Melville and Typee: sex, cannibalism, tattooing, taboo

Typee was Herman Melville’s first novel, and his first best-seller. It was all downhill from there for poor Melville. The editor of the New Riverside edition of Typee, Geoffrey Sanborn, helpfully tells me that:

“Its destabilization of white consciousness was probably not one of the things that made it a best-seller...” (p. 11)

No, probably not. I suspect the nekkid ladies had more to do with it. The internet informs me that Prof. Sanborn is or was at Bard, and that he has written a book called Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Creation of a Postcolonial Reader, and that this book “Extend[s] the work of Slavoj Zizek and Homi Bhabha...” Yikes. Run for it! Suddenly, compared to those terrors, Sanborn’s introduction seems extremely readable, almost conversational.

Sanborn does not really treat Typee like a novel, nor quite as non-fiction. To him, the book is more like an embodiment of attitudes or ideologies. The extra material in the back of this edition is split into four sections: sex, cannibalism, tattooing, taboo. There are some really useful illustrations of Polynesian tattooing, and some interesting old travellers’ accounts. This does some damage to the book, ignoring its fictiveness, but I can’t say the editor is wrong.

At some point or another during the past few years, reading around in Captain Cook’s Journals, or the chapters about Hawaii in John Kirk Townsend’s Across the Rockies to the Columbia, or the books about the U. S. Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842 (William Reynolds’s Private Journals and Nathaniel Philbrick’s Sea of Glory), I have picked up the notion that Polynesia had a larger influence on American and European ideas about race than I would ever have guessed.

To the Americans and Europeans, and to Melville, the Polynesians were the living examples of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Noble Savage, I think even moreso than Native Americans. There was some combination of elements that fit the ideology the Europeans had brought with them – the climate, the easy availability of food, the sexual habits and undress of the women, the cannibalism. It’s all very complicated. Add to this the sudden importance of the central Pacific in the global economy (whaling, the China trade).

I’ve reached the limit of my thinking, and competence, here. When I read the Philbrick book, I made a Polynesian history reading list. The humanist Typee, of its time but hardly typical, rightly topped the list.

Melville's Typee - a gesture expressive of deep commiseration

Moby-Dick was Herman Melville's sixth novel. Typee (1846) is his first. They are all sea novels, more or less. These are the only two I have read, the first and sixth. I can hardly tell that they were written by the same man. I can hardly believe that there is only five years between them.

In Typee, two whalers jump ship on an island in the Marquesas and hide out with the isolated Typee tribe, where they are both guests and prisoners. One of the sailors gets out quickly enough, but the Melville-ish narrator, "Tommo," has an injured leg so is stuck for a while. It's summertime every day, the livin' is easy, the breadfruit is abundant, the women are nearly nude. Only the fear that he may at some point be eaten by his hosts disturbs the idyll.

The models for Typee seem to be travel books rather than novels. Chapters discuss religious rituals, tattooing, sexual division of labor, warfare - anthropology. It's mostly pretty interesting.

It's the prose that really surprised me. It's so ordinary. I mean it's good, quite good, but nothing like what it would become only a few years later, in Moby-Dick, or even weirder books like Pierre. Where are the cadences of the King James Bible, or Sir Thomas Browne?

A few months ago I read the Penguin Classics selections from the Private Journals of William Reynolds, an officer on the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842. I don't remember whether Reynolds visited the exact island of Typee, but he was at least nearby, and Melville was familiar with and made use of the offical accounts of the ExEx. One of the most pleasurable things about Reynolds's book is watching him become a much better writer over time, funnier, more adept at description, more judicious in his details. The Melville of Typee is about as good as William Reynolds. The Reynolds book has more variety of incident.

Here's an uncharacteristic example of weirdness, from near the end of the novel. Tommo should be napping, but is instead watching his odd "host father":

"All alone during the stillness of the tropical mid-day, he would pursue his quiet work, sitting in the shade and weaving together the leaflets of his cocoanut branches, or rolling upon his knee the twisted fibres of bark to form the cords with which he tied together the thatching of his tiny house. Frequently suspending his employment, and noticing my melancholy eye fixed upon him, he would raise his hand with a gesture expressive of deep commiseration, and then moving towards me slowly, would enter on tip-toes, fearful of disturbing the slumbering natives, and, taking the fan from my hand, would sit before me, swaying it gently to and fro, and gazing earnestly into my face." (Ch. 33)