286
PARTISAN REVIEW
It contains many of the themes which Melville was later to develop.
The most striking
is
what we may call The Maimed Man in the
Glen. The hero of the story, who has injured
his
leg, languishes on
a tropical island in the deep, secluded valley of the Typees, a tribe
of Polynesians. The valley is a soporific paradise, a utopia for
Archaists and Doasyoulikes. Yet there is something menacing or
guilty about it. The natives are friendly to the hero and even worship
him, as a glamorous object from a distant land. But they are firm in
their refusal
~o
let him leave the valley. He begins to suspect them
of cannibalism. But glossing over these fears, the hero allows himself
to fall into a narcissistic reverie, as monotonous and opiate as the
procession of the days and nights. He oscillates between sickness and
health, pain and pleasure. He is "unmanned" by the "mysterious
disease" in
his
leg, which he is unable to cure. He is, as we come
gradually to realize, symbolically castrated.
In
Mardi
(a fantastic travelogue which can be loosely compared
with
Gulliver's Travels)
we discover a young king named Donjalolo.
An ancient taboo forces him to spend his life within the dark, nar–
row defile which encloses his kingdom. Like his ancestors, he must
"bury himself forever in this fatal glen." He rapidly changes from
a young man of great energy and promise to an effeminate exquisite
who flatters his senses with incense and languid maidens and who,
to escape the oppressive libidinal intensity of the sun, passes back
and forth every day between the House of the Morning and the
House of the Afternoon, two dark temples constructed with phallic
gigantism out of stone.
Ahab
is
one of these Maimed Men. He is castrated by his
whalebone leg, as Melville makes apparent in the chapter called
"Ahab's Leg." The central figure of
Pierre
(the novel which followed
Moby Dick,
in 1852) suffers from an Oedipus complex; he is another
one of these heroes-in
Pierre
Melville makes use of etymology in the
names of his characters, as Joyce was later to do: Pierre Glendinning
means "the stone which dwells in the glen." In
The Confidence Man,
" a kind of invalid Titan" emerges from a "cavernous old gorge"
and strikes down a smooth-talking peddler for selling a phony medi–
cine called the Samaritan Pain Dissuader. All of Melville's wounded
heroes have affinities with the saint and the savior- with Christ;
with Adonis; with the magician; with the
shaman,
whom primitive
peoples worship because of the
mana
he has acquired through his'
neurotic behavior. But in Melville the fate of these heroes, as we see
from Ahab and Pierre, is that they rush headlong into violent action,
