AN APPROACH TO MELVILLE
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attained the spiritual illumination of the Divine Inert without losing
the capacity for action of the Suicide but whose action is creative–
whose action, that is, takes the direction of the Handsome Sailor.
To put it another way, he is a man who is able to use the rhythms
of life and death toward creative ends.
Withdrawal and R eturn.
Melville symbolizes the rhythms of life and death in several ways.
In these pages I can hardly do more than set them down: sea
vs.
land, valley
vs.
mountain, stasis
vs.
motion, time
vs.
space, narcissism
vs.
genius, dark
vs.
light, night
vs.
day, and so on. In his
Study of
History,
Toynbee has subsumed these rhythms under the general idea
of "Withdrawal and Return." Briefly, Withdrawal and Return may
be described as the passage of the ego from the objective world into
the unconscious and back to the outer world. This spiritual transit is
the highest manifestation of the basic rhythms of the universe: the
alternation of night and day, of death and life, the change of the
seasons, the cycle of vegetation. The transit is not automatically pro–
ductive in the higher forms of life. It succeeds only when the organ–
ism emerges on the returning beat of the rhythm transfigured by the
ordeal of the journey and in possession of revived potency and "illu–
mination." Withdrawal and Return is symbolized in a great many
mythical themes-for example, awakening after a deep, deathlike
sleep; the folk-heroes who are beheaded or otherwise injured and
magically restored; the death and rebirth of the savior-gods (Christ,
Attis, Adonis, Osiris) ; the banishment and return of heroes like
Oedipus; the ordeal of the Arthurian knights in their search for
the grail. Toynbee's point, and Melville seems to be making ap–
proximately the same point, is that all creativity, whether individual
or social, prt>ceeds from individuals who can uncompromisingly
embark on the transit of Withdrawal and Return and who, so to
speak, can ride out the rhythms without coming into conflict with
them.
The Divine Inert fail because they respond only to the first
beat of the rhythm.
The Tragic Suicides fail because they allow themselves to be
caught and mangled between beats. Theirs is the complex person–
ality which demands to withdraw from the world in preparation for
the ordeal of heroic accomplishment on the returning beat of the
rhythm. But they are unable to countermand the demonic energy
generated by their conflicts which prohibits a decisive withdrawal
