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.
Overview
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.
Style
Influence of Rabelais and Swift
The voyage from island to island echoes Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, especially the last two books. According to scholar Newton Arvin:
The praise of eating and drinking is highly Rabelaisian in intention, and so in general is all the satire on bigotry, dogmatism, and pedantry. Taji and his friends wandering about on the island of Maramma, which stands for ecclesiastical tyranny and dogmatism, are bound to recall Pantagruel and his companions wandering among the superstitious inhabitants of Papimany; and the pedantic, pseudo-philosophy of Melville's Doxodox is surely, for a reader of Rabelais, an echo of the style of Master Janotus de Bragmardo holding forth polysyllabically to Gargantua in Book I.
Arvin also recognizes the influence of Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift:
... there is something very Swiftian in Melville's Hooloomooloo, the Isle of Cripples, the inhabitants of which are all twisted and deformed, and whose shapeless king is horrified at the straight, strong figures of his visitors from over sea.