May 27, 2009

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Melville’s Typee (1846) and the Case for Civilization

from The Brussels Journal, May 19, 2009My subject is Herman Melville, and more specifically Melville’s case for civilization, but I would like to approach his Typee (1846), where he makes that case, through a preamble having to do with the figure against whose arguments Melville stakes his own: Jean-Jacques Rousseau.IThere is a shadow-side in the Western tradition that takes the...

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May 24, 2009

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D. H. Lawrence on Herman Melville’s Typee and Omoo

“There is an invisible hand that grasps my heart and prevents it opening too much to these strangers. They are beautiful, they are like children, they are generous: but they are more than this. They are far off, and in their eyes is an easy darkness of the soft, uncreate past. In a way, they are uncreate. Far be it from me to assume any ‘white’ superiority. But...

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