Taipi, Tipii, Typee: Place, Memory, and Text A Response to Robert C. Suggs

'7wassuspendedovertheYawningChasm." IllustrationbyH.MooreforHermanMelville, Typee:LifeintheSouthSeas(Boston: D.C.Heath,1902),67. Taipi, Tipii, Typee: Place, Memory, and Text A Response to Robert C. Suggs JOHN BRYANT Some might argue that it does not matter whether Melville did what he said he did in Typee; it is the text and our reading of it that matters, not the biographical events upon which that text is based. The assumption is that we cannot retrieve the past— whether the writer took an eastern or a northern route over the mountains—or know a writer's intentions. Therefore, our critical efforts are best reserved for the text itself, as we receive it. And this line of reasoning might go some distance if the text in question is, in fact, a fiction like Moby-Dick in which the narrator's voice is removed from the precise particulars of Melville's maritime past. That is, for the most part, the text of Moby-Dick does not require us to read it biographically (although quite obviously one can, and some have). Typee, however, is different because its rhetoric insists upon Melville's authenticity: he was there; this is what he saw; it aroused him and angered him; this is (he says) the "unvarnished truth."1 Of course, we know that, in the case of Typee, the truth was obviously "heightened for effect," as one reviewer put it. At the same time, this reviewer allowed that "many of the incidents . . . seem too natural to be invented."2 Modern readers recognize that "authenticity" in a narrative is itself a fabrication : that is, a good writer can manipulate a text so that the narrator's voice sounds sincere, without wax, unvarnished. One strategy in performing this feat is for the narrator to admit his limitations: his doubts, fears, and ignorance. And repeatedly ESQ \V.51\ 1ST-3RD QUARTERS | 2005 237 JOHN BRYANT Tommo tells us in Typee that he was "baffled" by what he had seen and amazed at what he had done. The same might be said for Ishmael; he, too, is radically unstable, and famously so. But from the moment the narrator demands to be called Ishmael, we know that we are launched into a fiction that bids farewell to biography. Typee, however, demands biography: it is rooted in a place and forged, initially, out of memory, then ceaselessly revised before, during, and after publication. It is a biographical text that forces us to question its authenticity. Typee is a fluid text. That is, it is a work that exists, textually, in revision and may be read in its various sequential versions in both manuscript and print. If Typee is that kind of text that requires us to seek out biography, then the writing process itself (evident in the text's revisions and evolving versions) may be seen as part ofthat biography. Accordingly, in order to read Typee, we need to know the conditions of its creation; and we need to be able to discern actual biographical events (let's call them "facts") from linguistic inventions and manipulations (call them "fictions"). The point is not to settle the matter of Melville's fabrication of authenticity but to find a way to differentiate reality and mind or, more to the point, memory and imagination, in the writing process and in a piece of writing . In my approach to Typee, then, it is useful to know the facts of creation as clearly as possible, from the narrative's earliest inception to its final revision. Archaeologist Robert C. Suggs has written an engaging (although flawed) essay arguing that Melville's recounting of his escape into the mountains and over to the valley ofthe Taipi is entirely false. He offers evidence, but I will show that his evidence is less than meets the eye. Moreover, he ignores evidence that shows the likelihood of Melville's veracity on certain important details concerning his escape route. But let me stress that, while I think Suggs's essay aims to undermine Melville's claims to authenticity, I do not believe that authenticity is the real issue, for even if Suggs's thesis were true, readers of Typee would want to ask why Melville would play...