September 2023 – High Pressure Days

(Note: I have fallen behind on my promised follow-up to my post on Michelle Remembers, so here is a little something to tide over all zero of my regular readers. It is a slightly edited version of a paper I wrote for an independent study back in grad school, so of course MLA formatting is present in all of its glory. I had previously posted on Herman Melville and his third novel, Mardi, here and here. Enjoy! I hope to have the MR post up sometime in October.)

Herman Melville’s literary ambitions underwent a significant change in character between his second and third novels, shifting away from the genre of fictionalized (though how fictionalized is still debated) travelogue to the romantic, philosophical, and more self-consciously ‘literary.’ The change is announced from the author’s note that precedes the title page of Melville’s third production, Mardi (1849):

“Not long ago, having published two narratives of voyages in the Pacific, which, in many quarters, were received with incredulity, the thought occurred to me, of indeed writing a romance of Polynesian adventure, and publishing it as such; to see whether the fiction might not, possibly, be received for a verity: in some degree the reverse of my experience. This thought was the germ of others, which have resulted in Mardi.” (xvii)

Though the broad and expansive genre of the nautical adventure ostensibly remained the baseline for this literary project (Melville even promises to focus his attention on Polynesia, the setting of his first two works, Typee and Omoo.), Melville clearly intended for there to be dramatic formal, stylistic, and thematic alterations to the nature of his writing. In that respect, Mardi does not disappoint. Though Melville advertised an intention to compose a ‘romance,’ not necessarily in the Hawthornian sense of that word, there really is no pinning down the generic orientation of Melville’s third novel. The author’s note foregrounds, right from the outset, an interest in the relationship between truth and fiction, a topic which inevitably summons the larger subject of epistemology. Melville was notably frustrated by critics who took his Typee and Omoo as fabrications when he intended them to be reflections of his actual lived thoughts and experiences. The fact that a literary mediation cast doubt on what Melville understood to be the truth would be the first ‘germ’ in the cultivation of a radically new way he had about how he understood and ‘thought with’ literature. This was no doubt helped along significantly by the immense volume of new books he was reading in the months leading up to and during the composition of Mardi. Melville, being an expansive if occasionally confused thinker, must have noticed immediately that the problem of genre is at the heart of the question concerning the relationship of fiction and truth. The formal conventions of genre and the specific, often constraining storytelling elements that go along with it, impose a degree of artifice on the vagaries, disunities, and contradictions that mark human thought. Human thought may not necessarily be ‘the truth’ of the universe (in fact, it quite probably is not) but it is quite obviously the only material human beings have to work with for comprehending themselves and their environment, or whatever other phenomena they may care to ponder. While composing Mardi, Melville discovered with an intense zeal his capacity for intellectual, spiritual, moral, and aesthetic exploration, and this led inexorably to a frustration with genre, more specifically his chosen genre of the seafaring romance. The consequence of this struggle is a book that is of multiple genres, and which possesses little formal unity. The critic Merrell R. Davis isolated no fewer than three distinct books within Melville’s ostensibly single volume: “The Narrative Beginning,” “The Romantic Interlude,” and “The Travelogue-Satire.” It may be possible to isolate further books still. Overall, Mardi gives the reader a vivid sense of the circumstances of its writing; when Melville seemingly exhausted the epistemological potential of one genre, he would move on to another, leaving the attentive critic with the over-arching impression of a meditation whose structural integrity hinges on the ongoing act of literary composition.

For these reasons, what ‘standard’ formal coherence exists in Mardi is, I would argue, a product of Melville‘s engagement with his major theme: knowledge. Mardi can be taken as an intelligible record of an artist’s intellectual growth, but not as a fully-realized aesthetic achievement. Melville’s favored rhetorical devices for the exploration of the range and limits of the human mind, especially in the later sections of the book, were the allegory and the philosophical dialogue. The shifts in genre that occur throughout the novel, for the most part, can be tracked through the alteration of these rhetorical devices and related stylistic shifts; it is a compositional approach that has the effect of altering the ‘reality’ (that is, the superficially realistic qualities of the story and how they relate to the putative reality of the reader) of the narrative. If one were to merely consider the events of the narrative, then Mardi would seem to be a more easily classifiable text. As the scholar Chris Sten noted, Mardi can be understood as an “imaginary voyage,” or “one of the principal forms of the novel before the twentieth century. The precursor of the modern genre of science fiction, which proposes to describe life in a distant time, the imaginary voyage pretended to describe life in a distant place…” (64) This narrative form proved to be sufficiently expansive to accommodate the full range of Melville’s developing obsessions, leaving room for philosophical speculations, mythopoeic questing, rugged nautical adventure, pointed political satire, and much else besides. The imaginary voyage would seem to have allowed Melville the opportunity to think about the world through a representation of the world (arguably the business of all literature) in the fluid and multifaceted way he desired.

As I have indicated, the chief theme of Mardi is knowledge, and the cumulative effect of the narrative is that of a journey inward, into the life of the mind. The story’s essentially tragic orientation is recognition of the frustrating insecurity that comes from an awareness of the limitations and frequent unreliability of human thought and perception. The basic plot, or the bulk of it anyway, consists of the narrator Taji’s efforts to recover the maiden Yillah (a symbolic personification of a utopian or spiritual ideal) within the mythical South Seas archipelago of Mardi. Assisting him is an entourage from the island kingdom of Odo whose members are each representations of certain human intellectual and creative faculties. As Merrell Davis observed, “The voyage through Mardi is both a quest and a sight-seeing expedition, at once a grand tour of the innumerable islands of a mythical archipelago and a quest to recover a phantom… the voyage affords an opportunity for presenting… satirical characterizations which are directed toward the exposure of the follies and vices of man and the institutions which man has created” (142). Mardi is a world in itself, an arena to be explored or mapped out. Yillah can be taken as an ideal clarifying principle, or a vision of utopia. Her perpetual elusiveness illustrates both the limitations of human knowledge, and the un-achievability of a utopian social order. The relationship between the world and the means of representing the world, and by extension understanding the world, has central importance in Mardi. The proliferation of diverse social orders and personalities in conjunction with a proliferation in symbolic representation is, I will argue, the principal reason behind its stylistic changes; as the world changes (that is to say, as we perceive more and more of the world’s varied constituent parts), so must the mode of representation, and any shift in representation in turn informs how the world comes to be understood, and how new information about it is processed. The practical effect of this unfolding in the context of Melville’s novel is a drift away from representing reality into representing representation, or the patterns of human thought itself. The ‘voyage thither’ of the subtitle could just as easily be ‘a voyage inward.’

As I have established, Mardi is conspicuously lacking in a formal structure from a strictly ‘literary’ point of view, but some unity becomes legible if one thinks of it as less a novel and more a creative representation of an intellectual development. In some respects, Mardi is a bildungsroman (or a confessional) masquerading as a romantic quest. One critic who has gone further than most in tracking the elusive formal unity of Mardi is Bruce L. Grenberg, who reasonably observed, “Surely it is foolish to think that the shift from adventure-narrative to allegorical quest slipped into Mardi undetected by Melville… it seems manifest that Melville saw a unity in the book that has eluded most readers, a unity that comprises more than a simple consistence of narrative point of view” (27). The narrator of the story, who will eventually adopt the moniker Taji, begins his tale as a bored and listless crewmember on a whaling ship becalmed at sea. His dissatisfaction stems not just from mere boredom, but a more deeply felt spiritual malaise. His vision of the universe is monistic, and perhaps panentheistic: “Thus all generations are blended: and heaven and earth of one kin… the nations and families, flocks and folds of the earth; one and all brothers in essence… All things form but one whole; the universe a Judea, and God Jehovah its head” (Melville 12). The narrow and circumscribed world of the whale ship Arcturion is hardly a fitting place to become better acquainted with the expansive divinity of the wider world. This line also marks the first unambiguous evocation of a Neoplatonic conception of the world, a view that Melville granted a number of his narrators, most notably Ishmael from Moby-Dick. In the Neoplatonic scheme, the Great Chain of Being, the most perfect being sits atop a metaphysical hierarchy and governs the apparent plurality of all things, including the principles of change and evolution. The unity of the plurality can be understood in terms of the most perfect being on top- God. “[F]or certainly in this conception of the universe, angels and earthlings… and human ‘nations and families’ can indeed be ‘brothers in essence… for all these creatures have in common their spiritual selves (their essences) and all emanate from the Supreme Being” (Zimmerman 39). This understanding of ultimate truth deeply informs Taji’s quest and helps explain the seemingly endless proliferation of island nations explored in the later chapters of Mardi; from the Neoplatonic standpoint, one arrives at ultimate truth through an engagement with the diversity of forms- and concludes that they are ultimately One.

Even in the early, realistic chapters of Melville’s novel, Taji’s quest has a clear intellectual component, and the reader receives some subtle hints of the future dissolution of the recognizable ‘real’ world and the entrance into the fanciful world of the mythical archipelago. Taji’s motivation for abandoning the Arcturion with his simpleton companion Jarl sets up the eventual generic shift: “We are asked to join a narrator who… flees a known and secure reality in search of self, tries simultaneously to penetrate and transcend the facts of the world in an effort to grasp the comprehensive meaning of those facts. We are asked to enter the world of the mind” (Grenberg 28). However, such an abdication of security, both physical and social (Jarl aside), cannot have immediate rewards. Abandoning one’s ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is not a soft measure, and the most immediate effect is not one of transcendent experience but an encounter with the raw, brutal reality of the natural order. Here the reader gets their first epistemic model- Empiricism. More precisely, an empiricist approach to the natural world is joined with a Transcendentalist sensibility in Taji’s character. “With the security of social order and custom behind him, the narrator finds himself frighteningly close to the dense reality he would transcend… Melville is asking us to join his narrator in exploring the world as it truly is, not as it seems to be through habit and common perception” (Grenberg 28). This intimate encounter with reality is perfectly matched with a relatively realistic (but typically rhapsodic and allusive) narrative style in the early chapters, and Taji’s method of epistemic mastery is careful observation and classification. This is on display in chapter 13, where Taji describes the various species of shark observed from his and Jarl’s boat. This task has a peculiar sense of urgency: “Ever present to us, was the apprehension of some sudden disaster from the extraordinary zoological specimens we almost hourly passed” (Melville 40). The use of the term “zoological specimens,” as well as the explicit reference to the great German naturalists Muller and Henle, implies a solid grounding in the empirical or natural sciences. Taji is classifying to conquer, to gain a knowledgeable basis for making his way in an apparently hostile and volatile environment. Taxonomy is just the first of a plethora of knowledge-organizing models to come in Melville’s narrative. It proves inadequate in itself as a means for truly achieving transcendent knowledge. As Grenberg observed, “The mind can work upon, but not control, the reality that exerts itself suddenly and without warning… it is this quality of nature’s unpredictability, with its implicit unconcern for human concerns, that most thwarts the narrator’s efforts to control his existence” (29).

It is tempting to mark the Aleema sequence of the novel as the first major generic transition Melville imposes. It is the point where Taji confronts and kills the priest Aleema who is about to sacrifice the fair maiden Yillah as part of a religious ceremony. This seems to be the moment where the far-fetched, but nonetheless reality-bound sailor’s yarns of the early chapter give away to the mythopoeic constructs of the romantic quest. However, Chapter 38 (“The Sea on Fire”) may be a more appropriate marking point since it features a major epistemic shift for the narrator-protagonist. After the events on the Parki, Taji, Jarl, and new companion Samoa come upon a phosphorescent patch of sea late at night. It has a strange, otherworldly, ethereal majesty that prompts much speculation: “Now, sailors love marvels, and love to repeat them. And from many an old shipmate I have heard various sage opinings…” (Melville 123) Taji then proceeds to list the possible explanations for the sea’s luminescence, which include Jarl’s formulation that it is the consequence of “commotion among the mermaids,” Faraday’s theory that an electrical phenomenon in the atmosphere is responsible, and the theory that it is the product of dead matter in the sea itself. “But these are only surmises; likely, but uncertain. After science comes sentiment…” (Melville 123) When it comes to assigning significance or meaning to an observed phenomenon, mere description or classification will not do. Sentiment, or the peculiar, emotionally-charged vagaries of the human heart, seeks to inflict its own logic. “The narrator’s gloss upon the fiery sea has multiplicity as its most salient feature… As logical explanation, scientific or otherwise, the narrator’s argument and conclusion are muddle-headed. As poetic statements of Melville’s larger purposes, however, they are pure revelation” (Grenberg 31-32). The poetic principle here is of a strongly Romantic character: the imaginative engagement with nature. Such a program introduces an additional lair of multiplicity through the introduction of ambiguity. The poetic principle lends itself to a peculiar personifying power when applied to the natural world, and in a manner that prefigures the far more violent quest of Captain Ahab, Taji is imbued with the desire to find the ultimate secret at the heart of nature. “Yillah is nature’s prized secret, which the narrator is determined to possess at whatever risk or cost” (Grenberg 32-33). Many a reader may find the introduction of such a romantic, mythopoeic entity like Yillah into a narrative that heretofore had been more-or-less realistic somewhat jarring, but her arrival could be said to have been subtly foreshadowed by the phosphorescent sea, since that is a point where the recognition of the desirability, if not necessity, of a new form of knowledge occurs.

The arrival of Yillah and Aleema on the scene prompts an action from Taji that parallels his abandonment of the Arcturion at the beginning of the novel. Taji confronts and kills Aleema and “rescues” Yillah. There follows a stretch of ten chapters where Yillah and Taji are together. It is important to give this portion of the novel some attention, since it in large part defines the scope of Taji’s quest for Yillah following her disappearance. The significance of the young lovers’ interactions corresponds to an ideal or idealized state, when nature is fully apprehended and in perfect harmony with the engaged imagination. This engagement is dialectical, and in Melville’s story occurs in the arena of social interaction. The foundational unit of this perfect state is two people- Taji and Yillah. Yillah can take on a social existence- that is, she can come to symbolize an ideal of social organization- in the later travelogue-satire sections of Mardi in part because of the dialectical quality of her introduction and early development.

The murder of Aleema is not the only sin Taji commits when it comes to Yillah. He also fabricates a story that brings Yillah’s mythical identity in line with his own. Upon their first meeting, Yillah tells a story about how she is a native of Oroolia, “the island of delights,” and how in youth she was ensnared by a sentient vine and transformed into a blossom, which in time rebirthed her and cast her ashore on the island of Amma, the home of the priest Aleema. She indicates that she has no actual memory of these events, but that they were revealed to Aleema in a dream. Taji is skeptical of the literal veracity of this story, and believes, not unreasonably, that Aleema has deceived Yillah as part of the sacrificial rites: “For ulterior purposes connected with their sacerdotal supremacy, the priests of these climes oftentimes secret mere infants in their temples; and jealously secluding them from all intercourse with the world, craftily delude them, as they grow up, into the wildest conceits” (Melville 139). Taji, with his Neoplatonic orientation and its demands for a plurality of experience as the chief means of acquiring authoritative knowledge, strangely has no compunctions about indulging Yillah’s fantasies for personal gain; whatever his interest in Yillah, he does not have any immediate inclination to lift her veil of delusions. “To possess her finally, the narrator does not discredit her dream world; he enters it by claiming for himself a divine origin in Oroolia and a dream past in which he was her lover” (Grenberg 33). This induces a state of “Romantic ecstasy,” or of seeming intimacy with Nature’s divine secret, the ultimate aesthetic goal of the Romantic imagination. What this might suggest is an end to all strivings, if not for the complicating factor of time. Romantic ecstasy is always fleeting, but leaves its mark to the effect of a restless epistemology. “In conception, and perhaps in aspiration, Melville was… akin to Emerson and Thoreau; if these elevated moments were to be accepted as anything more than hallucination or willing self-deception, they had to be integral to one’s persistent experience of the world” (Grenberg 34). Significantly, Taji and company make landfall on the island kingdom of Odo not long after acquiring Yillah. The domain of the sea, unencumbered by the social conventions represented by the whale ship Arcturion, could be a credible arena for the development of dreams, or the imaginative faculties. Sure enough, Taji manages to achieve an ideal in the form of Yillah, but such an ideal needs to be tested against the persistent, lived experience of the world in order to be authoritative and truly transcendent. In a turn of events at once predictable and indicative of yet another epistemic shift, Yillah vanishes not long after the group arrives in Odo. This sets the stage for the final section of the novel, the travelogue-satire with conspicuous shades of allegorical significance.

The sequence of events from Aleema’s murder at the hands of Taji to the disappearance of Yillah at Odo bears the character of an Edenic fall from grace, most conspicuously in the psychological effect it has on Taji. He ponders to himself and to the wider heavens, “To you, ye stars, man owes his subtlest raptures, thoughts unspeakable, yet full of faith. But how your mild effulgence stings the boding heart. Am I a murderer, stars?” (Melville 179) Taji now has the stain of an original sin, and he now must dwell in a world which constantly reminds him of his fallen state. His soliloquy to the stars reflects an awareness of, and a certain faith in, a heavenly, transcendent sphere, but at this point in his story the loss of Yillah has effectively cut him off from it. Here there is an epistemic shift towards the moral, and the moral compass Taji adopts is of a special significance itself: “Melville’s Mardian world and Taji’s ensuing search for Yillah throughout that world are irredeemably humanistic, and the ensuing search for Yillah… the attempt to realize humanity’s highest dreams, takes place in a context almost totally devoid of religious and transcendental implications…” (Grenberg 35) It is no longer the transcendent but the social that is held up for scrutiny by Melville, and appropriately enough, the generic orientation of the text transforms from romantic adventure yarn to travelogue-satire. Though there is a shift to the social, the world Melville depicts does not get any more noticeably earth-bound; this is the section of the narrative where Taji acquires his name and takes on the role of a Polynesian Demigod from the sun. This role involves Taji taking on yet another fictional backstory which he cannot substantiate or expound upon at any length, and one that, oddly enough, strengthens his new-found social role within the kingdom of Odo. While interacting with King Media (a self-styled Demigod himself) Taji remarks, “As for anything foreign in my aspect, and my ignorance of Mardian customs: – all this, instead of begetting a doubt unfavorable to my pretensions, but strengthened the conviction of them as verities” (Melville 174). The transcendent realm may be remote from social existence, especially in terms of knowledge, but it still exerts an authoritative influence. Furthermore, the social is no less mythological in potential. When Taji becomes a demigod, he assumes a cultural significance to the Mardians, and soon his desires and aspirations, his grand Yillah-oriented narrative, assumes a social significance which prompts action and questing among other parties. As H. Bruce Franklin observed, “This penultimate abdication [Taji leaving the ocean and arriving in Mardi] is his [Taji’s] penultimate allegorical death… From this point on, ironically and appropriately the Mardians become far more important than the narrator. ‘Taji’ as a Mardian conception becomes more significant than the player of Taji. The three mythologists and their king make Taji’s quest their own” (44). When personal transcendent knowledge assumes a social significance, it becomes myth, and myth prompts knowledge-seeking of a related, and perhaps cyclical, character. Taji’s quest for Yillah becomes a kind of epistemological compass by which the Mardian explorers navigate their archipelago, and a frame of reference which helps, at least in part, to contextualize the information they acquire on their journey. The journey has social significance not just because it is different and often conflicting social orders that are held up for scrutiny over the course of the travelogue-satire, but because the questers who adopt Taji’s obsessions are ideals and constituent parts of a civilized social order. Grenberg is again quite helpful: “Taji and his companions in the quest, Media, Yoomy, Babbalanja, and Mohi, constitute not only the multifaceted individual personality… but also the multifaceted structure of civilized society… it is natural to stress the characters’ identities as functions of the mind… but it is also noteworthy that Melville draws an analogy between the individual and his society” (35). Roughly, the questing characters can be taken as representations of mental faculties: Media is volition, Mohi is memory, Yoomy is creativity or imagination, and Babbalanja is reason and, occasionally, mystic perception. The social analogues of these mental functions are the philosopher (Babbalanja), the historian (Mohi), the poet or artist (Yoomy), and the politician (Media). Additionally, it is quite tempting to conceptualize these characters as the disparate parts of Melville’s artistic sensibilities, which he needed to synthesize in the space of the text in order to carry off a truly great feat of the literary imagination. Taji fades into the background in order to give these new arrivals center stage, and this robs the quest for the missing Yillah of a great deal of dramatic urgency, but it can be argued that Taji does not fade from the narrative so much as he is fragmented into this new set of personalities which dramatize the conflicted and multifaceted nature of his epistemological quest. Furthermore, Taji’s psychological and spiritual division can be understood as the inevitably and dramatically appropriate response to his fallen state and the loss of his Yillah: “[The] elastic relationship among the questers- threatening to break altogether periodically throughout the quest- reveals the disintegration of Taji’s personality in a world without Yillah” (Grenberg 36). By this point in the novel, Taji’s orientation toward knowledge has changed significantly. In the beginning, his endeavors were marked by a general sense of intellectual restlessness and social isolation. The latter quality in part informs Taji’s sense of independence, which aids his abilities as an inquirer, and his receptivity to the outside world. A broad sense of curiosity and a desire to absorb information marks the early stage on Taji’s intellectual journey. The encounter and communion with Yillah and her subsequent disappearance radically alter the manner in which Taji seeks understanding. “Before he first discovers Yillah, his wanderings have no definite object. After he loses her, he no longer drifts; he then searches specifically if futilely. In Mardi, therefore, the hero’s life is presented in two stages: he is a wanderer, and then a searcher” (Dillingham 105). A search implies an object or goal. It is essentially a teleological project, and the structure of Melville’s allegory makes it clear that his protagonist eventually develops a strong desire to believe that human striving for knowledge and understanding would eventually yield fruits. The epistemological goal, here represented by Yillah, serves an interpretive function in this quest; it is the standard by which new information is measured and contextualized.

Dysfunction of some sort marks every social order encountered by the questers in the kingdom of Mardi. For Grenberg, there is a recurring pattern to the seemingly diverse range of social problems Melville presents through his Mardian kingdoms- the inability of their rulers and citizens to properly integrate knowledge and experience into a coherent sense of self, a necessary prerequisite for a stable social identity. “The disintegrated world of Juam, Willamilla, Ohonoo, and Vivenza is presented as a product of the disintegrated personalities of its rulers. Thus, the quest for Yillah is both internal and external, the search for unity by the unintegrated self in a disintegrated world” (36). Isolation combined with stasis creates the inadequacies present in the island kingdoms. For Melville, relativism of a sort colors his assessments of different sociocultural landscapes, not because he felt there were no standards for judgment (Yillah’s presence would determine a utopian order) but because he felt that only comparisons among different social possibilities could yield sufficient information about the range of human possibility, understanding, and capacity to live and work in cohesive groups. This understanding may very well be a reflection of Melville’s conception of perfect knowledge, the ability to integrate and properly contextualize and comprehend the essence of the full range of baffling and frightening information the external world hurls at human subjects. “The individual islands clearly signify the isolated and fragmented nature of individuals and states who through ignorance, weakness, stubbornness, or pride have cut themselves off from the world… the beliefs and behavior of all those they meet are presented as direct products of the ways they look at their world” (Grenberg 36-37). The lack of utopia in Mardi is reflective of a lack of unity to human experience and perception, and thus signifies the impossibility of grasping any kind of ultimate knowledge. This has profound implications for the eventual emotional effect of Melville’s novel. Taji’s seeking after knowledge leads him to a greater incoherence, which strikes at the very unity of his sense of self; and yet he presses on. “Taji simply refuses to accept the implications of his own experience. His dream of attaining oneness with the universe is so intense that it blinds him to the facts of the world’s recalcitrance. Melville wants us to see these dreams as both irresistible and impossible… Taji’s quest is as hopeless as it is necessary to his self-definition.” (Grenberg 47) It is well worth mentioning that Taji’s transition from wanderer to quester inevitably entails a more active and opinionated engagement with the world. In short, the more he learns, the more he is prompted to act towards a focused end. The result of this development is a gradual articulation of the theme of the relationship between knowledge and action. How does what we know (or think we know) encourage us to act, or not act? For Melville, Mardi served as a sort of dry run for this theme, which would receive its greatest treatment in Moby-Dick, but the question has tragic implications in the context of Mardi as it is.

No consideration of Mardi would be complete without some attention paid toward Hautia, the mysterious and sensuous queen of Flozella. Her heralds pursue Taji and his companions all over Mardi, attempting to entice him to Hautia’s lair. Additionally, a trio of Aleema’s former associates pursues the band in an effort to kill Taji in retaliation for the murder of the priest. Respectively, these different pursuers represent forces that would halt meaningful intellectual exploration; Hautia is the realm of comfortable illusion, while the vengeful companions of Aleema are potent reminders of the fallen state that inevitably tortures and limits the experiences of human beings. Hautia is of slightly greater interest for the simple reason that she serves as a double for Yillah, or antithesis to Yillah’s thesis. If Yillah is a poetic ideal, then Hautia is the folly of poetic illusions, or the superficially beguiling sights and sensations that distract people from the pursuit of real truth; artifice as opposed to art. In her own way, Hautia represents the hazards of investing oneself too much in a beautiful illusion, much like Madame Bovary or Dorian Gray, and in that respect is the exact opposite of Yillah, who offered a ‘genuine’ vision of truth and beauty. “As the symbol of fathomless creative power, she serves as both inspiration and nemesis to Taji and… to Melville, for as creative imagination she on the one hand offers the possibility of all things, while on the other hand she denies to all things any status other than that of possibility” (Grenberg 55). This problem goes right to the heart of Melville’s project, which is fiction. Fiction, when in thrall of Yillah, is in harmony with the governing principles of nature. When it takes its cue from Hautia, fiction consists of nothing more than the meretricious beauties of mere fantasy and wish-fulfillment, superficially attractive, but lacking the permanent, self-sustaining value of truth.

Taji’s quest to recover Yillah, and achieve what he most desired from intellectual exploration- the perception of, and communion with, the ultimate truth or governing principle of the universe, is a failure. His consolation is to continue in his pursuit beyond the realm of both quotidian reality, social responsibility, and the circumscribed nature of human thought itself. His final defiant declaration as he leaves the Mardian archipelago pursued by Aleema’s former companions is quite telling- “Now, I am my own soul’s emperor; and my first act is abdication! Hail! Realm of shades!” (Melville 654) This intensely Miltonic line, which recalls Satan’s outburst upon his banishment in Paradise Lost, can be understood as a kind of spiritual and intellectual suicide. As Yillah cannot be found in Mardi, ultimate truth cannot be comprehended by ordinary human thought processes and habits. Surrendering to the wide unknown strangely enough does not end Taji’s forward momentum; he has reached the limitations of earthly knowledge and then sets out for parts unknown. It is quite tempting to consider this in light of Melville’s growth as a writer. As the critic Harold Beaver remarked, “Fiction was the one centre where all divergencies might converge and where all inconsistencies must necessarily consist. That was to become Melville’s task: not to resolve the dichotomies of love and hate, male and female, fact and fiction; but to calibrate their mutual tension” (39). In the end, such a project could be emotionally powerful, intellectually edifying, and aesthetically pleasing, but never attuned to any revelatory promise. For Melville, that was the tragedy of thought but the triumph of his fictional art.