'Melville Unfolding' and Beyond: Looking at culture, sexuality, and the fluid text 

I am presently writing a book, which is not exactly what I want to talk about, though I can’t see how to get around not talking about it.

This new book will be the third in a projected trilogy about the “Fluid Text.” My most recent publication—volume two in the trilogy—is titled Melville Unfolding: Sexuality, Politics, and the Versions of Typee, and I promise to get to it shortly. But right now, this third, unwritten work needs some airing. So far, I do not have a title for it. In fact, I am not entirely sure what it will finally say. As part of my research for it, I have kept a news clipping file of events that I am convinced relate to the content of this book. Here are some samples from that file. Please tell me if you see a message in them, the glimmer of a thesis, a connection.

Textangst: Is someone messing with someone else's words?

19 January 2006 In an English translation of Elie Weisel’s Holocaust memoir, Night, a description of people crammed into a boxcar uses the word copulate to describe the actions of young people. But subsequent reprints show that the word has been changed to flirt and then caress one another.
29 April 2006 A Spanish version of the national anthem was released today, and President George W. Bush announced that “people who want to be a citizen of this country … ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English.”
28 October 2006 In his edition of the unfinished 1865 novel The Curse of Caste; or the Slave Bride, by African-American author Julia C. Collins, scholar William Andrews supplies two alternate final chapters to complete the work.
22 December 2006 In a head note to their censored Op-Ed piece on Iran, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann tell readers that the blacked-out sections of their text are due to CIA intervention. The blackened passages contain already published information critical of the administration, none of which had ever been classified.
25 March 2007 Iranian-American Laleh Bakhtiar, preparing an English translation of the Koran, objects to a verse permitting a husband to beat his ill-behaved wife and has translated the Arabic word “daraba” (meaning beat or chastise) to “let go away.”
19 February 2008 A recently disclosed 2002 British intelligence report does not include any statement suggesting that Saddam Hussein could “launch chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to use them.” This text was added to the report by Tony Blair’s press advisers “to justify the decision to invade Iraq.”

These moments, recorded in The New York Times, have at least one thing in common: They are fraught with textangst. (I don’t think that is a real word, but it works, so I’ll use it.) The anxiety here is over the fact that someone for some reason is messing with someone else’s text.

In some cases, the violation of one’s text seems endurable, though a bit disconcerting. If Elie Weisel and his translators sanitize a passage in Night, perhaps at the behest of publishers hoping to increase sales to high schools, well, it’s their text and their choice. But the other episodes exhibit keener political and cultural tensions, as if the violation of one’s text is a violation of one’s self. Is it a crime if a woman translates away wife-beating in Islamic scripture? That will depend upon whom you talk to. Is it wrong if Latino Americans have a Spanish version of the Star Spangled Banner and sing it? Apparently their former President says it is wrong. Does a white scholar have the “right” to write his conclusion to a black woman’s novel? Can the CIA censor its former operatives even when they repeat truths that pose no security threat? Can British publicists revise intelligence memos when war is at stake, or at any time?

These instances of complicit or coerced revision of a text create textangst because while we can interpret a text our own way, we like to think that the text itself stays the same, over time, in your hands and in mine. But these six instances of willful textual alteration upset our cherished assumption of textual stability. In fact, the revision of a text, whether through translation, or censorship, or even authorial intention, is actually the rule not the exception. Texts evolve, though we may not see their evolutions or who made the change, how, and why. Written works exist in multiple versions because authors, editors, and readers make texts over often to make them more closely resemble themselves. They are “fluid texts,” and the ethics of textual revision is one subject I will be treating in this new unwritten book I have mentioned, though it is not my most urgent concern right now.

Revising events, revising identities, revising texts

For the moment I want to pursue a deeper connection we have to textual fluidity, which lurks in my sampler of news events. And it is this: These fluid text revisions are meaningful; they occur because authors and readers want control over the text, and they will rewrite the text to fit their vision of the text. And the way they revise—the way a text evolves—shows how individuals and cultures interact, over time and under varying conditions. But more: Humans evolve just as texts do. People revise themselves as they revise their texts. Textual revision and self-revision are a cunning, interdependent pair. So putting aside for the moment the rankest of textual censorings and deadly manipulations made by government officials, I want for the time being to focus on smaller textual moments in which text and identity evolve together. Ultimately, I want to ask how understanding fluid texts can help us understand the dynamics of identity formation in a multicultural society.

Let’s look at the sampler’s smaller “violations” to see if they are violations. What intrigues me is the modern, white male scholar who rewrites a nineteenth-century, black female’s book about slavery: Is this a transgression, or an attempt to transcend racial and gender boundaries, or an experiment in cross-identification? What intrigues me is the Holocaust survivor who converts copulation into caress: Is this a corrected memory of sex and death, or amnesia, or audience accommodation? What intrigues me is the immigrant who puts his new nation’s song into his native tongue and the female translator who seeks to revise androcentric Islam: Is this the death of a nation and a religion, or their rebirth? If these fluid text moments are textual violations, they are nevertheless also telling moments of desire that take us to the heart of a culture’s dilemmas, or a writer’s dance with ideology, or the acceptances and resistances that constitute identity in America.

Melville and Typee's evolution 

But this is the book I hope to write. The book I have recently published, Melville Unfolding, explores similar categories of textual revision and self-regeneration in Herman Melville’s struggle to compose his first (and, in his day, only successful) publication, Typee. This exploration focuses exclusively on what we can learn from the rich, tangled, dark terrain of deletions and insertions found on a recently discovered, three-chapter fragment of Melville’s working draft manuscript of his novel. The book also contains, in its appendix, an edition of the manuscript, which is itself a selection of materials from a fuller electronic archive, also recently launched by the University of Virginia Press.

Typee (1846) is a factual-fictional account of Melville’s four-week stay in Taipivai, a remote valley on Nuku Hiva, a South Pacific island in the (still) remote Marquesas group. In late June of 1842, Melville’s whaling vessel, the Acushnet, had anchored at the island’s most populous bay. The young whaler was twenty-three, and his eighteen months of regimentation and deprivation at sea were quite enough for him. He declared himself independent of his captain, ran off into the mountains with a friend named Toby, got lost, and ended up in the valley of the Taipis, a tribe of fierce warriors reputed to be cannibals. There, he falls famously for an island girl, Fayaway, who soothes his inexplicable feelings of guilt and depression once Toby makes a getaway. Adapting to life in what he would later call “Typee,” Melville, or rather Tommo (the character he would become in Typee), nevertheless balks when natives try to tattoo him and when he sees three suspicious-looking human heads, one seemingly that of a white man. Is it Toby? He doesn’t wait to find out and makes a violent getaway.

Upon his return home in 1845, Melville regaled friends and family with tales of his island and maritime exploits, so much so that he was convinced he could write a book about them. Which he did, and it launched the short publishing career of America’s greatest writer. Leap ahead, then, to 1983 and the discovery (in an attic in upstate New York) of three crucial chapters from the Melville’s first draft of Typee. In transcribing these chapters the following year, I began deciphering its thousand or so revision sites and readily observed that the great Herman Melville was no different from you or me when it comes to composition; he was an inveterate reviser, and in fact made up his story as he went along. I also discerned that he was making up himself—revising his politics and sexuality—while he was revising his text. Indeed his textual revisions were a stimulus to his self-revision.

But as my work continued into the 1990s, I found that transcribing the Typee manuscript pages was not enough. Patient analysis of Melville’s process showed me that the manuscript comprises three modes of revision that I call transcription, transformation, and translation. These “inferred versions” do not appear as independent drafts on separate documents but are layered one over the other, here and there, throughout the single, thirty-leaf document.

In the “transcription” version, Melville set down his experiences as best as his memory would allow. In this mode his drafting from memory triggered new memories, which in turn required him to make factual revisions. In the “transformation” version, Melville found that the people he remembered as facts were becoming characters in a little romance involving himself, Toby, Fayaway, and her family. Here, he focused his revision energies on dramatizing events, adding humor, tightening Toby and Fayaway’s language, and exploring the dynamics of their sexualities.

But if Melville were to sustain his factual account, and not overly expose his own sexual growth (although enough sexuality, in fact, survived to make Typee a sensation), in short, if Typee were to sell as the travel book it purported to be, he would have to curtail the romance. At the same time, as Melville researched other island travel books for facts beyond his personal experience, he discovered, in works by the missionary Charles Stewart and controversial Naval juggernaut David Porter, confirmation of his earlier observations and suspicions that American and European imperialists had wreaked havoc on the Pacific Islands. Thus, in the “translation” version, Melville added digressions to his narrative inveighing against the destruction of island culture by missionaries like Stewart and brutal opportunists like Porter. Rather than transcribing his memories, or transforming them into romance, he was translating his narrative into a polemic that would urge readers to comprehend an alien culture.

In thinking about how I would write all this up into a critical study, I realized that if I were to make a convincing case, I would have to display these versions somehow, or at least the thousand or so revision sites that constitute the versions. And to do that, I found myself seduced into becoming a textual scholar, and eventually a digital scholar. I had to become an editor of the manuscript in order to be a critic of Melville’s sexual and political evolutions. I found, though, that my fluid text approach had to differ from conventional editing that typically offers little more than the transcription of working drafts like the Typee manuscript. And given my development of what I call “revision sequences” and “revision narratives” (discussed below), which are linked to revision sites on the transcription, it was obvious that I would have to edit Melville’s versions of Typee electronically.

Here’s the problem. You can transcribe the manuscript so people can read Melville’s bad handwriting and discern his lined-out deletions and crammed-in insertions, but such a transcription alone cannot convey the steps Melville took in rewriting his text or even the wording of his revisions. To convey the texts of a “revision sequence,” an editor has to decode Melville’s revision codes on the manuscript—his instructions for revision, so to speak—and “textualize” each step of the process, spelling out the very texts Melville had in mind as he shifted from one wording to the next.

Part of my fluid text editorial project, then, was to supply revision sequences for over a thousand revision sites associated with the manuscript. In doing so, I was able to make the otherwise invisible texts of Melville’s revision visible, thus giving readers fuller access to Melville’s shifting intentions. But I also found that my revision sequences—the bare bones skeleton of a revision process—required some flesh, not to mention an argument for it. You and I may look at the same revision site and come up with different sequences. To justify one’s revision sequences, an editor must also narrativize the sequence. Therefore, I composed for each revision sequence an accompanying “revision narrative” that tells the story of why Melville took the revision steps he took.

With the full archive of materials—manuscript images, transcriptions, base text, revision sites, sequences, and narratives—assembled online by Rotunda, I then published Melville Unfolding, a separate critical work in print that also includes a selection of the digital archive’s edition. In the book I focus on various revision patterns to show how Melville grew sexually and culturally as he wrote.

The right word: savage versus islander

One intriguing set of revisions discussed in the book concerns Melville’s play with the word savage, which reveals the growth of his political consciousness. Generally speaking, in his initial composition, Melville referred to the Typees as “savages.” But in revision, the writer made a point to revise this negative ethnocentric term to cultural neutral descriptors: native or islander. And this pattern would seem to be compelling evidence that Melville was liberalizing his worldview as he wrote. However, in one or two instances I found that Melville reversed his revision pattern: He would change islander or native to savage. But in such cases, I also found that Melville would use savage during moments of cultural anxiety—such as when he and Toby think they are about to be eaten—that play upon Melville’s former fears and what he knew would be his present readers stereotyped misconceptions. Thus, rather than undermining the savage-native pattern, these fascinating, infrequent reversals reveal a more complex “revision strategy” linked to a rhetorical strategy: That is, Melville wasn’t just revising himself; he was trying to revise his readers as well and force them to grow as he had grown.

Revisions of the sexual self

Typee also records Melville’s sexual evolution. This growth is true even if you read the book as it was printed and without recourse to the manuscript’s earlier more explicit versions. Melville’s protagonist Tommo is strongly attracted to the smaller, darker, smartly dressed and volatile Toby; they are tight shipmate buddies. Their homosocial condition is compromised when they encounter the scantily clad women of Typee. Although Toby leaves before any rivalries arise, Tommo’s relation to Toby, as he evolves toward heterosexuality, is tense. The anxieties of Tommo’s sexual growth are all the more evident in the textangst of Melville’s revisions in scenes involving Toby and Fayaway.

If we read Typee as partial autobiography—and nothing prevents us—the departure of the real Toby—Richard Tobias Greene—seems to have played heavily upon Melville. His friend, it appears, escaped with the idea of returning to rescue the invalid Melville, who suffered from a leg wound (itself a potent symbol in the narrative). But Toby Greene never returned. Melville would eventually make his own escape, but Typee ends with a tense reflection on Toby: Did his shipmate abandon Melville? Was he killed? Astonishingly, upon the publication of Typee four years after their island adventure, the real Toby emerged in Buffalo, New York, to tell his tale, and Melville added to further editions of Typee his rendition of Toby’s adventures (and a vindication of him) in a sequel titled “The Story of Toby.” The friends reunited with old recriminations and doubts repaired.

But the manuscript was written in darker times, during which Melville struggled with anguish and guilt over Toby’s possible abandonment of him or his death because of him. In his drafting, Melville revisited, and revised, his mixed feelings for his beloved friend Toby, exploring issues “I had never before had the courage calmly to contemplate.” Increasingly depressed by Toby’s absence, Melville composed an early instance of the kind of psychologizing over human relations he would become famous for in Moby-Dick and other great works.

But with the inconstancy of a desponding mind that speculates in the dark as to the causes that have produced the misery under which it languishes, I would often experience the most bitter remorse after indulging in these reflections & again & again would seek to peirce the mystery that hung over the sudden disappearance of my companion.

Melville first erased the last two words, replacing “my companion” with “Toby,” as if to deprive himself and Toby of any acknowledgment of their close friendship. Melville’s second revision was to eliminate this passage altogether. Words like desponding, misery, remorse—the passions of despair—are gone as, too, as is the vaguely sexual phrase—“to peirce the mystery” of Toby—a hint at the intensity of the relationship the young, soon to be married Melville had to express but also had to hide through revision. In Melville Unfolding I explore the dynamics of Melville’s imperializing of his evolving sexual orientations.

Tommo’s attraction to Fayaway builds in the wake of Toby’s “sudden disappearance.” In a famous scene, Fayaway comes to comfort Tommo, or at least Tommo sees it that way. In the transcription version, Melville initially records Fayaway’s “sweet voice” and “expression.” But just as he removes evidence of his feelings for Toby’s departure, Melville also transforms the scene with Fayaway by converting descriptive detail into drama, thus her “glance” becomes “glistening eyes gazing.” But he also converts her “gentle bosom” that is swayed by “thoughts and feelings” into a “mind” swayed by “impulses.” In the absence of Toby, Melville is constructing the native Fayaway into a being that reflects his own cultural desires for both consciousness (mind) and primal instinct (impulse), and a being, by the way, more balanced than his former male companion.

The fuller story of Melville’s revisions with regard to his sexuality—his arresting of the narrative’s romance, his erasure of Toby, and his conversion of Fayaway—appears in the chapters that make up the section on “transformation” in Melville Unfolding. Other sections explore Melville’s political growth and his use of Stewart and Porter as source books he both plagiarized and attacked. As noted, the volume’s appended edition of the manuscript provides images and transcriptions plus a selection of revision sequences and narratives examined in the book itself. Readers wanting a fuller immersion into the manuscript can visit the electronic edition’s fuller archive, and browsers of the online edition hoping to gain further critical insight into Melville’s textual and self-revisions can peruse Melville Unfolding.

My hope in developing these two works—in print and online—is to give readers fuller access to otherwise inaccessible materials, and an approach that combines criticism and textual scholarship. But I also hope to grow beyond Typee. Melville used revision to find himself, sexually and politically, and to forge a relation with readers, one that conceals but also compels. And I feel his writing process is a link to larger patterns of identity formation and textual revision. But that is the work of another book altogether.

John Bryant is a professor of English at Hofstra University, specializing in early American literature, Melville, textual studies, and digital scholarship. His books include Melville and Repose (Oxford), The Fluid Text (Michigan), and Melville Unfolding (Michigan). He is co-editor of the Longman Critical Edition of Moby-Dick and the editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies and of the Melville Electronic Library.