"Some more than human clime": divine ecology in Melville's Clarel
Alexander Eisenthal
University of Pennsylvania
Alexander Eisenthal is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Before Penn, he studied at Cambridge University (BA, English) and the University of Sussex (MA, Critical Theory). He writes about American literature in relation to labor history, theories of progress, and the history of immigration. He has taught courses on Melville and the history of tragedy. His dissertation project, The Imported Radical: Jews and the Population of U.S. Literature, examines the impact of mass Jewish immigration on the emerging demographic imaginary in late nineteenth-century America. He has presented work at ACLA, ASA, and INCS.
Abstract
Clarel: a Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) depicts a spiritual struggle between faith and science. When it comes to the poem's lengthy treatment of "clime" however, religion and materialist science are harder to... [ view full abstract ]
Clarel: a Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) depicts a spiritual struggle between faith and science. When it comes to the poem's lengthy treatment of "clime" however, religion and materialist science are harder to separate. Melville used "clime" alongside "zone" to denote the regional specificity of humans: an old iteration of race or nation. At the same time, his poem shows humans crossing between climactic regions and adapting to them, severing the link between the body and its natal place. Rather than a stable designation, "clime" becomes a problem for understanding human movement and progress.
Clarel also contains discussions of climes that have changed. The Dead Sea is the scene of an argument about whether the geologically-proven climate change it once underwent was the product of natural or supernatural causes. As the supposed site of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Dead Sea was a landscape blighted by divine ordinance as a punishment for human transgression. As an inorganic, mineral-rich and depopulated landscape, it resonates with Melville's descriptions of industrialization.
A Biblical story of divine intervention provided the basis for reflection on the mutual transformations of human industry and the natural world. This paper proposes that Melville's notorious agnosticism was not the result of personal ambivalence, but of an intellectual conjunction of theology and science. Melville used clime to think about the use and abuse of particular spaces in a capitalist world-system. Using clime to think about the dangers and the limits of human power, Melville could write ecologically before the proper emergence of ecology.
Authors
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Alexander Eisenthal
(University of Pennsylvania)
Topic Area
Individual paper
Session
P96 » Transcendental Climates (09:00 - Sunday, 25th March, Enchantment C)
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