Mardi

Mardi is Melville's first purely fictional work. Although Melville and his publishers presented his first two books, Typee and Omoo, as nonfiction, enough critics were able to identify plagiarism in them (especially Typee) from other works, both fiction and nonfiction, that their veracity and Melville's integrity were always points of contention. As a preface to Mardi, Melville wrote somewhat ironically that his first two books were nonfiction but disbelieved; by the same pattern he hoped the fiction book would be accepted as fact.

Much as did Typee and Omoo, Mardi details the travels of an American sailor who abandons a whaling vessel to explore the South Pacific. Unlike the first two books, however, Mardi is highly philosophical and said to be the first work to show Melville's true potential. Although not as cohesive or lengthy as Moby-Dick, it is much longer than Typee and Omoo and has much more in common stylistically and thematically with Moby-Dick and other works of his maturity.

The tale begins as a fairly simple escape and survival narrative. It briefly becomes romance when the narrator falls in love with a mysterious woman he has questionably rescued from a difficult situation. After the woman mysteriously disappears, the novel presumably becomes a quest for her among the innumerable isles of the newly "discovered" archipelago of Mardi, isles with many different symbolic and allegorical meanings. As the main characters continue their search for the woman, the novel switches again, now focusing on more than travelogue-style reporting of the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells to be experienced in Mardi. The social conventions, political structures, religious practices, odd histories, and other aspects of each isle and its inhabitants spark philosophical discourses between four main characters, with two previously main characters no longer in the story and the narrator receding so far into the background that he does not even participate in the philosophical discussions. The quest for the woman continues but is barely mentioned, serving at least to get the main characters traveling through Mardi faster.

The voyage from island to island echoes Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, especially the last two books. According to scholar Newton Arvin:

The praise of eating and drinking is highly Rabelaisian in intention, and so in general is all the satire on bigotry, dogmatism, and pedantry. Taji and his friends wandering about on the island of Maramma, which stands for ecclesiastical tyranny and dogmatism, are bound to recall Pantagruel and his companions wandering among the superstitious inhabitants of Papimany; and the pedantic, pseudo-philosophy of Melville's Doxodox is surely, for a reader of Rabelais, an echo of the style of Master Janotus de Bragmardo holding forth polysyllabically to Gargantua in Book I.^[1]

Arvin also recognizes the influence of Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift:

... there is something very Swiftian in Melville's Hooloomooloo, the Isle of Cripples, the inhabitants of which are all twisted and deformed, and whose shapeless king is horrified at the straight, strong figures of his visitors from over sea.^[2]

The emotional center of the book, Arvin writes, is the relation between Taji and Yillah, the "I" and the mysterious blonde who disappears as suddenly as she appeared. Taji begins a quest for her throughout the islands without finding her. Though Arvin finds the allegory of Yillah "too tenuous and too pretty to be anything but an artistic miscarriage" in the poetic sense, he also finds it "extremely revealing" in connection with the whole Melville canon. Yillah, associated with the lily in the language of flowers, is "an embodiment of the pure, innocent, essentially sexless happiness", and Hautia, "symbolized by the dahlia", embodies "the sensual, the carnal, the engrossingly sexual". The middle portion of the book is taken up by "a series of forays in social and political satire, and by quasi-metaphysical speculations" that are, if at all, at best "only loosely and uncertainly related to the quest for Yillah". The only way to perceive any fabric holding the book together, Arvin feels, is by recognizing "a certain congruity among the various more or less frustrated quests it dramatizes--the quest for an emotional security once possessed, the quest for a just and happy sociality once too easily assumed possible, and the quest for an absolute and transcendent Truth once imagined to exist and still longed for."^[3]

For Arvin, in Mardi Melville rejects not "the profounder moralities of democracy" so much as "a cluster of delusions and inessentials" that Americans have come to regard as somehow connected to the idea of democracy. Arvin recognizes three delusions to the cluster:

• "that political and social freedom is an ultimate good, however empty of content;
• that equality should be a literal fact as well as a spiritual ideal;
• that physical and moral evil are rapidly receding before the footsteps of Progress."^[2]

The philosophical plot, Arvin believes, is furnished by the interaction between the intense longing for certainty, and the suspicion that on the great fundamental questions, "final, last thoughts you mortals have none; nor can have."^[4] And even while one of the characters says, "Faith is to the thoughtless, doubts to the thinker", Arvin feels that Melville struggles to avoid a brutality of what Melville himself calls "indiscriminate skepticism", and he got closest to expressing "his basic thought" in Babbalanja's speech in the dark: "Be it enough for us to know that Oro"—God--"indubitably is. My lord! my lord! sick with the spectacle of the madness of men, and broken with spontaneous doubts, I sometimes see but two things in all Mardi to believe:--that I myself exist, and that I can most happily, or least miserably exist, by the practice of righteousness."^[4]

Mardi was a critical failure. One reviewer said the book contained "ideas in so thick a haze that we are unable to perceive distinctly which is which".^[5] Nevertheless, Nathaniel Parker Willis found the work "exquisite".^[5]

Nathaniel Hawthorne found Mardi a rich book "with depths here and there that compel a man to swim for his life ... so good that one scarcely pardons the writer for not having brooded long over it, so as to make it a great deal better."^[6]

The widespread disappointment of the critics hurt Melville yet he chose to view the book's reception philosophically, as the requisite growing pains of any author with high literary ambitions. "These attacks are matters of course, and are essential to the building up of any permanent reputation—if such would ever prove to be mine ... But Time, which is the solver of all riddles, will solve Mardi."^[7]

In the description of Arvin:

[T]he thoughts and feelings he was attempting to express in Mardi were too disparate among themselves and often too incongruous with his South Sea imagery to be capable of fusion into a satisfying artistic whole. In the rush and press of creative excitement that swept upon him in these months, Melville was trying to compose three or four books simultaneously: he failed, in the strict sense, to compose even one. Mardi has several centers, and the result is not a balanced design. There is an emotional center, an intellectual center, a social and political center, and though they are by no means utterly unrelated to each other, they do not occupy the same point in space.^[2]

Giordano Lahaderne has proposed that Mardi may have been influenced by the Book of Mormon (1830). The opening sequence of each is an "Old Testament in reverse" and Mardi's second volume includes a discourse on "an illustrious prophet, and teacher divine" named Alma, a name shared by Alma, one of the major prophets and missionaries within the Book of Mormon.^[8]

• Arvin, Newton (1950). Herman Melville, available for borrowing at the Internet Archive.

 

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Mardi

Online versions

• Mardi (1864 reprint, vol. 1 of 2) at Project Gutenberg
• Mardi (1864 reprint, vol. 2 of 2) at Project Gutenberg
•   Mardi public domain audiobook at LibriVox