Introduction: Being There: Melville and the Romance of Real Life Adventure

Abstract

Title page, with illustration by Mead Schaeffer, for Herman Melville, Typee (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1923)- INTRODUCTION Being There: Melville and the Romance of Real Life Adventure G. R. THOMPSON There is no Frigate like a Book —Emily Dickinson (c. 1873) "You got tuh go there tuh know there." —Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) As an introduction to this symposium on the "actuality of place" in Melville's first romance-novels, the two quotations I offer as epigraphs suggest the broad territory ahead: reading and imaginative writing in relation to experience. "There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us Lands away, " Dickinson writes. Nor are there any "Coursers" quite "like a Page / Of prancing Poetry" to take us swiftly to places we have not physically been; with such "frugal" economy can a book become the "Chariot" of the "Human Soul."1 Janie, in Hurston's novel, expresses the other (though not the opposite) side of human understanding : experientially being there. The context of course is rather different; Janie is talking about understanding what it means to free herself from the "slavery" of gender. But Melville's narrators also express the tension between the mental slavery of socially determined preconceptions and some "other" actuality of things. The multiple aspects of these issues of objective and subjective truth and the limitations of the human condition are ESQ \V.51\ 1ST-3RD QUARTERS I 2005 1 G. R. THOMPSON also suggested by the allusion in the main title of this introduction . Being There, Jerzy Kosinski's 197° novel and subsequent screenplay (l979)> describes the interpretations and misinterpretations of a possibly wise but simple-minded witness who adopts the multiple personalities of those simulacra he watches on television. He is a suspect Christ-like figure, a tender of the "gardens" of the world, significantly named Chance, who would like to turn away all the unpleasant things he sees by "switching channels." And although he may, for the most part, be able to switch off what he doesn't like, the reader-viewer can't. Another relevant meaning of "being there" involves the intersection and intermingling, if not merging, of the issues of truth and fiction, the familiar and the exotic, humanity and inhumanity. Especially implicated is the interaction of the aesthetically imagined with the presumed "real" that seems to be "out there"—that is, the actual as the intersection of inner subjectivity and outer objectivity. The symposium articles that follow contain both scholarly and personal responses to the complex actuality oÃ- Typee (1846) and a few of Melville's other "island" writings, especially Omoo (1847) an I found that what my imagination had romantically anticipated was not diminished by the reality of place or the distance of time. A good example of anticipatory imagination (by which I mean to implicate both that of Melville's narrator and that of the reader) occurs in the first chapter of Typee. "Hurra, my lads! It's a settled thing; next week we shape our course to the Marquesas!" The Marquesas! What strange visions of outlandish things does the very name spirit up! Naked houris—cannibal banquets—groves of cocoa-nut—coral reefs—tatooed chiefs—and bamboo temples; sunny valleys planted with bread-fruit-trees—carved canoes dancing on the flashing blue waters—savage woodlands guarded by horrible idols—heathenish rites and human sacrifices. Such were the strangely jumbled anticipations that haunted me during our passage from the cruising ground. I felt an irresistible curiosity to see those islands which the olden voyagers had so glowingly described.8 Was it really like that? Is it still anything like that? In chapter 2, the narrator follows up on the intersection of imagination and reality: MELVILLE AND THE ROMANCE OF REAL UFE ADVENTURE Those who for the first time visit the South Seas, generally are surprised at the appearance of the islands when beheld from the sea. From the vague accounts we sometimes have of their beauty, many people are apt to picture to themselves enamelled and softly swelling plains, shaded over with delicious groves, and watered by purling brooks, and with the entire country but little elevated above the surrounding ocean...