멜빌의 남태평양 소설들과 근대성 문제: 로렌스의 멜빌론 고찰

Abstract

This paper purports to reconsider Lawrence’s critical position on Typee and Omoo, Melville’ early travelogue-styled novels of the South Pacific, comparing it with those of a few representative Melville scholars and critics. In his critical essay on the two works, which ended up to be the chapter 10 of Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence made it clear that in Typee Melville escaped two times, at fist from our modern world of humanity, and later from the savages of the South Sea Islands he happened to live with. Since the spread of postmodernity and postcolonial studies many scholars and critics including Gilles Deleuze noticed in those works the narrator’s white civilized self to be ‘dismantled’ and emphasized the importance of Melville’s separation or flight from the mainland stream of modern civilization. They seemed to pay, however, no attention to the second escape, which is presented almost as desperate as the first one in the narrative itself. Another significant point of Lawrence’s essay lies in his argument that Melville insists there should be a paradise somewhere, and the South Sea Island he lived with savages for a time, should be one, while through the narrative he tells a totally different story in secret. It should be attributed to Lawrence’s sharp critical insight when he points out that the queer symptom of Tommo’s unhealing leg reveals the island is actually a kind of ‘soft hell’, even worse than the ‘purgatory of Home and Mother’ from which he escaped. Making such keen critical comments in a passionate manner, Lawrence reveals an outline of the peculiar course of history he thinks we should pursue, that is we should make a great swerve from the straight forward progress of the white modern civilization though we cannot go back to the premodern life.