The Clearing: Divine Paradox in Moby-Dick and Beloved

Felicia I. Chavez Dr. Dennis Patrick Slattery Epic, MS 604 Spring Quarter 2013 The Clearing: Divine Paradox in Moby-Dick and Beloved Though distant in subject, structure and narrative voice, these two novels, Herman Melville‘s Moby-Dick and Toni Morrison‘s Beloved, share unexpected common ground. Both are remarkable for their breathtaking poetic treatment of suffering, brutal exploitation and killing. Both weave their narrative fabric in the rich territory where the struggle for survival overlaps with a desperate will to break barriers. And both, somehow, amidst the carnage, create an opening through which reaches the presence of the divine. Nearing the end of their epic journey, the Captain Ahab-led ship is deep into their quest for the White Whale, or Moby Dick. This ―leviathan‖ is considered to be the most dangerous whale that hunters could possibly face. Ahab‘s entire life—and by extension, the lives of his crew—will culminate with the confrontation between man and ―fish.‖ During the course of their journey, the whalers do not pass up opportunities to catch and butcher several non-lethal whales. Coming upon a huge heard, as the human pursuers bear down unceasingly, they send the animals into a panic: the whales are ―gallied.‖ As Melville defines in a footnote, this word means ―to frighten excessively,--to confound with fright‖ (322). Drug into the fray by a harpooned whale desperate to rid itself of its pursuers, a small boat is steered at high speed by the gallant Chavez 2 ―tattooed savage‖ (395) Queequeg. By some miracle—perhaps by virtue of the overtly spiritual orientation of Queequeg himself—the men find they have reached ―that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion‖ (324). An opening occurs. The narrative character, Ishmael, is aboard this small craft whose passengers arrive upon a completely unexpected world: ―submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries‖ (327). I mention this circumstance, because, as if the cows and calves had been purposely locked up in this innermost fold…Like household dogs they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them; till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched their backs with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the time refrained from darting it. (325) This last comment is poignant, encapsulating the paradoxical nature of the encounter. The group of hunters is briefly enchanted by the beauty of the ―innermost heart of the shoal‖ (324), even while they are hyper aware that they are trapped by a ―living wall that hemmed us in; the wall that had only admitted us in order to shut us up‖ (324). But the living wall that traps the hunters has, in a magical interlude, brought them nose-to-nose with the heart of their prey. But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales…The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the same time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscences;-even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards us… (325) This passage communicates the ineffable. The ―wondrous world‖ is genuinely felt by the narrator, and the suspension of violence by the group of hunters communicates their spellbound wonderment. ―Wonder‖ requires at least a moment of stillness for it to exist: stillness reflected by the relative smoothness of the ocean in this setting. It is also a ―yin‖ emotion as opposed to the ―yang‖ of hunter-mode. One spiritual author says about wonder: Chavez 3 From this archetypal feminine side there is no grasping or looking for logical meaning. You know how to just be and receive. You see something beautiful or fascinating and you open with awe and wonder. "Aaaah!" "Oooh!" No need to know how something works or why it is there… It is the way to receive the gods. (Camden) All lives—whales and men—are in danger at this moment, bringing that breathtaking sense of the great fragility, and therefore preciousness of life. The clarity of the water down into depths reflects the clarity of spirit in the moment: ―Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond‖ (326). The men in a boat have blundered into a view of heaven, but instead of up, they look down. Melville evokes the sense of a temple with several important motifs. He gives the wayward boat a threshold by which to enter, ―we glided between two whales into the innermost heart‖ (324). There is also an enclosure provided by the living wall, creating a sanctuary, much like the ―safe ground‖ of a church. He emphasizes the remarkable stillness to the extent that he describes the space as a lake or a pond, and the profound delicacy of the moment enhances the stillness, made even more delicate by the specter of hunters with tools of killing at hand. Most directly, Melville writes of ―spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscences.‖ Happily, these humans behave as one hopes they would when in the presence of newborn youth and the sacred, but this is the exception. In a book studded with all-to-graphic scenes of whale slaughter, the peace and innocence of the whale nursery is a precious interlude. A very different kind of precious interlude provides a sane and sacred backdrop for the deeply disturbing novel Beloved. Toni Morrison‘s historical fiction narrative is set in the mid1800‘s, around the time Moby-Dick was published, though Beloved was published over 130 years later, in 1987. The book is spiritually centered around the figure of Baby Suggs, holy, though she only appears in the narrative retrospectively: ―Accepting no title of honor before her Chavez 4 name, but allowing a small caress after it, she became an unchurched preacher, one who visited pulpits and opened her great heart to those who could use it…Uncalled, unrobed, unanointed, she let her great heart beat in their presence‖ (102). An iconic scene is painted in which the terrorized black people participate in the co-creation of spontaneous ritual, described as having occurred with some regularity in the years before the point at which the reader enters the story: ―When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing – a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of a path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place‖ (102). It is here that the miracle unfolds and the ineffable is manifested through the most precious, radically simple observation of being. Beginning with the people gathered outside the perimeter in the trees, she asks in turn the children to come into the Clearing and ―laugh,‖ the ―grown men‖ to ―dance,‖ and the women to ―cry‖ (103). Following the great animated catharsis, silence descends. ―‗Here,‘ she said, ‗in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard‖ (103). One can see Baby Suggs speaking as a goddess to assembled spirits, asking them to acknowledge their present, incarnated status. The sense that the gathered folk are spirits is emphasized when Baby Suggs says, ―What you say out of [your mouth] they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear‖ (104). She illustrates the ―unseen‖ nature of being an enslaved human, heart-wrenchingly portrayed throughout the book. There is also danger in being seen, as the slave traders and owners do not see human beings, no matter what. ―Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don‘t love your eyes; they‘d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it‖ (103). What Baby Suggs holds is a sanctuary space that is much larger than her Chavez 5 individual self, and big enough to hold her whole, budding community of former slaves. Baby Suggs, holy, is, in a sense, the ocean in which the people gather together to experience a world distinctly different from their daily lives, and to be held in it. ―With Baby Suggs‘ heart in charge, the people let go‖ (111). She is the Clearing, bringing a spell of opening in which emotions can be freely expressed for the first time, and the people truly seen. In both Moby-Dick and Beloved, a ―clearing‖ is paramount. The clear space exists on multiple levels, physical, psychological, and spiritual. Both authors create a sense of an organic ―circle‖ that exists multidimensionally. The whale sanctuary is rounded by a ―living wall‖ of the whales own bodies, and surrounded by ―outer concentric circles‖ in the ―distracted distance‖ (324). The human sanctuary is a circle of trees and people around an open space of safe ground, in contrast to the devastatingly unsafe environs of Nineteenth century, white-dominated society. At the most basic level, a ―circle‖ is a way to designate ―sacred‖ and ―profane‖ space. In these passages, the circle is also a refuge. The prevalence of innocent life—and the possibility of danger—stop the whale hunters‘ aggressive pursuit for a few minutes. They cannot help but recognize the refuge nature of the space. Baby Suggs‘ oceanic, holding nature creates a place in which the most devastated, traumatized humans can take a step into human beingness. (Her home at 124 Bluestone Road is also a refuge.) She brings peace in the midst of a dangerous, chaotic existence. The similarities between the community of hunted cetaceans and the enslaved and hunted Negros are ironic and telling. The humans are treated as brutally—and more so—as animals, and bought and sold as livestock. Conversely, the whales are treated as dumb animals and ―personified‖, made into persons, as in Ahab‘s personification of the White Whale. Indeed, with Chavez 6 respect to the concept of the Jungian ―shadow,‖ Ahab‘s view of the White Whale summarizes the way prejudiced whites have viewed blacks: All that most maddens and torments…all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down…(160) The passage summarizes what could be generically applied to any number of situations in which the ―other‖ is vehemently demonized. However, hatred ―made practically assailable‖ is indeed what slavery did to black people, who were originally captured in their native lands, put in chains, and dominated by weapons and physical, sexual and psychological abuse. Against the backdrop of Ahab‘s passionate hate, the sublime whale nursery (which would not have been possible if Ahab had been on the small boat) is that much more remarkable. The personification of whales worked in the opposite direction this time, with the narrator and other characters seeing the whales as persons abiding in the ―bridal-chambers and nurseries,‖ the doting ―Madame Leviathan‖ (326) and her playful calves. In the spirit of personification, the profound words of Baby Suggs could be viewed as coming from the whales themselves: ―Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don‘t love your eyes; they‘d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it.‖ Moby-Dick is, in some ways, a 470-page meditative dissection of not only whale hunting, but whale butchering, right down to the ―very sweet and rich‖ taste of the mother‘s milk noted in a footnote, which ―might do well with strawberries‖ (326). Even the elderly whale with ―his one poor fin‖ that ―beat his side in an agony of fright‖ (298) is not spared, but rather, mercilessly chased down by not one, but two vying whaling ships, harpooned Chavez 7 to death-by-blood-loss, and would have been flayed like the other whales, but instead, to the hunter‘s chagrin, simply sank into the sea (300). The hunters in Moby-Dick stumble upon a Sperm whale sanctuary and are stunned into uncharacteristic silence, stillness and clarity: the whales and men ―see‖ one another, and for a moment of grace the sacredness of life comes to the fore. The white hunters pursuing black humans in Beloved unwittingly come upon a scene that makes this novel infamous and serves as its historical core: a mother killing her small children in a woodshed. The white hunters are stunned into uncharacteristic confusion, the silence of horror, and even backward motion: ―By the time she faced him, looked him dead in the eye, she had something in her arms that stopped him in his tracks. He took a backward step with each jump of the baby heart until finally there were none‖ (193). The woodshed is the opposite of a ―clearing‖; it is a damning. The divine is fiercely absent, and the diabolical flows into the vacuum. And yet, is the divine absent from the woodshed? For readers, absolutely, there is no light here. It is dark; as dark as dark can be. The enfleshed ghost, ―Beloved,‖ that the mother‘s desperate act calls forth almost makes sense in light of this dark. However, ―Nothing was in that shed, he knew, having been there early that morning. Nothing but sunlight. Sunlight, shavings, a shovel‖ (185). Light is present. It‘s easily missed, strangely incongruent, and eclipsed by murder. Perhaps it is this incongruent light that lets three of the four children make it out of the shed alive; Stamp Paid had just happened to remove the ax earlier in the day (185). Perhaps it is the almost impossible presence of the divine—even in the darkest moments—that accounts for ―A profile that shocked them with its clarity‖ (179) as the vicious mother walked into police custody, and her ―calm‖ eyes portrayed in the newspaper drawing (183). Chavez 8 Though unthinkable, and entirely contrary to healthy human nature, the presence of the divine in the act of the killing of the children is a possibility that should not be reflexively closed. Unlike the countless (mostly) men who have justified murder for political motivations, Sethe, the mother who ―snatch[ed] up her children like a hawk on the wing‖ (185), had no such motivations. In the deep recesses of her being, her Will engaged in a manner entirely beyond the human level of reasoning, including her own. If one can say the divine is present in this act, the nature of the divine as put forth by Jung in a footnote is most palatable: ―Divine unconsciousness and lack of reflection…enable us to form a conception of God which puts his actions beyond the moral judgment and allows no conflict to arise between goodness and beastliness‖ (318). This is in line with Jung‘s handling of paradox: ―only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life. Non-ambiguity and non-contradiction are one-sided and thus unsuited to express the incomprehensible‖ (265). The ―incomprehensible‖ elements of paradox as ―beyond the moral judgment‖ seem to collide in this fateful detail: ―The ax he himself took out. Nothing else was in there except the shovel – and of course the saw‖ (183). A goddess possesses Sethe that is very different from the divinity that flows through Baby Suggs. In Sethe the divine is fierce and indeed paradoxical: ―This here Sethe talked about safety with a handsaw‖ (193). The mother saw the white hunters of blacks coming, and ―her face beaked…her hands worked like claws…she collected them every which way: one on her shoulder, one under her arm, one by the hand, the other shouted forward into the woodshed‖ (185). If the divine is present in this moment of murder—the historical event or the fictionalized scene—then a superhuman view is necessary to truly appreciate its presence. Again, Jung: ―…the grand plan on which the unconscious life of the psyche is constructed is so inaccessible to our understanding that we can never know what evil may not be Chavez 9 necessary in order to produce good by enantiodromia, and what good may very possibly lead to evil‖ (126). One cannot help but speculate that perhaps the woman Margaret Garner, who‘s killing of her own daughter provided the seed for Morrison‘s Beloved, caused a greater reflection on the part of white people, and contributed to the abolition of slavery. Some undoubtedly told themselves that this was just further confirmation of the non-human status of blacks. But for anyone with preexisting doubt about the efficacy of slavery, the human desperation inherent in the act speaks loudly. As one historian points out, while most hearings to return captured slaves to masters were decided ―in a manner of hours, even minutes,‖ the Garner case took four whole weeks (Reinhardt 3), and public officials fought heated battles over custody of the fugitive slaves before the hearings even began (6). Though it is possible to see evidence of the divine present in the woodshed, and perhaps even in the mother-turned-murderer, there is also the mere human level. The novel is set in a time when the abolition of slavery has just appeared on the horizon. Sethe‘s own life as a noncaptive is a seed just learning to sprout. For a mere twenty-eight days following her heroic escape from slavery, before the white hunters appear, she experiences another life in the warm company of Baby Suggs: ―Days of healing, ease and real-talk. Days of company: knowing the names of forty, fifty other Negroes, their views, habits; where they had been and what done; of feeling their fun and sorrow along with her own‖ (111). Marie-Louise von Franz mythically contextualizes the immensely delicate time between the death of the old and the birth of the new: This is an archetypal motif: where the pearl is, there is also the dragon, and vice versa. They are never separate. Frequently, just after the first intuitive realization of the Self, the powers of desolation and darkness break in. A terrible slaughtering always takes place at the time of the birth of the hero, as for instance the killing of the innocents at Bethlehem when Christ was born. Some persecuting power starts at once to blot out the inner germ. (171) Chavez 10 The ―dragon‖ is very much present in Beloved in a reference to the Klan: ―Desperately thirsty for black blood, without which it could not live, the dragon swam the Ohio at will‖ (79). One critic writes about the incarnation of evil being necessary in order to become free of it: ―…the purpose of the demonic grotesque is to demonstrate that the total revelation of evil—its full disclosure— is the necessary precursors for our struggle and victory against it‖ (Lake 53). The desolate darkness breaking in, as von Franz terms it, arrives in the form of the white slave hunters, Sethe‘s murderous reaction, and the ―demonic grotesque,‖ enfleshed ghost, Beloved. Where ―the total revelation of evil‖ has not been fully disclosed, human beings project it, which inevitably leads to becoming the thing itself in a more obvious, revealed sense. This principle is clear in white slave owners claiming Negros are not human but rather animal, and then inflicting the worst barbaric treatment upon them, causing Stamp Paid to declare, ―What are these people? You tell me, Jesus. What are they?‖ (213). It is also clear with Captain Ahab who engages in a mission to destroy the demon of the deep, called the White Whale, because it had taken his leg (Melville 77). Ahab becomes a man possessed, taking virtually all of his crew to their deaths. As the narrator notes in Moby-Dick, ―…there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men‖ (322). In Beloved, two-hundred years of the commodification of human beings has gained a momentum that calls forth a mother‘s insanely paradoxical ―protective murder‖ of her own child. One can infer poetic justice in the actions of the White Whale that turns on his ―monomaniacal‖ pursuer, and bashes his ship, inflicting a watery death on all but one crew member. The bloody pursuit of whale-parts-as-commodity poetically necessitates a break from the carnage. This break is provided by the ocean nursery: a scene that tells the reader that paradox accompanies revelation. The unrelenting pursuit of black people as captive labor necessitates Baby Suggs‘ Chavez 11 oceanic heart sermons in the Clearing: sermons that coax enslaved people to feel alive, human, sacred. Perhaps if the choir of women had been present for Ahab they, unlike Starbuck, would have succeeded in exorcising the devil from him, as they succeeded in exorcising the demon from 124 Bluestone Road: For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right combinations, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash. (308) The oceanic momentum of the divine ―broke over Sethe‖ in a way not unlike the sacred nature of the whale nursery-temple arrested and ―enchanted‖ the blundering hunters, and allowed them a glimpse of the divinity beneath the quiet waves, where ―deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy‖ (Melville 326). Chavez 12 Work Cited Camden, Ruth-Helen. "Soul Forces: Wonder." Clairvision School of Meditation Virtual School. 19 May 2011. Foundation Virtual School. [Private membership.] Web. 17 July 2013. Franz, Marie-Luise Von. The Feminine in Fairy Tales. Boston: Shambhala, 1993. Jung, C. G. The Essential Jung. Comp. Anthony Storr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1983. Lake, Christina Bieber. "Demonic in Service of the Divine: Toni Morrison's Beloved." South Atlantic Review 69.3/4 (2004): 51-80. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick: An Authoritative Text, Reviews and Letters. Ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. New York: Norton, 1967. Morrison, Toni. Beloved (Everyman's Library). New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Reinhardt, Mark. Who Speaks for Margaret Garner? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010.