bibliographing

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

2010-09-07T01:20:55Z

In some ways, the content of Freedom came as a surprise to me. I knew, between The Discomfort Zone and magazine interviews, that Jonathan Franzen was big into bird watching. I also knew that he was not so into TVs, consumerism, and all that jazz, from the same interviews, his novels, and the essays of How to Be Alone. But I wasn’t prepared for a novel so overtly political, or so overtly post-9/11. (I should say superficially, rather than overtly, but I’ll get to that below.) And forcing the characters, despite their sometimes radical leanings, to address the world almost entirely in contemporary American Democrat vs. Republican terms, made for a frustrating reading experience that seemed more concerned with current affairs than any wider moral issues. And as Mark Athitakis describes on his blog, “it’s a novel with that persistent, irritating drumbeat in the background—technological consumerism is an infernal machine”—and it is irritating.

But back to that “superficially” above. Much of the plot may revolve around politics, especially as a means to keep the action rolling along, but the heart of the novel is really in the home. This, along with many other features of the plot, makes the novel seem, as Sam Anderson notes in New York magazine, “from a distance” much like The Corrections. His rundown of the parallels is about what I came up with:

Freedom is a close cousin to The Corrections: a social-realist epic about a depressive, entropic midwestern family being swallowed and digested by the insatiable anaconda of modernity. The Corrections told the story of the Lamberts—Arthur and Enid and their three children. Freedom tells the story of the Berglunds—Walter and Patty and their two children. Instead of St. Jude (a proxy for St. Louis) we have St. Paul. Instead of a dubious get-rich-quick scheme exploiting the post-Soviet chaos in Lithuania, we have a dubious get-rich-quick scheme exploiting the war in Iraq. Like its predecessor, Freedom is heavy on psychology and extramarital affairs and earnest speechifying (capitalism, overpopulation, Israel). It is, in other words, classic Precambrian Franzen: a ready-made literary fossil. It’s hard not to be at least a little preemptively bored.

“Precambrian Franzen” in the sense that all Franzen is Precambrian, according to the argument that the social realist novel is dead (hence my irritation above, I suppose) and that this kind of domestic fiction has lost its place in the literary world and been relegated to chick-lit status (when written by women). I haven’t got much comment on that whole debate, as these days I don’t feel I know much about the contemporary American novel. But anyway.

As Anderson notes, what makes Freedom ultimately different from The Corrections is that the novels are “populated by different people”—an important distinction in Franzenworld, where characterization is extremely strong and the decades spent telling the story of the Berglund family backwards and forwards through time, with an all but omniscient narrator shadowing each character and two long sections written by the family matriarch herself, make for very precise and three-dimensional people walking around the novel. And I don’t mean three-dimensional in the sense of “round” vs. “flat,” but in the sense that they actually seem like humans that could get up and walk away—again, the words of Anderson are better than mine: Franzen’s skill “trick[s] us into beliving that a text-generated set of neural patterns, a purely abstract mind-event, is in fact a tangible human being that we can love, pity, hate, admire, and possibly even run into someday at the grocery store.” And the ages of both main generations of the Berglunds (both parents and children are younger, in real terms as well as within the narrative, than the Lamberts) happened to be more personally interesting to me.

It is this dense rendering of character—to paraphrase Anderson one last time—that gave such strength to The Corrections as well. Yes, the overarching ideas of modernity and the human family, yes. But nine years later, what do I remember more clearly than the pain of Gary and the awful, almost evil frustrations of dealing with his wife? The complete picture of Denise, possibly the weakest of the Lambert siblings, turning into a serious chef? Or Chip, the sheep so black and sheepish he finds himself accidentally “forced” to steal super-expensive salmon from a super-expensive boutique market by stuffing it down his shirt? Or was it his pants? Either way.

In Freedom it is not any sort of political message that comes out on top, but an endless string of interpersonal ones that are from beginning to end more important. The politics of the novel is dominated in its origins by family: Walter becomes the way he does about nature conservancy because of his depressed father and his marital problems; Joey turns against the family and becomes Republican because his rebellion against his parents pushed him into the arms of Republican-leaning neighbors; Patty even comes to understand late in life that her own mother was somewhat driven into politics to get away from her family, rather than the reverse.

The title of “Mistakes Were Made,” Patty’s therapy-induced autobiography, may be a dig at political events, and plenty such “mistakes were made” in the novel as well—Walter’s meltdown and Joey’s deal with the military-industrial devil, for example. But her autobiography itself is dominated by mistakes of a very different sort: mistakes with her parents and siblings, mistakes dealing with her rape, mistakes with her college friends, mistakes with men, mistakes with her children.

And those kinds of mistakes, on the part of everyone—because we all make them—are more intense psychologically than any of the environmentalism or anti-populism or anything about the Iraq War. Franzen paints the inside of a relationship so thickly and also so starkly that it’s hard not to be afraid of whatever parallels there may be to the reader’s life; most of these people are really unhappy and you do not want to do whatever they did to get here.

Politics can get you a few things—a well-attended funeral, immunity from prosecution, even an ultra-lucrative military contract—but it will also take you away from your family, sour your personal relationships, and even get you killed. By the last section of the book, “Canterbridge Estates Lake,” Walter has left family life almost entirely behind to reach his fullest crank potential. Echoing an earlier time in the novel when Patty lost it over Joey and sociopathically slashed the neighbor’s tires, he traps the neighbor’s bird-hunting pet cat and brings it to an animal shelter hours away to be euthanized. But family can bring him back from the brink of that level of misanthropy and dysfunction, smooth over relations with other humans, and make it possible for Walter to live in society again.

Speaking of family, Walter’s grandfather is the one who immigrated to America, from Sweden. As the narrator explains,

[h]e became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn’t the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn’t get along well with others.

It may sound like something a crank would say, but in Franzenworld it is true. No one “gets along well with others” in the larger sense, but sometimes certain people get along with certain other people, or force themselves to, because they have to, for the family or the “team.” To perhaps bring further home that chick lit point above, many of those peacemakers are women: Patty, Jessica, Lalitha, Connie, Dorothy. But men unquestionably have a role as well, such as in Joey’s little incident with his wedding ring and his larger decision to truly be with Connie, or Walter, when he negates his anti-overpopulation principles once with Patty and then wishes to again later with Lalitha. For all his commitment to politics and the vehemence he feels for his cause, he still literally “couldn’t stop imagining making Lalitha big with child. It was at the root of all their fucking, it was the meaning encoded in how beautiful he found her body.”

So, so much for changing hearts and minds, then, and we are what we are? Mistakes were made, and will be made, and we will forgive each other because we must and get along with each other just as far as we must because we must? There is a place in this world for cranks and angry political causes but ultimately life is much quieter than that, though still as intense? Social realism and domestic fiction are not at all dead? Perhaps. That is part of what I will leave with, at least. There’s a lot, lot more though, and I hardly need to note that it’s all carried off in Franzen’s super-assured sentences, which style, I think, may even have improved since the corrections, gotten a bit more mature.

Farewell, oh Great Melville Project

2010-09-03T02:06:53Z

Well, I’ve come to the end! Let me state the usual for a project recap: I did not do as much as I wanted, and I still have lots more I want to read! (Even more Melville: I did not read every single poem or short story, and hardly any of his letters.)

But…I did pretty much read all of Melville’s work, in chronological order, between last Thanksgiving and now. So I will congratulate myself in a pretty serious way. Also, it was awesome, and all my readers were awesome for somehow liking it. I already did a recap of the first half of the adventure, from Typee through White-Jacket, so now for the second half:

Moby-Dick was next on the list, and was a re-read for me, of one of my favorite books. I first addressed its alleged boringness, then its discussions of friendship and affinity. I talked a bit about its structure and Ishmael’s ideas about narration, then gushed about Ishmael some more. I wrapped up with the whiteness of the whale and links to many other bloggers’ excellent Moby-Dick posts.
I started reading Pierre, and then announced the Unstructured Clarel Readalong (which is still “going on”!).
Back to Pierre, I had to admit things got a little crazy, and not exactly reader-friendly, but certainly not offensive and also totally, in its own way, good (or even great).
Then I came to the fun and adventurous Israel Potter, discussed Melville’s depictions of clothing and mutability, Israel Potter’s encounters with important historical figures, and Melville’s anti-myth-making.
Melville’s break from the novel came next, represented here largely by The Piazza Tales. I wrote about “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and The Encantadas, as well as the non-Piazza Tale, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” (I would also strongly recommend “I and My Chimney,” just for the record.)
When I reached The Confidence-Man, I immediately thought of Mardi. Melville gets even slippier than usual in his language in this one. Of all the novels interlocutors, Pitch was probably my favorite (though who doesn’t love the cosmopolitan?). And I tried, a little bit, to write about confidence itself.
Before getting into Clarel I wrote just a bit about Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War.
Then came the monster: Clarel itself. I discussed beauty in the poem, and also weird, ugly weirdness, which may also be beautiful. I wrote about Mortmain, in the running for my favorite character (along with all the others!) and the lovely connection between Clarel and a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Suddenly, all that remained was Billy Budd, a novella heavy on the psychology and seemingly very mature though unfinished, and which pays some wonderfully Melvillean attention to the face.

Now, who’s next, and how many years until I do this one all over again? Because you know I will have to.

“a red light would flash forth from his eye like a spark from an anvil in a dusk smithy”

2010-09-02T01:56:26Z

For a novella so heavy on the psychology, it should perhaps not be surprising that the narrator of Billy Budd spends a lot of time describing people’s eyes. The whole aspect of the three main characters and several of the minor ones is described in minute detail. This is another instance of Melville’s focus on faces. The big thing Melville has to accomplish in Billy Budd is to explain to the reader the psychology of the three main actors—an impossible task, perhaps? It seems the narrator is desperate to get across a sense of the precise character of the men, by painstakingly describing habits, actions, and appearances, and letting “every one…determine for himself by such light as this narrative may afford” the truth behind what he is able to superficially report or speculate on.

But back to eyes. The very first mention of Billy Budd describes him as “welkin-eyed,” a ridiculous, Melvillean thing to say (and he does so two times further). It was the following passage that really jumped out at me, describing Claggart just after he has charged Billy Budd with attempted mutiny:

Meanwhile the accuser’s eyes, removing not as yet from the blue dilated ones, underwent a phenomenal change, their wonted rich violet color blurring into a muddy purple. Those lights of human intelligence, losing human expression, were gelidly protruding like the alien eyes of certain uncatalogued creatures of the deep. The first mesmeristic glance was one of serpent fascination; the last was as the paralyzing lurch of the torpedo fish.

Where else have we seen extended metaphors about eyes and the deep with bizarre creepy images of fish again? Oh, right, in Pierre. “Gelidly” I think makes it, here.

Note that Claggart’s aspect undergoes a transformation there, right in front of Billy Budd. Captain Vere must cover his own face with his arm to effect its transformation, and after uncovering it, it “was as if the moon emerging from eclipse should reappear with quite another aspect than that which had gone into hiding. The father in him, manifested towards Billy thus far in the scene, was replaced by the military disciplinarian.” All the way from Typee to here he’s been repeating how much can be read in the face—and how little.

Billy Budd—”one inly deliberating how best to put [his thoughts] to well-meaning men not intellectually mature”

2010-09-01T13:19:39Z

After Clarel, Herman Melville published only two books of poetry, both privately, before his death in 1891, but he also worked on a piece of prose that would be found among his papers and remain unpublished until 1924, during his revival. Billy Budd was begun around 1886 and recalls much about Melville’s earlier work. The title character is a Handsome Sailor, not entirely unlike Jack Chase of White-Jacket, working on the merchant marine vessel The Rights of Man in the 1794. He is impressed by the English ship-of-the-line Bellipotent, gets in the bad books of the master-at-arms, and comes to a tragic end.

The exposition of the main action is secondary to extended psychological examinations of three major characters, Billy Budd, John Claggart, the master-at-arms, and Captain Vere. The narrator is not a party to the story but is also not quite omniscient. Superficially, there are many parallels with works like Redburn, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick, but in my reading Billy Budd seemed more in the vein of Pierre. In the same sense that Pierre follows up Moby-Dick in its exploration of early insanity in Pierre compared with late-stage monomania in Ahab, Billy Budd relies heavily on another, and a different, instance of mental aberration. Actually, maybe two.

John Claggart, in the words of Billy Budd’s Dansker friend, is “down on” Billy. But why? Just as Melville’s narrator has spent chapters trying desperately to get across to the reader the truest depiction of the personality of Billy Budd and the nature of the Handsome Sailor, he discusses at length the nature of Claggart’s antipathy. He describes Claggart as a sociopath. In fact his appreciation of the Handsome Sailor as a phenomenon simply makes him hate Billy more:

One person excepted, the master-at-arms was perhaps the only man in the ship intellectually capable of adequately appreciating the moral phenomenon presented in Billy Budd. And the insight but intensified his passion, which assuming various secret forms within him, at times assumed that of cynic disdain, disdain of innocence—to be nothing more than innocent! Yet in an aesthetic way he saw the charm of it, the courageous free-and-easy temper of it, and fain would have shared it, but he despaired of it.

Claggart is complex, and the narrator’s portrait of him is intense. His descendence from Ahab is clear, with Melville describing “the monomania in the man—if that indeed it were—as involuntarily disclosed by starts…yet in general covered over by his self-contained and rational demeanor; this, like a subterranean fire, was eating its way deeper and deeper in him. Something decisive must come of it.”

Something decisive does come of it, and it brings into the action of the story Captain Vere—the “one person excepted” from the quote above, and the other possible victim of mental aberration. I found “Starry Vere,” as he is known in the navy, one of Melville’s more interesting characters. I would re-read Billy Budd on his account alone. Also for the narrator, who treats the characters and action with a knowingness but a tone of reportage rarely seen in his other work. How much do I love this scene, of Captain Vere pacing before the “drumhead court” he’s convened:

Turning, he to-and-fro paced the cabin athwart; in the returning ascent to windward climbing the slant deck in the ship’s lee roll, without knowing it symbolizing thus in his action a mind resolute to surmount difficulties even if against primitive instincts strong as the wind and the sea.

Perhaps it’s my imagination, but I think you can tell that Billy Budd was a work in progress, not fully edited and prepared for publication. Melville wasn’t quite done tinkering it the way he’d tinkered with all his other novels. But at the same time there is a maturity in structure, style, and philosophy that makes me feel good about the place Melville was at as a writer late in his life.

Fairhaven and Captain Slocum

2010-08-31T14:02:19Z

Across the Acushnet River from New Bedford is Fairhaven, where Joshua Slocum rebuilt and launched the sloop Spray before he became the first man to sail alone around the world.

There is a plaque near the spot where he worked on the ship and launched it.

And this is the view toward the harbor from the same place.

Things look a bit different around there now, I expect.

In the Fairhaven Town Hall there is a model of the Spray. I present it to you.

The town hall is a pretty amazing building in its own right, and the main auditorium has some locally-themed stained glass insets that I rather liked. This one was my favorite.

Now, vacation over, back to work! The end of the Melville project is on its way…

New Bedford and other whaling sights

2010-08-30T04:35:18Z

Last week during the great Unstructured Clarel Readalong, I was off having fun in and around New Bedford, MA, site of a national historical park devoted to whaling and a really good whaling museum well worth visiting.

Not least for the giant whale skeletons in the foyer. The bones themselves are composed of up to half whale oil, and a collection system is set up to show how much oil drips out of the skeletons hanging above.

The above was a right whale. This is the fin of a young sperm whale.

The museum has a wonderful collection of paintings, prints, and other whaling-related art as well as artifacts. Some were surprisingly detailed depictions of the process of whaling. Others were great examples of what Moby-Dick‘s narrator complains of in terms of grotesque anatomical mistakes, unrealistic scenes, and some excellent action as well. The exhibits trace whaling-related art through time from country to country, as it becomes dominant in various areas such as the Netherlands, England, France, and America. The Dutch even made delftware of this stuff—which I totally want.

Unfortunately most of these items were difficult to photograph. The below is a French print of whalers cutting in, or removing the blanket of the whale.

This is a crazy Renaissance allegory by Brueghel. Check out the fish with legs in the upper left corner walking away with a fish in his mouth. At this period, most depictions of whales relied on scenes of whales that had washed ashore, though this one is obviously not what you’d call realistic. The text at the bottoms reads, in Dutch and Latin, “little fishes make food for big fishes.” Well then.

Also in New Bedford is the Seamen’s Bethel, the real life Seamen’s Chapel of Moby-Dick, where Father Mapple preached from a pulpit shaped like the prow of a ship. It’s not authentic, but it’s there.

Ishmael attends services at the Chapel before embarking on the Pequod, and while there he reads the cenotaphs of whalers and other seamen who have gone before him—and not made it back home. These still appear in the Bethel, some old enough for Melville to have seen them and other as recent as the 1980s.

Here I am reading some of the cenotaphs in a pew marked as Herman Melville’s:

The outside of the church:

On the lawn you’ll find another grim reminder of the danger—and romance—of life at sea.

In addition to New Bedford, we made a stop in Mystic, CT at Mystic Seaport. The Charles W. Morgan, the last wooden whaling ship in the world, is there being fully restored. You can view the working shipyard where they are fixing it up and even board the ship during the restoration.

Here’s a top view of the try-works on the Charles W. Morgan, where the whale oil was processed. All the description of Moby-Dick was more helpful than any museum exhibit, by the way, in understanding what all the parts of the ship were for and how everything was supposed to work.

Here I am, in front of the try-works. It’s really not very big. Especially when you think of the size of a whale and how much oil they contained.

And here I am in the forecastle. Not a lot of room down there. The captain’s cabin was much nicer.

New Bedford was a great whaling city itself, but Ishmael took a packet from there to Nantucket, where he felt was the real place to start out. I didn’t do quite that, but I did take a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, home of the Pequod‘s third mate, Flask.

Tomorrow, more photos of nearby Fairhaven, which has a maritime history of its own and is related to another bibliographing favorite.

Sunday Salon

2010-08-29T17:39:35Z

Well, this Sunday brings an end to a lovely summer vacation as well as a lovely week blogging about Clarel along with the intrepid Amateur Reader. He may have joked about blog sweeps weeks, but this was actually a nice little week for me, not least thanks to a mention on the Quarterly Conversation by Levi Stahl. So perhaps doing crazy things on the blog is good after all–like your parents telling you to just be yourself, haha. (Hey, Rebecca, does that count as bookrageous? LOL)

So what can possibly follow such excitement? Well, though you may not believe it was unplanned, I just finished up a very blog-appropriate, semi-literary, or at least literary-historical, trip, and this week bibliographing nicole will be unveiled doing various Melville-related (and other) things. With fun facts! (Well, fun for me at least, and thus certainly fun for all of you. Right?)

And then, Billy Budd and, if you can believe it, the end of the Melville project. Wow! What on earth can follow that up?

“Let us keep each other’s secrets.”

2010-08-20T02:15:27Z

Reading all of a writer’s work is super awesome and rewarding not just for the insight into a writer’s “project” or even the excellent reading experience itself, but also for the “Easter eggs,” I’ll call them—the unexpected shiny objects that glint back at you only if you’ve been exploring. Melville recycles so much he’s really wonderful for this, and there are not only many familiar motifs but also reappearing details throughout his work, including in Clarel.

But here my favorite source of such a glint was an allusion to another writer’s work—something else Melville does in abundance, of course. And it was an allusion to something I wrote about on this very blog, something that made me reconsider Hawthorne all on its own, even before I knew he was so respected by Melville:

For Vine, from that unchristened earth
Bits he picked up of porous stone,
And crushed in fist: or one by one,
Through the dull void of desert air,
He tossed them into valley down;
Or pelted his own shadow there (3.5)

In “Foot-Prints on the Sea-Shore,” by Hawthorne, the model for Vine:

There lies my shadow in the departing sunshine with its head upon the sea. I will pelt it with pebbles. A hit! A hit!

And this story of Hawthorne seems strangely relevant, if not to the most central themes of Clarel than to many of the ideas in its orbit. Hawthorne’s narrator and his “we” “have been, what few can be, sufficient to our own pastime—yes, say the word outright!—self-sufficient to our own happiness.” As is Vine—and so few others—in Clarel.

And thus ends my portion of the Unstructured Clarel readalong! I feel like I should thank those still reading for bearing with it, if anything, but I do hope it was a positive experience. It was for me. Now, for the Big Question: will she read it again? While reading it, I would have said no. In fact, I did say several times, aloud, things to the effect of, “Man, I’m not re-reading this one.” But now I would have to say, someday—probably.

Title of this post taken from “Foot-Prints on the Sea-Shore.”

“Innocent be the heart and true—Howe’er it feed on bitter bread…”

2010-08-20T04:10:02Z

If anyone else had ever read Clarel, I would ask you to guess which of the many characters, major and secondary, I liked best. I think you would get it right, but since Clarel is, if not unreadable, certainly unread, I will tell you that it is Mortmain, the Swede who never “relaxes in his state of rigorous gloom.”

He is lovely and dark and a major focus of the middle part of the poem. A former revolutionary, he has come to the Holy Land after becoming disenchanted. I say Mortmain was my favorite, but the psychological depth of Clarel leaves me feeling I barely know him. I do know that he becomes just one of the vehicles Melville uses to comment on politics and war, however, subjects he seems to have become more and more concerned with as he matured as writer. These ideas make their first real appearance in Mardi, but grew, especially with the approach, horror, and aftermath of the American Civil War.

One thing I haven’t mentioned about Clarel, by the way, is that it was Melville’s Centennial poem. As in Israel Potter, but much more dark and serious, there is a lot of material about the success or failure of the American project.

Mortmain is partly Melville’s dark, misanthropic side:

“Man’s vicious: snaffle him with kings;
Or, if kings cease to curb, devise
Severer bit. This garden brings
Such lesson. Heed it, and be wise
In thoughts not new.” (2.3)

“This garden” is Gethsemane.

But like in The Confidence-Man, misanthropy and distrust are not always so wrong. Mortmain is certainly harsh in the next canto, and cynical, but wrong?

“Wouldst meddle with the state? Well, mount
Thy guns; how many men dost count?
Besides, there’s more that here belongs:
Be many questionable wrongs:
By yet more questionable war,
Prophet of peace, these wouldst thou bar?
The world’s not new, nor new thy plea.
Tho’ even shouldst thou triumph, see,
Prose overtakes the victor’s songs:
Victorious right may need redress:
No failure like a harsh success.” (2.4)

And in his own way, he is a humanist as well. He is against war. And it’s the very harshness of success he decries. He is obsessed with the “unutterable” depths of sin and the evil of the world. But so, so cynical, not something Melville likes.

Now that I’ve written this post committing myself to Mortmain forever, all I can think is how much I liked so many others—Vine, who was modeled on Hawthorne, Agath, Rolfe, Margoth… Not Clarel though, so much. He seems almost ephemeral compared to the rest, more like a sponge sometimes than a man of his own. That’s not fair; he manages to have his own arguments and discussions. But he’s on this pilgrimage among men to become a man, and his companions unquestionably have more forceful, fully-formed personalities. In many ways Clarel plays the part of the reader who would, like me, choose among them.

“silence like a poniard stabs, since there the low throb of the sea not heard is”

2010-08-20T03:38:25Z

Clarel may be beautiful, in part, in its way, but the ground it covers is not. Melville started his career practically as a travel writer, recounting stories of some of the most beautiful places on earth. Here, in the Holy Land, he describes a desolate, alien wasteland. Clarel might have been a pilgrim to Mars.

From the first canto of the second part, “The Wilderness”:

Not from brave Chaucer’s Tabard Inn
They pictured wend; scarce shall they win
Fair Kent, and Canterbury ken;
Nor franklin, squire, nor morris-dance
Of wit and story good as then:
Another age, and other men,
And life an unfulfilled romance.

It’s a fair warning. Instead, this is what they are on their way to:

Their mount of vision, voiceless, bare,
It is that ridge, the desert’s own,
Which by its dead Medusa stare,
Petrific o’er the valley thrown,
Congeals Arabia into stone.
With dull metallic glint, the sea
Slumbers beneath the silent lee
Of sulphurous hills. These stretch away
Toward wilds of Kadesh Barnea,
And Zin the waste. (3.1)

This passage includes many motifs that will be repeated throughout the poem in descriptions of the Holy Land. There is the blankness motif, in “bare,” which pops up here and there, though I’m not quite sure to what effect, in all cases, in Clarel. “Petrific” is wonderful for its weirdness and the stoniness motif is all over the place. The sea is also everywhere; the narrator of Clarel relies heavily on seafaring metaphors throughout and there is always an overarching sense that this desert was once underwater. “Sulphurous” is menacing, as the constant acrid fumes of the Dead Sea.

Let’s press on:

They climb. In Indian file they gain
A sheeted blank white lifted plain—
A moor of chalk, or slimy clay,
With gluey track and streaky trail
Of some small slug or torpid snail. (3.8)

Blankness, check. Chalk covers both rock (it is one) and signs of the ocean (it is one). “Gluey,” “slug” and “torpid” are characteristically grotesque, like “congeals” above.

One more, shall we?

Abandoned quarry mid the hills
Remote, as well one’s dream fulfills
Of what Jerusalem should be,
As that vague heap, whose neutral tones
Blend in with Nature’s, helplessly:
Stony metropolis of stones. (4.2)

That last line doesn’t ring terribly well to my ears, but I suppose it’s not meant to. By this point all this description had me thinking of only one thing: the Encantadas. And then Melville went and practically said it outright, in the person of Agath, a Greek sailor. I could say so much about Agath, not least about his tattoo of the crucifix. But for now I’ll just give you his story about an island he and his mates once camped at:

“In waters where no charts avail,
Where only fin and spout ye see,
The lonely spout of hermit-whale,
God set that isle which haunteth me.
There clouds hang low, but yield no rain—
Forever hang, since wind is none
Or light; nor ship-boy’s eye may gain
The smoke-wrapped peak, the inland one
Volcanic; this, within its shroud
Streaked black and red, burns unrevealed;
It burns by night—by day the cloud
Shows leaden all, and dull and sealed.
The beach is cinders. With the tide
Salt creek and ashy inlet bring
More loneness from the outer ring
Of ocean.” (4.3)

Yes, I think I will say it again; Clarel can be quite beautiful. At least when you’re used to it.