184 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865also suspected that there was no message to be heard – that, as one of his narrators
put it once, “Silence is the only Voice of our God.” “The head rejects,” the reader is
told in Melville’s long poem, Clarel (1876); “so much more / The heart embraces.”
That could stand as an epigraph to all Melville’s work because it exists in the tension,
the war between meaning and nothingness. It bears constant and eloquent testi-
mony to the impulse most people feel at one time or another: the impulse to believe,
that is, even if only in the possibility of belief, however perversely and despite all the
evidence.
Melville did not begin with the ambition to become a writer. Nor did he have an
extensive schooling. His father died when he was only 12; and, at the age of 15,
Melville left school to support his family. Working first as a bank clerk, a teacher, and
a farm laborer, he then, when he was 19, sailed on a merchant ship to Liverpool as a
cabin boy: the voyage, later to be described in his fourth novel, Redburn (1849), was
both romantic and grueling and gave him a profound love for the sea. Several other
voyages followed, including an 18-month voyage on the whaler Acushnet in the
South Seas. When he grew tired of this voyage, in the summer of 1842, he jumped
ship at the Marquesas and lived for a month in the islands. Escaping from the locals
who were holding him captive in the valley of Typee, he then sailed to Tahiti, where
he worked for a time as a field laborer. From Tahiti he sailed on a whaler again – to
Honolulu, where he enlisted as an ordinary seaman on the man-of-war United
States, serving on board for just over a year, until October 1844. Ishmael, in Moby-
Dick, insists that the whale-ship was the only Yale and Harvard he ever had; and
much the same could be said of his creator, who now returned to land, where he was
encouraged to write about some of his more exotic experiences at sea. Melville
accordingly produced Ty p e e (1846) and Omoo, a Narrative of Adventures in the South
Seas (1847), novels that deal, respectively, with his experiences on the Marquesas
and in Tahiti. They were romantic seafaring tales and, as such, proved immensely
popular. But, even here, there are anticipations of the later Melville: most notably, in
a narrative tendency to negotiate between contraries – youth and maturity, the
primitive and the civilized, the land and the sea.
In his next novel, Mardi: And A Voyage Thither, Melville grew more ambitious.
Based in part on the author’s experiences in the Marquesas, Mardi is an elaborate
allegorical and philosophical narrative. Taji, the hero, visits thinly disguised satirical
versions of the United States, Great Britain, and other lands. He travels with
Babbalanja the philosopher, Yoomy the poet, and others, discussing fundamental
issues and problems. He also meets and falls in love with a mysterious white maiden
Yillah, rescuing her from sacrifice then taking her to Mardi, the realm of transcen-
dental beauty, where for a while they enjoy intimacy and bliss. When she vanishes
suddenly, he goes in search of her. And, after many conversations and distractions,
he is still in pursuit of her when the book ends: “And thus, pursuer and pursued
fled, over a vast sea” are its last words. As a narrative of quest, the search for an elu-
sive object of desire, Mardi anticipates Moby-Dick. What it lacks, however, is any
fundamental narrative or imaginative drive. It was also a commercial failure.
Melville learned one useful lesson from writing Mardi: if he wanted to exploreGGray_c02.indd 184ray_c 02 .indd 184 8 8/1/2011 7:54:42 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 42 AM