Enchanted Isles: A Response to Robert C. Suggs on Typee

Enchanted Isles: A Response to Robert C. Suggs on Typee RUTH M. BLAIR What effect this relatively slight contact with primitive life may have had upon the spiritual biography of a sensitive young man is largely a matter of conjecture. —Charles R. Anderson, Melville in the South Seas The beach touched Melville more than Melville touched the beach. —Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches Even admitting that there was something dark that he chose to keep to himself, what then? —Herman Melville, "Daniel Orme" It is my dream to go to the Marquesas. Circumstances prevented my attending the conference on Melville in the South Pacific, but it is still my dream. For all their connections with the modern world, many islands of the Pacific are still relatively difficult of access; and the Marquesas, off in a corner of the Polynesian map as it were, retain something of the aura of exotic remoteness that they had in Melville's day. Charles R. Anderson puts his finger on this peculiar status. "For one reason and another," he says, "the Marquesas Islands have been far less frequented by white men than other Pacific archipelagoes ."1 That the Marquesas have remained remote, physically and symbolically, is evidenced by how long it has taken the sort of reconstruction Robert Suggs offers to appear. Melville has been dead for over a hundred years. Titus Munson Coan, who did a ESO I V. 52 I 1ST-3RD QUARTERS | 2005 87 RUTH M. BLAIR bit of retracing in 1867, is still quoted as one of the few pilgrim /verifiers.2 Why have scholars failed to flock there to tread in the footsteps and do the research? I half suspect that symbolic remoteness is in play here. Perhaps we are reluctant to abandon the aura that surrounds Melville's Pacific writings, so beautifully articulated by Virginia Woolf on the occasion of the centenary of his birth: "Somewhere upon the horizons of the mind . . . 'Typee' and 'Omoo' together with the name of Herman Melville, float in company. . . . [I]t is evident that a mist, due to ignorance or lapse of time, must have descended upon those far distant regions."3 Anderson's startling 1939 exposé of Melville's borrowings in his Pacific writings can still teach us much about how to read Typee. Anderson also dropped upon the growing world of Melville scholarship the indubitable fact that Melville spent about four weeks with the Typee, instead of the four months claimed in the narrative. He came to the conclusion that Typee is "a compilation, similar to the literary ethnologies which quote it as an authority," that "Melville gathered almost every shred of [ethnographic] information from contemporary travel books." "Indeed," he continues, "it can be said almost without exaggeration that . . . Melville might have written Typee without ever having seen the Marquesas Islands."4 Since Anderson's work appeared, scholars have had to acknowledge the factitiousness of the text, yet often with some reluctance, for the pull of the autobiographical, the need to believe in the story, seems too great to surrender. Witness Hershel Parker's treatment of this episode in his monumental and scrupulous account of Melville 's life. While not referring to Anderson, or, it seems, to any subsequent work on the "facts" of Typee, Parker gets around the problem by frequently reminding his readers that his account of Melville's experiences is "according to" or "claimed" by Melville.5 The effect of his narrative is to endorse Melville's account and to make it work as biography. Part of the problem , of course, is that we have no other record, and thus biographers find themselves in a tight corner. T. Walter Herbert's psychoanalytic reading of Typee remains one of the most interesting attempts to face up not only to the borrowings but also to the potential fictional status of much of the account. Given 88 ENCHANTED ISLES that Melville's jumping ship in the Marquesas is beyond question , the fictionality of the work becomes for Herbert (who puts Melville alongside other sojourners in the islands including Charles Stewart, David Porter, and Bronislaw Malinowski) a place to see the working out of an experience of the "other." Melville "appears before...