Pacific Poetics: Melville's South Seas Laugh

Abstract

WHAT DID MELVILLE FOLLOW into the Pacific? Besides other Melvilles and Gansvoorts, besides whales? I think he had a hunch that there was some very good theater being played out in that sea, and that after acting like a banker and a school teacher he thought acting like a sailor would be a bit of a lark. The spectacle of the Pacific, though, as opposed to his short stint across the Atlantic, swallowed up and spat out a new Herman. What I mean by swallowed is that great blue basin and its inhabitants gave young Melville a serious attack of performance anxiety; learning the ropes as a sailor or whaler in the Pacific did not only mean knowing how to handle yourself--it was also an awareness of yourself and your place at all times. Even a little slip in relation to those ropes and you'd be sure to knot them around your neck (witness Ahab). As Melville digested the Pacific it digested him--he did not merely pass through but was absorbed, was made a part of that thing he came to see. In the process he got, what I would call, wet, a condition from which he never recovered. (I do not mean to imply that his new state was like an illness, but like taking on a life-long exposure to the elements.) This fishy distinction marks him off from many European and American visitors to the Pacific who managed to float on the surface of their performance consciousness, maintaining a visitor's edge, a spectator's worldliness, a sense of humor bound up with a feeling of authority that resulted in a certain buoyant faith in their own vantage points. Another way to label this difference is to say that Melville dipped into skepticism (relaxed into it, like one relaxes into a bath) when many of his peers held firmly to other models--most notably that cushion against worldly oddities, irony. In the Pacific, irony often served as a visitor's head-abovewater floatational device. In that new place of dubious sign and season, it was easy to sink into a certain distrust, a creeping suspicion that the rules guiding one's behavior and understanding suddenly did not apply. In order to protect themselves from such a devastating self-examination, tourists stayed sure through devices like irony. Irony both depends upon and fosters a community that must know the same things. And that community must share the joke on a third group that is excluded from knowing those things, that is somehow in the wrong. As Wayne Booth has said, there are three points of connection necessary for irony to take place: one who makes, one who catches, and one who misses. This kind of humor throws a line back home--depends on someone getting it, assumes that there is an `it' to get. As Pacific scholar Greg Dening concludes in Mr. Bligh's Bad Language, his novel exploration of theater and mutiny: "Irony was the enlightened's trope.... Irony requires a perspective, a line of vision that the onlooker has but not the participant" (373). The South Seas, however, swamped Melville's flotational device--though it did not leave him humorless. When Tobias Green (the fellow New Yorker with whom Melville flees the Acushnet) abandons him in the Typee valley, Melville becomes that dangerous thing, a tourist severed from the tour. And it is not the threat of cannibalism, nor sexual unrestraint, nor facial tattooing, that Melville is left on his own with. He is left with the multiple responsibilities of performing and receiving his own jokes. He must be the one who "makes" as well as the one who "catches"--even sometimes, the one who "misses." (The paper trail of Melville's time in the Pacific looks something like the following: he jumps ship in the Marquesas and ends up in Taipivai--or what he calls the valley of the Typee, the story of which will become the subject of his first novel, Typee, written in 1846 on his return from the Pacific. He stays about four weeks before he returns to sea aboard the weedy rig Julia. Much of this crew, Melville quietly among them, mutinies and ends up temporarily imprisoned in Tahiti. …