Tahiti and Literature

In the South Seas 

by Robert Louis Stevenson

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.”   ― Robert Louis Stevenson






Tahiti was the setting for Herman Melville’s Omoo, published in 1847. This was the second of Melville’s novels — a sequel to Typee and so a second “Peep at Polynesian Life.” While both of his books were popular, another of my favorite authors also wrote eloquently of his travels including Tahiti. While he had previously travelled with a donkey, Robert Louis Stevenson in 1888 travelled to Tahiti, and after two more voyages settled in the Samoan Islands for the remainder of his life. It was from his time in Tahiti that he was inspired to write some of his most evocative poetry including the following:

Let me fathom out with my arms the length of golden-bred Tahiti
And number one by one the lands of Tautira.
I am seized with fear at Tepari
I shall stop short at Vaita
Clouds are over the sun and it blows a bad wind,
And my home is beyond at Faaroa.
At Vaiumete is a ledge where a man must go with the arms spread.
I must measure with my arms the face of that weary cliff.

Stevenson loved Tahiti and developed a close friendship with a Tahitian named Ori, becoming a "brother" to the Tahitian sub chief (Bell, p 217). While he published three tales about Tahiti his collection of travel essays, In the South Seas, did not include essays on the time he spent in Tahiti. I have always marveled at the various, often famous, adventure novels by Stevenson. My fascination with this author is enhanced by his life story, for as a sickly child, would grow up to travel extensively, often because of his illness. Needless, his wanderlust led in part to the wonderful novels of adventure that we have today.


In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson. Penguin Classics, New York. 1999 (1896)
Dreams of Exile, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography by Ian Bell. Henry Holt, New York. 1992

Charlatanism and Comedy

The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years 
by Thomas Mann

"What a glorious gift is imagination, and what satisfaction it affords!"  - Thomas Mann


This is Thomas Mann's last novel and his comic masterpiece. The story of Felix Krull is filled with humorous episodes worthy of the Mann's story-telling mastery. Mann based the novel on an expanded version of a story he had written in 1911 and he managed to finish, and publish part one of the Confessions of Felix Krull, but due to his death in 1955 the saga of the morally flexible and irresistible conman, Felix, remained unfinished. In spite of that it is still one of the best novels dealing with the question of identity.
Early in the story Felix learns to deal with circumstances by changing his character as needed and he continues to shift identities becoming whomever he needs to be in all the ensuing predicaments that he encounters. The expression of a latent admiration for a human being who can metamorphose himself into multiple identities reminds me of The Confidence Man by Herman Melville. That earlier novel is a precursor to the modernity of Mann's unfinished opus. Felix Krull seems to view the world like a chessboard on which he can take pleasure in manipulating the pieces at will and cultivate his ambition and his knowledge of the ways of the world by spending whole days peering into shop windows. His own calm demeanor throughout his escapades did not transfer to this reader who found his episodic life in different identities full of nervous suspense in a strangely vicarious way. It seems that Mann still had more story-telling magic left at the end of his life after World War II and decades after his great beginnings with Buddenbrooks and Death in Venice. The only regret is that Mann was unable to finish the novel; yet, the "early years" of Felix Krull still amounts to a small masterpiece.

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Beyond the Visible World

"the little lower layer": Digging Deeper 

into Joyce's Ulysses' Difficulties and Splendors

""Hark ye yet again- the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event- in the living act, the undoubted deed- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike though the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. " (Herman Melville, Moby Dick - Chapter 36 "The Quarter-Deck, p 164)

One year ago this month I attended a First Friday Lecture "Ulysses - A Human Work for Humans" presented by Claudia Traudt, Intructor Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults, The University of Chicago.  Today she followed up on that lecture with further thoughts derived from her longing to share "further, deeper, keener explorations of Ulysses' difficulties and splendors." (from the introduction to the lecture).  Beginning with a reading of Judge John Woolsey's decision allowing U. S. publication of Ulysses she explored some of the more challenging passages of this mature work intended for "Mature Audiences".

The lecture included, but was not limited to, an analysis of six excerpted passages that, while stylistically challenging, demonstrated some of the difficulties and splendors of Joyce's great novel.  The breadth of Ulysses is challenging yet even in the seemingly most straight-forward prose, for example as seen in Episode Ten: "the wandering rocks",  which consists of nineteen short views of characters, major and minor, as they make their way around Dublin in the afternoon. Even in this relatively simple section there are stylistic leitmotifs embedded in the prose that are invisible if one glides over the prose without further consideration.  Other examples included selections from:  Episode Twelve: “Cyclops”;  Episode Fourteen "Oxen of the Sun" which demonstrates the gestation of the English language. The prose styles of many different time periods, along with the styles of their most famous authors, are replicated and at times parodied in chronological order;  and, Episode Fifteen: "Circe" where the majority of the action of occurs only as drunken, subconscious, anxiety-ridden hallucinations.

The climax of the lecture for me came when Ms. Traudt demonstrated the critical emotional links between Leopold Bloom's meditations during his lunch in Episode Eight: “Lestrygonians” where he looks above the bar at the tins of food. He ruminates about food: odd types, poisonous berries, aphrodisiacs, quirky personal favorites. Bloom notices two flies stuck on the window pane. He warmly remembers an intimate moment with Molly on the hill on Howth: as Bloom lay on top of her, Molly fed him seedcake out of her mouth, and they made love. Looking back at the flies, Bloom thinks sadly of the disparity between himself then and now.   Significantly Molly reprises the seedcake moment from her point of view in her magnificent monologue that goes on for a moment of infinity in the final section of the book concluding with joy that encapsulates the possibilities for humans.  This lecture unlocked some of "the lower layer" beyond the visible world in the minds of everyday men and women who live and love in their very human lives.

Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville. W. W. Norton, 1976 (1851).
Ulysses by James Joyce. Vintage International - Vintage Books, 1990 (1934).

A Story of Walls and More

Great Short Works of 

Herman Melville 

by Herman Melville

"I waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener, the strangest I ever saw, or heard of." (p 39)




In the spring of 1853 after the failure of his novel Pierre: Or the Ambiguities and the rejection of his most recent manuscript, The Isle of the Cross (now lost), Herman Melville submitted three stories to Harper's. This was the beginning of period that would see the publication of such great stories as "Bartley, the Scrivener", "Benito Cereno", "The Piazza", and others. It would culminate with his great unfinished novella, Billy Budd, Sailor. All of Melville's tales including Billy Budd are included in this collection from Harper's Perennial Library.

By the end of 1853 Melville submits his first story that can be considered not only great but even amazing; this is Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. The story amazes in many ways and on many levels. One theme is a world of walls as the narrator, an "unambitious" lawyer who prefers the peace of his office to the bustle of the courtroom with judge and jury. He describes himself as "an eminently safe man", certainly someone who his clients can trust. The world of his office, located on Wall Street, is one of walls within, separating the scriveners from the lawyer, and walls without since the view from the few windows is limited by the proximity of the walls of the building next door.
Into his apparently prosperous business enters Bartleby, a scrivener or clerk, who is hired to handle some additional copying work. Bartleby, as we soon learn, would "prefer not" to do any task other than copying and before too long he seems to slowly stop doing any work. He is a "forlorn" and sickly character from the beginning (reminiscent of the copyist "Nemo", a minor character in Dickens' Bleak House). And his presence gradually requires the narrator to attempt, unsuccessfully, to provoke him so that he might respond in kind. Their worlds clash and in another deeper sense a spiritual realm is entered. The result is a crisis of faith for the lawyer, he thought to himself: "I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach." (p 56)
Death seems to surround Bartleby from the moment he walks in the door and into the narrator's life. He's described incessantly as "cadaverous," and this corpse-like disposition is reflected not only in his pallid appearance, but in his eerily calm manner. There is a chilling vision of Bartleby as a corpse in his winding sheet, which evokes both sympathy and fear in himself and in his readers, and even when Bartleby is alive (technically), he has a certain undead quality about him. Also significant is what the narrator calls Bartleby's "dead wall reveries," in which Bartleby stares at the "dead," blank brick wall outside his office window for hours on end. This presence of the living dead in the office is a really disturbing one – there's something incredibly creepy about Bartleby's perpetually incomprehensible inaction.
A question that does not arise is the position of women in the story.  Since there are literally no women in the 19th century world of commerce that we see here (and this is true of much Victorian fiction that is not based on the world of commerce--the example of  Stevenson or Wilde immediately comes to mind), any question of heterosexuality is simply a non-issue. As with most Melville texts, an argument could be made for the presence of some very, very faint homosexual undertones – however, in this story, it's not really much to base an argument on. While some might claim that the narrator's interest in Bartleby is really some kind of deeply hidden desire for Bartleby, I suggest that this is much more a story about the nature of humanity – what makes Bartleby fascinating is simply the incomprehensibility of his character.

The story introduces Bartleby by citing his "advent" and this is not the only allusion to Christ.  So we may interpret Bartleby as a "Christ-like" messenger, but what is his message? The variety of themes in the story takes on an objective pathos and parabolic overtones that are almost Dostoievskian in complexity.  The story ends with a sort of epilogue that succeeds only in muddying the message further. What makes the story so magnificent is all of the many different possibilities present in it. Just as the narrator has his faith shaken and his perceptions changed by Bartleby, the reader finds his imagination roiled by the possibilities -- the ending merely lays out a choice for the reader. You decide what it all means.

Great Short Works of Herman Melville.  Harper Perennial books, 1969.

Notes on Moby-Dick

 Man and Fate

...it  seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates.  There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own.  This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. (p 213)

When one reads the first line of Moby-Dick, "Call me Ishmael.", he does not realize that the story about to unfold, a narrative that will include lessons in whaling and the mysteries of the deep, is already set in stone so to speak.  Nor does he realize that he is about to embark upon a journey with the narrator, Ishmael, that will, more than five hundred pages later, tell him that "This whole act's immutably decreed." (p 548)  The 'Loom of Time' described in the epigraph above is indeed fixed and Ishmael's, and our own, weaving has independence only in our dreams.  The unchanging nature of fate, its existence and our subjection by it is part of the story.  Not even as men are described as philosophers with their Faustian striving (p 51) do they manage to avoid that which fate holds for their lives.  The vicissitudes of life are ever present in this sea story and vivid as they are they do not detract from the omnipresent nature of fate.  Melville is poetic in his characterization of this aspect of our lives in the following passage from Chapter 60:

Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play -- this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair.  But why say more?  All men live enveloped in whale-lines.  All are born with halters around their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift , sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.  And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side." (pp 280-1)


In Melville's tale the warp and woof of life is always present in one form or another, whether discerned by the men who go whaling or stay home.  We readers can only wonder at the progress of the tale and the lives therein; and try to make use of the lessons for our own life.  For we are one with Ahab, at least it seems to be so, as if life is a game like this passage from the end of Chapter 118:

"Well, well; I heard Ahab mutter, 'Here some one thrusts these cards into these old hands of mine; swears that I must play them, and no others.'  And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right; live in the game, and die in it!" (p 490)


Moby-Dick or the Whale by Herman Melville. W. W. Norton, New York. 1976 (1851)

Melville's Bartleby

“Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”
- H. Melville

Bartleby, the Scrivener: a Story of Wall Street is a long short story or novelette by the American novelist Herman Melville (1819-1891).
The narrator, an elderly lawyer who has a very comfortable business helping wealthy men deal with mortgages, title deeds, and bonds, relates the story of the strangest man he has ever known. One of the most complex stories ever written by Melville, it was no great success at the time of publication. Bartleby the Scrivener is now among the most notable of American short stories and is considered a precursor of absurdist literature, touching on several of Kafka's themes in such works as A Hunger Artist and The Trial.

(source: Classical Pursuits)