Mapping Typee: Space and the Genres of Truth

Abstract

"Map of the Marquesas Islands. " From Herman Melville, Typee: Life in the South Seas (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1902), facing 1; reprinted from the 184 0. edition. Mapping Typee: Space and the Genres of Truth ALEX CALDER An atlas of the novel. Behind these words lies a very simple idea: that geography is not an inert container, is not a box where cultural history happens, but an active force, that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth. —Franco Moretti (1998) If Franco Moretti's Atlas of the European Novel were to have a New World supplement,1 how might we picture the relation between actual and literary space in Typee? And what would the map disclose ? Robert Suggs has given us the makings for one possible map: draw an outline of the island of Nuku Hiva, color in the different valleys, and then put in some finer detail, as if on a boy's treasure map. From the novel, you might draw a canoe shed with 3<%s for snoring sailors, or a waterfall with a springy coconut tree alongside it. And from real life: redoubts, paths, paepae. Finally, you would plot a line of the protagonist's movements , changing from dots to dashes to indicate where the truth stops and fiction starts. A map ofthat sort is conceivable, but it would not be very interesting. It reminds me of another archaeological investigation into the literature of the American Renaissance: an excavation of the site of Thoreau's cabin at Waiden Pond. Among the various items unearthed was an unusually large number of bent nails. If the sciences of actual space have anything to say to literary criticism, perhaps we should be on the lookout for ESQ \V.51\ 1ST-3RD QUARTERS | 2005 115 ALEX CALDER something more than the discovery that Mr. Self-Reliance was inexpert with a hammer. My point is that we don't need an archaeologist to tell us this; "naive" readers do it all the time. In any classroom discussion of Waiden, for instance, there is always someone who fastens like a limpet to the question of factual accuracy. Thoreau's mother did his washing. He ate out. What a fibber. The problem with such a response (if it is a problem) isn't so much a Gradgrindish failure of aesthetic appreciation as a common empirical prejudice that considers facts to be the bedrock of truth. In a crude form, this is the view that the past consists of facts, and that we can understand the past and settle interpretative controversies simply by examining what those facts are. For example, people have often wondered whether Typee is a true story, and it might seem only reasonable to look at the facts, and then draw the inescapable conclusion that the book is, to use phrases from Suggs's first paragraph, "a work of fiction," "a realistic-seeming novel," "an alternative version of reality." But I think Suggs's aim of disentangling fact from fiction takes too narrow a view of what counts as a fact, and too large a view of the distinction between factual and fictional prose. Style and humor and exaggeration for effect are significant "facts" in Typee, and from a literary point of view (although not from a legal one), I would say the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is a question for narratology rather than ontology, involving normally distinct forms of packaging rather than distinct kinds of content. In other words, even the "plain fantasy" (47) OI" days lost in the mountains might nonetheless be a representation of Melville's actual experience. True, it is not a point-to-point reflection ofthat actual experience, but what account ever is? Journalists, as well as poets, have license, and in Melville's case it permits a more vivid and more ample telling of the experience of cross-cultural encounter than any of his sources can provide. In the fine discrimination of today's paperback blurbs, "Based on a True Story! " in a large font would fit the bill for Typee, for it promises the peculiar mix of imagination and information one expects of a novelized work of nonfiction. I fear I may be laboring my point or starting hares with this 226 MAPPING TYPEE talk about fact and fiction, so let's change the terms. In one of his reflections on Pacific history, Greg Dening introduces a helpful distinction between what actually happened and what really happened. Actuality, he writes, is "what happened as it is known in its balance of the circumstantial and the determined, in its typicality as well as its particularity, known for its multivalent meanings."2 When we say we know "what really happened ," by contrast, our knowledge of the past is likely to be reductive and partial and to have the simple confidence of an appeal to common sense. As a historian, Dening aims to be scrupulous about actualities but endeavors to be skeptical about reality claims, both in his sources and in his own writing. In the place of hard-and-fast conclusions, Dening characteristically prefers self-conscious story telling, mannered personal anecdotes, an eye for the theater of social situations, multiple perspectives, and other highly reflexive forms of speculative reconstruction. It is an outlook, one might argue, that the author of Typee in large measure shares. In terms of what actually happened on Nuku Hiva in July 1842, I suggest readers compare Suggs's version with the several pages devoted to Melville in Dening's very recently published Beach Crossings—an exemplary study of Pacific actualities that Suggs would not have had an opportunity to read. There are a number of differences. Dening reckons the Acushnet anchored not off Fort Collet but alongside the whaler Potomac, away from the French ships, "at the extreme western end of the bay, opposite a collection of open sheds that housed a dozen or more canoes." If you change the starting point to the ridge directly behind those canoe sheds, then the story of the obstacles and hazards of Melville and Greene's escape seems less removed from possible experience—although Dening's comment that "Melville did not have to romance their dangerous, slippery trek in the dark on the edges of high cliffs" may seem questionable in the light of Suggs's topographical demonstration of what could not have happened when they reached the high ground.3 The more significant differences, though, involve the nature of tribal and intertribal relations and the role of the French. Suggs's map reminds me of a military model in which distinct units having distinct affiliations move in pre227 ALEX CALDER dictable ways. There is a lot of close surveillance across hard boundaries (an island version, perhaps, of the jungle tomtoms and wafted smoke signals that, on continents, remind white guys the natives are watching). Dening's beach is a more disorderly, mobile, and divided place. Temoana's Taipi wife, disgusted with her husband's fawning on the French, has disappeared . There are pro- and anti-French factions among the Te Ti. The French—the mafaui*—are comically out of place yet effective in ways they cannot predict or control in their performance of takeover, an action Dening presents in terms far closer to Melville's denunciation of their "shameless subterfuges "5 than Suggs's sanguine view of an extension of French law and order to a people plagued by riotous beachcombers. As far as Dening is concerned, the most notable thing that could not actually have happened in the opening pages of the book is the flotilla of sportive nude maidens swimming out to greet the ship. Scenes like this had once happened, but visiting whalers were now routine in Taioha'e—forty in the twelve months preceding the arrival of the Acushnet—and Melville's shipmates, preceded by several thousand Frenchmen, would have encountered the mundane and tired world of organized prostitution. "This was no pristine beach, "writes Dening. "The sands were a jumble of footsteps. ... It would be Melville's fiction to make it 'native.'"6 Suggs fastens on different details to make the same point. But I am not sure that fiction, with its air of romantic indifference to a sordid reality, is quite the word I would choose. When Melville gives the misleading impression that life in Taipi is unmarred by civilization, he deliberately introduces details that telescope the full history of the European encounter with the Pacific into a single adventure . The Western world had made less of an impact on the islands of the Marquesas than on Hawaii or Tahiti, but Melville exaggerates the contrast between these island groups in order to focus a tension in his ideas about what the history of contact with the indigenous peoples of the Pacific really amounts to. White folks, as he complained of Francis Parkman, are always mistaken when they assume the inferiority of "primitive" peoples, but the personal pleasure and self-knowledge he finds in his own encounter with them only accelerates the "fatal 22S MAPPING TYPEE embrace" he fears will destroy them entirely.7 Although the Marquesas became (and still remain) French territory, I think there is some point in placing Typee west of Parkman's Oregon Trail on an expanded map of the American frontier, or, as I would myself prefer, on a map of the settler societies of, say, New Zealand, Australia, British Columbia, Hawaii, California, Wyoming. The map might show sites of resistance movements and land confiscations in relation to the working out of literary plots; it might link farm production to maps of where good Indians and bad Indians congregate in books; it might plot the course of literary love affairs between members of different races/cultures, and their tragic or workable outcomes, in relation to perceived racial types; it might show correlations between average temperatures and the dangers of "degeneration. " I would have a particular interest, myself , in situating works now regarded as canonical that seem to belong to no distinct genre (Waiden, The Confidence-Man) or start new ones (The Virginian), that pose problems in their classification as fiction or nonfiction in the manner of Typee, or that set out to exploit instabilities ofthat sort in a Shandyesque manner . American examples are well known, but readers not wholly committed to isolationism might add F. E. Maning's Old New ¿¿aland (1863) or Guthrie-Smith's Tutira (1921) from my part of the world, Furphy's Such Is Life (1903) from Australia, and a parcel of books besides. Might the truth versus fiction map I disparaged earlier in this piece be redrafted as a map testing a possible correlation between the (un) settlement of New Worlds and new literary forms? I like to imagine maps on a micro scale too. Suggs takes me nearest to one when he describes Melville's "hoolah hoolah" grounds with an archaeologist's eye. It would be worth reconsidering the feast of calabashes and the cannibal discovery scene in relation to a very detailed map like that. I've written elsewhere about the way Melville has a style of not knowing (about tapu or cannibalism, for example), and that it is a style in which things can be said.8 In other words, I tend to trust Melville for the details, for what he says actually happened in his own version of what really happened. It seems to me that one of the most distinctive features of Typee is how much the book is al22P ALEX CALDER ready a kind of map, one that discloses lines of permission and constraint, and in which access to a knowledge of other cultures is already figured spatially. University of Auckland NOTES 1. Franco Moretti, Atlas ofthe European Novel, 1800—1900 (London: Verso, 1998). 3· 2. Greg Dening, Performances (Melbourne: Melbourne Univ. Press, 1996), 60. 3. Greg Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures and Self (Melbourne : Miegunyah Press, 2004), 94—9e*· 4. A transliteration of "Ma fois! Oui! Oui!" (Dening, Beach Crossings, 95)· 5. Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, vol. I oÃ- The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and the Newberry Library, 1968), 17· 6. Dening, Beach Crossings, 95· 7- See Melville, Typee, 26. 8. See Alex Calder, "The Thrice Mysterious Taboo: Melville's Typee and the Perception of Culture," Representations 67 (Summer 1999): 27—43· 220 ...

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