Typee

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Typee (1846; in full: Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life) is American writer Herman Melville's first novel, partly based on his actual experiences as a "beachcomber" in the South Pacific Marquesas Islands. It was Melville's most popular work during his lifetime; for 19th century readers his career seemed to go downhill afterwards, but during the early 20th century it was seen as just the beginning of a career that peaked with Moby Dick (1852).

At first Typee provoked disbelief among its readers until two years after its publication the events were corroborated by Melville's fellow castaway, Richard T. Greene,^[1] who appears in the story as the character Toby. Until the 1930s, it was seen as factually based tinged with romance, when Robert S. Forsythe and Charles R. Anderson exploded the myth^[2] showing there were no factual sources available to verify the details of the story. It is now generally accepted that Melville exercised his artistic license so much that Typee is properly considered a work of fiction: the three week stay on which he based his story is extended in the narrative to four months, and he drew extensively on contemporary accounts by Pacific explorers to add cultural detail to what might otherwise have been a straightforward story of escape, capture and re-escape.

Critical opinion on Typee is divided. Scholars have traditionally focused attention on Melville's treatment of race, and the narrator's portrayal of his hosts as noble savages, but there is considerable disagreement as to what extent the values, attitudes and beliefs expressed are Melville's own, and whether Typee reinforces or challenges racist assessments of Pacific culture. The issue of class also plays an important role, albeit largely subliminated, with Tommo (as the natives call the narrator) struggling to assert his identity as a member of the working class in a society where work, in the modern capitalist sense, is unknown.

In the final analysis, it is certain that Typee delineates a crisis of identity, whether racial or economic: much as he enjoys his sojourn, Tommo is terrified of being permanently absorbed into native society. Much attention has been given to Tommo's fears that he will become a victim of cannibalism, although this fear runs in the face of much evidence (he is not, after all, eaten). Melville does claim, however, to have caught the natives eating an inhabitant of one of the neighboring valleys on the island. The natives who have captured Melville reassure him that he will not be eaten, although he does state that he believes that the only thing preventing him from being eaten is an infection in his leg, for which his friend Toby is allowed to leave in search of a cure, so Melville can be healed and then eaten.

Typee is one of the first and arguably the most intelligent contemporary account of Western and Polynesian cultural interaction in the nineteenth century Pacific, and provided many later writers (such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis Becke and Jack London) with the themes and images that came to symbolise the Pacific experience: cannibalism, cultural absorption, colonialism, exoticism, eroticism, natural plenty and beauty, and a perceived simplicity of native lifestyle, desires and motives.

[edit] Versions

First published in England, by a publisher who believed it to be factually based. Same version published in the US. But critical references to missionaries and Christianity were censored in the second US edition. Later additions included a "Sequel: The Story of Toby" written by Melville explaining what happened to Toby (although this, also, has never been factually verified).

The inaugural book of the critically acclaimed Library of America series was a volume containing Typee, Omoo, and Mardi, published on May 6, 1982.

[edit] References

^ Editor's Introduction by Ernest Rhys, in Typee, A Narrative of the Marquesas Islands, by Herman Melville, Everyman's Library 1907/1949
^ Forsythe, "Herman Melville in the Marquesas", Philosophical Quarterly, 15/1 (Jan 1936), 1-15. Anderson, Melville in the South Seas (1939).