Typee: "An Almost Incredible Book"

Heman Melville in l847- Oilpoñrait by Asa Twitchell. By permission ofthe Berkshire Athenaeum, Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Typee: "An Almost Incredible Book" SAMUEL OTTER In the lucid and learned essay, "Melville's Flight to Taipi, " the archaeologist Robert C. Suggs raises new questions about fact and fiction in Typee, specifically about the accuracy of the narrator's description of his five-day journey from Taioha'e (Melville's "bay of Nukuheva") to Taipi (Melville's "Typee"), and Suggs does something more.1 Of course, questions about the authenticity of Melville's Pacific Eden are not a new phenomenon. During the last great wave of skepticism about Typee, Robert S. Forsythe, in "Herman Melville in the Marquesas" (1936), documented Melville's expansion of his several week's stay to his narrator's four months with the Taipi. Charles Roberts Anderson, in his influential Melville in the South Seas (1939), showed Melville's indebtedness in detail and language to the travel narratives of such early nineteenth -century writers as the naval captain David Porter, the maritime chaplain C. S. Stewart, and the naturalist G. H. von Langsdorff. Anderson argued that the autobiography in Typee was thin and the ethnography, while accurate, was largely compiled from his sources. Anderson saw himself as correcting the mistakes of Melville's biographers, who conflated fiction with fact. As Raymond M. Weaver, the biographer who helped to fuel the revival of interest in Melville's work in the 1920s, had put the case, "Typee, Omoo, and White-Jacket are transparent chapters in autobiography. " While suggesting that much ofthe book was the product of Melville's reading and his imagination, Anderson also concluded that it was grounded in fact, point ESQ \V.51\ 1ST-3RD QUARTERS | 2005 169 SAMUEL 07TFÄ ing to such evidence as the record of Melville's desertion from the whaler Acushnet in Taoiha'e on Nuku Hiva on 9 Juty 1842· Forsythe, too, had supported a factual basis for the book, offering the corroborating testimony of Melville's shipmate Richard Tobias Greene, the "Toby" of Typee, published in July 1846 during the controversy that followed the book's initial appearance.2 MELVILLE S VERACITY That controversy disturbed the twenty-seven-year-old author . Melville was especially galled by an "obnoxious review" in the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer (17 April 1846), which he felt might endanger "the success ofthe book here as a genuine narrative." After praising Melville's "exceedingly racy and readable style," the Courier and Enquirer expressed the "candid opinion" that, in our judgment, in all essential respects, it is a fiction,—a piece of Munchausenism,—from beginning to end. It may be that the author visited , and spent some time in, the Marquesas Islands; and there maybe foundation for some portions ofthe narrative. But we have not the slightest confidence in any ofthe details, while many ofthe incidents narrated are utterly incredible . We might cite numberless instances of this monstrous exaggeration; but no one can read a dozen pages ofthe book without detecting them. The Courier and Enquirer raised questions that persist in the debate about Typee's authenticity. However pleasurable it is to read and whatever basis there is for its story, is the book mostly a tall tale? What is the relationship between its facts and its fictions? What kind of confidence can readers have, do readers want to have, in its details? What difference does it make if Typee tells an actual, embellished, or fabricated story?3 270 "AN ALMOST INCREDIBLE BOOK" American editors and Melville's American publishers Wiley and Putnam stoked the controversy. In prefatory remarks to Richard Tobias Greene's first letter announcing that he had been Melville's "Toby" and confirming the accuracy of Melville 's portrayal of events in which he was involved, the Buffalo Commercial Advenuer described the letter as "a strange verification of a very strange and, as has hitherto been deemed, an almost incredible book." Then, and now, Typee seems to have drawn its readers to the limits of belief, the asymptote of confidence . In a "Publisher's Advertisement" attached to the revised American edition of Typee (first appearing in August 1846), Wiley and Putnam included excerpts from a review...