, even though he is an impressionable young man, it is not clear that he could at his age realistically choose Rolfe as a possible role model and exemplar to follow. After all, what was the now-glib Rolfe himself like when he was as young and impressionable as Clarel? We are not told. Nevertheless, the poem has served the instructive purpose of presenting a young and impressionable religious searcher with an array of examplars and possibilities to consider.
Surely Melville knew that his long poem was not going to be widely read. However, if we follow Kenny's lead and see Melville as delineating possibilities for Clarel, then we would have to say that Melville saw himself as an elder writing for the benefit of perplexed young men such as Clarel. In other words, after the Civil War (1861-1865) had tragically pitted young American men - about Clarel's age -- against one another, Melville the elder wrote his centennial poem in the spirit of generativity (in Erik Erikson's terminology) for impressionable young men like Clarel who are searching for meaning in their lives.
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