Now, because Melville turned 32 in 1851, the year in which Moby-Dick was published, we should note here that the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung, M.D. (1875-1961) conducted his dangerous experiments of diving deep into his psyche between 1913 and 1916 - roughly between the ages 38 and 41. Jung processed the material he had experienced in his recently published The Red Book: Liber Novus, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Mark Kyburz, John Pick, and Sonu Shamdasani (2009), which Jung worked on between 1915 and 1930 (roughly between the ages of 40 and 55). Years later, in 1944, Jung suffered heart attacks and was hospitalized. During his hospitalizations, he experienced vivid visions involving the archetypal field. His last major publication was Mysterium Conjunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 2nd ed., translated by R. F. C. Hull (1970; orig. German ed. published in two parts, 1955 and 1956). Jung lived to 1961; he died at the age of 85. Jung was also keenly interested in what Ong refers to as primary oral cultures.
Because Melville's Clarel unfolds in four lengthy parts - (1) "Jerusalem," (2) "The Wilderness," (3) "Mar Saba," and (4) "Bethlahem" -- this four-fold structure calls to mind Jung's fascination with quaternity symbolism. But it appears that no Jungians have published discussions of Melville's Clarel. As a matter of fact, it appears that his centennial poem has not attracted much discussion beyond a relatively small group of Melville specialists.
In my estimate, the American Protestant Jungian psychotherapist and psychological theorist Robert Moore's exploration of quaternity symbolism - indeed, the double quaternity symbolism - deserves to be mentioned here. With Douglas Gillette as his co-author, Moore explores quaternity symbolism in the following five books:
(1) King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine (1990);
(2) The King Within: Accessing the King [Archetype] in the Male Psyche (1992a; but also see the revised and expanded 2007 edition);
(3) The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight [Archetype] in the Male Psyche (1992b);
(4) The Magician Within: Accessing the Shaman [Archetype] in the Male Psyche (1993a);
(5) The Lover Within: Accessing the Lover [Archetype] in the Male Psyche (1993b).
Briefly, Moore takes Jung's reference to the double quaternity symbolism to refer to the two sets of archetypes of maturity in every person's psyche: (1) the four masculine archetypes of maturity and (2) their four feminine archetypal counterparts.
Now, even though Knapp does not explicitly invoke Jung's idea of the collective unconscious, he does explicitly invoke another conceptual framework that opens the way of considering more than just Melville's personal unconscious. Knapp says, "Every great writer is engaged in a dialectic with the society which has formed him and which he either accepts or rejects. Or, in Lionel Trilling's words: 'In any culture there are likely to be certain artists who contain a large part of the dialectic [of a nation's culture] within themselves, their meaning and power lying in their contradictions; they contain within themselves, it may be said, the very essence of the culture, and the sign of this is that they do not submit to serve the ends of any one ideological group or tendency.' Herman Melville, as is well known, is pre-eminently an example of the great writer's ability to contain both the yes and the no of his culture, especially the no" (page 1; Knapp inserted the bracketed material; he is quoting from Trilling's 1957 book The Liberal Imagination, page 126).
Perhaps we could say that Knapp, drawing on Trilling's conceptualization, is going to explore Melville's American collective unconscious - as distinct from Melville's personal unconscious, which would include his memories of his childhood (e.g., his father's death). However, as Edinger's 1978 book about Melville's Moby-Dick, mentioned above, suggests, Melville had already moved beyond his personal unconscious in his now-famous 1851 novel Moby-Dick, which has long be seen by literary critics as being about the very essence of American culture, to paraphrase Trilling.
Now, in 1962, drawing on Bezanson's 1960 critical edition of Melville's Clarel, Knapp completed his doctoral dissertation on Melville's Clarel at the University of Minnesota, which he subsequently revised and published as the 1971 book Tortured Synthesis: The Meaning of Melville's Clarel. For my present purposes, I want to note here that Knapp (pages 118-119) refers to Perry Miller's 1939 book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century and to Ong's 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason - Ong's pioneering study about print culture that emerged in Western culture after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the mid-1450s. From the earliest colonial times onward American Protestant culture was obsessed with the King James Bible of 1611 - and Melville's centennial poem Clarel in 1876 is largely an exploration of American Protestant beliefs, but with a certain passing attention to Roman Catholicism.
However, unlike Knapp, the American Jesuit philosopher and theologian Donald L. Gelpi does not refer to either Miller's massively researched 1939 book nor to Ong's massively researched 1958 book in his 2000 book about the American Protestant mind titled Varieties of Transcendental Experience: A Study in Constructive Postmodernism. Nevertheless, what Gelpi refers to as the American Protestant dialectical imagination (pages 82, 132, 164, 172, 174, 192, 193, 206, 223, 224 280, 281, and 282) bespeaks the Ramist dialect that both Miller and Ong studies in their respective books. Gelpi contrast the American Protestant dialectical imagination with the Roman Catholic analogical imagination.
We should recall here how Knapp appropriates Trilling's insights about the dialectic within a given culture to focus his (Knapp's) attention on how Melville as an American explores the dialectic of his American culture in his literary works. In Gelpi's terminology, Melville tends to critique the American Protestant dialectical imagination. In Fox's Sheer Joy, he quotes Aquinas as saying, "'There is no contrary to the object of contemplation, because contraries, as apprehended by the mind, are not contrary. Rather, one is the means of knowing the other'" (quoted on page 203). Melville seems to have figured this much out for himself - without being familiar with Aquinas' thought. However, he did not exactly figure out Aquinas' complex position on evil (see the index in the 2020 edition of Fox's book for "evil" for specific page references).
Now, long after Melville's death in 1891, Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941), Dorothy Lee (1905-1975), and others would further elucidate characteristics of what Ong refers to as primary oral cultures - through their studies of American Indians. For further reading, see Whorf's 1956 book Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, edited and with an introduction by John B. Carroll; and Lee's 1959 book Freedom and Culture.
More recently, the retired American biblical scholar James L. Kugel of Harvard University has explored ancient biblical culture as, in effect, exemplifying what Ong refers to as a primary oral culture in his 2017 book The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times - even though Kugel does not happen to advert explicitly to Ong's work about primary oral culture. Concerning the shift that Kugel refers to, see my article "Walter Ong and Harold Bloom can help us understand the Hebrew Bible" in the journal Explorations in Media Ecology, volume 11, numbers 3&4 (2012): pages 255-272.
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