CHAPTER ELEVEN

Travels in the Interior

Typee, Pym, and the Limits of Transculturation

Susan Garbarini Fanning

FOR American antebellum writers, the Pacific South Seas served as ideal space in which to dramatize political and economic debates relating to imperialism and race. Paul Lyons notes the tone of “anxiety” that permeates descriptions of encounters with South Sea islanders in texts by European and American authors, writing that there has been a tendency “to imagine an interior Pacific inhabited by fetishized, cannibalistic ‘Stone Age Savages,’ or one in which the voyaging self moves backward in time and consciousness rather than engaging in the material present” (“Opening Accounts” 291, 292–93). Such distorted representations might cause modern readers to underestimate the degree to which writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville exposed the ugly underside of colonial policy and racism in their texts while remaining within a narrative framework that appears to uphold Euro-American imperialism. Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket first appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1837, and its negative depiction of black-skinned South Sea islanders reflects antebellum paranoia about imperialism and race. However, while Poe has been largely viewed as a “Southern” writer who supports Anglo-racial superiority, more recent critics of his work have noticed a disjunction in his seemingly conventional representation of racial attitudes. For example, the unflattering depiction of white characters in Pym suggests that Poe had difficulty accepting hierarchical relations based on race. Lyons argues that “the discernment of parody is crucial to any historically sensitive reading of Pym” and emphasizes that while the novel clearly participates in antebellum debates about colonialism, it does not necessarily uphold them (“Opening Accounts” 311). Dana Nelson concurs with this view, writing that while “on one level Pym is a racist text, on another the text provides a reading that counters racist colonial ideology and the racialist, scientific knowledge structure.” She observes that the “two levels of the text exist in a tension” (92). Nelson’s remarks prompt a modern reader to examine more carefully whether Poe’s portrayal of race relations in the work is the product of his ambivalence on the subject or a parody of the hypocrisy underlying racial theories and hierarchies of the period.

Close reading of Herman Melville’s Typee, which similarly combines the travel book and adventure story genres with scientific realism, suggests that Melville was familiar with Poe’s Pym before drafting his first novel, and further, that he was actively engaged in a “dialogue” of sorts with his American predecessor, probing more deeply the disturbing questions Poe raised and then dropped in his narrative. Melville’s parody of colonialist race ideology—if indeed that is what it is—is cautiously veiled beneath Tommo’s encounters with light-skinned Marquesans. Yet Melville aggressively challenges definitions of what constitutes a “savage” and what it means to be “civilized,” undermining Western ideas of primitivism and progress normally supported in travel-book convention. Both Melville and Poe plunge their protagonists into what Mary Louise Pratt has labeled the “contact zone” (4, 6–7), portraying them as individuals who report what they see and, in turn, are themselves perceived and represented by an alien consciousness. This reciprocity, or “transculturation,” to borrow Pratt’s term—limited in Pym and far more penetrating in Typee—illustrates how the South Seas loomed in the imaginations of these authors as a rich ground for exploring antebellum controversies over economic imperialism and race. The question that emerges, then, is, can an author fuse two or more distinct viewpoints into a single narrative discourse—a discourse that, paradoxically, presents a debased image of indigenous people, thus justifying their domination by white European-Americans while at the same time projecting ideas that challenge racialist scientific ideology? Poe was aware, in all likelihood, of the troubled ideological terrain he had entered and sought to suppress depictions of racial hierarchy that would provoke his audience. I would argue that Melville is more sharply cognizant than Poe of how his presuppositions colored his representations, and he allows them full play in Typee. Melville, salvaging the tabooed concerns that Poe so hastily abandoned, cleverly manipulates them through the conflict of Tommo, his “observing man” who oscillates between blindness and enlightenment.

AMBIVALENCE OR CONTROLLED PARODY? POE’S PYM

Poe’s racial views have long been the source of dispute. The belief that Poe harbored proslavery sentiments originates in the acceptance by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars that Poe was the author of an unsigned favorable review of two proslavery texts that appeared in the April 1836 Southern Literary Messenger. James Kirk Paulding’s Slavery in the United States and William Drayton’s The South Vindicated from Treason and Fanaticism of Northern Abolition. This belief was challenged by William Doyle Hull in his 1941 dissertation, in which he argued that proslavery apologist Beverly Tucker was the review’s author. Hull’s thesis, in turn, was challenged by Bernard Rosenthal, who pointed out that there was no tangible evidence to connect Tucker with the review. The fact that G. R. Thompson defends Hull’s thesis in his essay “Edgar Allan Poe and the Writers of the Old South” in the 1988 edition of the Columbia Literary History of the United States may be of small importance; as Rosenthal observes, Poe’s proslavery sympathies surface in his letters and reviews, making the case for the author’s racist sentiments undeniable (Nelson 90–91; Worley 244). Literary critics have long been sensitive to Poe’s racial attitudes. Harry Levin, for example, has called attention to Poe’s anti-abolitionist sentiment and “racial phobia” (121); and Leslie Fiedler, in an oft-quoted remark, argues that the reader, in being transported to the inexplicably warm climate of the Antarctic island Tsalal, with its jet-black native population, is “carried back to Ole Virginny” (398), drawing a distinct parallel between the American South and the Pacific South Seas.

It should not be surprising, then, that compared to Melville’s Typee, Poe’s Pym presents a strongly pro-colonialist ideology—at least on the surface. Published when public interest in the 1838 United States Exploring Expedition was at its height, the novel’s title page alludes to events that occurred not only in the “South Seas” but also on islands located in the Antarctic region, in the “EIGHTY-FOURTH PARALLEL OF SOUTHERN LATITUDE” and “STILL FARTHER SOUTH” (Poe 1). Poe was writing in an era when the United States was engaged in an aggressive program of economic expansion on land and sea through exploration and acquisition of slave territories, and when the United States had adopted a corresponding racialist science that supported such an enterprise. Poe derived his facts from numerous sources, several of which would have been familiar to Melville: William Scoresby’s Journal of a Voyage to the Northern Whale-Fishery; Benjamin Morrell’s Narrative of Four Voyages to the South Sea, North and Pacific Ocean, Chinese Sea, Ethiopic and Southern Atlantic Ocean, Indian and Antarctic Ocean from the Year 1822 to 1831; Washington Irving’s Astoria; or, Anecdotes of Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains (which perhaps influenced Poe’s conception of the Tsalal section of Pym); Paulding’s Slavery in the United States (which, as noted above, Poe is alleged to have reviewed favorably); John L. Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land; Captain Edmund Fanning’s Voyages around the World (which may have inspired Poe’s description of treachery among the Tsalalians); and David Porter’s Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean. Poe was also influenced by the enthusiasm of his friend Jeremiah Reynolds for the theory of Captain John Symmes, who argued for the existence of openings to the earth’s hollow core through gaps in the polar surface (Whalen 173).

Of chief concern was the commercial interest the Wilkes Exploring Expedition would serve. In 1836, Poe reviewed the Report of the Committee on Naval Affairs and, in 1837, Reynolds’s Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and South Seas. Reynolds, along with the press and whaling industry, supported the expedition, arguing in his report to the House Committee on Commerce for the necessity of the “intelligent merchant and wise government” to obtain “intimate knowledge of all seas, climates, islands, continents, of every river and mountain, and every plain of the globe, and all their productions, and of the nature, habits and characters of all races of men” (qtd. in Whalen 169). Lyons notes how Poe echoes this imperialist discourse in his own writings and, like Reynolds, regards the natives of these islands as a threat, arguing that because of their “murderous hostility[,] they should be conciliated or intimidated” (qtd. in Lyons, “Opening Accounts” 299–300). Such a perspective shows how colonialist racism is fueled by economic concerns. Here, in turn, the travel narrative genre serves a special function. According to Pratt, such narratives connect “the knowledge edifice of natural history” with colonialist enterprise, thus providing natural justification for the domination of indigenous peoples (125). Terence Whalen, too, emphasizes how narratives that expose a Western audience to the exoticism of undiscovered regions also support economic domination. This permeation of the travel-book form by commercial interest could account for the break in narrative style and focus that occurs midway through Pym: Whalen argues that there is a “shift from psychology to political economy, for the issue is no longer why desperate souls wander from home, but rather why ship owners and governments would finance their voyages in the first place” (Whalen 171–72).

It is apparent that young Pym’s severing of home ties and thirst for adventure are linked to this mercantilist spirit of the period. His voyage is launched from Nantucket, center of the whaling industry and investment in the Pacific, and his father is “a respectable trader in sea stores” (Poe 57). Augustus, the father of his traveling companion, is a sea captain who had been on whaling voyages to the South Seas and had had contact with natives. This pragmatic spirit may seem at odds with Poe’s surreal manner of presenting Pym’s voyage as a journey backward to the origins of the earth; yet Poe’s representation is one that nineteenth-century readers would have embraced, for it shows humans in a stage of primitivism that would reinforce hierarchical relations under a colonial system. In a pattern that would be repeated by Melville, Poe portrays Pym’s descent into a subconscious—even preconscious—state and reemergence into new life through images of sleeping and waking, and more particularly of death and rebirth. Pym’s release from a coffin-like box following the bloody mutiny aboard the Grampus is depicted as a symbolic “rebirth,” and his drinking of water to quench his burning thirst as a baptism. But a baptism into what?

It could be into the transcultural encounter soon to be described. Pym transforms from a lethargic character to a dominant one when he is rescued by the Jane Guy, and he pressures Captain Guy, an unmotivated British mariner who has engaged in the “southern traffic” (symbolic of commercial trade in the Pacific and perhaps the American slave economy) to abandon his seal hunt and push southward to unexplored regions. The Jane Guy’s goal is clearly expansion and conquest, since her cargo consists not only of items for trade such as “beads,” “looking-glasses,” “calico,” and “trinkets” but also tools for the building of empire, including “axes,” “hatchets,” and “saws.” Pym carefully records the bizarre natural phenomena encountered, such as streaks in the water, colored vapor on the horizon, white ashy powder in the atmosphere, and a huge white shrouded figure looming out of the mist. However, it is the breakdown in classifications of natural order that seems to fascinate and horrify Pym and the Jane Guy’s crew the most—a horror that intensifies at the sight of “the carcass of a singular-looking land animal … three feet in length, and but six inches in height, the feet armed with long claws of a brilliant scarlet, and resembling coral in substance. The body was covered with a straight silky hair, perfectly white. The tail was peaked like that of a rat, and about a foot and a half long. The head resembled a cat’s, with the exception of the ears—these were flapped like the ears of a dog. The teeth were of the same brilliant scarlet as the claws” (Poe 167). The disturbing blurring of species this creature represents has already been embodied in the figure of Dirk Peters, a mutineer-turned-ally who as misshapen half-breed straddles the boundary between human and savage beast. Peters is a complex and contradictory character, for his deceptive, murderous role in the mutiny shows his capacity for evil; however, his loyalty to Pym reveals his capacity for goodness. As racial hybrid, Peters represents the contact zone where civilized and more primitive cultures converge and raises questions about what Poe’s views of race really are.

The most unsettling representation in Pym is Poe’s portrait of the natives of Tsalal, for it is here where Pym’s capability—and limitations—as a “transculturator” becomes apparent. The antithesis of black and white is pronounced in this section of the narrative, with blackness being equated with diabolism, and whiteness with the sacred and mysterious. Although the islanders possess a mixture of racial traits, their “jet black skin” and “thick and long woolly hair” match contemporary portraits of blacks, particularly Morrell’s description in Four Voyages of natives of the Massacre Islands, whom he describes as “dark-skinned Africans” (qtd. in Poe 318). Sam Worley notes that the Tsalalians’ appearance “conforms to that of the African in both travel and exploration narratives and proslavery writings. These texts are based on the conviction that Blacks are culturally and intellectually inferior and are absolutely different from Whites, and that Blacks pose an ever present threat of violence and therefore require constant surveillance for purposes of control” (225). Pym’s account of the islanders’ culture reinforces these beliefs. He remarks on the extreme squalor of their lives, which he compares to that of Stone Age humans. Such a depiction supports the proslavery ideology which argued against the possibility of civilizing Africans, emerging on the American continent (Worley 225, 227). The simplicity of the Tsalalians’ language is held as further proof of the lack of complexity of their social structure; yet, as Worley points out, Poe’s insertion of the detail does not necessarily reflect the author’s own view, since Poe was skeptical that language was reflective of a natural hierarchy. On the contrary, he argues, Poe was quite aware that control of language is intrinsic to white hegemony (235). The Tsalalians’ lack of property and disinclination to trade are also considered by the crewmen as measures of their low level of development. All these traits provide Pym and the ship’s crew with an excuse to exploit the natives and explain their disgust when the Tsalalians abandon their harvesting of the mollusk “biche de mer [sic],” which was to have brought the white men great profit. Their interaction is largely confined to commercial exchange; the crew is eager for a reciprocal relationship, but it is less to gain an understanding of the Tsalalian culture than to find a means of expanding their pocketbooks.

The worst quality Pym paints in his portrait of the Tsalalians, however, is their deceit and inhumanity, and here, perhaps, Poe’s irony reaches its full weight. The islanders deceive the sailors by ambushing them in the chasm, massacring all but Pym and Peters; and they fail to show sympathy toward each other when they are injured by the exploding ship. Worley writes that such depictions suggest that “equality and coexistence between the races were impossible, unnatural, and undesirable, and that whites had to enslave or be enslaved” (229), thus upholding a doctrine of white supremacy. Pym, dismayed by the islanders’ betrayal, deems them “among the most barbarous, subtle, and bloodthirsty wretches that ever contaminated the face of the globe” (Poe 180). Poe cannot be unaware of the statement’s irony, given his grisly dramatization earlier in the narrative of the butchery committed by the Grampus’s crew during the mutiny and of Pym’s and the other survivors’ resort to cannibalism. Pym is more appalled by the natives’ deceit than by their violence; yet he has on several occasions proved himself to be an artful deceiver by stowing away aboard the Grampus, disguising himself as a corpse to fool the mutineers, and tricking the crewman Parker in the cannibalism scene. Lyons, like many other critics, notes that in Pym, “every image of Tsalalian treachery has its mirror among the Grampus’s crew. At the same time, Pym cannot muster concern for natives who, composite abstractions or not, are … shown as incapable of self-reflection, unable to achieve mirror-stage or the foundations of Western individuation” (314). Pym’s dreamy plunge downward into a chasm holds out brief hope: he imagines that a “dusky, fiendish, and filmy figure” stands waiting below, and he is filled with an “irrepressible desire” to fall “within its arms,” suggesting a subconscious longing for union with the natives. However, the half-breed Peters catches him instead, and despite Pym’s declaration that he “felt a new being” (Poe 198), he escapes the island convinced that the natives are a barbarous lot, and that he is a superior specimen of humanity.

There is no narrative resolution, and Pym emerges from his encounter in the same condition in which he started: drifting on the sea in a state of psychological solitude and lassitude. A spirit of reciprocity is largely absent from the encounter he describes; indeed, exchange is limited to the white men’s unpleasant discovery of the Tsalalians’ skin-deep loyalty. Nelson suggests that Pym’s deception might “be taken as a symbol of his own rhetorical strategy in his narrative and, at a larger level, of a culturally sanctioned policy of colonialist subterfuge” (94). It can easily be argued that the Jane Guy’s crew members are the most duplicitous of all, for they lure the natives with bright beads, trinkets, and cloth while masking their true agenda of harnessing the Tsalalians for commercial profit. Strangely though, as Whalen points out, Poe’s narrative offers no information that would be of commercial value to enterprising Americans looking to capitalize on the resources of the South Seas. He attributes this fact, oddly, to the link among racism, domestic production, and a national program of imperialism, noting that racist ideology justified the subjugation of the working class and the martial exploits on land and sea that would protect economic expansion. “Under these circumstances,” he notes, “the travel writer, and especially the composer of imaginary voyages, would be sorely tempted to substitute ideology for science” (181). Yet, as Whalen also points out, Poe is unable to make such a substitution, perhaps desiring to avoid controversial political issues that would irritate a national audience (Whalen 181). Poe was quite aware that, in America, Northern racial theorists agreed with the South’s view on the question of Anglo-American racial superiority.

Possibly, however, Poe did not unequivocally support a national program of white racial superiority. The latter part of Pym consists of elaborate speculation regarding a system of racial classification based on a distinct separation of white and black; yet the text offers no concrete conclusion that such a system is valid. On the contrary, it shows that both whites and blacks are capable of deceit—a discovery that casts the Euro-American interlopers in a diabolical light, and the black natives in a more exalted one, since the power to deceive is an unmistakable sign of human intelligence. Poe’s dramatization of white encounters with South Seas islanders reflects a deep ambivalence about racial codes of the period. Lyons places Poe “within the discourses of proslavery without seeing Pym in any single sense determined by it” (“Opening Accounts” 242). He writes, “To read Poe as a Southerner for the purposes of convicting him of racism reproduces a pattern (which persists to this day) of quarantining the issue of race in America to the South” (“Opening Accounts” 298). Nonetheless, it is evident that Poe chose to remain within a narrative framework that supported colonialist enterprise while giving release to his own anxieties provoked by racial debates of the period. Perhaps this would account for the collapse of the white-black binary system that Poe explores at the narrative’s conclusion: as Nelson notes, black blends into white, producing an indistinct grayness characterized by the “milky hue” of the water and the “sullen darkness” that finally overtakes Pym, Peters, and the captive native Nu-Nu (102). Whatever the case, Pym, despite its upholding of a colonialist ideology based on race, also reveals the unstable foundation of that ideology while exposing the self-serving motives that spurred the national program of economic expansion and tainted transcultural encounters between whites and native groups.

A MUNGO PARK OF SORTS: MELVILLE’S TOMMO

Many scholars believe that Melville’s own work has been deeply influenced by Poe’s writing. Burton Pollin, for example, has cataloged over seventy passages in Melville’s writing that critics believe are colored by Poe’s work, most notably passages in Mardi and Moby-Dick (Poe 3). Although no objective evidence has surfaced that Melville read Poe’s Pym prior to writing Typee, it is quite probable that he did. Merton M. Sealts Jr. notes that Melville’s brother, Gansevoort, purchased the first Wiley and Putnam edition of the novel in London sometime between 1845 and his death in 1846, and Melville presented the 1859 Blakeman and Mason edition of the work as a gift to his wife in January 1861 (“Supplementary Note” 5; Melville’s Reading 86). Mary K. Bercaw’s Melville’s Sources lists Pym as a source for numerous texts Melville wrote prior to 1861 (110), and Pollin, too, calls specific attention to Newton Arvin’s attribution of Melville’s turbulent “‘dream imagery,’ ordeals of hunger and narrow escapes” in Typee to the author’s reading of Poe (Poe 3). Arvin writes that such imagery is “far less reminiscent of Two Years [before the Mast] than it is of Mrs. Radcliffe or Poe” (84). Patrick Quinn has connected Pym’s fall down a chasm into Dirk Peters’s arms in Chapter 24 to Tommo and Toby’s arduous passage through deep ravines and down steep cliffs in Typee (292), and Bryan Short also draws a parallel between Pym’s and Tommo’s separate plunges (25–26). Close examination of Melville’s first novel strongly suggests that he was familiar with Pym prior to writing Typee, and that he was at least intrigued (if not attracted to or repulsed) by the work’s racist depictions of white encounters with a dark-skinned people. If this is the case, it is apparent that Melville was fascinated by Poe’s ambivalent and often contradictory representation of race relations and sought to engage his “Young America” predecessor in an indirect dialogue of sorts as he wrote Typee. In doing so, Melville reconfigures some of the racist conceptions that appeared in Poe’s work.

Like Poe, Melville recognized the Pacific South Seas as fertile ground for exploring the controversies over imperialism and race that were erupting on the American continent. He was aware of the nationalist surge toward economic expansion and would have been influenced by various missionary and sailor reports that portrayed the islands alternately as the last outpost of the un-Christianized frontier or as a paradise waiting to be plundered. Yet, while Melville portrays the Marquesas as romantically suspended between an idyllic state of purity and one of impending corruption, he displays a keen awareness of the reciprocal dynamics such a suspension entailed, and the fact that the natives are not a passive force in this dynamic. Therefore, while Tommo is seemingly cast as the narrator of a travel book who, despite his desertion from Western civilization, nonetheless harbors the belief that his “parent” culture is ascendant over those of the indigenous populations he encounters, Melville adroitly portrays him as an unwitting “transculturator,” an observer who unintentionally indicts and undermines Euro-American colonialist ideology.

Tommo may not be the profiteer that Pym is, but he is a Mungo Park of sorts. Adventurous of spirit and desperate to escape the tyranny of whale-ship life, he casts his lot among the cannibals and emerges from his travels in the interior of Nukuhiva having seen and experienced things few other white men have. His name is significant. As Michael Clark has noted, he may be named after Tomo Cheeki, the Creek Indian portrayed in Philip Freneau’s book, The Splenetic Indian, who travels to Philadelphia to observe the customs of civilized people and returns to the wilderness. Melville’s Tommo makes a reverse journey—from civilization to the island and back to civilization—yet he too sympathetically contemplates the nobility of the savage in his natural environment and civilization’s corrupting influence (Clark, “A Source” 262–63). The Typees’ renaming of Tommo is also significant, for as John Samson notes, in the Marquesan language, tommo means “to enter into, to adapt well to.” The name proves to be ironic, because, despite his sympathy, Tommo does not recognize the name as an invitation by the Typee to enter their culture, nor does he adapt. On the contrary, Tommo continues to embrace his Western prejudices and only in brief bursts acknowledges the validity of the Typee culture all on its own (Samson, “The Dynamics of History” 30–31), in sharp contrast to Melville. After his Pacific voyages, Melville bore a more enlightened view of dark-skinned races and would continue to legitimize their cultures throughout his career.

Tommo’s strongly Euro-American perspective emerges early in the novel. Viewing the bay at Nukuhiva with an imperial gaze, he observes, “Nothing can exceed the imposing scenery of this bay. Viewed from our ship as she lay at anchor in the middle of the harbor, it presented the appearance of a vast natural amphitheatre in decay, and overgrown with vines, the deep glens that furrowed its sides appearing like enormous fissures caused by the ravages of time” (Typee 24). Before disembarking from the ship, then, Tommo sees the island as caught in a process of decay, or de-evolution. He reflects on the internecine warfare that followed the natives’ earliest encounters with the white race, foreshadowing the novel’s violent climax. To his credit, Tommo reflects on the Western interlopers’ hypocrisy in branding the Fijians “diabolic heathens” for massacring crewmen of the Hobomak, when, in fact, it is the natives themselves who have suffered “unprovoked injuries” (Typee 27). However, despite these brief flashes of sympathy, Tommo generally views the Marquesans with a Westerner’s myopia.

Like Poe, Melville uses baptismal imagery to dramatize Tommo’s turbulent initiation into Polynesian culture. Upon deserting the Dolly, he and Toby hastily retreat into the interior of the island to preserve their newfound independence. Out on the ridge, Tommo is exhilarated as he views two worlds at once: the “civilized” harbor of Nukuhiva and the virgin territory he is about to enter. This exhilaration is short lived, for like all mortals, he must abandon the peak to seek food and water. At this point, Tommo’s leg begins to swell, an ambivalent response, for as many critics have noted, it suggests both an attraction to and a repulsion from his new environment. Like Pym and Peters, who hide in a chasm to escape detection by the Tsalalians, Tommo and Toby traverse numerous damp, frigid ravines to avoid the natives and search for food. The water the chasms provide has an “antibaptismal” effect on Tommo when he first drinks it: “Had the apples of Sodom turned to ashes in my mouth, I could not have felt a more startling revulsion. A simple drop of the cold fluid seemed to freeze every drop of blood in my body; the fever that had been burning in my veins gave place on the instant to death-like chills, which shook me one after another like so many shocks of electricity, while the perspiration produced by my late violent exertions congealed in icy beads upon my forehead. My thirst was gone, and I fairly loathed the water” (Typee 53). Defeated, Tommo and Toby cast their fate with the natives in the valley, and in what is possibly Melville’s parody of Pym’s dreamlike fall downward into the arms of a “dusky savage,” Tommo makes his precarious plunge down a ravine, crashing through a tree and landing miraculously unharmed at the bottom.

There is no savage who literally catches him, but almost immediately, Tommo is forced into the reciprocal relationship he wished to avoid. He and Toby stumble upon a native boy and girl and ask what they later deem this “wily pair” whether the valley is inhabited by the Happar (“good”) tribe or the (“bad”) Typee, Toby even clownishly pantomiming his antipathy toward the latter. The boy and girl assent that a good tribe dwells there, and the two men are conducted within a circle of the native chiefs and face the most imposing among them. Tommo recounts the first of many transcultural shocks in the narrative: “Never before had I been subjected to so strange and steady a glance; it revealed nothing of the mind of the savage, but it appeared to be reading my own.” The chief (King Mehevi) turns the tables on Tommo, forcing the white man to identify him and his tribe as “Typee” and to pronounce the word “Mortarkee!” for “Good!” (Typee 71). Immediately after this, “Tom” is rechristened “Tommo,” a name stripping him of his white identity. Tommo and Toby’s diminution is complete when a platter of “poee-poee” is set before them and, too hungry to control themselves, they shove food into their mouths with their hands. Mehevi teaches the two white men how not to eat like barbarians.

Unaware of the invitation his new name implies, Tommo functions as an observer without “entering into” or “adapting to” Typee culture. The Typees display great curiosity toward the white men, and Tommo assumes, with romantic pride, that it is because they are “the first white men who have ever penetrated thus far back into their territories.” In true travel-book fashion, the islanders are awestruck by the whiteness of the interlopers’ limbs as they remove their garments and touch their skin, as Tommo recounts, “much in the same way that a silk mercer would handle a remarkably fine piece of satin,” even applying “the olfactory organ” in their inspection (Typee 74). This arrival scene is a convention of travel writing. As Pratt explains, such scenes serve as “a potent site for framing relations of control and setting the terms of its representation,” for what occurs between invader and host culture is less a conquest on the invader’s part than a “mutual appropriation” (79–80). Tommo thus invades the tribe’s “interiority,” but they swiftly readjust and absorb him into their social organism. Although Tommo plays a passive role (indeed, he often refers to his stay in the valley as a “captivity”), there is a certain degree of reciprocity between him and the Typees: he must satisfy their curiosity in exchange for food, shelter, and an understanding of their culture.

Tommo learns a great deal about Typee society, and through these human-centered exchanges Melville dramatizes the phenomenon of transculturation. However, while the Typees are quick to understand and “represent” Tommo (as a white interloper who is separate yet welcome to join their family unit), Tommo is less astute and often succumbs to Western romanticized views of the community and its ways that limit his understanding. For example, he underestimates the shrewdness of Mehevi: the king is desirous to learn “the customs and peculiarities” of Tommo’s far-off country and, more specifically, of the proceedings of the “Franee” (French) in the distant bay (Typee 79), showing a practical concern with his tribe’s involvement in world affairs. The Typees’ worldliness is more blatantly revealed when Tommo is shown the formidable arsenal within the Ti: “On entering the house, I was surprised to see six muskets ranged against the bamboo on one side, from the barrels of which depended as many small canvas pouches, partly filled with powder.” Interspersed with these modern weapons are “a great variety of rude spears and paddles, javelins, and war clubs” (Typee 92). This sight disabuses the reader, if not naive Tommo, of the Typees’ role in the fratricidal advance of human history. If any doubt remains about Happar “goodness” in contrast to Typee “malice,” it is shattered when Toby is wounded by Happar warriors while seeking medicine for his friend. Later, in a burst of blind admiration for his captors, Tommo marvels at the lack of warfare between the Typee and Happar, speculating that tales of cannibalism have been grossly exaggerated. Gunshots are immediately heard in the hills, dispelling Tommo’s theory in gunsmoke. Melville further underscores Tommo’s narrow understanding of the native mind when Tommo recounts the battle of the popguns. Tommo’s effort to train the tribe in the mass manufacture of toy guns exposes the commercial underpinnings of relations between white invaders and native populations, showing how reciprocity between colonizers and colonized often manifested itself in hierarchical relations along race lines. Like the islanders in Pym who soon abandon their harvesting of “biche de mer,” the Typees busily manufacture popguns for a short while, and then, as Tommo reflects, “the excitement gradually [wears] away” (Typee 145). Such is Melville’s satire on colonial enterprise, and it is sinister at the least, for ultimately guns will subdue and destroy the native population.

Tommo, from the outset, is confused by the customs and rituals he witnesses and is, like Pym, skeptical of the Typees’ capacity for reason. His question “Typee or Happar?” reveals his bewilderment at the polarized accounts he has heard that stereotype the natives as being either noble sons of Adam or bloodthirsty savages. Yet his confusion may also be rooted in an unwillingness to fully understand the Typees; for to truly understand an alien culture requires an identification he is unwilling to make. For example, when he first arrives in the valley, Tommo has no knowledge of the Typee language; yet, as his stay in the valley lengthens, he comes to understand many of their terms. Oddly, as Christopher McBride notes, Tommo will often pretend ignorance of their speech, remarking, “I could not comprehend a word [they] uttered” (25), suggesting that their language is so rudimentary that it defies comprehension by a more highly evolved race. Nicholas Nownes writes that Tommo’s deliberate ignorance of the natives’ customs reflects his rhetorical efforts to contain the Typees in a familiar category. Of the tribe’s rituals, Tommo frequently comments that he is “puzzled” and that the Typees are “activated by some mysterious impulse”; of the tribe’s explanations to him of the rituals’ significance, Tommo says they are “a mass of outlandish gibberish.” Nownes writes, “This is willed ignorance as a rhetorical strategy, for Tommo has already demonstrated his facility with the Typee language, and his refusal to impose structure upon the events he describes predictably wreaks havoc with textual order” (332). Tommo even denigrates the Typees’ understanding of their own cultural history. When Kory-Kory shows him the remains of a monument in the jungle, explaining that it is “coeval with the creation of the world” and “that the great gods themselves were the builders,” Tommo hastily concludes that neither Kory-Kory “nor the rest of his countrymen knew anything about them” (Typee 155).

Tommo maintains a psychological distance from the Typees in the early part of the narrative, where, not surprisingly, his stereotyping of the natives is most blatant. Gradually, his prejudices diminish, however, perhaps because he grows to understand the reality of his circumstance and that the Typee intend him no harm. Tommo declares that he begins to “experience an elasticity of mind” (Typee 123), and signally, his portraits of the Marquesans grow more flattering. In sharp contrast to Pym’s racist descriptions of the Tsalalians, Tommo exalts the Marquesans’ faces and physiques above all other human types, Melville’s parody, perhaps, of Poe’s harsh rendering in Pym: “In beauty of form, they surpass anything I had ever seen.” Still, Western bias permeates his description: “The distinguishing characteristic of the Marquesan islanders, and that which at once strikes you, is the European cast of their features—a peculiarity seldom observable among other uncivilized people. Many of their faces present a profile classically beautiful, and in the valley of Typee I saw several who… were in every respect models of beauty” (Typee 184). Tommo’s admiration extends further to the Typees’ mild, democratic form of government. Although the tribe is ruled by chiefs, these govern gently, and there is an “equality of condition” among tribe members that strikes Tommo, for it contradicts Western views of the restiveness of native populations. He asks in wonderment, “How were these people governed? how were their passions controlled in their everyday transactions? It must have been by an inherent principle of honesty and charity towards each other. They seemed to be governed by that sort of tacit commonsense law which, say what they will of the inborn lawlessness of the human race, has its precepts graven on every breast” (Typee 200–201). Quarrels are unknown among the Typee, and in strong contrast to Pym’s disgust at the lack of familial feelings among the Tsalalians, Tommo marvels, with unintentional irony, at the spirit of “community” that flourished in the valley: “The natives appeared to form one household, whose members were bound together by the ties of strong affection,” and “where all were treated as brothers and sisters, it was hard to tell who were actually related to each other by blood” (Typee 204). When Tommo tries to organize a boxing match, no one steps forward to engage him in combat, and he is forced to box with an imaginary foe. So struck is Tommo by the Typees’ gentle nature that he even refrains from condemning their cannibalism, explaining that they only indulge in the practice “when they seek to gratify the passion of revenge upon their enemies” (Typee 125). His is a rather myopic Western view, for as Mitchell Breitwieser notes, “Cannibalism is a ritual institution rooted in ritual practice—the ingestion of the enemy’s virtue—and this is not a commensurate revenge modeled after the interloper’s example. Cannibalism does not begin with the interaction of colonialism, and it cannot be understood as a just, equivalent return of blow for blow” (3). Tommo cries out in a fit of idealism, “Are these the ferocious savages, the blood-thirsty cannibals of whom I have heard such frightful tales! They deal more kindly with each other, and are more humane, than many who study essays on virtue and benevolence, and who repeat every night that beautiful prayer breathed first by the lips of the divine and gentle Jesus” (Typee 203). Such panegyric may emerge from multiple sources: from Tommo’s impulse to create exalted, romantic images of the Polynesian because of the new stage of reciprocity he has entered, and perhaps from Melville’s desire to parody Poe’s invective against the darker race in Pym and illustrate that representations of this group as diabolical heathens on one hand and saints on the other is a dichotomy that exists in the white imagination alone.

Still, transculturation has its limits, and it is fear of cannibalism that spurs Tommo to disengage himself from Typee society. The real impetus may be his fear of being tattooed, for, as many critics have argued, Tommo cannot abide the thought of being visibily marked as a member of a dark-skinned culture that his own has labeled savage flesh-eaters. Despite his sympathy and budding appreciation for the Typees’ humanity and culture, Tommo breaks away, resurrecting the very stereotypes he had previously undermined with his own observations. He reverts to the racist language he used upon his arrival on the island, calling the tribe members pursuing the boat “savages” and hesitating only a moment before hurling a boat hook at Mow-Mow, the fiercest of the warriors, when he tries to stop Tommo from escaping. He fails to recognize that the Typees are a complex people, as illustrated in their varied responses at the climactic moment of his departure: the tribe has broken into two factions, represented by Old Marheyo, who understands Tommo’s urge to return home, and the warriors who would detain him on the island. So, for all its enlightened rhetoric on Marquesan virtue, Typee appears to end on much the same ambivalent note as Pym. As Breitwieser speculates, “The ambiguity lies in the observing consciousness, not in the culture being observed … the fracture in [Tommo’s] point of view stems from having postulated the Typee culture as an unwitting critical negation of his own culture, only to learn that he does not wish to have his whole culture negated” (405). The ambiguity could also lie in Melville’s own observing consciousness; the author was an older, more knowledgeable man who was trying to depict the response of a youth plunged into a strange and extreme circumstance. Like Pym, Tommo has embarked on a voyage that should initiate him into the mysteries of life among a different people; however, his exchange with the Typees is ultimately a failure, for he departs the island in much the same condition in which he arrived: as a deserter, a permanent exile who will continue to drift alone on the ocean. This pattern of embrace and recoil is worth a study in itself, for Tommo is clearly the first in a series of “isolato” figures to haunt Melville’s fiction.

Melville’s portrayal of Tommo’s internal conflicts is fairly controlled. It reveals contradictions; yet these are plausible, given the wide-ranging emotions any individual would experience if plunged into the contact zone. T. Walter Herbert writes that Tommo’s conflict represents that of Melville himself: “he finds his mind radically divided between horror and profound admiration for the islanders, as it is also divided between hatred for civilization and a frantic desire to return to it” (158). This was a result of the challenge Melville faced in writing Typee: although he drafted his novel nearly a decade after Poe wrote Pym, it was still in a climate hostile toward more progressive and enlightened views of what constituted a savage. Herbert notes that this challenge was further complicated by Melville’s own bias and ambivalence about such matters (175–76). I would argue, however, that Melville is more acutely aware than Poe of how his prejudices affect his representations, and he unleashes them in Typee. Whereas Poe allows contradictions to emerge in recording the adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym and quickly suppresses them, Melville, picking up the tangled threads that Poe so hastily dropped, cleverly manipulates them through the conflict of Tommo, his observing man who is capable of enlightened thinking yet is often blinded by his own prejudices. Tommo’s ability to recognize the Typees’ humanity, yet his refusal to embrace them, raises disturbing questions. Apparently there is a limit to the degree of reciprocity that can be reached between two radically different groups: boundaries that cannot be crossed, “interiors” that cannot be penetrated. Yet Melville, albeit indirectly, raises an awareness about race relations, both abroad and on the American continent. Tommo’s failure to thrive in the contact zone may bode ill for a swift resolution to racial conflict, but it points to the validity of foreign cultures separate and distinct from those of Europe and America and holds a mirror up to the “civilized world,” revealing the often selfish and primitive impulses that drive its own more grandiose, profit-driven enterprises.