"Made in the Marquesas": Typee, Tattooing and Melville's Critique of the Literary Marketplace

JOHN EVELEV "Made in the Marquesas": Typee, Tattooing and Melville's Critique of the Literary Marketplace [My] apprehensions were greatly increased by the desire which King Mehevi and several of the inferior chiefs now manifested that I should be tattooed. . . . What an object [t]he[y] would have made of me! -Typee A few years since there was living on the island of Maui ... an old chief who, actuated by a morbid desire for notoriety, gave himself out among the foreign residents of the place as the living tomb of Captain Cook's big toe! —affirming, that at the cannibal entertainment which ensued after the lamented Briton's death, that particular portion of his body had fallen to his share. . . . The result was the making of his fortune; ever afterwards he was in the habit of giving very profitable audience to all curious travelers who were desirous of beholding the man who had eaten the great navigator's great toe. —Typee These epigraphs depict the simultaneously threatening and profitable exchanges between the "primitives" of the South Sea Islands and "civilized" whites in the early days of South Pacific exploration , trade, and colonization represented in Herman Melville's first novel, Typee.' The object of representation ofTypee is, above all, primitivism : the encounter ofcivilization with the exotic primitive. But these encounters reflect not only on the cultural gaps between the sailors and missionaries and the islanders but also upon the poetics and politics of Arizona Quarterly Volume 48 Number 4, Winter 1992 Copyright © 1992 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 6 10 20John Evelev representation in Melville's writing. Though they depict different situations and reactions, the quotations betray what we could think of as Melville's anxiety over being made the "fancied ideal" of a public's objectifying reading.2 These encounters with represented primitivism show an awareness on Melville's part of the threat of representation: in any act of representation, whether narrating or tattooing, the subject of representation is objectified by an audience. Like the Hawaiian story-teller whose "morbid desire for notoriety" culminates in his being known as "the man who had eaten the great navigator's great toe," Melville would later in his career comment (and lament) on the process of readerly objectification that established his own "reputation" forever after Typee as "a 'man who lived among cannibals '!"' Representation operates as a threatening fixing of identity, where the represented "object" ("What an object he would have made ofme!") is victimized by the commodification of and trade in representation. Drawing connections between the "savage" context of the Typees' system of symbolic representational exchange and the alternate "civilized " context of the literary marketplace in the age of burgeoning industrial capitalism, I want to read Typee as a critique of the practices and requirements of the literary profession in the United States of the 1 840s. Tommo's alternating attraction toward and rejection of Typee culture and the objectifying exchange of tattooing is a textualization of Melville's critical consciousness. Tattooing (in both its positively aesthetic and terrifyingly violent forms) is a representation of representation : a place where Melville's attitudes toward writing get expressed. It is the scene of Melville's conflicted reaction toward writing written across the narrative.4 The depiction of tattooing in Typee serves as a literal form of documentation (as factual texture, proof that Melville was in the Marquesas ), but it is also symbolic, symbolic of a set of meanings which reflect not so much on the Typees, but on Melville himself in the act of writing in New York in 1845. If Typee is split by the ambivalences and contradictions in its attitude toward tattooing, we must see these contradictions not only as reflecting on the complicated attitudes of the "civilized" to the "primitive," but also on Melville's own conflicted attitude toward writing itself. Tattooing is a form of writing which seems a threat of violence, a violence to identity, and thus Tommo's rejection "Made in the Marquesas" seems a rejection of writing as a recuperation or re-assertion of identity. At the same time, however, Melville's willingness to conform to the market's requirements, to write and re...