Laura López Peña - Beyond the Walls.

The previous instances already illustrate how Melville places intersubjectivity, both its potentiality and the destruction of this potentiality, at the center of his works. Intersubjectivity, therefore, is inseparable from Melville’s articulation of universalism as a process conditioned by its own imperfect nature and lack of wholeness, and even exposed to being dismantled in the dialogue by which it may be created through the contact, negotiation and contestation of different worldviews. Melville’s oeuvre constructs universalist contexts which expose, bring to dialogue, and evaluate interpretations of reality as varied and diverse as each of the characters inhabiting the texts: Taji and his fellow travelers’ multiple encounters throughout the different isles they explore in Mardi ; the diversity in national origin of the sailors aboard the Pequod in Moby-Dick and the Neversink in White-Jacket ; the variety of passengers on board the Fidèle in The Confidence-Man ; the plurality of (even antagonistic) perspectives in Melville’s Civil War poems in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War ; the global microcosm of Jerusalem and the Holy Land in Clarel ; the different stories of sailors in John Marr and Other Sailors ; the telling of the story of Bartleby in “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, of the slave revolt in “Benito Cereno”, of the Portuguese sailors in “The ’Gees”, or of the pale maids at the paper mill in “Tartarus of Maids”, among many other instances. Taken as a whole, Melville’s literary production is polyphonic in the diversity of voices and worldviews it gives expression to: slave-owners, lawyers and representatives of the upper classes (the lawyer in “Bartleby”, the bachelors in “The Paradise of Bachelors”, Glaucon and the Banker in Clarel ); representatives of law and order (Captain Vere in Billy Budd, Sailor , Captain Claret in White-Jacket , the Union government in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War , King Charles III in Israel Potter , the kings in the isles of the Mardian archipelago in Mardi ); philosophers, preachers, religious leaders and representatives, intellectual charlatans (Plotinus Plinlimmon and Reverend Mr. Falsgrave in Pierre , the Rabbi in Clarel , the Chaplain in White-Jacket , Father Mapple in Moby-Dick , the cosmopolitan in The Confidence-Man ); maniacs and “mad” men (Ahab, Cyril, Habbibi, Nathan); national icons and anonymous fighters (Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones or Ethan Allen, and Israel in Israel Potter ; Grant, McClellan, Mosby, Sherman or Stonewall Jackson and the anonymous Confederate and Union soldiers in Battle-Pieces ); Arab, Polynesian, African, Native American, mixed-race characters (Abdon, Belex, or Djalea in Clarel , Annatoo or Samoa in Mardi , Queequeg, Pip, Fedallah, etc. in Moby-Dick , the Portuguese sailors in “The ’Gees”, Hunilla in “The Chola Widow”, Babo or Atufal in “Benito Cereno”, Delly in Pierre , etc.); slaves (Babo, Atufal and the rest of the unnamed slaves in “Benito Cereno”, Jane Jackson in Battle-Pieces ); socially oppressed individuals, outcasts, exiles, loners, and above all, human endurers (Israel Potter, Bartleby, Hunilla, Marianna in “The Piazza”, White-Jacket, anonymous crowds [e.g. the London crowds in Israel Potter ] and maids [“The Tartarus of Maids”], John Marr in John Marr and Other Sailors , Billy in Billy Budd, Sailor , Celio, Agath, Ungar, Mortmain, Don Hannibal, Nehemiah, etc. in Clarel , Isabel, Lucy and Pierre Glendinning in Pierre , Ishmael, the Pequod sailors, and even Ahab in Moby-Dick ; animal endurers [Hunilla’s dogs, Nehemiah’s donkey, Glaucon’s horse, the tortoises in the island described by Agath]), are perhaps the most representative of the previous unfinished listings within categories clearly prone to overlapping. This diversity of characters populating Melville’s works, representative of the diversity of the “human stock” the writer nourished himself with and resolved to fictionalize, constitutes a fundamental basis to the author’s creation of universalist contexts. These contexts confront readers with the inevitable partiality, provisionality of meaning, as well as with its lack of totality (and perhaps permanent vacancy). That is, if the construction of dialogue in Melville’s ouvre is based on an understanding that a person’s access to different versions of reality will always remain incomplete and partial, and that final Meanings may not exist, it also underscores that any universalist dialogue will never be fully universalist, because it will always be, inevitably, both enriched and limited by those who construct it. It will also, Melville’s works emphasize, be always consequently exposed to the possibility of being neutralized due to the inexorable intermingling of good and evil within human nature. Above all, Melville’s plural dialogic contexts enable the author to juxtapose and place under evaluation the worldviews embodied by characters, as well as to underline the manysidedness of humanity and, yet, the interconnected vulnerability and suffering condition of such vast diversity of human beings.

Melville locates humanity in anonymous, rejected, forgotten, and unhomely rovers who suffer and are, alone, at a loss: “Humanity, thou strong thing, I worship thee, not in the laurelled victor, but in this vanquished one”, exclaims the narrator of “The Chola Widow” (127). The universalist understanding of humanity in Melville’s works emphasizes connectedness in separation, transcending, even destabilizing, the traditional divide between the local and the particular, as well as the global and the universal. At the same time, Melville’s works (some of which would themselves become “dead letters” in their times) rescue from oblivion the “Dead letters” of humanity in a project of individualization and remembrance which shows an extraordinary concern for individuals who are victims of the sociopolitical, economic, religious, and also national(ist) apparatuses which both generate and perpetuate human segregation and social injustice. Yet, at the same time that they analyze the complex singularities of the characters they construct, writing literary monuments honoring individualities violently obliterated or even sacrificed by oppressive forces, 3 Melville’s works connect these characters to a universal community of grievers. As Michael Jonik notes in his discussion of Clarel , the population of pilgrims-travelers in the poem is not much different from that of Melville’s other works:

Much like the “mariners, renegades, and castaways” who are “federated along the keel” of the Pequod (NN MD 117), Clarel’s cavalcade is another “wrangling crew” (NN Clarel 1.44.27), a reprise of the Anacharsis Clootz procession of universal humanity but with its attendant animals. In “Via Crucis”, the collective form of the Whitsuntide procession allows for a blurring of the human and animal […]. (72-73)

Even if Melville’s works engage in the task of doing justice to a representative group of those oppressed and forgotten, “Or man or animal” (4.34.42), at the same time, the author’s understanding of the impossibility to know his own characters is humble: respectful of his characters’ privacy, the author acknowledges the impossibility of putting in words the complexities of the human heart, and he offers instead sketchy portrayals of the personalities of the characters inhabiting his works. A number of texts, written at different stages throughout Melville’s career, illustrate this point, for example Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855), the narrative of an ex-revolutionary hero who dies forgotten and neglected by his country and compatriots. Despite its nationalist plot, Israel Potter displays a global narrative consciousness that transcends the boundaries of time and space, and points to a conception of the world beyond the nation-state. In the same way that Billy in the novella Billy Budd, Sailor —written over thirty years later and which, left unfinished in the author’s desk at his death, was not published until 1924—Israel is a subject shaped by, and entangled within, nationalist forces which he can neither control nor escape. Despite presenting the life-story of a particular individual, in the same way that “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) or “The Chola Widow”, to mention but a few, the story fuses the particular with the global, as the narrator emphasizes, at many moments throughout the narrative, Israel’s existence within a larger human context that transcends nation-state boundaries. The novel, thus, points to a universalist conception of humankind, as contextualized and specific (the particular case of Israel, or Bartleby, or Hunilla, or Ishmael, or Clarel, in the present moment) as it is transnational and even transhistorical: “Here, in this very darkness, centuries ago, hearts, human as his [Israel’s], had mildewed in despair; limbs, robust as his own, had stiffened in immovable torpor” (505). These passages from Israel Potter anticipate the universal yearning and human cries Melville gives expression to in Clarel . They also resemble the human tide Clarel joins at the end of the poem-pilgrimage, and which connects the young student’s particular pain to a universal grief that evokes the human wail of souls “in endless dearth” described earlier in the poem ( Clarel 1.24.87). Also in Israel Potter , Israel’s individual status as a marginalized, even invisible, outcast is connected to the fate of “tormented humanity” (604), as well as to the biblical narrative of the Israelites’ wandering the desert, seeking the promised land after having escaped bondage in Egypt (the name of the protagonist evidently bears ironic echoes of the mythical “chosen people” and “promised land” of the Bible). Like Clarel’s, Israel’s suffering is not exceptional: “Neither was our adventurer the least among the sufferers” but one among “this sudden influx of rivals, destitute, honest men like himself” (607). Like he does to Clarel, Melville elevates and individualizes Israel at the same time that he keeps him connected to his suffering fellow mortals, some of whom Melville, in turn, individualizes in other works. This prevents, thus, characters such as Clarel, Bartleby, Hunilla, Billy Budd, Ishmael, Babo, Queequeg, John Marr, Marianna, etc. from being forgotten within a sea of dead letters constituting irrecoverable losses to humanity. It is indeed significant to underline that many of Melville’s works end with images of grieving individuals joining a more global procession of sufferers: Clarel’s joining the heterogeneous crowd of “Cross-bearers” in the Via Crucis, at the end of the poem, mounted on Nehemiah’s donkey; Hunilla’s disappearance into Payta (Peru) also riding a donkey; Israel’s becoming part of the London masses, a “gulf-stream of humanity—which, for continuous centuries, has never ceased pouring, like an endless shoal of herring, over London Bridge” (603). In this respect, it is relevant that Melville had Ishmael assert in Moby-Dick that “[t]he truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows” (376). Also significantly, Melville’s suffering characters often seek the ocean or the desert as spaces of refuge and meditation: