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Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Inward Bound: Americanism and Truth in Melville's Typee"


Russ Pottle
Southeastern Louisiana University
rpottle2@selu.edu

Melville's Typee is often cited for its sympathy to the plight of non-Western cultures during European and American expansionism in the nineteenth century. In its time, Typee was used as a reference in the debate over religious imperialism in the South Seas (Hugh Heatherington, Melville's Reviewers [Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1961], 59). More recently, this portrait of life in the Marquesan Islands has led critics to view Melville as a defender of threatened peoples. Michael Rogin, for instance, argues that with the publication of Typee, "Melville entered literature as a spokesman for the aboriginal victims of Manifest Destiny" (Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville [New York: Knopf, 1983], 48). Lee Mitchell and Faith Pullin describe Melville's early works, Typee especially, as books that protest the destruction of non-white societies by white cultural imperialists (Witnesses to a Vanishing America [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981], 198; "Melville's Typee: The Failure of Eden" [New Perspectives on Melville. Kent: Kent State UP, 1978], 15). Yet through this critique of Western perspectives, and a critique of Americanism in particular, Melville mounts in Typee a critique of travel narrative itself, calling attention to travel writing as an agent in the destruction of non-Western cultures.

Typee's narrator, Tommo, has been identified by Mitchell Breitwieser as an American on the run from the strictures of Western culture, using the islanders that he meets during his mutiny as materials from which to construct a primitivist argument that justifies his flight ("False Sympathy in Melville's Typee" [American Quarterly 34: 396-417]). Closer examination of the text, however, reveals that Tommo uses American nationalist rhetoric to justify a series of self-interested actions that he visits upon the Typee tribe. For instance, by exploiting his friendship with a tribal chief, Tommo is able to break a tribal taboo that demands the separation of men and women during certain activities. While Tommo presents this action as a blow for equal rights and social justice in Typee culture by employing the language that threaded through the American Revolution, the narrowness of Tommo's intentions becomes clear when the reader of the narrative realizes that the final result of Tommo's "emancipation" of island women has simply been to allow Tommo to have his island girlfriend go with him for boat rides (Typee: A Peep At Polynesian Life [Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968], 133-35). No far-reaching cultural changes appear (even if these would have been desirable). Instead, the whole affair calls attention to Tommo's exploitation of both island and American culture in the name of self interest.

Such events call attention also to Tommo's general narrative treatment of the Typee tribe, which, as the book progresses, becomes steadily less a product of the accepted nineteenth-century travel writing methods of close observation and reportage (Janet Giltrow, "Speaking Out: Travel and Structure in Herman Melville's Early Narratives" [American Literature 52: 18-32]) and more a product of what James Jubak would call "a record of events true only to the individual perceiving mind" ("The Influence of Travel Narrative on Melville's Mardi" [Genre 9: 121-33], 128). In fact, by the later portions of the narrative, Tommo actually begins to construct a version of Typee culture based on a series of things that he has not seen. He writes about things that he has "never witnessed" or "did not perceive" as if they truly existed (Typee 122, 204). When this created culture comes crashing down around him, Tommo frantically flees the Typees, falling literally into the arms of Western culture and presenting the West with an enigmatic, duplicitous, and violent portrait of South Sea culture. This ending leads toward the conclusion that an "other" culture is inaccessible to voyaging white writers. Any travel writing becomes a voyage inward to the biases of the travel narrator. The revelations of travel narrative become the revelations of self-divulgence. While this is part and parcel of modern analysis of travel writing, it cuts against the grain of received nineteenth-century readings of travel books (Giltrow 22), indicating a broader scope for Typee than just a study in cultural relativism.

Thus critique in Typee extends not just to Tommo's self-interested use of Americanist rhetoric or the way in which that rhetoric played out in the expansionist decades that preceded Melville's first book. Typee presents Melville himself as being highly skeptical of the very vehicle that presents other cultures to the dangerous and flawed West. The subject of narrative -- the other culture, and in later works the other person, the other class, the other in general -- remains beyond writing. This calls for a darker reading of Melville, whose works at first glance would seem to affirm at least the act if not the effect of writing. Melville's style in Typee may serve to "problematize" nineteenth-century encounters between whites and non-whites, as T. Walter Herbert, Jr. argues (Marquesan Encounters: Melville and the Meaning of Civilization [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980]), but it also makes problematic the very place in which such encounters were played out for the public: the written texts of travel narrators, in which narrators like Tommo claim to present the "truth" about cultures in foreign lands. If Melville documented in his early books the "vanishing" of non-Western cultures (Mitchell 191-92), these same books, Typee in particular, identify travel narratives and their narrators as agents that helped cause those cultures to disappear.


Russ Pottle
rpottle2@selu.edu

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