Oedipus in the South Seas: The Case of Herman Melville's 'Typee.'

Abstract

Despite Melville's avowal that the account of his first voyage the South Seas was the unvarnished truth, Typee (1846) is in fact an exemplary demonstration not only of Melville's early capacity for poesis, for arranging the incidents of his narrative with an artfulness alien if not unknown in real life, but also of the young Melville's impressive assimilation of the writings of other people. Disappearing down the maw of Typee's intertextuality are not just those works of earlier visits by various naval officers and missionaries the South Seas - David Porter, C. S. Stewart, and William Ellis - but also more familiar classics - Book II of Plato's Republic, with its distinctions between the healthy and luxurious city, Montaigne's account Of Cannibals, genially subversive of the savage/civilized binary, and Diderot's notions of Tahitian free love in the Supplement the Voyage of Bougainville.(1) In fact whole libraries of great books were apparently necessary the writing of this simple factual account. One writer who has the honor of actually being cited by Melville is Jean-Jacques Rousseau (in Typee, Chapter XVII), generally simplified in Melville criticism as the beatnik celebrant of neo-primitivism.(2) In fact, the degree which Melville's ambivalence toward man is also Rousseau's own not only shows the care with which Melville read Rousseau, but also suggests a peculiar sort of affinity between them. The experience of reading Rousseau is perhaps best described as the effort simultaneously entertain on any given subject at least two irreconcilable points of view. would be frightful, says Rousseau in a familiar passage, to be obliged praise as a beneficent being him who first suggested the inhabitants of the banks of the Orinoco the use of the slats he ties the children's temples, and which insure at least a measure of their imbecility and of their original happiness.(3) He is not praising the inhibition of the mental development of Orinoco children; do so would be frightful. But he does clearly imply that while Orinoco children are happy, those who are can only be imbeciles. A little later in the same Discourse one finds a primitive compassion so natural and instinctive that even the animals show evidence of it, while in uncanny proximity this passage we find compassion flowing, not out of the hollow combs of the heart a distressed fellow creature, but from the civilized artificialities and unreal situations of the stage melt the flinty cockles of even the most murderous tyrant (160-61). In effect, pity is natural and pity is engendered by artifice: two irreconcilable points of view. Melville's reflections on neolithic village life in the Marquesas have a similar ambivalence. It is not enough divide the readings of Typee between glorifications of the happy valley and melancholy critiques of it, nor even suggest the ideal is somehow, like the rambling kannaka Marnoo, have access both. Tommo generally finds his commitments civilization intensify precisely the extent that he approaches the perfect freedom of savagery. He never completely registers the beauty of neolithic life until its jeweled lakes and euphoric natives are lost him forever. Never does he feel such oppression as when he should be in the fairy regions with Fayaway, whose laughing mouth is an arta fruit, milk-white teeth imbedded - rather uneasily, come think of it - in an otherwise inviting cleft of red and juicy pulp: that which is be devoured itself displaying an uncanny capacity devour. And never does he have such a favorable opinion of human nature as when he has lost the company of his simple native friends and has fallen again among his mean-spirited, syphilitic, civilized fellow men. To notice these and other hesitations and conversions is not by any means denounce either Rousseau or Melville as incoherent, but simply affirm once more the trembling, which is characteristic of any merely human project, the extremely fatiguing instability, as Blanchot would call it, of the way things are the closer one comes them. …