In Melville's collective American consciousness, his experiences living with cannibals in the South Seas would resonate with the much earlier encounter of American colonists with American Indians. No other significant American writer lived at an impressionable young age with people in a primary oral culture as young Melville did. Because Melville in his fifties created the impressionable young American Protestant divinity student Clarel as the focal person in his centennial poem, we should not forget that Melville himself was an impressionable young American Protestant when he lived with cannibals in the South Seas - out of which exotic and sensationalistic experience of cultural relativity he was able to launching his writing career with Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), which eventually led to his deeply meaningful friendship with the older admired writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) and his (Melville's) writing his famous novel Moby-Dick (1851) at a still relatively young age.
Now, Ong's pioneering study of print culture Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason was published in 1958. Subsequently, he developed his view of what he eventually came to refer to as primary oral culture (1) in his 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History, mentioned above, (2) in his 1971 book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture, (3) in his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture, and (4) in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, his most widely translated book - and in other books and articles.
For complete bibliographic information about Ong's 400 or so publications, including information about reprintings and translations, see Thomas M. Walsh's "Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006" in the 2011 book Language, Culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong, S.J., edited by Sara van den Berg and Thomas M. Walsh (pages 185-245).
Now, in Knapp's 1971 book, he says, "Clarel is Melville's attempt to bring into focus the conflicting polarities that confronted the intelligent critic of nineteenth-century America - conflicts that were social, industrial, theological, economic, and military, among others. The theme that Melville chose for his long poem was a national theme, the theme of nineteenth-century America's search for values in a rapidly changing civilization" (page 4).
Knapp also says, "In his long and difficult education, Clarel soon learns that his guides [among his fellow pilgrims] fall into two categories, minor and major. The minor guides are superficial thinkers, those who either mistake a fragment of experience for a whole by accepting the intellectual currents of their age, or those whose opposition is merely an unreasoned rejection. Thus Nehemiah, who represents American fundamentalism with its typical American sense of mission, is a minor guide for Clarel, since his scriptural literalism and millennialism are too simplistic to come to grips with the changing times. Derwent also is a minor guide. This Anglican clergyman, a British counterpart of Emerson, with equal ease Henry James, Sr., might have referred as 'my unfallen friend,' had made peace with his age. His easy capitulation to science, his identification of change with progress, and his unthinking denial of evil, reflect a transcendentalism that Melville explored and rejected. Margoth, the 'geologic Jew' who has forsaken his heritage in favor of science, is also a minor guide, since his claim of science's infallibility is merely surrender to his age. These three guides are minor only in Clarel's - and Melville's - eyes. For the age they represent, they mirror the American mind" (page 5).
Speaking of infallibility, the First Vatican Council (1869-1870) in the Roman Catholic Church formulated the doctrine of the pope's infallibility in matters of faith and morality - which infallibility the pope must explicitly invoke in any such declaration. For further reading, see the American Jesuit church historian John W. O'Malley's 2018 book Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontaine Church.
Now, to spell out the obvious, Knapp's terminology (minor and major guides to Clarel) bespeaks a very different way of categorizing certain characters than Bezanson's far more general terminology about major characters. Not surprisingly, all three of the characters categorized as minor guides to Clarel - (1) Nehemiah, (2) Derwent, and (3) Margoth -- are considered to be major characters by Bezanson. The far more surprising categorization by Knapp involves the four major guides to Clarel: (1) Mortmain (one of Bezanson's monomaniacs), Ungar (another one of Bezanson's monomaniacs), (3) Rolfe (a younger version of Melville himself), (4) the Dominican (who is not even considered to be a major character by Bezanson). So three of the four major guides of Clarel according to Knapp are described in somewhat dismissive terms by Bezanson. Now, Bezanson is preoccupied by the possibility that Vine is loosely based on Hawthorne. But Knapp does not categorize Vine as either a minor or a major guide to Clarel.
In addition, Knapp says, "The major guides, on the contrary, are profound thinkers - the men able and willing to dive into themselves and into the society that confronts them. These are the Nay-Sayers, united in their common opposition to the prevailing values of their times, but individual in the counterarguments that each presents in the light of his own experience.
"[1] The first of these is Mortmain, disillusioned with man's [sic] natural goodness, and preoccupied with death. He represents European existentialism with his intense sense of alienation. He exemplifies the religious dread of the isolato caught in an intolerable world, without meaning and without God; and he lives out in practice Nietzsche's dictum: 'God is dead.'
"[2] Ungar, the self-exiled officer of the Southern Confederacy, completes the revolt against optimism begun by Mortmain. For Ungar, both the Civil War and the rising industrialism prove - even in the New Eden of America - man's [sic] inhumanity to man [sic]. He gives an American context to the intense sense of alienation so vividly illustrated in Mortmain.
"[3 and 4] Rolfe and the Dominican provide the alternative to atheistic existentialism. The Dominican represents the Catholic response to the age - a response that tempted Melville, Hawthorne, and Lowell, and converted Brownson and Hecker - by showing Rome's ability to adapt to time and place without losing its essential characteristic of endurance. Rolfe is the intellectual pioneer, the frontiersman [sic] of the mind, who joins philosophy with the life of experience. Although he is tempted by thoughts of America as the New Eden, he is knowing enough to understand that the classical Golden Age is past, and he is realist enough to see that utopianism is a Christian heresy. From the Dominican's presence and arguments Rolfe sees only two answers: Atheism or Catholicism" (pages 5-6).
Speaking of Nietzsche, see Ong's essay reprinted as "Post-Christian or Not?" in his 1967 book In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture (pages 147-164).
For Bezanson's relevant discussion of the Dominican in the 1991 edition of Clarel, see the subsection "A Critical Index of the Characters" (pages 613-635 at 622. Among other things, Bezanson says, "The priest is doubtless a fiction; his significance is best understood in terms of Cardinal John Henry Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), Arnold's later essays, and the spiritual history of such diverse Americans as Orestes Brownson and Henry Adams" (page 622).
For further discussion of Newman (1801-1890), see Ong's 1986 book Hopkins, the Self, and God, the published version of Ong's 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto (pages 18-19, 24, 90, 95-96, 119, 124-126, and 132-133). But also see Ong's article "Newman's Essay on Development [1845] in Its Intellectual Milieu" in the Jesuit-sponsored journal Theological Studies, volume 7 (March 1946): pages 3-45, which is reprinted in volume two of Ong's Faith and Contexts (1992b, pages 1-37).
In addition, Ong discusses the American Protestant convert to Catholicism Isaac Hecker (1819-1888) in his essay reprinted as "Father Hecker and the American Situation" in his 1959 book American Catholic Crossroads: Religious-Secular Encounters in the Modern World (pages 46-66).
In Ong's 1986 book about Hopkins, he discusses what he refers to as particularism (pages 21, 65-75, 78, 84-85, 88, and 117-120). It strikes me that Melville was also a striking practitioner of what Ong refers to as particularism in his now famous 1851 novel Moby-Dick.
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