"Prizeable Companions": Missing Friends in the Marquesan Accounts of William Crook, Edward Robarts, and Herman Melville

“Prizeable Companions”: Missing Friends in the Marquesan Accounts of William Crook, Edward Robarts, and Herman Melville VANESSA SMITH University of Sydney “We were seeking each other before we set eyes on each other—[. . .] we embraced each other by repute. Michel de Montaigne, “On Affectionate Relationships” M elville’s portrayal of masculine friendship has long posed problems for interpretation.1 Indeed, the problem of friendship might be paradigmatic of the hermeneutic enterprise per se: “is it all that it seems”? Friendship has become the most transparent of intimacies, inviting the contemporary reader to see it inevitably as a figure for something else. The extent to which we see through friendship to what is nested within it— be it desire or exploitation—registers our social sophistication, our political commitment, our capacity for hindsight. Yet one of friendship’s most subtle critics, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, prefaced her early work on the subtexts of friendship—which focused on the writings of Melville among others—with an expression of frustration at those types of reflexive cleverness that inflect interpretation of intersubjective relations. Sedgwick noted that “a tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of categorization have been painstakingly inscribed in current critical and political thought: gender, race, class, nationality, sexual C  2009 The Authors Journal compilation C  2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 See, for instance, Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (London: Paladin, 1970); Robert K. Martin, Hero, Captain and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Caleb Crain, American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) and “Lovers of Human Flesh: Homosexuality and Cannibalism in Melville’s Novels,” American Literature 66.1 (March 1994): 25-53; Mitchell Breitweiser, “False Sympathy in Melville’s Typee,” American Quarterly 34.4 (Autumn, 1982): 396-417; Malini Johar Schueller, “Colonialism and Melville’s South Seas Journeys,” Studies in American Fiction 22. 1 (Spring 1994): 3-18; Wai-Chee Dimock, “Typee: Melville’s Critique of Community,” ESQ 30 (1984): 27-39; K. L. Evans, Whale! (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); David Bergman, Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); and Paul Lyons, American Pacificism: Oceania in the U. S. Imagination, (London: Routledge, 2006). 10 L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S “ P R I Z E A B L E C O M P A N I O N S ” orientation are pretty much the available distinctions.”2 She situated a late twentieth-century frustration with the explanatory power of such frameworks in the context of a post-AIDS familiarity with loss: connecting it to the desire to capture, in mourning, the uniqueness of the lost individual, or as she expressed it, “the piercing bouquet of a given friend’s particularity” (Sedgwick 23). I want also to focus on the burgeoning sense of the particularity of the friend that occurs in mourning, and on the relationship of that particularity to the crude but necessary structures that currently describe relationships between self and other. To do this, I want to read the friendship between Tommo and Toby in Melville’s Typee via another relationship, between the beachcomber Edward Robarts and the missionary William Pascoe Crook, two men left by ships in another part of the Marquesas some years prior to Melville’s brief sojourn on Nuku Hiva. Both friendships never quite took place. Like Tommo and Toby’s friendship , Robarts and Crook’s occupies an imaginary space adjacent to and conjured by a beachcomber text from the Marquesas. Tommo and Toby’s friendship is a version of a friendship between Melville and Richard T. Greene, just as his novel dilates upon rather than simply describes a brief sojourn in the Marquesas. Robarts and Crook’s friendship, although adumbrated in a nonfictional work, has even more of a quality of the imaginary: it is a friendship dreamed up within Robarts’s account, between two historical...