(Note: I originally wrote this while I was in grad school, hence the MLA citations; no Works Cited though, as I only drew on one source, a single endnote aside. This is a review of a book-length study published in 1952 of Herman Melville’s third novel. I had previously written about Mardi here.)
Merrell R. Davis’s book-length study of Herman Melville’s third novel, Melville’s Mardi: A Chartless Voyage (1952), engages its subject in a somewhat counterintuitive manner. Mardi has been a problematic text since its publication in 1849, and there has been a pronounced critical tendency, at least since the Melville revival of the 1920s, to consider it in terms of works that would follow, most obviously Moby-Dick. What might be called a “standard” approach to studying Mardi is to analyze its contents and structure as a trying-out phase for Melville to first discover, then explore and hone, his emerging literary ambitions and talents. Mardi is typically regarded as a text of little intrinsic value and more a tantalizing indicator of what was to come. I will admit to a degree of bias; I see little reason to dissent from this critical line. While there are many substantial reasons to challenge the Moby-Dick-centrism that sometimes informs Melville studies, Mardi seems to work best as a record of unfolding and not as a fully-realized literary composition. It is therefore quite interesting that Davis chooses to investigate and analyze Mardi largely on its own terms. This is not to say that context is not an important aspect of Davis’s study, just that the contexts he selects do not extend beyond or much before the composition of Mardi; Melville’s life prior to pursuing a career in letters is given a cursory overview and hardly anything at all is said about what followed the publication of his third book. Understanding Mardi as a self-contained work of literature would seem to be Davis’s priority, with the specific circumstances of composition and the curious qualities of its formal structure being brought to the forefront of the analysis. Within the parameters Davis constructs for his study, Melville’s Mardi is thorough, insightful, and informative, but its narrow focus seems somewhat myopic. Davis would appear to believe that Mardi is best understood in terms of its composition, and while that is undoubtedly an essential, even principle, component to an informed understanding of the text, I feel that more attention could have been paid to the circumstances of Mardi’s critical and public reception, and how its reputation has developed over the years amongst readers, writers, and critics. It is well-established that Melville was attuned to the reactions of his reading public and the critics to his books, and that his responses to these reactions at least partially informed the course of his creative endeavors; the author’s note that precedes the main narrative of Mardi makes this perfectly clear.[i] Davis acknowledges that one of the central reasons Mardi holds some interest is that “the experience… it exemplifies marks a significant growth in an author who came to acknowledge an ambition to write ‘such things as the Great Publisher of Mankind ordained ages before he published ‘The World’” (200). The growth of Melville’s ambition in tandem with his idea of his audience is one of the most fascinating components of Melville’s art, at least partially because it was one of Melville’s chief sources of frustration and struggle. It can be argued that Mardi is the first significant benchmark of that unfolding struggle, and it is somewhat frustrating that Davis does not pay it more attention.
Davis’s study has a conveniently bifurcated structure, with the first half covering Melville’s early literary career (the publications of Typee and Omoo) and the circumstances surrounding the writing of Mardi, and the second half given over to an analysis of the novel’s formal structure and purpose. Appropriately, Davis’s primary sources for the biographical portion of his study consist largely of correspondence among members of the Melville family and between Melville and his publishers in both England and America. Davis effectively proves what most readers of Mardi intuit; that Melville’s ambitions for his third book underwent significant changes over the period from 1847 to 1849 when he was writing it. The skeptical response of some critics to the allegedly true events of Melville’s first two books, Typee and Omoo, apparently rankled Melville enough to encourage a stylistic and thematic shift for his third effort, one which would be more conducive to his developing philosophical interests and thematic concerns and which would also provoke the more literary sensibilities of critics who had previously been preoccupied with biography. There was also, apparently, the more prosaic matter of financial returns. After the (mostly) enthusiastic reception of Typee, Melville resolved to pursue a career as a professional writer, and needed to take into account the practical demands such a decision would entail. While engaging in a discussion with the English publisher of his first two works, John Murray, Melville evidently came to realize that he could anticipate diminishing returns for every reiteration of his South Seas adventures, and that altering the character of his storytelling was a prerequisite for long-term literary success. Ultimately, it would be Melville’s voracious reading, Davis argues, that most strongly informed the character of the change in his writing. Davis writes: “Either by coincidence or design, just at the time Melville was expanding the plan of his book he was beginning to buy new books and to borrow others… in addition to the travel books… Melville was reading Seneca, Proclus, Montaigne, Burton, Sir Thomas Browne, Ossian, Hartley, Coleridge, and Rabelais… These books contributed to the content or the literary manner of Mardi” (62 and 66). In this reading list one can find the inspirations for Melville’s densely allusive style and more conspicuously literary and philosophical orientation. Reading the classics of the Western canon not only changed the stylistic nature of Melville’s writing, but his engagement with life and the world generally, and this in turn would come to inform Melville’s thematics. Davis persuasively demonstrates that the last, or nearly last, material Melville wrote for Mardi was the satirical-allegorical section in which the group of island-hopping questers land on a series of islands that are thinly disguised representations of real countries. In this material, Melville refers to then-current events, like the activities of the Free Soil Party and the 1848 revolutions in Europe. By incorporating current events into his increasingly bizarre and fluid allegory, Melville demonstrated that his active engagement with the world was starting to take on a decisively literary character.
The second half of Davis’s study, as already indicated, is given over to an extended analysis of Mardi itself. Overall, this second section is less edifying than the first and marked by a sterile formalism in its approach to literary criticism. Davis effectively divides the narrative into three sections, “The Narrative Beginning,” “The Romantic Interlude,” and “The Travelogue-Satire.” These sections each possess an internal narrative structure of their own, so much that each can be considered a book in itself. Davis, for better or worse, cannot isolate much worth analyzing in the beginning chapters, the section of the book that most closely resembles Melville’s lighter, early work, and reduces the formal effect of its episodes to the conjuring of suspense. Some appreciation is reserved for its comic aspects as well, particularly the fractious relationship between husband and wife Samoa and Annatoo. Davis argues that the center of the Romantic Interlude section of Mardi is the character of Yillah and her dramatic and transformative effect on the narrator-protagonist Taji. Yillah can be understood primarily as a mythopoeic construct, one who happens to have both a “realistic” and “mythical” life story. The literary antecedents for Yillah can be located in the work of Romantic poets like Byron and Shelley, and as a beguiling representation of an abstract concept (or set of concepts) Yillah also has the archetypal quality of a mythical, goddess-like figure. Thematically, her function is to introduce the theme of guilt (Taji murders the priest Aleema in order to “rescue” her) and provide the symbolic significance that characterizes the third section of the book. The third section, or travelogue-satire, is perhaps the most difficult and unwieldy part of Mardi. Davis splits his consideration of this section into two chapters, one that explores the satirical and symbolic qualities of the island visits, and one that considers the characters that make up the traveling entourage. I am in agreement with Davis that the philosopher Babbalanja warrants special consideration; he is the only character other than Taji with a distinct and independent quest. While it could be argued that both Taji and Babbalanja are seeking “knowledge” of a sort (though it is worth remarking that Babbalanja’s knowledge-goal lacks a symbolic personification) Babbalanja’s orientation is that of the philosopher, not the romantic quester. Davis observes: “Babbalanja has a quest of his own. Throughout the voyage he has exhibited his concern over the problems of science, religion, and philosophy as they relate to the sources of man’s knowledge and his faith. As a philosopher, he would find the philosopher’s stone, and his quest is ended by his humble acceptance of the limitations of his own reason” (198). At least within the context of the travelogue-satire, Babbalanja is the only character aside from Taji who undergoes something resembling a persuasive change (the sudden religious conversion of the other characters at Serenia is less convincing) and therefor is more recognizable as a well-constructed character than the other travelers.
As I have already indicated, Davis’s study is somewhat limited by its adherence to a rote formalism as its principle means of literary analysis and it is somewhat frustrating that Davis does not do more to contextualize Mardi in the entire, completed body of Melville’s works, or give any consideration to its critical reception or how its reputation has developed over the years. However, A Chartless Voyage makes expert use of biographical data to meticulously chart the course of Melville’s development while he was composing Mardi, and the cumulative effect is quite edifying. Whether Davis consciously intended to or not, the significance his study suggests for Melville’s third novel is the development of a conflict between Melville’s professional and artistic ambitions. By seeking alternatives to the travel-adventure mode which initially made his reputation, Melville plunged headlong into the self-consciously literary and the densely philosophical, a mode which allowed for the creation of some authentically timeless works of art, but which he was never able to harmonize with a professional career.
[i] “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 previous experience.
This thought was the germ of others, which have resulted in Mardi. New York, January, 1849.”
High Pressure Days 