“From Typee to Clarel: ‘Across the Chasm’”

Abstract

racialized “Other”—can have over a white subject and narrator. Ahab’s sublime vision dominates the entire crew of the Pequod. And the sublime novel uplifted some readers, enabling them to respond creatively to the text. The black abolitionist and intellectual, James McCune Smith, and Clara Guernsey, a popular writer and reformer from Rochester, New York, creatively reinterpreted Melville’s sublimity in Moby-Dick. Guernsey, who published six novels and numerous stories in well-known magazines, was a friend of the Senecas and eventually became an adopted member of their tribe. Two of her novels, The Merman and the Figure Head (1871) and The Shawnee Prisoner (1876) vividly reveal Melville’s influence on her as a writer; and The Merman and the Figure Head is the most sustained engagement with Moby-Dick in the Civil War era. In it Guernsey transforms Moby-Dick into a domestic tale of interracial romance; and she focuses on and gives voice to characters who are silent in Moby-Dick: the white whale and sea creatures, especially the protagonist, a merman, who lives in a republican society of mer-people off the coast of Massachusetts, whose fancy for humans is his undoing. “From Typee to Clarel: ‘Across the Chasm’” Samuel Otter University of California, Berkeley Neither persistent critical narratives of decline or exhaustion nor Melville’s weariness with his typecasting as “the man who lived among the cannibals” should obscure the importance of Typee in the epic reflections of Clarel. In Clarel, Melville rewrites his Marquesan encounters. Memories of Nuku Hiva mark the terminus of the poet’s pilgrimage in the Holy Land. When critics do avoid a narrative of loss in moving from Typee to the poetry, they tend to interpret Melville’s Pacific depictions as retrieving a balance or repose associated with the South Seas. I would like to suggest something different: that the Marquesas continue to disorient and surprise and that these effects are valued, maybe given the highest value, by the poet. Tommo’s view of Nuku Hiva at the beginning of Chapter 7—the ascent that gives access to gaps, the line of sight that turns out to be composed of precipitous ridges—seems to have made a deep impression on Melville. Much of the pleasure and the challenge of reading Typee and Melville’s other prose and poetry involves the longing to, as Tommo puts it, stride “from summit to summit” and the necessity of heeding gaps. Melville continually figures such interrupted rhetorical advances. In Moby-Dick, the narrator describes both the course of the ship and an experience of reading: “The strange, upheaving, 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 125