THE PAN-AMERICAN ZONE: EMERSON, MELVILLE, AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL COLONIZATION OF THE PACIFIC

RICHARD HARDACK

I

The American presence in the Pacific begins in the realm of transcen­ dental representation, in the notion of a universal nature. In this arti­ cle, I focus on the representations of ships, oceans, and aboriginal peoples in mid-nineteenth-century American literature, and specifically on how two transcendental American writers, Emerson and Melville, use the Pacific to universalize American culture. 1 As a result of their belief in a transcendent nature, Emerson and Melville paradoxically imagine the Pacific as a microcosm of the world, but a world that needs no micro­ cosm in already being entirely homogeneous. Instead of concluding that Americans should simply colonize the Pacific, these writers discover that American transcendentalism represents the impossibility of travel: all movement in a universal zone becomes circular, reflexive. As Emerson writes in "The Progress of Culture," "the war-proa of the Malays in the Japanese water struck Commodore Perry by its close resemblance to the yacht 'America'" (emphasis mine; Works VIII 215). For Emerson and Melville, transcendental representation enacts a form of American imperialism, critiquing but finally recapitulating the ideology of mani­ fest destiny. Particularly on the oceans of the world, the "uncharted" Pacific most of all, everything becomes a palimpsest represented in terms of its resemblance to that archetypal yacht, America. In fact, Melville repeatedly refers to this new oceanic arena as "the immense blank of the western Pacific" (Omoo 33). (For the purpose of this essay, I sit­ uate Melville as a critic of transcendentalism and pantheism-that belief in universal nature-who ultimately reinscribes their rhetoric and ide­ ology. In broader terms, American pantheism is a manifestation of Emersonian transcendentalism, specifically the obsessive deification of nature and natural law. For American writers, nature operates as an "arena" in which conflicts between the parts and wholes of selves, bod­ ies, and nations are staged. Pantheism at first offers a rhetorical strat­ egy for reconciling these parts and wholes. Symbolically, this process is

Passages 1, 1 54 RICHARD HARDACK

typically represented by the physical merger of the parts and wholes of bodies, a merger that also figuratively allows the American sailor and traveler to "transcend" not just their own male bodies but nationality itself-in the Pacific, all particularities are merged into the All of nature. Through this "refinement" of pantheism, transcendentalism hardly con­ fined its ideological or geographical forays to New England.2) The "naturalization" of the laws of space and time, reflected under a theory of transcendentalism or pantheism, allows Emerson and Melville to construct American spaces as well as artifacts of travel as universal reference points. Particularly while at sea, the traveler finds that every­ thing reminds him of some transcendental, ahistorical "America." To the transcendentalist, nature recognizes no man-made boundaries, and he follows suit, mapping everything under the one rubric of universal nature, the paradise (and existential anomaly) of the Pacific. Transcen­ dental pantheism represents the immersion of self in nature, its loss of personal borders, as evidenced in Emerson's merger into the transparent eyeball. The same process occurs with nations, whose subjects imagine themselves as the center of the world, as universal, while coterminously losing all sense of where they begin and end. American transcenden­ talists, though retaining their models of British heritage and imperial­ ism, shift their attention from the historically and culturally bound Atlantic to the new-world, universal Pacific, a process that begins at the end of the eighteenth century, much as Americans begin to imagine themselves as universal models of mankind. Whereas the Atlantic remains tied to a specific, fixed European history, the Pacific represents a dehis­ toricized space, seemingly without written record or finite parameters. Having arrived at the Pacific, America has ideologically respatialized the new world as its own, transcending history and time through uni­ versal nature. Emerson's and Melville's Orientalism, I would argue, does not fetishize Asia or the Pacific so much as internalize and homogenize them; to offer a catch-phrase, they trope the tropics. Melville's interest in the representation of Pacific cultures is hardly surprising: his most successful novel, Typee, recounts his own travels through the Pacific, and much of his subsequent work conceptualizes the West/Pacific as a site of static universality: an atemporal space cre­ ated by, but beyond the reach of, historical American culture, but one which he can inhabit and from which he can then critique his own society. As an anthropological novelist, Melville is a profoundly Pacific writer, who not only incorporates beliefs from Pacific cultures but is among the few writers who consciously apprehends the way American society structures itself around its representation of the Pacific. Melville's