"One insular Tahiti"

[fino sjohn]

All,

    Re this expression, the Mansfield-Vincent edition suggests a comparison with the sentence from "The Grand Armada": But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still forever disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve around me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy."

 

    This seems more in keeping with the psychology of man than the statement from "Brit" where he admonishes one to "Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return." Obviously Ahab pushes off from his insular Tahiti. But if someone like Ahab could never return, he could not be redemptive.

 

   Either the Tahiti statement was written at a much earlier time, or intended to present a more fearful Ishmael as Hardeman suggests, or this statement had been changed by Melville's 19th-century editors, or I'm missing something.   John Gretchko

[Stephen Hoy]

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in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return! - Ch 58 Brit
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In answer to John G's query, I propose reading this passage as an implicit invocation of the expulsion from Eden. The underlying assumption is that the divine is found within a person's own soul, while the world without is a source of evil. As with Melville's insular Tahiti, once you leave Eden, you can't go back--not merely because of a formal injunction, but because innocence once lost can never be regained. 

Unlike innocence lost, a Paradise Lost doesn't necessarily preclude a Paradise Regained. The evidence of redemption John Gretchko looks for in The Grand Armada is somewhere in M-D, and can be sought and found consistently in Melville's other works, typically figured as the end stage of a psychological sequence progressing successively through stages of innocence, strife, death (defeat), and rebirth (redemption).

 

But this line of thought seems too serious for a proper enjoyment of Melville's mock-seriousness in the closing passage of Ch 58 Brit. Doesn't it seem that the author is pointedly poking fun at a specific target with the phrase "the horrors of the half-known life"?

[Phil Walsh]

In an off-list email a day or two ago I mentioned to another Ishmaelite
that my reading of "push not off from that isle" has always made me
think of the garden story. My thought, far cruder than Stephen's
explication but I think very much in sympathy with it, is that it is as
though Melville is reading the garden story and saying to the characters
"Don't bite the apple! Don't do it!" He knows the impossibility of what
he is saying, but doesn't stop wishing it could be so.

Phil W.

[Clare Spark]

You guys are all so not Jewish. And of course HM was struggling with
Christian belief all his adult life. First, look back at Mardi, the
"Dreams" chapter. Second, consider Goethe's influence and the
importance of the Pelagian heresy, in which I believe Melville
indulged.
On the difference between Jewish and Christians regarding paradises
lost, regained, or only existent upon earth, see the following, just
posted on my website, and now on History News Network at
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/10140. Why do you suppose Olson and
Murray spotted him as a "Jew" or as "Hebraic?" It was not his lifelong
belief in original sin and fallen flesh or the incomprehensibility of
it all.

Clare

[Phil Walsh]

On Thu, 2009-07-16 at 14:51 -0700, Clare Spark wrote:
> You guys are all so not Jewish.

Perhaps one of the pleasantest ways anyone has ever said to me "you
don't get this at all."

:-)

[Clare Spark]

Isn't there a poem ("Diving Bell")? thant ends with the line "where
more is hid than found." So I gather that he was a scrupulous
self-examiner (so Protestant), but either backed off from seeing, or
pretended that what was there wasn't ("vacant is the soul of man" ?).

thanks, Phil, and you are entirely correct about the meaning of
the message I had sent. Facebook is making me more obstreperous. That
and my website.
Clare, or you can call me Isabel, which is what everyone does anyway