The Poetics and Politics of the “Unmanageable”: Cultural Cross-Currents in Melville’s Mardi

Abstract

T H E P O E T I C S A N D P O L I T I C S O F T H E “ U N M A N A G E A B L E ” : C U L T U R A L C R O S S - C U R R E N T S I N M E L V I L L E ’ S M A R D I S T E P H E N DE PAU L University of Ottawa -A fter writing two successful travel narratives about the South Seas, Melville extended the images and social structures of Polynesia to his own Western culture in his long and rambling novel Mardi (1849). The new book was a survey of his thoughts on the nature of myth and allegory, very much “a strange compound,” as George Ripley called it.1 But the amorphous, unwieldy format also reveals the complexity of Melville’s aims as a novelist. In com­ bining the elements of Polynesian and Western culture in one imaginary soci­ ety, Melville created a tactical literary problem. The focus on a narrative self, which fulfils the expectations of the nineteenth-century Western reader, is inconsistent with the actual dispersal of self-identity suffered by the Melville protagonist, who typically moves through an alien and unreadable society. The friction between the very Western centring of narrative focus and the historical displacement of the rover into terra incognita had emerged earlier in Omoo, Melville’s travel romance about Tahiti. There he recounted the large-scale cultural displacements produced by European colonization.2 Omoo dramatizes the extent to which “ every thing in Tahiti was in an uproar” as a result of the contact between natives and Europeans (75). The narrator assembles his own identity from the image-fragments produced by cultural contact. He records the gradual exchange of cultural traits between Western­ ers gone native and Tahitian converts to Christianity. Melville also recounts the radical amendments of prior cultural values of both Polynesia and the West. The images and artifacts of both native and colonial cultures, displaced from their original locales and functions, are now locked away in a room in Queen Pomaree’s palace “without the slightest attempt at order.” Once mean­ ingful in their respective cultural settings, the objects in this “museum of curiosities” (310) are the bricolage of mutual “acculturation.” Indeed Mel­ ville’s observations on the dispersed, fragmentary Tahitian culture in the colonial period anticipate Elias Ganetti’s comment in 1943 about modem culture: “ ‘Culture’ is concocted from the vanities of its promoters. .. . The purest expression of culture is an Egyptian tomb, where everything lies about futilely, utensils, adornments, food, pictures, sculpture, prayers, and yet the E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x iv , 2, June 1988 dead man is not alive” (Canetti 22). Omoo, specifically in its description of Queen Pomaree’s palace and generally in its form, has the same purity of expression. Melville understood how the social structures of nineteenth-century Poly­ nesia had been redefined by new cultural images. He could sense the vulner­ ability of the island cultures to the shifting interpretations of these images by various players, Polynesian and Western alike. Marshall Sahlins has described the historical process of cultural revision in the South Seas as a “ risk to the sense of signs in the culture-as-constituted.” According to Sahlins, “Man’s symbolic hubris becomes a great gamble played with the empirical realities. The gamble is that referential action, by placing a priori concepts in corre­ spondence with external objects, will imply some unforeseen effects that can­ not be ignored” (Islands 149). The unforeseen attains high profile in the South Pacific as the bricolage of fragmentary custom and belief, the texts of cultures. It is not surprising that “referential action” in a culture should become the subject for a writer such as Melville, for whom the novel itself was from the start an ambiguous text lacking a homogeneous and uniform referential quality. Even as he conceived of his new novel, Melville was still working from inside this tangle of Polynesian social...