Mardi - Herman Melville

Mardi: And A Voyage Thither (Herman Melville, 1849)

After two largely autobiographical travel works (Typee and Omoo), Melville dove face first into what he termed his first "romance of Polynesian adventure," though that description really only fits the first 150 pages. Mardi is actually a dense, poetic allegory distracted by some dated satire and a lot of metaphysics. Sounds like Moby Dick, right? It's a fair enough comparison to say Mardi is just a dry run for the whale tale, but I think it has commendable qualities of its own, even if it's not entirely successful.

As I said, it starts out as an adventure novel. The nameless narrator enlists a comrade and together they desert their whaling ship. In an open boat, they sail west for a thousand miles across the Pacific, eventually reaching the fictional archipelago of Mardi. On the way, they have various adventures surviving the open sea and encountering other mariners. They even rescue a maiden in distress. In Mardi, the narrator is accounted the sun god Taji (though just one god of many) and welcomed by fellow god King Media of the island of Odo. Henceforth known as Taji, the narrator and the maiden Yillah fall in love and begin an idyllic existence.

So far, we have a pretty standard adventure tale, though with some poetic writing and entertainingly elevated language to distinguish it. However, Yillah vanishes, and Taji enlists King Media, the historian Mohi, the philosopher Babbalanja, and the minstrel Yoomy to help him search all of Mardi and find her. At this point, Taji almost disappears from the narrative, and it becomes a mixture of allegory and satire as they tour Mardi, each island they visit providing some picture of the state of man (or some particular nation in 1849). We also have some pretty heavy dialectic, mainly between Babbalanja and King Media. Many of these discourses are thought provoking, and many more are humorous, but there's only so much variety you can get after hundreds of pages.

The same is true for the isles they visit: some are brilliantly conceived and others are just tiresome. Usually the good ones are more abstract and truly allegorical, i.e. you can't say, "Oh, that island is symbolizing France." In one island, the child ruler is believed to harbor the souls of all previous rulers, who inhabit the child at different days. So what he enacts one day, he annuls the next, and no one holds him accountable. In another island, the ruler is bound by law and superstition to never leave his mountain-locked valley. He tries to learn of the outside world through emissaries, but their seemingly contradictory accounts throw him into despair, and he tries to drown his sorrows in women and wine. Maramma, the official seat of religious authority in the archipelago, boasts blind guides, unquestionable dogma, and idol souvenirs. Meanwhile, the two peoples on the Island of Diranda are afflicted with peace, so the two rulers devise bloody games to keep down the population.

These more striking pictures have powers and delights of no inconsiderable measure, but the book is weakened by other stops of a less universal nature. A good part of the last third of the book tries to satirize Britain, Europe, and the U.S. in a Swiftian fashion. These more topical stops would be alright if they signified anything, but we don't get much outside of a condemnation of slavery and a philosophical whitewashing of the horrors of the French Revolution. I guess they can't all be winners...

Though Taji occasionally pipes up in the narrative, he remains largely an observer and listener. Babbalanja the philosopher supersedes him as the main character: a feisty, tricky, sometimes clownish but almost always despairing rationalist trying to make sense of Mardi. He has some pretty funny discourses with King Media, quoting from Mardian sages and claiming temporary insanity when his arguments don't sit well with his monarch. As the book continues, Babbalanja grows more despondent of finding answers, digging himself into a Nietschean hole of existential pain.

Things pick back up at the end of the book. Hope comes for Babbalanja in an unexpected form, but Taji will have none of it. He must find Yillah, even if it means finally giving in to the enticements of Queen Hautia, who has hounded their trail off an on throughout the novel. Taji pursues his quest to the bitter end, and what a bitter end it is. The end is shocking, abrupt, and haunting. It's no wonder the book didn't sell.

Ultimately, I think Mardi is two different stories. They are related to a degree, but they would have been stronger on their own: either the philosophical allegory of Babbalanja's journey to answers, or the tale of Taji searching for a lost love. Mixed together, they distract from each other, even though they do comment on each other. Mostly, though, the book needed a merciless editor to trim about 100 pages (maybe 200). Then we might have an indisputable masterpiece on our hands; as it is, we have a worthy attempt.

Arbitrary rating: 4 out of 5 novel-length prose poems