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• W2024989241 abstract "MELVILLE'S MEMENTO MORI Robert Waite' The writings of Herman Melville are unified by characteristic thematic concerns and artistic devices. One device which recurs in several of his works is the memento mori, usually a human skull or skeleton. Variations of this motif appear in Typee, Mardi, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, Benito Cereño, The Encantadas, The ConfidenceMan , and BUIy Budd, Sailor. In each case the image is more than a reminder of the inevitability of death. Its significance lies in its relationship to the epistemological concern of the work, for the image always challenges an attempt to perceive reality through non-empirical means. Religious beliefs, philosophical assumptions, or psychic disorientation can make reality seem absolutely knowable, but Melville expresses skepticism of such certainty through the conventional iconography of the memento mori familiar to him through his reading of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers such as Francis Quarles.1 Thus he invests the convention with new meaning, making it, like the doubloon in Moby-Dick, a reminder of the enigmatic nature of reality. Melville's first book, Typee, is essentially an account of Tommo's attempts tounderstand realityas he perceives it on the Polynesian island. Trying to interpret the religious practices of the Typees, Tommo mentions his fascination with a mausoleum containing an effigy of a deceased warrior chief. He regards the mausoleum as emblematic of religious faith in an afterlife, so Tommo's understanding of the mausoleum becomes his evaluation of the religious assertion that temporal life is less real than the life everlasting. His description of the mausoleum at first suggests Tommo's skepticism of religious faith. He reports that the effigy of the chief is seated in the stern of a canoe, holding his paddle with both hands in the act of rowing, leaning forward and inclining his head, as if eager to hurry on his voyage. Glaring at him for ever, and face to face, was a polished human skull, which crowned the prow of the canoe. The spectral figurehead , reversed in its position, glancing backwards, seemed to mock the impatient attitude of the warrior.2 Tommo's friend Kory-Kory explains Robert Waite is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maine. This article is his first professional publication. 188Robert Waite that the chief is paddling toward heaven, but Tommo appears dubious. When Kory-Kory admits that he is in no hurry to forsake this life on earth to join the warrior chief in heaven, Tommo remarks, Kory-Kory was a discreet and sensible fellow, and I cannot sufficiently admire his shrewdness (p. 173). Yet Tommo is not a complete skeptic; his attitude is more complex than that. He concedes that every man feels within him an immortal soul aspiring toward some unknown destiny. To this extent, Tommo himself is vulnerable to the appeal of religion, and in this mood he can look upon the effigy with the eye of faith (p. 173). At the same time, he realizes that the consequence of such faith is the surrender of his sensory awareness, and thus the loss of his individual identity, since to deny the contradictory evidence of the material eye is to yield [him]self up to the fanciful superstition of the islanders (p. 173). Tommo's dilemma is that, simultaneously looking through both eyes, he sees the natives' faith as at once persuasive and untenable. Ultimately, then, Tommo's attitude is ambivalent. He does bid the effigy, 'God speed, and a pleasant voyage.' Aye, paddle away, brave chieftain, to the land of the spirits! but he also resists the peculiar charm of religious faith, saying that he can only almost believe that the grim warrior was bound heavenward (p. 173). Reflecting this paradox, the reversed skull at the front of the chieftain's canoe suggests that the validity of religion as a means of understanding reality is an unresolvable question. In Mardi there are three memento mori images. The first involves the canoe of another island chieftain, King Media. The prow of his boat bears a similar figurehead: But what is this, in the head of the canoe, just under the shark's mouth? A grinning little imp of an image; a..." @default.
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• W2024989241 date "1977-01-01" @default.
• W2024989241 modified "2023-10-16" @default.
• W2024989241 title "Melville's Memento Mori" @default.
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• W2024989241 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.1977.0004" @default.
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