Mardi by Herman Melville

Protracted Pacific allegory

Nowadays Herman Melville is best known as the author of Moby-Dick, but in his lifetime he was popularly known as the writer of Typee and Omoo. These two books, adventure memoirs of Melville’s own travels to islands in the South Pacific, established him as a successful author. Melville had higher literary aspirations, however. With his third book he decided to turn away from nonfiction and become a novelist. The result, his 1849 novel Mardi, was poorly received by the critics of his day and is still regarded as one of his least successful efforts.

At first, Mardi seems like just another variation on the plots of Typee and Omoo. The narrator is a crew member on a whaling ship plying the tropics of the Pacific Ocean. Unable to find a profitable population of whales in equatorial regions, the captain decides to head North to the Arctic. Such a journey is not what the narrator signed on for, so he decides to jump ship, accompanied by his new friend, a brawny Nordic fellow named Jarl. After escaping in a small boat, the two figure that if they continue to head West they will eventually run into some tropical islands. The journey is more arduous and protracted then expected. In fact, a quarter of the entire novel is occupied with their wayward drifting before the pair ever reach land. Along the way they encounter a few other characters, but just as the reader starts to get involved with them, Melville pretty much abandons their story line and takes the book in an entirely different direction.

The castaways finally reach an island, where they receive a friendly welcome from the Natives. This island is one of many forming an archipelago the local inhabitants call Mardi. The narrator is given an island name, Taji, and welcomed among the ranks of island kings. Along the way he has found a love interest, named Yillah. Inexplicably, she’s a white woman, probably because the audience of Melville’s day would not have tolerated an interracial romance. One day Yillah disappears, and Taji ventures to the neighboring islands in search of her. This plot development, however, is simply an excuse to send Taji on a Gulliver’s Travels-esque tour of the islands, though the inhabitants of Mardi are not as fantastical as those Gulliver encountered. Rather, Melville uses the various islands to demonstrate various political systems, philosophical beliefs, or moral lessons. One island, for example, is a blatant surrogate for the Confederate States of America. Other islands illustrate the pros and cons of monarchy versus democracy or different denominations of faith. Taji is accompanied on his journey by a handful of local monarchs. At every stop the group engages in spirited philosophical debates reminiscent of Plato’s dialogues.

The text is thick with references to ancient history, classical mythology, and classic literature, all used as metaphors to describe the islanders. Melville also writes in a code of tropical lingo with which the reader must gradually become accustomed. The word “Mardi” is used as a synonym for the world, “Oro” is God, Alma is the name of a Christlike prophet, and so on. Mardi is loaded with beautifully poetic passages of writing, as well as some truly profound thoughts. Each chapter on its own could be studied and quoted for pearls of wisdom, but the cumulative effect of the 195 chapters in total is somewhat of a jumbled mess. Melville just tries to do too much with this novel when he should have spread all these ideas over the course of three or four books. Melville scholars probably love Mardi, because they can no doubt find much insight into the author’s personal philosophy and political views. Most other readers, however, will find Mardi overwhelmingly long, glacially paced, and narratively disappointing.
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