When considering Herman Melville’s third novel Mardi, or A Voyage Thither (1849), an attentive reader is presented with a formidable challenge, or rather set of challenges. Isolating a dominant theme, and relating it to the book’s formal structure, as well as determining if there, in fact, is a formal structure, is not a straightforward task in the least. Like other works in Melville’s oeuvre, the structure is very suggestive of the process of composition, or of a text that grew and changed over the course of its being written. What formal unity exists suggests a tripartite structure, a narrative that evolves from maritime adventure to Romance to Philosophical Dialogue with aspirations to allegory. Perhaps inevitably, there is some generic blending and backtracking along the way (The story reverts to romantic adventure just in time for a climax of sorts), but overall the breaks in genre can be clearly delineated by the reader since Melville includes some helpful signposts along the way, usually in the form of character arrivals and departures. The organic growth of the text is, I would argue, suitable to its dominant theme, which is knowledge. Mardi, more than any other novel I have encountered, gives the impression of a developing thought process. Its true subject is its author, or more precisely, how its author thinks through the construction of a fictional narrative. The artistic problem of Melville’s novel is therefore largely psychological. Its chief pleasure is the experience of witnessing genius discovering its potential; its chief pain, or challenge, is the experience of the error side of the inevitable trial and error process of discovery.
In many respects, Mardi reads like a prototype or draft of all of Melville’s most fully realized artistic achievements. The densely allusive style and seafaring quest narrative anticipate Moby-Dick, as do the enigmatic allegorical elements of the story. The philosophical dialogues look ahead to The Confidence-Man and the metafictional speculations are not unlike the digressive chapters of that novel and the later sections of Pierre. Even the songs routinely strummed out by Yoomy as aesthetic punctuations to the more involved metaphysical conversations seem to prophesize Melville’s late-period turn to poetry. What distinguishes Mardi from Melville’s other works is that, along with Pierre, it demands that the reader be conscious of the relationship between knowledge and fiction. In composing his narrative, Melville is himself questing after an epistemological goal, one tied to his developing identity as a writer. In fact, it is a text so closely bound to Melville’s sense of his development that the average reader can be excused for finding the proceedings somewhat alienating. Mardi is less a work of fiction than a record of Melville’s unfolding.
From Chapter 65 Mardi becomes a quest narrative, with the protagonist/narrator Taji seeking out his lost maiden Yillah throughout the imagined South Seas archipelago of Mardi. The lost Yillah develops symbolic significance almost immediately, with the utopian viability of each visited island being determined according to her presence or absence; as she is always absent, utopia remains an elusive concept all the way to the end of the novel. A serious flaw attends this quest narrative, and that is a significant lack of dramatic urgency developed with recognizable (not necessarily realistic) human characters. Melville allows his protagonist, and his emotional investment in Yillah, to fade into the background for large swaths of the narrative, instead focusing attention on the three great wise men of the Mardian kingdom of Odo and their less-distinguished king/demigod Media. These wise men, named Babbalanja, Yoomy, and Mohi (aka Braid-Beard) are clearly personifications of broad intellectual concepts or disciplines. Babbalanja is the representative philosopher, Yoomy is the poet, and Mohi is the historian. The action of the later chapters of the book concern visits to various islands throughout Mardi that, like most of the characters, have the spectral and fanciful quality of allegorical entities. They are places governed by mores Melville wishes to hold up for scrutiny, or satirical exaggerations of real countries; the most obvious are Dominora, representing England, and Vivenza, representing the United States. The combination philosophical discussion and travelogue frequently places Taji in the background, so for long stretches he is all but absent. The urgency and romance of Taji’s infatuation with Yillah being neglected, the reader is left with the dry, intellectual engagement with what Yillah may be or represent. The discourse is interrupted occasionally by a trio of pursuers, associates of the priest Taji killed in his “liberation” of Yillah, who slay the only two other realistic characters in the book, Jarl and Samoa, and offer a tantalizing glimpse as to what the narrative could have been if Melville paid as much attention to the dramatic side of his project as he did to the philosophical. As it stands, an occasionally oppressive inertia characterizes long stretches of the chartless voyage which makes up the bulk of Mardi; it seems inappropriate that a globe (or at least archipelago)-trotting quest should so often give the reader the sensation of sitting perfectly still. Melville at times seems to skip past telling his story so as to explore its intellectual implications. In this respect, Melville’s representative intellectuals serve his mission well. They all seem to, at various times, articulate the poetic, moral, and philosophical concerns that Melville felt he needed to address and synthesize in order to carry off a truly great feat of the imagination in a literary medium.
Another reason that Taji’s not-quite absence from the later episodes of the novel is so distracting is the marked contrast with his conspicuous presence in the earlier sections. The course of his development flows more-or-less in line with the generic shifts of the narrative, so that the changes in Taji in large part, and appropriately enough, reflect the changes in Melville’s book. In the early, Typee/Omoo-esque chapters, Taji is merely an unnamed narrator. He acquires his name when he enters the mythical domain of Mardi and takes on the role of a demi-god, a shift in the narrative’s generic orientation that takes it away from the real into the realm of the romantic and allegorical. This (admittedly non-literal) change in Taji’s metaphysical constitution occurs simultaneously with a change in motivation; he becomes infatuated with the maiden Yillah, and seeks her all across Mardi after her mysterious disappearance. It would seem appropriate, and desirable, for Melville to develop Yillah as a symbol in tandem with Taji as a character in order to maintain a sense of narrative momentum and dramatic urgency. This approach, at least in part, is manifest in the later construction of Captain Ahab and Moby-Dick. By choosing to grant Mohi, Babbalanja, and Yoomy (and Media) center stage, much is lost in terms of dramatic heft, and instead the intellectual problems Melville saw manifest in his project are given primacy. To his credit, Melville tweaks the generic conventions of his novel accordingly, and presents his ruminations as a series of philosophical discussions; many passages in the second half of the book read like Socratic dialogues imbued with Melvillian rhapsody.
Of Melville’s three wise men, the one that gives the impression of possessing a life apart from the formal and personal demands of Melville’s allegory is Babbalanja, the representative philosopher. I find it quite remarkable that Melville chose him, and only him, as the character to achieve a degree of intellectual fulfillment and inner peace near the end of the quest, and I find it even more remarkable that this inner peace and fulfillment came about through an encounter with a very thinly disguised Christianity. Joining the philosophic impulse of the creative faculty with Christian love strikes me as a decision more personal than aesthetic. It becomes even more attention-grabbing when the reader recalls Babbalanja’s alter-ego Azzageddi, a manifestation of the unconscious explicitly associated with deviltry. Babbalanja’s own conception of his quest is articulated in chapter 189, when he chooses to leave the company and remain on the island of Serenia- “My voyage is ended. Not because what we sought is found; but that I now possess all which may be had of what I sought in Mardi. Here I tarry to grow wiser still…” The quest is explicitly relocated from the physical space of the world into the mind, where perhaps it belonged all along. It is also well worth noting that the remainder of the group also embrace the Mardian analogue to Christianity, but apparently not to the same end or with the same conviction as Babbalanja. Taji in particular is obviously still obsessed with Yillah, and his quest for utopia-through-Yillah has a tragic dimension that, in Melville’s hands, takes on a biblical aspect; Babbalanja makes it clear that Taji cannot reclaim Yillah since he acquired her through the commission of a sin, and Yillah is not for post-lapsarian man. Though the narrative’s seeking for utopia has an ethical component, for Melville it would seem that Yillah was also in part an idea of aesthetic perfection. The world of Mardi, in addition to being a world of flawed and sinning human beings, is also explicitly understood to be a text, and clearly a text Melville wishes to perfect. The beginning of Chapter 191 describes a scene “as if Mardi were a poem, and every island a canto,” a conception which foregrounds the aesthetic dimension in contrast to an earlier passage that likens Mardi to an encyclopedia. Melville clearly had a conflicted relationship with literature, a factor that animates all of his most ambitious works, but it is a tendency arguably at its most conspicuous in Mardi. Whether Melville ever resolved the conflict to his own satisfaction may not be clear, but there is broad agreement among readers that later works would present Melville’s obsessions in more congenial and moving forms.
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