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Melville's Pacific and the Pacific's Melville.(Herman Melville)(Critical Essay)

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From: Leviathan
Date: 20031001
Author:Calder, Alex

It has become hard to find copies of Symmes Hole these days. Since I like to teach Ian Wedde's brilliant novel--whose central character thinks he is Herman Melville--at the tail end of a course on literature and cross-cultural encounters, I find I often have to borrow copies from my colleagues. This year one student got Albert Wendt's. The novel has an introduction by Dr. Keehua Roa of the University of West Hawaii (duh?) who says: "But Herman Melville's was a 'new world' imagination, and he had, or had learned, [a subversive] view and philosophy of history, making him a Pacific ...

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