Марди: Путешествие и поиски смысла

Mardi: and a Voyage Thither is the third book by American writer Herman Melville, first published in London in 1849. Beginning as a travelogue in the vein of the author's two previous efforts, the adventure story gives way to a romance story, which in its turn gives way to a philosophical quest.

Mardi is Melville's first purely fictional work. Although Melville and his publishers presented his first two books, Typee and Omoo, as nonfiction, enough critics were able to identify plagiarism in them (especially Typee) from other works, both fiction and nonfiction, that their veracity and Melville's integrity were always points of contention. As a preface to Mardi, Melville wrote somewhat ironically that his first two books were nonfiction but disbelieved; by the same pattern he hoped the fiction book would be accepted as fact. Much as did Typee and Omoo, Mardi details the travels of an American sailor who abandons a whaling vessel to explore the South Pacific. Unlike the first two books, however, Mardi is highly philosophical and said to be the first work to show Melville's true potential. Although not as cohesive or lengthy as Moby Dick, it is much longer than Typee and Omoo and has much more in common stylistically and thematically with Moby Dick and other works of his maturity. The tale begins as a fairly simple escape and survival narrative. It briefly becomes romance when the narrator falls in love with a mysterious woman he has questionably rescued from a difficult situation. After the woman mysteriously disappears, the novel presumably becomes a quest for her among the innumerable isles of the newly "discovered" archipelago of Mardi, isles with many different symbolic and allegorical meanings. As the main characters continue their search for the woman, the novel switches again, now focusing on more than travelogue style reporting of the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells to be experienced in Mardi. The social conventions, political structures, religious practices, odd histories, and other aspects of each isle and its inhabitants spark philosophical discourses between four main characters, with two previously main characters no longer in the story and the narrator receding so far into the background that he does not even participate in the philosophical discussions. The quest for the woman continues but is barely mentioned, serving at least to get the main characters traveling through Mardi faster.

The emotional center of the book, Arvin writes, is the relation between Taji and Yillah, the "I" and the mysterious blonde who disappears as suddenly as she appeared. Taji begins a quest for her throughout the islands without finding her. Though Arvin finds the allegory of Yillah "too tenuous and too pretty to be anything but an artistic miscarriage" in the poetic sense, he also finds it "extremely revealing" in connection with the whole Melville canon. Yillah, associated with the lily in the language of flowers, is "an embodiment of the pure, innocent, essentially sexless happiness", and Hautia, "symbolized by the dahlia", embodies "the sensual, the carnal, the engrossingly sexual". The middle portion of the book is taken up by "a series of forays in social and political satire, and by quasi metaphysical speculations" that are, if at all, at best "only loosely and uncertainly related to the quest for Yillah". The only way to perceive any fabric holding the book together, Arvin feels, is by recognizing "a certain congruity among the various more or less frustrated quests it dramatizes the quest for an emotional security once possessed, the quest for a just and happy sociality once too easily assumed possible, and the quest for an absolute and transcendent Truth once imagined to exist and still longed for."