Week 06, London
Notes on Jack London’s Tales of the Pacific: “The House of Mapuhi” (31-53); “Mauki (64-79); “The Sheriff of Kona” (121-34); “Koolau the Leper” (135-50); “The Bones of Kehekili” (151-73).
“The House of Mapuhi” (31-53)
Human desire outlasts or rides out nature’s spectacular fits. So which desires are most worthy of survival? Whose wishes does the story validate? The tale only seems to pit primitive beliefs and desires against more civilized ones. But things aren’t so clearcut as that by the end, when Mapuhi is left alone with his family speculating about their prospects for getting their house built, and dealing with the white people’s economy. The elements expose us all to luck and randomness, but there’s more than that to Mapuhi’s survival, it seems; his material fantasy of a home sustains him, and it is also what sustains Nauri when she makes her way back home. Mapuhi has a will to live and some firm plans that don’t reduce to mere greed. He wants to make his ideal real.
Well, the story mocks human pretensions to strength and permanence. Toriki and Levi, for example, are taken away by the storm; Captain Lynch and the Mormons die, too. Raoul survives, and there’s something admirable about his matter-of-fact utterance, “So this is a hurricane” even at the worst point of his sufferings. Mapuhi survives, and so does Nauri even though she is an old woman. In
Towards the end of the story, after the brief but violent hurricane works its destructive magic, the perspective has shifted decisively from Raoul to Mapuhi and family. This isn’t a return to primitivism. That huge pearl works as a talismanic object to help Nauri make her way home—it stands not so much for greed as for hope. In the end, the natives are left huddling over the value of the white men’s hard cash, so they really can’t escape from the “civilized” economy and all the risks connected with it.
“Mauki (64-79)
Mauki is a “special” breed of primitive, a strong individual. The story pits two kinds of savagery, we might say: Mauki’s (as explained on page 65) versus the “degenerate brutality” of the white man Bunster, which is of course backed up by the larger-scale violence of those man-of-war ships off the coast. Mauki escapes countless times only to be recaptured. Being sent to serve Bunster on Lord Howe Island, however, turns out to be his salvation—an outcome half-predicted by the white men who sent Mauki to him (71). Bunster’s severed head becomes a powerful fetish-object, and is made to serve Mauki’s ends once he returns to Malaita on the Solomons, making himself ruler of his old homeland. It seems that both sides are resourceful in their own ways, but Mauki wins this particular context between European colonizers and natives. In the end, the joke is on the white men and their ridiculous legal contracts—we recall that Mauki’s many escapes had bound him ever more closely to his indentured status, but when he gains enough information about his European oppressors, he is able to turn that information to account, taking a sadistic and oddly appropriate revenge upon Bunster, whose head becomes the most powerful “devil-devil” on Malaita.
“The Sheriff of Kona” (121-34)
Again, it’s a contest between natives and whites, with the latter defining themselves as the healthy ones and the former being defined as subject to the dread disease leprosy. The narrative really rubs things in with regard to the Europeans’ notions about their immunity to leprosy: Lyte Gregory is said to have been in perfect health, and it’s said as well that he really loved Kona and thought of it as his native land. But then he becomes a leper, and such pariahs cannot be suffered to remain in the island paradise of Kona. Leprosy has its own time-frame—an incubation period of seven years makes for lots of uncertainty, waiting for the dreadful transformation of self into despised other. A person may have cancer or some other disease, but a person afflicted with leprosy is a leper. Since biblical times, the disease has usually been treated more as a moral condition, a state of soul, than as a mere skin disorder. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond points out that disease is every bit as much a weapon for colonial invaders as the guns and swords they carry with them. The Conquistadores, for example, followed that paradigm whether wittingly or otherwise—they brought their pathogens with them and wiped out large portions of the native population. Smallpox and other diseases made the work of conquest much easier. In the case of
“Koolau the Leper” (135-50)
“The Bones of Kehekili” (151-73)
Very often
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