Island Fictions, Intellectual Fictions: Dramas of Pacific Isolation in Stevenson, Wells, and Conrad

Abstract

“Consider the Island,” Deryck Scarr invites us in his history of the Pacific: “the idea of the island.”1 That idea, which Westerners brought to and imposed upon the insular Pacific, is of serious antiquity, in existence well before Magellan’s entry to it in 1521. “Those of us involved in Pacific studies,” Kerry Howe writes,2 “have been too impressed with the apparent novelty of the eighteenth-century Pacific dream island. But that Tahitian mirage was at the end of a very long imaginative tradition, one that long predated the Enlightenment, and even the Renaissance. Indeed it goes back to the very beginnings of Western civilization”—in Greek myth, Plato’s Atlantis, the Bible, and stories like the supremely imaginative “The Shipwrecked Sailor” from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. The Rousseauesque dream and mirage faded rapidly enough in Western thought after first contact with Tahiti in the 1760s, as stories of Polynesian infanticide and homosexuality were eagerly circulated by the fourth estate in an atmosphere of religious revival in late eighteenth-century England. (John Hawkesworth’s editorial compendium of 1773, An Account of the Voyages undertaken by the order of his present Majesty for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, was an important early revelation in that process.) But a myth inverted need lose little of its power and influence. That which was once utopian became dystopian, and the noble savage became ignoble, but the precedent myth of island isolation, augmented as it had been by accounts of Magellan’s travels by Antonio Pigafetta and others, accompanied and intensified almost every aspect of the West’s imaginative involvement with the “South Sea.” It does so still, though indigenous writers and historians have long since cast doubt upon it. The most important revisionary intervention in that respect is probably Epeli Hau’ofa’s essay, “Our Sea of Islands,” which does a good deal of myth-inversion of its own as regards Western views (political, economic, and cultural) of the islands of the Pacific as “tiny, confined spaces” at immense distances from both each other and the cosmopolitan epicentres of the First World. The peoples of Oceania, Hau’ofa argued, “did not conceive of their world in such microscopic proportions”: