(This is an edited and slightly expanded version of a paper I wrote in grad school some years ago; again, the explanation for the tiresome MLA flourishes.)
Herman Melville’s seventh novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities can be said to be a work with more defenders than admirers, and therefor a work that attracts modes of criticism that emphasize justification instead of explanation; that is to say, the business of shedding some hermeneutical light is intimately bound up with the task of explaining (wishing) that the light will catch something worth seeing. The reader of such criticism is assumed a skeptic. Indeed, Pierre has generally only been judged worthy as a kind of post-Moby-Dick hangover (a metaphor for Melville’s psychological disturbances, which we hope weren’t overly determined by alcohol), or as a parody of contemporaneous novelistic modes, or as a precursor to broadly ‘modernist’ literary techniques, or simply the predecessor to Melville’s strong short fiction and poetry. Very few have taken the book to be of value in itself, and matters are not helped by Pierre’s lurid subject matter (The plot briefly summarized: A young man breaks it off with his fiancé so he can marry his sister.) or its oblique approach to its thematic concerns. Oftentimes, the emotions and subjects Melville evokes seem to exist at a right angle to the events of the story, especially the transparently autobiographical later chapters of the book in which the titular hero embarks on a doomed writing career. Pierre, whatever its eccentricities as a story or as a work of art, is too rich and profound in many of its sections to be dismissed outright, but a significant challenge to any critic, still having to play the role of a defender, is to elucidate on the ‘ambiguities’ alluded to in the title. The most effective way to do this is to consider, at least in part, the circumstances under which it was written and the motivations Melville had in writing it in the first place.
It is not unreasonable to suggest that Melville’s writing was every bit as exploratory as it was declarative; its sermonic tendencies may have obscured this point for some readers. Putative statement need not be lacking in a capacity for ambiguity. Melville wrote to work through his moral, aesthetic, spiritual, and psychological obsessions, and occasionally, over the course of a single work, his thematic and philosophical subjects would alter significantly, shooting off on discursive courses over which the author felt he may not have had full control. Of the most importance, Melville would leave the shifts in theme apparent to his readers, as they were easily trackable through the alternating generic modalities of his style; the attentive reader could trace Melville’s thought process, or at least a literary proxy of it, over the events of a story. Moby-Dick is the paradigmatic example of this tendency. The critic Andrew Delbanco put it quite well:
“He [Melville] was the first to understand that if a literary work is to register the improvisational nature of experience, it must be as spontaneous and self-surprising as the human mind itself. …by concealing the existence of earlier versions of his work, he ran the risk of falsifying himself. In this sense, Moby-Dick was like an active archeological site in which the layers of its own history are left deliberately exposed. (146)
I will argue that while foregrounding the writing process is useful for understanding many of Melville’s works, it is absolutely essential for understanding Pierre. Pierre is the novel where the act of composition is considered in a direct, literal fashion, and the value of writing is confronted and interrogated at length. The mental process revealed over the course of the plot is one of disillusionment, but that assessment in itself is incomplete. There are in fact multiple types of disillusionment on display, running from loss in faith in the security of the family unit, the viability of Christian morals, the achievability of an ideal artistic expression, the ability to communicate anything of oneself to others, and even the possibility of knowledge. In writing Pierre, Melville displayed a forfeiture of faith in writing itself, or in the creative act which had sustained him for many years. Considering his productivity after the publication of Pierre, it is safe to say that Melville recovered from this disenchantment to some degree, but his seventh novel represents what is probably his biggest crisis in faith; namely, his faith in his artistic mission. My task will be tracking the psychological and emotional trajectory of this crisis as presented in Pierre.
The origins of Melville’s ‘Kraken’ book lay in his frustrations concerning readers’ expectations. Pigeonholed as a relatively frivolous travel writer and “resident authority on things nautical and places exotic” (Higgins and Parker 5) Melville was keen to make the best use of his newly-discovered literary talents. The genesis of his first post-Moby-Dick outing was part of his expanding effort to attain artistic and intellectual autonomy and uniqueness: “…in mid-November 1851… Melville was ripe for an attempt at a new, non-nautical genre through which he might make a bid for a high, less specialized literary reputation and through which he might satisfy his internal needs to surpass his previous literary achievements” (Higgins and Parker 5-6). Inevitably, such ambition is accompanied by anxiety, and Melville was (oddly?) predisposed to exacerbate it by modeling the dysfunctional dynamic of the Glendinning family, the focus of his novel’s incestuous drama, after his own family’s internal scandals. Specifically, there is some reason to believe that Melville’s father, Allan Melville, had fathered an illegitimate daughter. In addition, he had died in a state of delirium not dissimilar to that of Pierre Glendinning’s father (Higgins and Parker 6). These disparate anxieties would coalesce to generate the story of Pierre. The symbolic capacities of the subjects already existed in incipient form, as observed by Higgins and Parker:
In Pierre, the plot involving the sudden appearance of an unknown young woman, supposedly half-sister of the hero, had the great advantage of being easily allegorized within Melville’s psychological preoccupations: in the “boundless expansion” of Pierre’s life and mind Isabel would represent the invading unconscious. (6)
This “invading unconscious” would prompt an internal unfolding that would disrupt every vestige of security the character of Pierre possessed. Once Pierre comes to recognize the needs of his inner life, he becomes inescapably dissatisfied with his hollow existence at his estate, Saddle Meadows. The story’s tragic dénouement is the revelation that Pierre is incapable of satisfying his social and psychological needs due to both his circumstances and personal flaws.
The parodic tendencies of Pierre are most conspicuous in the early parts of the book, where the pastoral quaintness of Pierre’s home at Saddle Meadows is too overtly saccharine to be taken seriously. As one critic described it, “…we can suspect that nature has been too thoroughly domesticated… This place is too soft a pastoral… its very lushness a symptom of unresolved and unrecognized problems” (Brodhead 226). The picturesque environment is meant to symbolize the infantile falsity of Pierre’s youthful mindset at the start of the story. Pierre’s troubles are clearly not meant to be contingent or avoidable, but a permanent feature of his condition that, in his ignorance and youth, he is initially unable to recognize. Saddle Meadows is only edenic in appearance because Pierre has yet to acquire necessary knowledge, and this knowledge significantly prompts an inward-directed psychological investigation that comes to generate very external social consequences.
As the great, exploratory symbol of Moby-Dick is the whale, the image that centers and structures the symbolic order of Pierre is the human face. This implies many things, including a thematic concern for communication (Human expressions are ‘read,’ after all.) and human subjectivity (Human expressions reveal inner emotional truths, after all.). It is a human face that initially disrupts Pierre’s harmonious existence. Attending a social gathering with his mother, Pierre observes a young woman whom the reader later learns is Pierre’s half-sister Isabel. Observing Isabel’s melancholy features exerts a profound influence on Pierre that proves life-altering: “…my creed of this world leads me to believe in visible, beautiful flesh… but now! – And again he [Pierre] would lose himself in the most surprising… ponderings, which baffled all the introspective cunning of his mind. Himself was too much for himself” [Italics mine] (Melville 49). Furthermore, Isabel’s face is said to “mystically appeal to his own private and individual affections… challenging him in his deepest moral being…” (Melville 49). It is important to bear in mind that all of these ponderings occur well before Pierre has any way of knowing who Isabel is or her relation to him and his father. Yet all of Pierre’s future anxieties are already present in incipient form, implying either an origin from within or a kind of mystical sympathy between the characters. The challenge of Isabel’s countenance is that of an authentic image- perhaps kindred to a Platonic form, or deeper truth- that disrupts the superficial (some might say degraded to artificiality) appearances of Pierre’s immediate environment. This initial shock prompts further, eventually self-destructive, reflections and discoveries.
Upon learning of Isabel and her illegitimate origins, Pierre relocates the portrait of his father, whom he had previously venerated, and pauses a while to observe his features as the painting mediates them; this is the novel’s second considered ‘reading’ of a human face. It prompts the first lesson of Pierre’s development, and that is the essential artifice and hypocrisy of the adult world and social environment he is about to enter as a young man coming of age. Imagining the portrait speaking to him, Pierre hears: “I [the image in the painting] am thy father as he [Pierre’s actual father] more truly was. In mature life, the world overlays and varnishes us… we, as it were, abdicate ourselves, and take unto us another self… in youth we are, Pierre, but in age we seem” (Italics Melville’s) (Melville 83). The painting of his father reinforced Pierre’s heroic conception of the Glendinning family dynamic, and the recognition of the hollowness and inauthentic nature of its idealized portrayal signifies a simultaneous loss of faith in the possible accuracy of artistic expression. In this section, Pierre learns that his social existence is false and that the lie is reinforced with the misleading idealizations of art.
The possible meanings of this revelation and their implications are temporarily deferred and the subsequent courses Pierre’s psychological development takes are significantly different. They primarily concern a repudiation of contingency, or the efforts of Pierre to locate an eternal, transcendent principle in his inner self that owes nothing to the circumstances of his lived, social reality or the material world. Pierre even asks himself, “How shall I steal yet further into Pierre, and show how this heavenly fire was helped to be contained in him, by mere contingent things… but I shall follow the endless, winding way… careless whither I be led, reckless where I land” (Melville 107). Pierre makes this declaration with the intention of acting on the dictums issued from within his soul, to forsake mere propriety for eternal Truth. The actions Pierre ends up taking are done with the purpose of creating a ‘pure’ social order in line with the eternal truths of God. The impossibility of achieving such an order is supposed to be the crux of the story’s tragedy, but the resemblance of Pierre’s mission to Melville’s own literary endeavor is unmistakable. Not content with his privileged but limited lot, he seeks alternatives courageously but recklessly, valuing the journey perhaps due to an intuitive understanding that the destination does not exist.
The manner by which Pierre seeks his alternative social and moral being was and remains the most controversial aspect of his story. He dissolves his relationship with the respectable young woman Lucy Tartan and arranges a false ‘marriage’ with his newly-discovered half-sister Isabel and then flees to a nameless city to pursue a career as a writer. The incestuous subtext is immediately apparent, and the fact that Pierre seeks to justify his actions with broadly moral rhetoric makes the arrangement that much more grotesque and bizarre. Amy Puett Putters put it quite well: “The work evolved… into a scathing portrayal of a young man consciously bent on doing right- honoring an obligation to support a girl he believes to be his late father’s illegitimate daughter- but unconsciously driven by incestuous love for this same girl” (239). It is important to understand, however, that Pierre’s ethical concerns are not mere sublimation of sexual desire. Rather, the two feelings coexist and amplify one another. Richard Brodhead aptly described the tendency as a “holy feeling” that increases with its combination with a sexual desire and the suppression of the awareness of that desire (235). The result is an often confusing but fascinating yearning that is both authentically holy and genuinely profane. Such a yearning is rearticulated in the later section in the form of Pierre’s attempt at beginning a career as a writer, a move that excites his inner desire for truth-telling but which he undertakes at least in part for vulgar (or at least practical), material reasons. He needs to earn money for his new family. However authentic each half of his desire may be on its own, practical demands work so that they cancel each other out, and Pierre is forced to lie to himself and others in order to pursue his ‘Truth.’ “The necessary deception,” observed the critic Lawrance Thompson, “to the effect that Isabel and Pierre are married, is but the first of innumerable subterfuges and lies which Pierre is forced to make… as he tries to imitate God…” (280). The result is that both Pierre’s publishers and the relatives of his surrogate family correctly brand him a liar, and Pierre’s final self-recognition is the novel’s tragic ending.
The fact that Pierre receives two nasty letters near the story’s end accusing him of being a liar and a fraud is significant. They repudiate not so much Pierre’s moral mission as his inability (or possible unconscious unwillingness) to properly communicate its importance and legitimacy to anyone else. The letter from Stanly and Frederic attacks Pierre’s pursuit of an alternative family and corresponding social structure, and the letter from the publisher attacks his artistic integrity, on moral grounds (Melville 356-357). Neither set of accusations reflects the true motivations of Pierre, but rather the social compromises he had to make to pursue those motivations, and our protagonist is left with the reputation of possessing those familiar faults- that is, essentially fraudulent modes of expression- that he had previously ascribed to the social milieu he has come to reject and that were interrogated at length vis-à-vis the painting of Pierre’s father. The most intriguing thing about Pierre is the manner in which Melville expands and alters the trajectory of its tragedy. The surface plot involves a young man learning the impossibility of leading a holy and truthful life in line with God’s eternal laws because the material and contingent social concerns of the world make such a life impossible. In pursuing this line of thought, Melville seemed to recognize a parallel with the creative desire, and the inherent uncertainty about whether art could codify and make coherent many of life’s mysteries. He also came to recognize art’s capacity to be frivolous or fraudulent, and this led to at least a temporary state of disillusionment with his creative capacity. The worst possible thing that could happen to an artist in Melville’s position is to be accused of inauthenticity, and this is exactly what happens to Pierre. The split nature of the book’s tragedy is somewhat confused, but undeniably rich and possibly the single most revealing and autobiographical sequence in all of Melville’s works. The depiction of the anxiety of the religious mission is partially abandoned for the portrait of the artist as young martyr.
Works Cited
Delbanco, Andrew. Melville: His World and Work. New York: Random House, Inc.
Print.
Melville, Herman. Pierre, or the Ambiguities. New York: Penguin. 1996. Print.
Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parker, eds. Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s Pierre,
Or the Ambiguities. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co. 1983. Print.
Brodhead, Richard. “Conscious Idealizings and Unconscious Sexuality.” Higgins and
Parker 226-236.
Emmers, Amy Puett. “New Crosslights on the Illegitimate Daughter in Pierre.” Higgins
and Parker 237-240.
Higgins, Brian and Hershel Parker. “Introduction.” Higgins and Parker 1-27
Thompson, Lawrance. Melville’s Quarrel with God. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
(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,hereandhere. 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.
Works Cited
Beaver, Harold. “Mardi: A Sum of Inconsistencies.” Herman Melville: Reassessments. Ed. A.
Robert Lee. London: Vision and Barnes and Noble, 1984. 28-40. Print.
Davis, Merrell R. Melville’s Mardi: A Chartless Voyage. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1952. Print.
Dillingham, William B. An Artist in the Rigging: The Early Work of Herman Melville.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972. Print.
Franklin, Bruce H. The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1963. Print.
Grenberg, Bruce L. Some Other World to Find: Quest and Negation in the Works of Herman
Melville. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Print.
Melville, Herman. Mardi, and A Voyage Thither: The Northwestern-Newberry Edition.
Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library,
1970. Print.
Sten, Christopher. The Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel.
Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1996. Print.
Zimmerman, Brett. Herman Melville: Stargazer. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s
(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 Mardihere.)
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.
Herman Melville (1819-1891) 1868.
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.”
(Note: I originally wrote this when I was in grad school, hence the meticulous adherence to MLA style and citations. I present it here with some minor edits and nifty YouTube videos for anyone who might find it compelling.)
William Shakespeare, standing as the supreme canonical figure of Anglophone literature, has been used by different societal milieus as a tool of cultural interpretation, or a tried and tested means of attaining cultural self-knowledge. It is perhaps axiomatic, or merely common-sensical, that the task of cultural interpretation develops a sense of urgency during periods of profound social change. In such instances, Shakespeare has proven to be an invaluable tool to establish a sense of continuity, and to gain a seemingly accurate understanding of how human beings change and why, what prompts changes in character, and how those changes relate to both the personal and public spheres. Encircling all these concerns is the question involving what aspects of the human condition are permanent and which ones are fluid and/or contingent. The United States in the aftermath of the Second World War was a social and cultural space with tremendous anxieties concerning gender and sexuality. The necessities of the war effort propelled women into previously male-dominated jobs, and labor-saving technologies further blurred the distinction between men and women’s work, making a gendered division of labor and, by extension, much of the patriarchal social and economic structure, seem less viable, or at least less “necessary.” However, the social imperatives of Cold War politics and social mores placed a strong emphasis on the traditional nuclear family commanded and headed by the father, and so we are blessed yet again with a historical pivot point beset with contradictions. The desire to affirm ‘tradition’ in the face of perceived (and profound) social and political change is a conspicuous feature of many American cultural products of the late 40s and 50s. The celebrated musical Kiss Me Kate, written by Samuel and Bella Spewack with memorable music and lyrics contributed by Cole Porter, is in some regards an example of this rule, and in others a subversion, and it utilizes Shakespeare as a tool of interpretation and affirmation of the prevailing sexual politics of its time. Specifically, it takes one of Shakespeare’s most notoriously problematic plays, The Taming of the Shrew, a work that has been regarded as controversial to varying degrees since its initial composition and performance in the late sixteenth century due to its apparent advocacy of female submission to male authority, and transposes it onto a modern setting, taking a meta-theatrical approach to the material. The plot covers the backstage antics of a group of actors putting on a performance of a musical version of Shakespeare’s play (also called Kiss me Kate). The relationships and romantic stresses the performers endure mirror the events of The Taming of the Shrew, but are significantly altered and have very different implications due to the changed nature of the relations between the sexes since Shakespeare’s time (and place). It is a storytelling approach that invites- in fact demands- comparisons between the past and present (or at least how both temporal conditions are imagined) and an assessment of the nature of social change.
The film version of Kiss Me Kate directed by George Sidney and written by Dorothy Kingsley is one of the more polished and vivacious versions of the musical available, and I will be using it as my source text for an assessment of the story’s gender politics, as well as an analysis of how they relate to the original play. Then, I will apply the adaptation theory developed and propounded by Linda Hutcheon to the work in order to gain a broader understanding of how inter-temporal cultural dialogues operate, and what the implications of striving for a sense of cultural continuity are. Central to my interpretation will be a thorough exploration of what I believe is the key difference between the Elizabethan ‘taming’ process depicted in Shakespeare’s play and the modern one depicted backstage in Kiss Me Kate. In the original The Taming of the Shrew, the lead Petruchio effectively tames his new wife, the quarrelsome and shrewish Katherina (Kate), by taking control of the domestic sphere wherein she is expected to dwell and, to some degree, manage her responsibilities. His efforts are an apparent success. In Kiss Me Kate, the lead Fred Graham (who is playing Petruchio in the play-within-the-play) tries to take control of Lilli Vanessi (playing Kate) by manipulating the public sphere in which Lilli has some degree of visibility and sway. His challenges soon outpace his abilities, as the public sphere is much bigger and difficult to control than the domestic, and the effort at taming apparently fails. It is only by way of a last-minute contrivance that a happy, guy-gets-the-girl ending is secured. This contrivance stems from a certain faith in the value of ‘romance,’ a force that gives the musical a decidedly conservative character that is meant to be authoritative, but remains unpersuasive in the end. The metaphorical (and literal) presence of the Shakespeare play is what is supposed to give the values on display their moral and aesthetic weight, but as the complexities of Shakespeare’s art resist easy identification with any one system of values or glib compartmentalization, so any work derived from it, or at least any work concerned with ideological circumscription, inevitably fails to limit and control the principles it attempts to discover in the Bard’s words. The failure of the conservatism in Kiss Me Kate, in essence, develops, as well as reveals, more complexities, problems, and anxieties in Shakespeare’s cultural presence.
The storytelling conventions employed in Kiss Me Kate are derived, to a significant degree, from the play on which it is based. These conventions are altered, and in some instances, expanded to suit the work’s unique artistic goals, but there is hardly a device present in the musical that does not have some sort of obvious mirror in Shakespeare’s play. For this reason, it may be useful to begin with an analysis of The Taming of the Shrew and a description of how its problematic themes have often been approached in performance.
Not the most PC of character arcs.
The themes of The Taming of the Shrew are difficult to take at face value thanks to the presence of a framing device, commonly called the Induction, in which a ne’er-do-well drunkard named Christopher Sly is, after a night of indulgence at a local tavern, deceived by a mischievous lord into thinking he is a wealthy lord himself, and the entirety of the main action of The Taming of the Shrew is an entertainment performed for his benefit by a traveling troupe of actors. As noted by the Shakespeare scholars Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, “…the opening scenes with Christopher Sly place the entire play within quotation marks. The ‘induction’ presents a series of wish-fulfillment fantasies to a drunken tinker… The effect of the frame is to ‘distance’ the action and so suggest that it does not present the ‘reality’ of proper marital relations” (527). In short, an extra layer of narrative context has the power to change the significance of words and actions within a work of literature, just as an understanding of context can change an individual’s understanding of events and behaviors in real life. As usual with Shakespeare, the approach to context taken by the play is multi-layered and complex. Just as the induction challenges the reader to think twice before taking the story’s surface morals literally, the circumstances surrounding Kate’s climactic speech (the most controversial portion of the play wherein male supremacy and female submission are upheld and advocated) at the play’s end lead any attentive reader to wonder if irony is playing a significant part in the apparently sexist proceedings. “The first half of Kate’s famous submission speech is spoken in the singular, addressed specifically to the widow [whom the character Hortensio has married for largely financial reasons] and not to womankind in general…” (527) Kate’s brand of advice and the social program she seems to be promoting have a dubious relation to the material and economic realities of the union between Hortensio and the wealthy widow. “…in contradistinction to Kate’s prescriptions, in this marriage it will be the wife… who provides the ‘maintenance’; Hortensio will be spared the labors of a bread-winner” (528). The theory of female submission does not match the practice of the incredibly complicated and dynamic realities of male/female relations. Economic conventions and their essential instability seem especially pertinent, as they make any singular theory of marriage and its accompanying social and familial arrangements seem similarly and oddly unstable. Kate is propounding an ideology that lacks the authoritative aura of credible permanence or decisive inevitability. Furthermore, her lack of awareness regarding the social bonds arranged by other people in her community has the effect of making her appear isolated and ignorant, which is of course the intuitive consequence of Petruchio’s shrew-taming program, which involved intensive social isolation and sensory deprivation. By the end of the play, Kate has thoroughly lost the ability to recognize context, and by extension irony, or to recognize particularities or contingencies. She has only the patriarchal dogma inculcated by Petruchio, which she is inclined to apply uncritically to any and all situations. It would seem that Shakespeare is closely associating the perception and awareness of context with power: the more one is aware of the broader social programs governing human lives- or in other words, the degree one is aware of the public sphere and how it relates to the domestic- the more likely one will be able to assert one’s will. The most remarkable thing about Kate’s final speech is that it is undertaken as a performance in front of an appreciative audience, including Petruchio, Hortensio, the Widow, Baptista, Vincentio, Lucentio, among others. There is an irony to the fact that Kate’s exile to the domestic sphere and estrangement from the public is announced in such a decidedly public fashion, but the artifice of the performing act again puts the whole matter in quotation marks. The artful act of ‘performing’ seems to cast the legitimacy, or at least the ‘naturalness,’ of specific social prescriptions into doubt, and this, of course, mirrors the dynamics present in the induction, in which the social reality in which Christopher Sly finds himself embedded is marked as false due to the presence of performing actors and the deception governing the whole situation. A Huntsman attending the Lord remarks, “As he shall think by our true diligence/ He is no less than what we say he is” (Shakespeare 531). This mandate is initially met with resistance. When Sly awakens in a lord’s bed in a lord’s chamber surrounded by servants, he says, “I am Christophero Sly, call not me ‘honour’ nor ‘lordship’. I ne’er drank sack in my life… ne’er ask me what raiment I’ll wear, for I have no more doublets than backs, no more stockings than legs…” (533) It could be considered strange and ironic that Sly would insist on a beggar’s identity when he is placed in the position of one of the higher classes. When he is first introduced in the very first scene of the play, he puts on airs and insists on noble lineage when he is accused of being a petty, drunken rogue by the Inn’s hostess: “You’re a baggage, the Slys are no rogues. Look in the chronicles, we came in with Richard Conqueror (sic)” (530). Self-definition is an extraordinarily important prerequisite for self-respect, dignity, and agency, and Shakespeare shrewdly depicts the pattern of resistance likely to be undertaken by those who have their sense of self imposed on them by others, especially more powerful others. He also understands the resources and abilities the powerful possess over the powerless that often make said pattern of resistance unsuccessful- the ability to name and label, and access to resources to give their names and labels material significance and, by extension, the impression of authority and permanence. Sly comes to be what others claim he is, but the reader knows that the performance being put on for his benefit is comically fragile and can be stopped and revealed as false at any moment. Kate’s situation is hardly any different in structure, although it is largely the opposite in superficial character. She is debased where Sly is elevated, a clever mirroring that suggests the essentially inauthentic quality of both the master and slave roles, if not their respective material conditions. Petruchio’s power is derived from both his ability to deprive Kate of resources, and to name things; that is, to bring about an understanding of the external world through a linguistic act. At the beginning of Act 4 Scene 3, Petruchio and Kate are making the journey from Petruchio’s shrew-taming school to Kate’s home, and they converse about the nature of reality. Petruchio insists that the shining sun is, in fact, the moon, and Kate predictably challenges him. Petruchio threatens to return Kate to his ‘school’ if she does not parrot his description of the outside world, and this threat prompts, to an even greater degree than Kate’s final submission speech, Kate’s total acquiescence to Petruchio’s will. Reality is what he says it is:
Kate: Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,
And be it moon, or sun, or what you please.
An if you please to call it a rush candle,
Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.
Petruchio: I say it is the moon.
Kate: I know it is the moon. (574)
The audience comes to gain a sense of the fragility of Petruchio’s power moves because the formal structure of the play foregrounds the performative quality of them, and reminds anyone who may be watching that performance confers a measure of fluidity to social relationships.
So even in the original play, the framing device mirrored the events of the drama involving Petruchio and Katherina, and called the events depicted and the values espoused into question. This approach would be significantly expanded for the production of Kiss Me Kate, though many of the factors enabling the events in The Taming of the Shrew would be conspicuously absent or fundamentally altered.
Another crucial element at play in the social dynamics of the characters in The Taming of the Shrew is economics. This may not be immediately obvious, as love and romance in the ideal are elevated and celebrated at many points throughout the play, such as the instance when Baptista is discussing Petruchio’s desire to wed Kate: “Ay, when the special thing is well obtained, / That is, her love, for that is all in all” (549). However, the practical necessitates of marriage as an exchange of economic resources hover above the actions of the characters at all times. Indeed, it is the very first thing Petruchio undertakes to discuss with Baptista when first exploring the prospect of marrying Kate:
Petruchio: Then tell me, if I get your daughters love,
What dowry shall I have with her to wife?
Baptista: After my death the one half of my lands,
And in possession twenty thousand crowns.
Petruchio: And for that dowry I’ll assure her of her widowhood…
Let specialties be therefore drawn between us,
That covenants may be kept on either hand. (549)
The arrangement is material and negotiated exclusively between men. Kate’s perspective is only considered as an afterthought, and it is a perspective that is understood to be amenable to change. This mode of exchanging resources was typical of stratified societies that emerged in conjunction with advanced agricultural techniques (it is my understanding that the matter of causality between the two phenomena is still controversial). The different, post-industrial economic realities of the mid-twentieth century would mean that marriage would be a very different business in Kiss Me Kate.
Although the text of The Taming of the Shrew is rife with complexities that undermine its ostensible ‘message’ regarding female submission, these can be very easily altered or undermined through the exegesis implicit in the performance. The performance itself is both an interpretation of a text and an adaptation, as it inevitably provides additional information (assuming the text itself is not abridged, and even then there will be augmentations)- information that may or may not contradict what is written on the page- than can be conveyed exclusively through the play’s written words. Acting, direction, scenery, pacing, and much else besides both expand and demarcate the viewers’ perception of the events of the story and the words written by Shakespeare. For instance, I’ve already discussed the parallels between Christopher Sly’s situation in the induction to Katherina’s, but the perception of the parallel can be fundamentally altered through some creative casting. Marcela Kostihova, in her assessment of various Czech stage productions of The Taming of the Shrew, remarked on one performance, “The Taming directed by Michal Docekal… is the first Czech production to include the Induction and the Epilogue… As a result, Katherina’s taming can be interpreted as the dream of the drunkard Sly, played by the same actor who plays Petruchio…” (73). This approach to the performance adds an extra layer to the dynamics of domination and submission. If Petruchio is in some sense the powerless and put-upon Sly, then it would seem his abuse of Katherina stems at least in part from his own sense of powerlessness. This is an impression that can only be achieved through a staging of the play, as there is little in the text itself to support the interpretation of Petruchio as insecure in any sense. This creates a story in which makes the implicit quotation marks around the main narrative events are now explicit. The implication is that the medium of performance can become the means by which a different time and cultural space comments on both itself and the past, and registers social, sexual, and political change. The perception of change is intrinsic to Shakespeare’s art, so it is hardly surprising that during times of cultural uncertainty (that is, most times) he is called on as a valuable tool to understand (and by extension, control) changes in social conventions. “’Shakespeare’ itself is no safe haven but a field of ‘genuine struggles’” (Kostihova 79).
And now for a different kind of struggle- resisting the charms of Ann Miller.
Kiss Me Kate debuted on the Broadway stage in 1948 and received its film adaptation courtesy of director George Sidney in 1953. The plot involves the theater director and thespian Fred Graham directing and starring in a musical rendition of The Taming of the Shrew written by Cole Porter, who, in classic meta-theatrical fashion, is also a character. Graham manages to entice his ex-wife Lilli Vanessi (who is engaged to a Texan cattle Baron and very much absorbed in her career) into playing Katherina in the production. Accompanying them are a young couple, the aspiring, up-and-coming actors Lois Lane (playing Bianca) and Bill Calhoun (playing Lucentio). Lois is vying for Fred’s affections in part to gain money from him, and Bill is incredibly dissolute and gambles excessively, often putting girlfriend Lois in the awkward position of bailing him out of excess debts. The bulk of the action takes place during the opening night at the theater, and in the tradition of a grand farce, many things go wrong until the climatic romantic reconciliation between Lilli and Fred. The backstage romantic entanglements and financial woes of the main characters mirror the events they are enacting in The Taming of the Shrew, and their approach to the material fluctuates with their emotional states, which are largely influenced by their off-stage problems. By this technique, Shakespeare’s work becomes a means by which the characters engage with their lives and, arguably, the culture at large. Their very modern problems also cast new light on the play they are performing, with the theme of gender roles looming especially large. The critic Irene G. Dash grasped the method of Kiss Me Kate quite well: “Exploring the roles of women in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, this musical employed song, dance, and plot to present a woman’s dilemma of marriage versus career. Because the collaborators of Kiss Me Kate framed the Renaissance comedy within a backstage play, they could also immediately leap into the more accessible modern world and offer contemporary parallels” (49). The dynamics of sex and gender have changed significantly between the time of Shakespeare and the modern world of Kiss Me Kate, but much has remained the same as well. The most conspicuous difference is the financial significance and power assigned to women. In the original Taming women’s economic value was closely tied to that of their fathers or husbands. If a woman was rich, like the widow, it was because she inherited her money. The degree this arrangement applied to ALL women in Shakespeare’s era is largely irrelevant to the world of the play. As a cultural interpretative tool and emblem, the play depicts and assumes a patriarchal dynamic. The lives of its female characters, or at least their material and monetary value and positions, are closely tied to that of their male relatives. Inevitably, the women of Taming are assumed to confine their interests and duties to the domestic sphere. By contrast, Kiss Me Kate has women who possess a degree of financial independence and sexual autonomy. A major source of conflict between Bill and Lois is his tendency to be irresponsible with money, and her tendency to give sexual favors to wealthy men in order to obtain money. The two (perceived) vices are mutually reinforcing, and tied to a conservatism regarding gender roles. The lesson is that a man must be responsible in his bread-winning duties if he wishes to secure the sexual loyalty of a woman, and aspects of this dysfunctional dynamic are reflected in the play-within-the-musical. Bianca’s compliant agreeability becomes not-so-coyly expressed promiscuity (“I’m a maid mad to marry/ And will take double-quick/ Any Tom, Dick or Harry/ Any Tom, Harry or Dick”) as character traits that were previously understood as being in the mould of the passive feminine are re-articulated in terms of relative sexual freedom. Such alterations-by-juxtaposition-and-reinterpretation are made possible by the device of the induction, which is given a significant overhaul in the musical.
The induction has a much greater importance to Kiss Me Kate than it does to The Taming of the Shrew. In Taming the induction is short and can easily be omitted. Omitting the framing device in Kiss Me Kate would render the story incoherent. “Borrowing this device from Shakespeare’s play but transforming it, the collaborators too rely on the play-within-a-play… This further distances that story and thematically blurs the play’s meaning” (Dash 52). In the original play, the ‘performative’ qualities of Petruchio and Kate’s story were merely suggestive. Here they are central. Much like Petruchio, Fred Graham attempts to undertake a ‘taming’ of his estranged wife, trying to get her to finish her performance in the play and secure her as a romantic and professional partner. He does this by manipulating the environment around Lilli as much as possible. Gangsters arrive to obtain money from a gambling debt incurred by Bill but signed in Fred’s name. Fred informs them he can get the money if they can intimidate Lilli into finishing the show. He disseminates similar bits of misinformation to Tex, Lilli’s fiancé, and others in order to gain the upper hand, and the romantic and financial struggles of these characters often spill out into their performance of Taming. One of the most memorable moments in the musical is when the gangsters take on bit parts in the play in order to keep an eye on Lilli and hilariously misquote a variety of Shakespeare plays irrelevant to the production. The hyper-modern features of their slang contrasts comically with the mellifluous qualities of the Elizabethan poetry, making the clash between the modern and early modern aesthetics most overt. The essential difference between Petruchio’s efforts and Fred’s is twofold. First: Petruchio successfully dominates Kate by controlling the domestic sphere which is understood to be her rightful ‘place,’ and Fred unsuccessfully dominates Lilli through a failed effort to control the section of the public sphere of which they are both a part. Second: Petruchio possesses the power to name, and Fred does not. The essential difference between the Elizabethan and the modern social milieu in regards to gender is spatial. The necessary ability to isolate the ’shrew’ in Kiss Me Kate is absent, because women are now effective agents in the public sphere in a world where the domestic and familial are considerably diminished. Shakespeare’s play is the tool used to tease this truth out, and serves as the hermeneutic guide to a specific cultural moment.
One of the most conspicuous qualities of this specific cultural moment is the position of marriage. In the modern world, the economic importance of marital arrangements is noticeably diminished (though obviously not eliminated), and this is reflected in Kiss Me Kate, which uses a play which displays multiple and shifting attitudes toward marriage and its functions, both romantic and practical. “How one is to understand this show, depends inevitably on the particular aspect that catches one’s attention…. The show praises marriage, yet shows wedlock as inconvenient and unnecessary… various approaches suggest how Shakespeare’s figure functions in American culture… [and] serves metaphorically as a sort of magic ring granting wishes or as a universal solvent dissolving problems in the fiction” (Teague 138). The problem that is effectively dissolved is the material necessity of marriage. Shakespeare’s play is used to affirm romance in the face of the economic utility of wedlock falling into obsolescence.
If one were to apply an effective theoretical lens to the curious relationship between The Taming of the Shrew and Kiss Me Kate, it would need to pertain to adaptation. Kiss Me Kate is in dialogue with a cultural product which, owing to its canonical status, has the power to both challenge and interpret the mores of the cultural moment of which Kate is part. Linda Hutcheon’s adaptation theory, the most thorough of its kind to date, will be useful here to both understand the dynamic present in Kiss Me Kate and similar works, and to place it in a larger cultural and historical context. Hutcheon remarks in her book A Theory of Adaptation, “Part of this pleasure [of adaptations]… comes simply from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise. Recognition and remembrance are part of the pleasure… of experiencing an adaptation; so too is change” (4). The repetition present in Kiss Me Kate comes with the aspects of gender and art that are presented in The Taming of the Shrew and affirmed in the modern setting. The ending in which Fred and Lilli are reconciled is especially revealing here. Fred ultimately fails to keep Lilli in the theater and admits his defeat to her in private. His failure to control the public sphere has apparently thwarted any hope for happiness in the diminished private. He returns to his performance expecting an understudy to recite Kate’s final submission speech. However, to the surprise of absolutely no-one except Fred, Lilli returns at the last moment and performs the last scene as Kate before an enthusiastic crowd, and it is implied that she and Fred are again ’together.’ Lilli’s performance of the speech is ironic considering Fred’s admission of defeat to her in private. In Kiss Me Kate, patriarchy has a public face but little private significance. The ironic context of Kate’s submission speech is retained from the original Taming (the repetition as described by Hutcheon), but is altered by the self-awareness of the heroine (the change) so that it takes on something close to a heroic dimension.
Another important and helpful insight offered by Hutcheon that can be applied to Kiss Me Kate concerns the manner of story presentation, or medium. She remarks, “…considering changes in the more general manner of story presentation, however, other differences in what gets adapted begin to appear. This is because each manner involves a different mode of engagement on the part of both audience and adapter” (12). The most noticeable change in the presentation of the story of Kate and Petruchio undertaken by Kiss Me Kate is the change in the nature of the induction. The centrality of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ events renders the action of The Taming of the Shrew more artificial, and more conspicuously ‘performed.’ In the original text, it is very easy to forget that the main plot is a performance for Sly’s benefit, and indeed, many productions of the play omit the induction entirely. In Kiss Me Kate, despite the absence of anything that can be credibly called ‘realism,’ art is not allowed to cast its spell to the same degree because attention is constantly being drawn to its manufactured and constructed nature. Art cannot make reality, and reality is always undermining art, as the constant interruptions of the staged show in Kiss Me Kate demonstrate. The mode of engagement this encourages in the audience is essentially of a contextualizing character. Kiss Me Kate, in its own whimsical way, is constantly encouraging its audience to draw comparisons to different artistic styles and between different times and places. It is an aesthetic that enables the perception, and appreciation, of change.
The third, and final, point espoused by Hutcheon that I would like to draw attention to vis-à-vis Kiss Me Kate concerns both the definition of adaptation itself and the process of artistic production and reception. “[Adaptation] is actually very difficult to define, in part… because we use the same word for the process and the product. As a product, an adaptation can be given a formal definition, but as a process- of creation and reception- other aspects have to be considered” (15-16). The full range of these ‘considerations’ are beyond the scope of this inquiry, so I will focus on just a few aspects that pertain to Kiss Me Kate. As a musical, it foregrounds the process of its own creation and anticipates its reception. It is a musical about a musical being performed. This complicates its engagement with the text it is ostensibly adapting, The Taming of the Shrew. It is by now well understood that modern peoples cannot have access to Shakespeare’s creative process. Distance in time and culture prevent us from really knowing what compelled him to write his plays, beyond the obvious financial incentives, but even if we cannot fully grasp his art, we have some idea of his technique, and it, quite suggestively, included adaptation. The Taming of the Shrew itself is thought to be adapted from texts by George Gascoigne and Ludovico Ariosto (Bate and Rasmussen 529). This would seem to suggest that Shakespeare’s play was in dialogue with a number of cultural traditions and backgrounds, making it an act of interpretation and a receiving. The process of adaptation is the process of recycling stories, and commenting on them anew with each cycle. Kiss Me Kate is very much a link in the continuous process of Taming’s reception, an invitation to construct a relation with the cultural dialogues and conflicts presented through the aegis of Shakespeare’s art and, perhaps, have a say in how the process will continue.
The preceding analysis of Kiss Me Kate and its sister text The Taming of the Shrew is by no means exhaustive. My primary concern was to convey an understanding of the essentially conflicted nature of Shakespeare’s work, and how that sense of conflict and uncertainty makes the play an effective tool for artistically interpreting the realities of social change, especially change that pertains to gender. I also wished to offer a theoretical paradigm (adaptation theory) that may prove useful for gaining a broader understanding of how inter-cultural and inter-temporal dialogues exist through art. Kiss Me Kate presents conflicts between men and women which have the aura of intractability but are always continually resolved through the healing power of ‘romance.’ The fragility of this concept is revealed by its engagement with The Taming of the Shrew (a play which doesn’t offer much hope for the fulfilling power of marriage minus the presence of female submission and monetary gain) and yet paradoxically affirmed by the use of a parallel structure that augments and extends Shakespeare’s artistic methods into a modern setting and deprives the original play of at least some of its superficially misogynistic bite by revealing that the conflicts it depicts can never have a final and decisive victor.
A reminder that ‘kinky’ is in the eye of the beholder.
Works Cited
Bate, Jonathan and Eric Rasmussen. “Introduction to The Taming of the Shrew.”
William Shakespeare: Complete Works. Ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen.
New York: The Modern Library, 2007. 526-529. Print.
Dash, Irene G. Shakespeare and the American Musical. Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 2010. Print.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Kostihova, Marcela. “Katherina ‘humanized’: Abusing the Shrew on the Prague
Stage.” World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and
Performance. Ed. Sonia Massai. New York: Routledge, 2005. 72-79.
Print.
Shakespeare, William. The Taming of the Shrew. William Shakespeare: Complete
Works. Ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. New York: The Modern Library, 2007. 530-583. Print.
Teague, Frances. Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge
The setting is Terra (Earth) and the surrounding solar system during the 25th century (24th in some other editions) and things are as wonderful and terrible as they have always been. The fog of time has rendered certain formerly disreputable manifestations of capital (think your Coca-Cola and IBM) somewhat respectable, and blessed with the graceful decadence a hypothetical Average Reader may associate with aristocracy. Space-faring is a thing, as are increased lifespans and the spirit of discovery. Alas, so are war and inequality. An ongoing struggle rages between Terra proper and the denizens of the Outer Satellites, with the latter winning. A significant complicating factor in social affairs and political economy is the phenomenon of “jaunting,” or the ability to teleport. Apparently, it has been innate and dormant in the human primate for millennia, but has only begun to manifest in recent centuries. It is a paradigm-smashing development, as the reader would immediately guess- “Any man was capable of jaunting provided he developed two faculties, visualization and concentration. He had to visualize, completely and precisely, the spot to which he desired to teleport himself; and he had to concentrate the latent energy of his mind into a single thrust to get him there.” In addition a measure of faith had to be brought to bear on the act, or the jaunter would be unable to summon the requisite energy. An important detail- “Despite all efforts, no man had ever jaunted across the voids of space, although many experts and fools had tried.” Naturally, this upends conventional earth-bound modes of transportation, and cars and motorbikes soon become nothing more than decorative vanity conveyances for the upper crust. Think of horses in a post-train/plane/automobile world.
This is the basic set-up for American writer Alfred Bester’s still-celebrated but yet-to-be-canonized-by-contemporary-pop-culture-in-the-form-of-a-film/tv show/video game-adaptation novel The Stars My Destination, originally published in the UK in 1956 under the title Tiger! Tiger! and then serialized in Galaxy magazine in four parts before being brought to the US market in book form under the title for which it is now most widely known.
The basic plot is a retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.
The setting promises a kind of whirlwind satire that might scan (if you are anything like me, and you might not be) as a prototypical arena for a Douglas Adams spacefaring farce or a Woody Allen riff on modern life (think Sleeper), and in parts it most certainly is. The satirical impression is ultimately not the most prominent or potent when the reader gets into the main thicket of the plot, however, and this is a consequence of the forceful presence of the novel’s protagonist, Gulliver Foyle, a proletariat near-illiterate on a bloody-minded quest for vengeance so all-enveloping that he makes Captain Ahab look like Billy Pilgrim. The tale proper begins with Gully Foyle adrift in the wreckage of the spacecraft Nomad after an attack from an Outer Satellite fleet. He is the sole survivor, and he spends months barely clinging to life with minimal supplies and zero human contact. The mind-warping insult that prompts Gully’s turn towards his vengeful novel-spanning purpose is his abandonment in space by a passing starship that could have rescued him- the Vorga. The scenario leading up to that insult turns out to have complicating layers that the reader only discovers near the story’s conclusion. You may recall that I mentioned that the apparent human inability to space-jaunt would turn out to be kind of important. Well, yes. It is revealed, just in time for the climax, that the apparent human inability to space jaunt is tightly bound up, like wasp-wax to a rusty old shack in an Appalachian backwoods, with that human myopia which afflicts us all.
Neil Gaiman insists that Gully Foyle has not dated an inch since he first debuted in the 1950’s. He’s correct, of course. Gully can’t be dated for the simple reason that he commands a text which still has cultural relevance. The most expedient way to keep a science fiction narrative current is to place it in thrall of a domineering personality which has a dual, paradoxical aspect which I will clunkily call the melding of the archetypal and the peculiar/distinct. Archetypes have the untainted visage of the familiar; wise and creative historical figures have associated such imagined personalities with the figures of myth. Archetypes have a way of taking command of the narratives they inhabit and guiding them through the vagaries and contingencies of material history so that they emerge with the singular presence of… (drumbeat now) memorable characters. Memorable characters are distinct from archetypes because they are forged in imagined histories which have an apparent freedom that the rigid demands of wizened old myths do not. They are blessed with the novel qualities of the non-timeless. This makes them relatable to the squishy and merely mortal; that is, you and me. They initially command the attention through their pure qualities, and retain it through the qualities that are specific and- we’ll use a loaded word here- strange, and rooted in the scenarios which are unique to them.
Gully Foyle, of course, has a familiar name to go with his familiar qualities; it is clearly an allusion to Jonathan Swift’s famous traveling protagonist. But the character is recognizable as a legitimate literary construction, first and foremost, because he changes in a manner which does not precisely dovetail with his namesake. This point is so obvious as to be almost banal. Characters need to change, and their capacity to signify as novel creations is roughly in alignment with the novelty of their transformation and their relationships. If they did not undergo change, they would not be recognizably “human” in the way most of us would appreciate, or otherwise be inclined to validate. The essential character of his change is signposted through poetry. Bester bookends his narrative with a pair of tasteful rhymes that track a psychological shift from acute alienation to commanding social presence. Observe-
“Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation.
Deep Space is my dwelling place
And death’s my destination.”
Before the chapter is completed, these sentiments are articulated in more pragmatic and quotidian forms. That’s to say, the poetic departs, and the dialectal arrives, in its familiar prosaic manifestation. Naturally, this shift affirms something disruptive, the sting of the unfamiliarly authoritative.
“Who are you?”
“Gully Foyle.”
“Where are you from?”
“Terra.”
“Where are you now?”
“Space.”
“Where are you bound?”
The next few words of the next paragraph are thematically instructive. They explicitly contradict the poetry of the earlier light verse and foreshadow the catharsis of the later chapters. “He awoke. He was alive. He wasted no time on prayer or thanks but continued the business of survival.”
Well, of course he did.
By the time the reader reaches the final chapter, the opening rhyme is reprised.
“Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation.
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination.”
Here we have the essential shift in Gully’s character. It is a move from the mindset of a vulgar, unambitious, uneducated, functionally working-class crewman to an enlightened, sage-like, wise, functionally upper-class prophet possessed of magical (in the science-fictiony, Arthur C. Clark sense of that word) abilities that will ennoble and “evolve” mankind.
But we may be getting ahead of ourselves.
Art is the most quintessential of communicative acts. Grunts can be therapeutic to the individual. Information is practical, language a solitary tool primed for organizing the raw material of experience. Only the aesthetic is fundamentally communicative. The shift from poetry to pragmatic engagement with his sense of self sends Gully Foyle into a very vulnerable state in the first chapter of The Stars My Destination. That’s to say, he comes to recognize that he is about to die. He realizes that his defenseless state on the wrecked remnants of the starship Nomad has sent him to a very peculiar state of psychological susceptibility, one that has less in common with the standard issue physical vulnerability which is so acutely familiar to even the dullest amongst the conscious. Cast out in the wreck of the Nomad Gully Foyle feels the need for communication even more than his physical body needs rescue.
And then the Vorga shows up. And what does it do?
It abandons him.
There is scarcely another option. Foyle feels the steely pinch of ice-cold resolve.
In the gutter tongue he utters a vow. Certainly, not to be confused with a prayer, though the intensity is scarcely distinguishable to the layman- “Vorga, I kill you filthy.”
Here is a pure hate. Of course, a responsible writer scarcely has any choice but to indulge in some grin-provoking irony here. The attentive reader will guess the emotional tenor, if not the literal events, of the novel’s climax based on these foundational narrative seeds. As is often the case with such things, it comes down to a quote from Shakespeare- “My only love sprung from my only hate!”
Yes. Obviously. Our poor vulnerable Gully Foyle will come to love the person aboard the Vorga who chooses to abandon him to his death. But also, of course, Gully Foyle is a persona scarcely amenable to death, as most would understand that literary concept. He will transform, but not die.
It is worth remembering that both the Nomad and the Vorga are owned by the wealthy and illustrious Presteign industrial clan.
Eventually, Gully manages to escape the remnants of the Nomad and finds himself in the compassionate clutches of an asteroid-based cargo cult. Here Bester almost seems to anticipate Douglas Adams with his giddy satirical spirit- “They were savages, the only savages of the twenty-fifth century; descendants of a research team of scientists that had been lost and marooned in the asteroid belt two centuries before when their ship had failed. By the time their descendants were rediscovered they had built up a world and a culture of their own, and preferred to remain in space, salvaging and spoiling, and practicing a barbaric travesty of the scientific method they remembered from their forbears. They called themselves The Scientific People. The world promptly forgot them.”
Their leader, Joseph, greets Gully upon his arrival as follows- “You are the first to arrive in fifty years. You are a puissant man. Very. Arrival of the fittest is the doctrine of Holy Darwin. Most scientific.”
The cult proceeds to initiate Gully into their community, and this entails tattooing his face with a tiger design which is clearly fated to acquire symbolic significance over the remaining course of the narrative. Gully eventually manages to escape (“Don’t even ask me how.”- Bob Dylan) and returns to Terra, where the reader becomes acquainted with Presteign, a wealthy post-industrial nobleman who is keen to recover the cargo that was aboard the Nomad. This cargo, it turns out, is an experimental weapon known as PyrE, a powerful nuclear explosive that can only be detonated through the thoughts of anyone inclined to detonate it- a process known as psychokinesis. In order to prevent capricious detonation, the material must be stored in an “Inert Lead Isotope.” It could potentially turn the tide of the ongoing war with the Outer Satellites in Terra’s favor. Gully bursts on the scene rather abruptly and attempts to destroy the Vorga– which is docked on Terra- with a crude explosive. His effort is unsuccessful, but it does not take long for Presteign and his entourage to deduce that Gully was aboard the Nomad and may have information about PyrE. They interrogate him but he proves uncooperative, and under the aegis of the Presteign hatchet-man Dagenham, he is sequestered in a dark, subterranean jaunt-proof prison to rot away his resistance.
I should add here that in an interlude before Gully’s raid on the Vorga he finds time to sexually assault a woman named Robin Wednesbury, a negro telesend (one-way telepath- she can project her thoughts into the heads of others but can’t receive any). The rather blasé way this plot thread is handled is one of the novel’s more dated attributes.
While in prison Gully meets a woman, an incarcerated ex-embezzler named Jisbella McQueen who sympathizes with Gully’s single-minded intensity and proceeds to give him an education; she also proposes the pragmatic strategy of locating and targeting the crew of the Vorga rather than the ship itself. After a wonderfully tense Great Escape scenario (seriously, it’s exciting stuff; selected quotes would not really do it justice.), Jisbella and Gully pay a visit to a former associate of Jisbella’s who removes the tiger tattoo from Gully’s scarred visage. The procedure proves to be only a partial success, as the ink can’t be removed from the subcutaneous layers of Gully’s skin; the ghastly tiger face reappears every time Gully loses control of his emotions. Jisbella adequately summarizes the situation, spelling out its new symbolic significance on the crest of Gully’s character arc- “Needle scars. They don’t show normally, but they do show, blood red, when your emotions take over and your heart begins pumping blood… when you’re furious or frightened or passionate or possessed… You can’t ever lose control, Gully. You’ll never be able to drink too much, eat too much, love too much, hate too much… You’ll have to hold yourself in an iron grip. You’ll never get rid of this stigmata, Gully. You’ll have to learn to live with it…”
And so, we have the mark of Cain, pure uninhibited savagery, dwelling just beneath the surface of emergent civilized man.
Jisbella and Gully travel to the asteroid of the Scientific People where the wreckage of the Nomad is still stashed. At this point neither have an idea about PyrE, but they appreciate that something valuable must have been aboard if Presteign and co are so eager to acquire it, and they wish to obtain it for themselves to use as a bargaining chip. They manage to recover the safe containing the PyrE in addition to a veritable treasure trove of platinum, but Dagenham catches up with them and in the ensuing melee Jisbella is captured (although Gully initially thinks she is killed) and Gully takes off with the goods, his tattoo marks spreading across his face as he accelerates towards his purpose.
William Burroughs once remarked that the best way to conceal something is to create disinterest in the area in which it is hidden. His go-to example was a tiresome American tourist- “There is no better cover than a nuisance and a bore.” Bester would seem to have shared a similar sensibility, as Gully’s next move following his acquisition of a fortune is to adopt the persona of effete wealthy dandy “Geoffrey Fourmyle,” a foppish faux-aristocrat cast in the ‘nouveau riche’ mode who travels around Terra with a carnivalesque entourage, creating a spectacle which charms the proverbial pants off Terra’s upper crust. He conscripts his former rape victim Robin Wednesbury to aid in the cultivation of his façade as an educated elite (she uses her psychic powers to send mental messages on what he should do and say). Robin is (shockingly?) willing to go along with the program as Gully may have information concerning her lost family; they may have been refugees being transported aboard the Vorga at the time of Gully’s abandonment in space. Additionally, Gully has used a portion of his fortune to cybernetically alter his body into a perfect war machine, the optimal condition to investigate the crew of his hated Vorga. He seeks out the former crew and interrogates them one by one, wishing to find out who gave the order to leave him to die. Unfortunately, each man is implanted with a death reflex and dies before he can reveal the essential information. At each interrogation, Gully and Robin experience a disturbing vision- an image of Gully Foyle on fire, his tiger tattoos showing through bright and vivid, appears before them upon the death of each Vorga crew member.
And then Foyle goes to a party hosted by Presteign.
I feel compelled to do some glossing over at this juncture. Suffice to say, Jisbella is alive and sleeping with Dagenham. Robin attempts to abandon Gully. Gully falls in love with Presteign’s blind daughter Olivia. Olivia reveals that she was the one who gave the order to let Gully rot aboard the Nomad.
Why?
“For hatred… to pay you back, all of you… For being blind… For being cheated. For being helpless… They should have killed me when I was born. Do you know what it’s like to be blind… to receive life secondhand? To be dependent, begging, crippled? ‘Bring them down to your level,’ I told my secret life. ‘If you’re blind make them blinder. If you’re helpless, cripple them. Pay them back… all of them.”
Of course, the parallel between Olivia’s vengeful invective and Gully’s cannot be missed. They are both helpless, and so they will both cripple. Naturally, this leads to a startling moment of empathy which only intensifies the love Gully feels, and even enables him to transcend his myopic focus on Olivia and generalize it to a larger purpose. Gully proceeds to turn himself in, intending to answer for the crimes he committed in his quest for revenge. Unfortunately, the man he chooses to confide in, a lawyer named Sheffield, turns out to be an undercover operative for the Outer Satellites.
One thing leads to another and Sheffield reveals that Gully can space jaunt; that he was set adrift in space after the attack on the Nomad but that he managed to unconsciously teleport back to the wreckage. And now Sheffield wishes to acquire both the PyrE Gully is hoarding and Gully himself, so that the secrets of space-jaunting can be revealed, studied, and mastered.
Yet another thing leads to another and Robin telepathically activates some PyrE, sending Gully into a maelstrom of flames which again activates his space-jaunting abilities. He teleports through “elsewhere and elsewhen” and- you guessed it- becomes the burning man vision from the earlier chapters of the story.
Much surreal voyaging ensues, with some pretty potent descriptions of synesthetic experience- “He was not blind, not deaf, not senseless. Sensation came to him, but filtered through a nervous system twisted and short-circuited by the shock… He was suffering from synesthesia… So, in Foyle, sound registered as sight, motion registered as sound, colors became pain sensations, touch became taste, and smell became touch…”Eventually, Gully finds himself in hospital being observed by the bulk of the central supporting characters. He now has a precise understanding of the implications of hist space-jaunting talents and the weaponry at his disposal. A philosophical discussion ensues- “Am I to turn PyrE over to the world and let us spread our freak show from galaxy to galaxy through all the universe? What’s the answer?”
An attendant robot provides the capping modules of revelatory wisdom, courtesy of being rendered into a state of malfunction as a result of Dagenham’s radiation (Have I had occasion to mention that? Dangenham is radioactive and needs to minimize physical contact with man, beast, and machine alike.)- “The answer is yes… A man is a member of society first, and an individual second. You must go along with society, whether it chooses destruction or not… you must teach, not dictate. You must teach society.”
Gully Foyle responds- “To space-jaunte? Why? Why reach out to the stars and galaxies? What for?”
The robot replies- “Because you’re alive, sir. You might as well ask: Why is life? Don’t ask about it. Live it… Don’t ask the world to stop moving because you have doubts.”
In summary- meaning is sought.
Gully takes the advice to heart. He immediately jaunts to multiple locations around Terra and gifts samples of PyrE to the civilian population of the world, basically granting them immediate power over life and death. He then space-jaunts, visiting multiple planets across the galaxy- “Foyle hung, freezing and suffocating in space, face to face with the incredible destiny in which he believed, but which was still inconceivable. He hung in space for a blinding moment, as helpless, as amazed, and yet as inevitable as the first gilled creature to come out of the sea and hang gulping on a primeval beach in the dawn-history of life on earth.”
In time, Gully jaunts to his final destination, the Nomad, still stationary on the asteroid of the Scientific People. He is welcomed as a holy man and prophet and begins the hard work of educating them in his mysteries.
So, what are we to make of this? The novel is clearly about evolution, in the personal, social, and biological senses of that word. Gully’s character arc is a violent war march from barbaric to civilized man, with a Vico-esque shift from the aristocratic to democratic to neo-theocratic occurring on the final leg of the narrative, with the latter two states being possessed of memorably intense Pentecostal zeal. The story’s conception of evolution does not seem to be naively progressive, as the destructive potential of both PyrE and space-jaunting is clearly illustrated. Evolution in The Stars My Destination is a matter of trends toward greater complexity, and the dominant metaphor is a sort of layer, perhaps best demonstrated by Gully’s facial tattoos. First, they form a layer of ink on his face, then they slip to the layers beneath his face, with his apparently cleaned visage now becoming the mask of nominally civilized man. A full-body envelopment in flames (Tiger, tiger, burning bright…) in which he becomes the vision of the Burning Man foretells his shift to religious prophet. Each physical, visible layer of violent coloration on Gully ads another coating of signification to his role in human affairs, and, not coincidentally, his psychology and character. A constant in this evolution is the stark fact of Gully’s “driven” nature. Once he develops his tendency towards obsession in the wreckage of the Nomad it never leaves him, it just assumes new directions. The pivot is from ‘death’s my destination’ to ‘the stars my destination.’ The negative and material to the positive and transcendent. Uplifting stuff, surely.
And on that note, I’ll just leave you with this fine reading of the opening chapter.
High Pressure Days 