Typee: Four Months' Residence in the Marquesas

First published in 1985. Typee, originally published in 1846, was Melville's first book. Full of romance and adventure, it is also largely autobiographical. It was an immensely popular and controversial book in its day and made Melville the literary discoverer of Polynesia. It tells the story of Tommo, a sailor, and his adventures on the Marquesas Islands. The book contains much romance and action packed events in a location that is totally exotic and sensuous. There is a serious background to.the work. When Melville was in Polynesia the missionaries had already begun their work and the colonists were hard on their heels. Melville's views on the influence of the two groups and his fair portrayal of the Polynesians were the centre of the controversies which raged over its publication and led to the book's ultimate censorship in America

1142224816
Typee: Four Months' Residence in the Marquesas

First published in 1985. Typee, originally published in 1846, was Melville's first book. Full of romance and adventure, it is also largely autobiographical. It was an immensely popular and controversial book in its day and made Melville the literary discoverer of Polynesia. It tells the story of Tommo, a sailor, and his adventures on the Marquesas Islands. The book contains much romance and action packed events in a location that is totally exotic and sensuous. There is a serious background to.the work. When Melville was in Polynesia the missionaries had already begun their work and the colonists were hard on their heels. Melville's views on the influence of the two groups and his fair portrayal of the Polynesians were the centre of the controversies which raged over its publication and led to the book's ultimate censorship in America

105.49 In Stock
Typee: Four Months' Residence in the Marquesas

Typee: Four Months' Residence in the Marquesas

by Herman Melville
Typee: Four Months' Residence in the Marquesas

Typee: Four Months' Residence in the Marquesas

by Herman Melville

eBook

$105.49  $140.00 Save 25% Current price is $105.49, Original price is $140. You Save 25%.

Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

First published in 1985. Typee, originally published in 1846, was Melville's first book. Full of romance and adventure, it is also largely autobiographical. It was an immensely popular and controversial book in its day and made Melville the literary discoverer of Polynesia. It tells the story of Tommo, a sailor, and his adventures on the Marquesas Islands. The book contains much romance and action packed events in a location that is totally exotic and sensuous. There is a serious background to.the work. When Melville was in Polynesia the missionaries had already begun their work and the colonists were hard on their heels. Melville's views on the influence of the two groups and his fair portrayal of the Polynesians were the centre of the controversies which raged over its publication and led to the book's ultimate censorship in America


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781317856900
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Publication date: 10/24/2018
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 256
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

Herman Melville (1819-1891) is recognised as one of America's greatest writers.

Date of Birth:

August 1, 1819

Date of Death:

September 28, 1891

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Place of Death:

New York, New York

Education:

Attended the Albany Academy in Albany, New York, until age 15

Read an Excerpt

Introduction
Robert Sullivan

N THE BEGINNING of Melville, back before the White Whale, there was Typee, the true-life account of the soon-to-be novelist’s adventures in the South Seas—the scandalous, enthralling, and, yes, titillating story of the man who lived among cannibals. And even at this primordial moment, even in this youthful telling, all of Melville is there: the effortless style, the lush and poemlike descriptions, the Joycean humor (why is everyone always so serious about Melville?). On top of all that, it’s a great read, a legitimate adventure. Are our wounded hero’s newfound pagan friends feeding him or fattening him, and how exactly will he ever escape?

How amazing that Typee ever came into being at all—it is the almost accidental birth of a master. There was young Herman, just returned from sea, the son of a well-born but failed businessman, a near ne’er-do-well who had dabbled in schoolteaching, who had tried his hand at a few little pieces for the local newspaper, and who, seemingly for lack of anything better to do, found himself on a whaling ship with a sea captain who was not terribly interested in workplace morale: Captain Pease on Melville’s first whaling ship, the Acushnet; Captain Vangs in Typee; later to be born again in hell as Ahab. Even on a good ship, whaling was tough, a semi-consensual version of slavery, a life of hard crackers and stale water in the cramped infinity of the great sea. “Oh! for a refreshing glimpse of one blade of grass—for a snuff at the fragrance of a handful of the loamy earth!” goes the longing cry at Typee’s outset. When young Tommo, as the nativesrefer to the narrator, arrives in Nuku Hiva, the largest of the Marquesas Islands, he is greeted in the tropical bay by a boatless flotilla of local maidens (“these swimming nymphs”) who eventually board the whaling ship—a scene that was censored from the first editions: “Our ship was now wholly given up to every species of riot and debauchery. Not the feeblest barrier was interposed between the unholy passions of the crew and their unlimited gratification.” In a few days, the young sailor hatches a plan. He will escape into paradise.

Tommo is accompanied by a shipmate, Toby, energetic and fearless whereas Tommo is reluctant and a bit of a snob, the slighly detached (read: Ishmaelean) adventurer. They head for the hills—the large verdant, nearly impenetrable, volcanic hills—wary of the village of Typee, where, sailors’ lore has it, a fierce band of cannibals lives. It’s a harried trip, low on supplies, high on directionlessness. On several occasions, Tommo nearly kills himself trying to keep up with Toby. The misadventures end up sounding like one of those old Bing Crosby and Bob Hope buddy movies: The Road to the Marquesas. Naturally, the two wind up in the wrong village. Soon enough, they are—whoops!—dining with cannibals.

Are they being treated graciously or being fattened? Toby doesn’t stick around to find out. Tommo, meanwhile, is stuck with a bad leg, the pain and inflammation of which fluctuates in proportion to the imminence of danger. Still, Tommo thrives, investigating the practices and customs of what he eventually comes to call the Happy Valley. He makes friends with the local chieftain, visiting him each day like a beat reporter checking in regularly with the desk sergeant. Tommo is assigned a valet, Kory-Kory, who, Queequeg-like, is a friend, respected and even loved despite if not because of his differences. Typee is the birth of the ardent anti-racist: in the beginning, Melville was a radical.

Tommo also finds himself in the everyday heap of bodies that naps through the humid days and snores through the night on the dirt floor of the hut. Specifically, he is alongside a young woman named Fayaway. Fayaway is beautiful, in a word, something Jean-Jacques Rousseau might have come up with if, instead of Emile, he had written soft porn. Not that there is anything illicit in Melville’s portrait. The passages regarding Fayaway are at once friendly, funny, and sensuous—in detail of flesh and landscape, Typee is a very sexy book. Once, in a canoe, Fayaway stands and spreads out her shawl of tappa, in imitation of a sail. “We American soldiers pride ourselves upon our straight clean spars,” the narrator states, tongue at least partly in cheek, “but a prettier little mast than Fayaway made was never shipped aboard of any craft.” (For insight into the richness of Melville’s entendres, go find out what the word mast meant in the local patois, which need not be discussed in detail here—this is a family introduction, after all.)

If Typee was to be excerpted in a contemporary outdoor and travel magazine of today—and modern adventure-mag editors would kill each other for it, take it from me—Melville would no doubt be asked to pick up the pace a little and cut some of the amazingly detailed descriptions, but the ending might just work: there’s blood, tears, home, and, jarringly, mother. Suffice it to say, Tommo somehow survives the cannibals and escapes, and—talk about anticlimaxes—turns back into Herman, who ends up living with his mother in upstate New York. It doesn’t take a Melvillian imagination to visualize the newly returned sailor wowing little parties of ladies and gentlemen with his inelegant remembrances of sumptuous South Pacific rainforests, of naked natives, of people eating people. He must have been quite pleased when people suggested he write it all down. He quickly did, padding his own photographic memories with notes from the reference works of the day. He found a publisher. Some revisions were called for. It was suggested that the author strike a number of the classical references, for instance; his publisher felt sales would improve with a dumbing down. His brother passed it on to some friends in England. Eventually, Washinton Irving read a draft. In a flash, Melville was famous, off and running at twenty-seven, cranking out books, on hiw way to The Whale.

Table of Contents

Preface, Chapters I to XXXIV

What People are Saying About This

D. H. Lawrence

Melville at his best invariably wrote from a sort of dream self, so that events which he relates of actual facts have a far deeper reference to his own soul and his own inner life.

John Updike

We are, perhaps, after a century of literary wasteland, able to read not only a personal predicament but a general truth in Melville's blasted island, bedeviled ships, misshapen houses, falling towers, kicking tables, and blank brick city walls. The appetite for truth is what gives Melville's narrative a persistent interest and, even under the spell of discouragement, that untoward verbal energy...like Billy Budd, Melville when a sailor on a man-of-war was a top man, at home on the highest yarns, enjoying the ride of few...Melville instinctively aspired to the grandest scale, and even his shorter works offers vast inklings and resonance of cosmic concerns.

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews