Compression, or, the Time Signature of Melville's Typee

Herman Melville’s first novel, Typee, begins as the character Tommo escapes from the painful time of drudgery onboard a western ship to engage in the pleasurable temporality of the Marquesas Islands, only to return, yet... [ view full abstract ]

Herman Melville’s first novel, Typee, begins as the character Tommo escapes from the painful time of drudgery onboard a western ship to engage in the pleasurable temporality of the Marquesas Islands, only to return, yet again, to what Thomas M. Allen calls the “clock time” of the industrialized west. While this abrupt return to the temporality of imperialism at the end has proven troubling for critics, Matthew Rebhorn argues that Melville undercuts this return to clock time by problematizing how the reader experiences this ending in time, the untimely reading that emerges in the final pages of this novel set in the South Seas frontier. In particular, Rebhorn focus on the ending’s temporal compression in order to reveal the way that Melville disfigures what Rebhorn calls the “time signature” of the imperialistic genre of the South Seas adventure tale, offering instead an untimely, fugitive rhythm of reading for making sense of cultural and ethnic difference.