Melville's Spell in Typee

ELIZABETH RENKER Melville's Spell in Typee Let me begin with a well-known story. Published as an autobiographical travel narrative in 1846, Typee, Melville's first book, provoked a controversy among readers and reviewers. English publisher John Murray's Colonial and Home Library, the series in which Typee was published, specialized in the real-life experiences of travelers in exotic places and promised factual accuracy. But the taint of fiction that was taboo in Murray's series clung to Melville's manuscript. Readers doubted that "Herman Melville" was a real person, and that his account of his experience in the Marquesas Islands was true. British readers in particular were incredulous that any common sailor could write so well. Murray, who worried from the start about the authenticity of both the author and the tale, repeatedly begged Melville to substantiate the truth of the narrative somehow, even after "Toby," one of the book's main characters, fortuitously appeared, "happy to testify to the entire accuracy of the work, so long as I was with Melville."1 Although today we know that "Herman Melville" was a real person who had shipped as a common sailor to Polynesia and jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, we also know that the authenticity debate over the book was well founded. Herman's brother Gansevoort, acting as his agent in London, assured Murray that the author of Typee had "never before written either book or pamphlet, and to the best of my belief has not even contributed to a magazine or newspaper."2 But Melville had already published at least several letters and one piece of fiction in the local press. Furthermore, as Charles R. Anderson demonstrates in his groundbreaking Meíviííe in the South Seas (1939), Typee was a substantially embellished version of the "facts," converting Melville's "relatively slight contact with primitive life" during a four-week sojourn in Arizona Quarterly Volume 52, Number 2, Summer 1995 Copyright © 1995 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 1610 Elizabeth Renker the Marquesas into Tommo's extensive interaction during a four-month captivity,3 a premise that rendered Typee an authoritative source for subsequent generations of ethnologists. Anderson also shows that Melville borrowed heavily from previous travel narratives, even in constructing allegedly "first-person" observations, and argues that almost all of Melville's recorded "experiences" in Typee were in fact derived from the travel literature he read upon his return home. Melville frequently copied not only the subject matter for his chapters and theit arrangement, but also entire phrases and figures of speech. Anderson concludes that he must have worked with his source books open in front of him, and that he "might have written Typee without ever having seen the Marquesas Islands."4 Hershel Parker similarly concludes: All in all, the evidence seems to show that Melville's lastminute cobbling was not inspired by his publisher but by his own desire to eke out his brief impressions from his four weeks among the Typeeans (rather than the four months he was claiming), plundering sourcebooks for passages which could be rewritten as his own experiences.5 Thus Melville's written account of his experience in the Marquesas violated what Nina Baym calls the "implicit genre contract" with his readers to tell the truth, a truth that contemporary admirers of Typee adamantly defended.6 Although Melville's use of sources in Typee is well known among Melville scholars, the implications of this writing practice have not been adequately grasped. Literary criticism of this fitst novel has concentrated on the conflict among European, American, and Polynesian cultures to which Melville was an eyewitness. Although different moments in the history of criticism approach this conflict in different terms—in some cases by invoking contrasting notions of "civilization" and "the primitive," in others by exploring Melville's role as impassioned critic of the Euro-American destruction of Polynesia or, alternatively , as complicit tool of imperialism7—the underlying focus on cultural conflict as such remains constant. Melville's position (sometimes differentiated from, and sometimes equated with, Tommo's) within a range of cultural discourses about missionary activity, "the primitive," imperialism, Manifest Destiny, Indian removal, and so on have long...