SOURCE: “Melville and the Tradition of Primitive Utopia,” in JGE: The Journal of General Education, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, Spring, 1981, pp. 6-14.

[In the following essay, Beauchamp evaluates the primitive, escapist utopia of Melville's Typee.]

Among the compensatory myths of political theory, before the Idea of Progress pushed all others to the periphery, three figured most significantly: the myth of the Golden Age, the concept of the Noble Savage, and the dream of utopia. Although these imaginative constructs differ to the obvious degree of each requiring its own rubric, they nevertheless interpenetrate in crucial ways and share a number of common features. Of the three, the image of utopia is the most complex, the most multi-dimensional, with the most tangled intellectual history. Those ideographs of society redeemed from the Fall and purified of the ills of the real world, which we call utopias, themselves divide dramatically into two types—what Lewis Mumford has called utopias of reconstruction and utopias of escape.¹ The tradition of the reconstructive utopia begins with Plato's Republic and Laws and includes most of the works that constitute the literary-cum-philosophical genre: More's Utopia, Campanella's City of the Sun, Andreae's Christianopolis, Cabet's Voyage to Icaria, Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race, Bellamy's Looking Backward, Wells' several technocratic futures, and B. F. Skinner's Walden Two, along with a host of less significant progeny. What unites these fictive projections—as well as numerous political blueprints, such as those of Robert Owen, Fourier and Comte—is a stress on social organization and behavior control. Rational planning is the keynote, with the inevitable result that the imaginary citizens of these imaginary societies appear manipulated, regimented, and fungible—quite rational, but rather robotic. The model of the reconstructive utopia I have elsewhere defined as civilization-only-more-so: that is, as a systematic intensification of the restraints upon which all actual societies rest.²

The model of the escapist utopia, paradoxically, represents the other extreme: a primitivist rejection of the entangling restraints of civilization. That the same generic term should denote both models is a source of no little confusion. R. W. Chambers, for instance, complains that, while More's Utopia is “a sternly righteous and puritanical State, … yet we go on using the word ‘Utopia’ to signify an easy-going paradise, whose only fault is that it is too happy and ideal to be realized.”³ This is true, it is perplexing, and the ambiguous usage will no doubt continue. Our only resort is to make the necessary discriminations at the necessary junctures. But it needs to be insisted that the reconstructive utopias are not hegemonic of the genre. The utopias of escape have their own tradition, more venerable even than those in the Platonic tradition, and their own appeal. A few years ago I came across a newspaper column that began this way: “Ask most guys to describe Utopia and they’ll say something about being stretched out in a hammock on a tropical island with no taxes, no sinuses, a surplus of parking places, no tipping, a 32-inch waistline, and not having to shave, while Raquel Welch peels you a grape. … That’s Utopia all right!” It is, in fact, not a bad redaction of the escapist version of utopia, though Sir Thomas More would no doubt be dumbfounded that his pun had come to encompass visions of Raquel Welch and peeled grapes.

In its primitivistic rejection of civilization's arbitrary coercions, the escapist utopia emphasizes man's innate goodness, his naturalness—as opposed to the artificial sophistications of civilized man—and his saving simplicity. Unlike its reconstructive counterparts, with their plethora of rules and prescriptions, the escapist utopia projects a world of gentle, unthreatening anarchy. Rabelais' quasi-utopia anti-monastery, the Abbey of Thélème, captures precisely the spirit that informs these secular images of paradise. “All their lives,” Rabelais writes of his Thélèmites, “was spent not in laws, statutes and rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labor, sleep when they had a mind to it, and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them. … In all their rule and the strictest tie of their order, there was but one clause to be observed: do what thou wilt.” Reaching back to Hesiod's Golden Age and forward to Morris' News from Nowhere—or even beyond, to Huxley's Island—the escapist utopia embodies man's dream of an innocent, playful existence, in which nature itself conspires to fulfill his every desire, a life without effort, without toil. In the most extreme versions—the medieval folk utopias, like Schlaraffia and the Land of Cockaigne—the trees bear pancakes, the rivers run wine, and roast pigs roam the streets, with knife and fork in their backs, crying “Eat me, eat me!” Though the wish-fulfillment manifest in these Cloud-cuckoolands quickly shades them into comic fantasy, still they bear eloquent witness to man's enduring illusion that he ought to be able to find complete happiness, this side of heaven.

Tales of these wonderful lands long predate even the Odyssey and Gilgamesh, where they first enter literature, but with the voyages of discovery in the sixteenth-century, they assumed a new geography and a new ontology. The Noble Savages of the New World were reputed to be, in the words of Arthur Barlowe (a member of the first Roanoke expedition), “most gentle, loving and faithful, void of all guile and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the golden age.”⁴ A society composed of Noble Savages, living after the manner of the golden age, constitutes perforce an escapist—in Mumford's sense—or primitivist utopia: here the three compensatory myths merge in, as it was supposed, not a fiction, but a flesh-and-blood fact. The natives of the New World appeared to have incarnated some of the deepest-seated hopes and longings of the natives of the Old, reifying utopia in the forest wigwams of their unfallen Eden. Montagine's famous essay “Of the Cannibals” provides the paradigmatic statement of the superiority of the Noble Savage's primitivism over not only the European realities of the day, but also over the venerated utopian ideations of Plato and Plutarch. In a celebrated passage, part of which Shakespeare appropriated for Gonzalo in The Tempest, Montaigne writes of the Indians of Brazil:

I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato had no knowledge of them, for it seems to me that what we have learned by contact with those nations surpasses not only all the beautiful colors in which the poets have depicted the golden age, and all their ingenuity in inventing a happy state of man, but also the conceptions of Philosophy herself. They were incapable of imagining so pure and native a simplicity, as that which we see by experience; nor could they have believed that human society could have been maintained by so little human artifice and solder. This is a nation, I should say to Plato, which has no manner of traffic; no knowledge of letters; no science of numbers; no name of magistrate or statesman; no use for slaves; neither wealth nor poverty; no contracts; no successions; no partitions; no occupations but that of idleness; only a general respect of parents; no clothing; no agriculture; no metals; no use of wine or corn. The very words denoting falsehood, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction … [are] unheard of. How far from this perfection would [Plato] find the ideal republic he imagined!

Here, then, are encapsulated the essential characteristics that mark the escapist utopia, the primitivist ideal of life lived according to nature.

II

In his first published work, Typee (1846)—that strange mixture of novel, travelogue, and treatise—Melville describes, as more or less sober fact, a society of South Sea islanders that manifests almost all of the features of the primitivist utopias sketched above. I have argued elsewhere that in Typee Melville was indebted to (or at least very closely paralleled) Montaigne's essay in his treatment of the natives of the Marquesas. The ideological tendenz of Typee accords exactly with that of other works depicting the Noble Savage inhabiting a primitive utopia, works such as Diderot's Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville. The primary function of the primitive utopia is social criticism of civilized life: the moral excellence and unspoiled naturalness of the primitive are held up as a rebuke to the decadent, dishonest, immoral mores and manners of European man. The writer attempts to subvert the smug assumptions of superiority his countrymen feel toward the backward races by representing a world happier and healthier than their own, free of its perfervid pressures and irrational practices. By means of his relentlessly pejorative contrasts of the exotic with the familiar, a Montaigne, a Diderot, or a Melville forces the reader to adopt a new angle of vision—what Darko Suvin has called estrangement⁵—so that he must reassess what is truly savage and truly civilized. Inevitably the primitive utopia of the bon sauvage serves to condemn the reader's own race, moment, and milieu as artificial, unnatural, perverted. This purpose pervades Typee, to a degree unparalleled by any other work in this tradition.

Melville never calls Typee Valley a utopia, of course, but that hardly signifies. In effecting his escape from the whaling ship Acushnet, he clearly felt that he—in the guise of his persona-narrator Tommo—had stumbled upon paradise. The lengthy account he provides of the Typees' Edenic valley rehearses all the motifs of a tradition of which he knew, most likely, relatively little. “The penalty of the Fall,” Melville writes, “presses very lightly upon the Valley of Typee; for, with the one solitary exception of striking a light, I scarcely saw any piece of work performed there which caused the sweat to stand upon a single brow. As for digging and delving for a livelihood, the thing is altogether unknown. Nature has planted the breadfruit and the banana, and in her own good time she brings them to maturity, when the idle savage stretches forth his hand, and satisfies his appetite” (p. 220).⁶ Or again: “There seemed to be no cares, griefs, troubles, or vexations in all of Typee. The hours tripped along as gaily as the laughing couples down a country dance” (p. 146). Here is the quintessence of the popular image of utopia, of one of those easy-going paradises that Chambers faulted only for being too happy and too ideal to be realized; but the force of Melville's account stems in large part from its not being fantasy but fact—embroidered fact, to be sure, but fact nonetheless. Melville's amateur ethnography largely replaces imagination, so that the Typees owe their utopia not to authorial fiat, but to Nature's own grace and bounty, of which Melville claims to be merely the recorder.⁷

The solitary exception to the Typees' exemption from labor—their difficulty in striking a fire, mentioned above—itself serves as occasion for one of those invidious comparisons that fill the book.

What a striking evidence does this operation furnish of the wide difference between the extreme of savage and civilized life. A gentleman of Typee can bring up a numerous family of children and give them all a highly respectable cannibal education, with infinitely less toil and anxiety than he expends in the simple process of striking a light; whilst a poor European artisan, who through the instrumentality of a lucifer [match] performs the same operation in one second, is put to his wit's end to provide for his starving offspring that food which the children of a Polynesian father, without troubling their father, pluck from the branches of every tree around them (p. 132).

While the lucifer match hardly qualifies as an instance of high technology, still the comparison here points up that the material progress that marked the industrial age entailed no concomitant social or moral progress. Indeed, the uses to which Western man's technology were put elicit from Melville outbursts of Swiftean savae indignato: “The fiend-like skill we display in the manner of all death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth” (p. 145). If civilization, with its technological superiority, produces such savage behavior, then the primitive simplicity of the savage is clearly to be preferred.

[T]he Polynesian savage, surrounded by all the luxurious provisions of nature, enjoy[s] an infinitely happier, though certainly a less intellectual, existence than the self-complacent European. … [T]he voluptuous Indian, with every desire supplied, whom Providence has bountifully provided with all the sources of pure and natural enjoyment, and from whom are removed so many of the ills and pains of life—what has he to desire at the hands of Civilization? … In a primitive state of society, the enjoyments of life, though few and simple, are spread over a great extent, and are unalloyed; but Civilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve—the heart burnings, the jealousies, the social rivalries, the family dissentions, and the thousand self-inflicted discomforts of refined life, which make up in units the swelling aggregate of human misery, are unknown among these unsophisticated people (pp. 144-45).

If time allowed, I could detail more specifically the features that the world of the Typees shares with other fictive and quasi- or pseudo-anthropological works in the primitivist utopian tradition; but one or two must suffice as representative. Like Rabelais' Thélèmites, Montaigne's Brazilians, or Diderot's Tahitians, the Typees live without benefit of laws, judges or jails: “During the time I lived among the Typees, no one was ever put on trial for any offence against the public. To all appearances there are no courts of law. … In short, there were no legal provisions whatever for the well-being and the conservation of society, the enlightened end of civilized legislation. And yet everything went on in the valley with a harmony and smoothness unparalleled … in the most select, refined, and pious associations of mortals in Christendom” (p. 227).

True, Melville observed that a subtle, intricate network of proscriptions arranged much of Typeean life. The paradox that Polynesia, equated in the popular imagination (then as now) with unrestrained ‘natural’ freedom, should have provided the term taboo did not escape his attention, and he devotes some of the most fascinating pages of Typee to pondering the inexplicable labyrinth of the primitive's social code. Still, for all that, the Typeean taboos appear to be an innate, natural part of their existence, not an artificial, arbitrary imposition demanding constant monitoring, as is the case in civilized lands. Indeed, the indiscerptible concord, the oneness of view that characterizes their society, constitutes the goal of all utopian models, whether reconstructive or escapist. In sociologists' terms, utopias are equilibrium, as opposed to conflict, models of society: their ideal is a world where no differences of opinion, and thus no social conflict, can exist.⁸ Swift, in describing his utopianesque Houyhnhnms, provides the classic formulation of this desideratum: “their grand maxim,” he writes, “is to cultivate reason, and be wholly governed by it. Neither is reason among them a point problematical as with us, where men can argue with plausibility on both sides of a question; but strikes you with immediate conviction; as it must needs do when it is not mingled with, obscured or discoloured by passion and interest.” Any survey of utopian societies will quickly establish this Houyhnhnmesque uniformity of belief as a primary essential; but, again, what the imagination projected in its fictive ideations, the Typees had realized in fact:

There was one admirable trait in the general character of the Typees which, more than anything else, secured my admiration: it was the unanimity of feeling they displayed on every occasion. With them there hardly appeared to be any difference of opinion upon any subject whatever. They all thought and acted alike. I do not conceive that they could support a debating society for a single night: there would be nothing to dispute about (p. 229).

That Melville found the total harmony of the Typees their most admirable quality is hardly surprising, for that same quality has entranced utopists of all varieties in all ages; but it leads, in turn, to consideration of one of the most paradoxical aspects of Typee. If Melville, that is, had encountered paradise in Typee Valley, why was he so hellbent to leave it? As any reader of the novel will remember, Tommo spends much of his time entertaining means of escaping the valley and, when the opportunity at last appears, even resorts to fatal force to achieve his deliverance. The ostensible reason for his eagerness for rescue is his fear of the Typees' cannibalism: given that they were never anything but kind and considerate to him, Tommo nevertheless cannot escape the fear that he might some day end up in the trencher. Yet one feels that if the Typees had limited their diet exclusively to bananas and breadfruit, Tommo still, after his initial curiosity was satiated, would have wished himself out of Typee Valley and back among the white men whose practices he spends so much time excoriating so bitterly. Why should this be so?

Melville provides a clue when he describes his Noble Savages as like “a parcel of children playing with dolls and baby houses” (p. 201). The very childlikeness of the Typees—so similar to that of the ennervated Eloi of Wells' The Time Machine—proves finally uncongenial, alien to the active restlessness of the Western psyche. D. H. Lawrence, in his pioneering essay on Typee, offers a perceptive, if rather perfervid, analysis of this alienness:

Paradise. He insisted on it. Paradise. … Plenty to eat, needing no clothes to wear, sunny, happy people, sweet water to swim in: everything a man can want. Then why wasn’t he happy along with the savages? … [I]t seems to me, that in living so far, through all our bitter centuries of civilization, we have still been living onwards, forwards. … [H]owever false and foul our forms and systems are now, still, through the many centuries since Egypt, we have been living and struggling forwards along some road that is no road, and yet is a great life-development. We have struggled on, and on we must still go. … But we can’t go back. Whatever else the South Sea Islander is, he is centuries and centuries behind us in the life struggle, the consciousness-struggle, the struggle of the soul into fullness. … We can’t go back to the savages: not a stride. We can be in sympathy with them. We can take a great curve in their direction, onwards. But we cannot turn the current of our life backwards, back towards their soft warm twilight and uncreated mud. Not for a moment.⁹

Thus Melville-Tommo must escape from the Typees, else his personality would decompose in the very placidity of their soft, undemanding paradise, which represents, at least for Western man, a kind of mind-death, like that which the Lotos-Eaters offer Ulysses' sailors in Tennyson's poem. Perhaps the Faustian restlessness and onward striving of the Western psyche is its fatal flaw, as has often been asserted. Still, Lawrence is right: there is no turning back to the childlike innocence of Eden, playing with dolls and baby houses. Like Tommo, we would be bored to death. The protest of Dr. Johnson's Prince Rasselas against the unvarying perfection of the Happy Valley where he is imprisoned would probably sum up the reaction we would have to life in the primitive utopia, perhaps, indeed, in any utopia: “That I want nothing … that is my complaint. … Possessing all that I can want, I find one day and hour exactly like another, except that the latter is still more tedious than the former. … I have already enjoyed too much; give me something to desire.” Utopias may incline us to re-evaluation of our own society, even to reforms of it, but should we ever find ourselves actually ensconced in one, like Tommo we would probably start casting about for some means to escape.

Notes

1. The Story of Utopias (1922; rpt. New York: Viking Press, 1962), pp. 15-23.

2. See “Of Man's Last Disobedience: Zamiatin's We and Orwell's 1984,” Comparative Literature Studies, 10 (1973), 285-301; and “Utopia and Its Discontents,” Midwest Quarterly, 16 (1975), 161-74.

3. Thomas More (1935; rpt. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1958), p. 125.

4. David B. Quinn, ed., The Roanoke Voyages, 1585-1590 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1955), I, 108.

5. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

6. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life during a Four Months' Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas (New York: Signet Classics, 1964). Subsequent page references to this edition will be given parenthetically in the text.

7. For the most intensive attempt to sort out what is “fact” and what is “fiction” in Typee, see Charles Anderson, Melville in the South Seas (1939; rpt. New York: Dover, 1966), pp. 179-95. Anderson concludes that, for all his novelistic reworking of his experience, Melville gives an essentially accurate ethnological account of Typee life. See also Leon Howard, “Historical Note,” in the standard edition of Typee (Evansville and Chicago: Northwestern U. Press and the Newberry Library, 1968), pp. 291-93.

8. For a more detailed analysis of this aspect of utopias, see my “The Anti-Politics of Utopia,” Alternative Futures, 2 (1979), 49-59.

9. Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; rpt. New York: Viking Press, 1964), pp. 135-37.