A Political Companion to Herman Melville

Chapter 1. Who Eats Whom?

1 Who Eats Whom? Melville’s Anthropolitics at the Dawn of Pacific Imperialism Kennan Ferguson In no respect does the author make pretension to philosophic research. —Herman Melville, Omoo “From where?” asks Melville, in story and novel. What is the source of justice, of desire, of revenge, of human experience? When someone arrives at a new destination, what brought him (for the narrator is always male) there? How do we attempt to escape our pasts and how does their return compromise us? The role of the past in the present and the demand for causation and those resistances to that demand constitute both literature and humanity within Melville’s corpus. But the question should be asked of Melville himself as well. From where did his authorship arise? What dynamics of literature made him the famed writer who by the twentieth century was considered one of the greatest American novelists? Surprisingly to some, the answer lies not in the United States, but in the South Pacific. Long before Melville’s posthumous fame as the writer of Moby-Dick, before his brief and suggestive novellas and short stories that make Billy Budd and Bartleby familiar names, he came to the literary world’s attention as a writer of putatively autobiographical nonfiction. Focusing on sailors and savages, civilization and cannibalism, he emerged not as a literarily canonical figure but as an author of adventure. In his first two works, Typee and Omoo, Melville operated as an anthropological narrator, a sympathetic captive, and a possible fabulist. 22 Kennan Ferguson Both books tell of adventures in the South Pacific. The first describes how Tommo, the narrator and stand-in for Melville, jumps ship to escape the drudgery of civilization and finds himself captured by a tribe of Marquesans . These Taipis, called “Typees” by Melville, he first thinks to be cannibals, but after living among them for a while, he ultimately comes to admire their life and culture, even though he still desires escape.1 The second follows the same narrator (now, revealingly, called “Typee” by his new shipmates) to Tahiti, where he observes the mostly pernicious effects that colonial administration has on the indigenous islanders. The political content, genre trouble, and imperial outlook of these works have drawn the attention of today’s critics, but they were far more popular in Melville’s day than any of his subsequent posthumously canonized work. These books formed the basis for Melville’s fame, and for the tropes that his later writing would draw out and develop.2 In each case, the narrator comes to doubt his own knowledge: appearances are subverted, assumptions are disproved, surfaces mislead. In his later work, Melville would extend these doubts to much of nineteenth-century American existence. Melville gave the Anglophone world an imaginary of the South Seas, especially the islands of the Marquesas and of Tahiti, as powerful as that developed a generation later in France by Paul Gauguin. Melville did so in the middle of the nineteenth century, in a time of imperial expansion, when the relationships between the United States, England, and France—among other imperial powers—were being contested on the lands and bodies of Pacific peoples. In the stories narrated in these two tales (many of which depended on—were even plagiarized from—others’ works), Melville presented scientific knowledge, cultural study, adventure, and narrative ambiguity in the form of reportage. His anthropolitical imaginary presents the Pacific Islanders as a beguiling mixture of savagery and wisdom, populating islands of beauty and danger . Unlike his fellow white sailors, Melville sees the indigines as justified in their violence both against one another and against foreign invaders, and he views the intrigues between island chieftains and queens as equivalent to those of their European counterparts. He reports on their clothing, food, toilette, and traditions with a benignant eye, noting that his admiration for their culture opens him to a charge of being sympathetic with cannibals. The admiration he feels for the “native damsels” hints at an erotic freedom, one embodied in the emblematic figure of his lover, the girl Fayaway. But Who Eats Whom? 23 these admiring glances mix with a simultaneous narration of civilization and savagery that dislocates Pacific Islanders into the realm of pure nature, a narration that undermines a simple interpretation of Melville as an antiimperialist . Telling of his own capture, Melville emphasizes the danger of the warlike tribes. When he discusses his own travels, he...