Speaking Out: Travel and Structure in Herman Melville's Early Narratives

Abstract

GENERIC MISCLASSIFICATION can have consequences to the interpretation and evaluation of a text. This has been the case with Melville's early writing, composed in the expository mode of the travel genre but now typically viewed in the light of another prose form, the novel. If genre is misconstrued or disregarded, meaning is obscured; and commentary which directly or indirectly attributes to a text alternate generic values can be ingenious, but it cannot address the text's formal significance. Typee (1846), Melville's first published volume, has been especially susceptible to critical ingenuity. Commentators have scanned it for convenient hand-holds where modern methods and current aesthetic values can get good purchase on the text. As a result, it has suffered the misnaming of its genre as critics have disregarded large evidence of the book's travel form and seized instead the smallest tokens of novelistic form. Disconcerted by Typee's repeated and irreverent trespass of the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, critics have tried to establish order by isolating its most conspicuously fictive aspects and then treating the whole book as a covert novel, or near-novel. But if we come to Typee prepared to account for its formal properties-which are those of travel narrative-the text divulges unified meaning and intent. Undertaking the travel form early in his career, Melville fully and consciously engaged the complex of ideas in which the genre originates. And the travel genre does frame one of the most provocative of human ventures and literary enterprises-the setting out from familiar shores to travel remote coasts, the discovery of an astonishing other-world, and the carrying home of marvellous news.'