Indian Mounds as Cultural Signs in Melville

September 28, 2008

I have been reading slowly through Clarel by Herman Melville. It's a work I have always wanted to read, and I can't say what pushed me over the edge just now. It might take me all year to read at my current pace. (For those who don't know Melville's work, this is a long epic poem set in the Holy Land and containing much ruminating on faith and doubt.)

The canto "Nathan" works well as a stand alone poem. It describes the restless spiritual journey of a midwestern descendent of the Puritans who finds his way to Judaism and life in Palestine. What I found most gripping was the early description of how doubt crept into his heart:

A stripling, but of manful ways,
Hardy and frugal, oft he filled
The widow's eyes with tears of praise.
An only child, with her he kept
For her sake part, the Christian way,
Though frequent in his bosom crept
Precocious doubt unbid. [lines 48-54]

The young man plays a dutiful part and keeps to his Christian upbringing, partly for his widowed mother. But then Melville introduces the notion that doubt assaults this young man. He is clear that there is no searching for doubt, but that it stalks this young man. He goes on to describe some portals for doubt present in the American landscape:

...The sway
He felt of his grave life, and power
Of vast space, from the log-house door
Daily beheld. [lines 54-57]

Melville points first to the inherent gravity of life imposed by the vastness of the Midwest (a farm in Illinois). The scene is reminiscent of section VI of "Auroras of Autumn" by Wallace Stevens. There too a small person opens a door upon vastness and feels himself engulfed: "The scholar of one candle sees/ An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame/ Of everything he is. And he feels afraid." In this presentation of nature, there is not familiar resort to the heavens as declaring the glory of God, but a darker sense that the nature can strip one of personhood.

Then Melville adds something else to his vast emptiness:

...Three Indian mounds
Against the horizon's level bounds
Dim showed across the prairie green
Like dwarfed and blunted mimic shapes
Of pyramids at distance seen
From the broad Delta's planted capes
Of vernal grain. In nearer view
With trees he saw them crowned, which drew
From the red sagamores of eld
entombed within, the vital gum
Which green kept each mausoleum. [lines 57-67]

Melville refuses to have anything to do with the crazy legends about the origin of Indian mounds. He straightforwardly describes them as the tombs of ancient Native Americans. Moving into a more metaphorical stream of thought, Melville associates the greenness of these mounds with their vital connection to those Native American chiefs (sagamores) buried within. Thinking again of the basic scene, we have these ever-green mounds seen from a small cabin on the prairie. To Nathan, living in that cabin, the mounds communicate an alternative spiritual life. And by comparing these three mounds to the pyramids of Egypt, Melville also endows them with immense age and mystery. That age is another way that these mounds call into question the Christian narrative with which Nathan had grown up.

What is most notable about this passage is the way Melville introduces the Indian mounds of the Midwest and endows them with cultural and religious meaning.. and it is a doubt-inducing meaning. This stands opposed to the ways in which other groups in 19th century America made the mounds into some confirmation of their own sect or race.