John Bryant and the Old Notion of "Truth in Packaging"

John Bryant and the Old Notion of "Truth in Packaging"
This deserves a separate little note, reposted in May for convenience of readers.

This is the full title a book by John Bryant: MELVILLE UNFOLDING: SEXUALITY, POLITICS, AND THE VERSIONS OF TYPEE: A FLUID-TEXT ANALYSIS, WITH AN EDITION OF THE TYPEE MANUSCRIPT.

What can the University of Michigan editors have thought they were doing when they allowed such a title?

There are no "Versions of Typee." There are versions of a handful of passages in Typee.

There exists no "Typee Manuscript" as far as anyone knows. There is NO SUCH THING.

There exist sixteen leaves from the first draft of Typee. As far as we know, this is all--one that had long been in the NYPL-GL, fifteen added as part of the 1983 "Augusta Papers."

16 Leaves and What Do You Get?
---- -- ---- -- ------- ---- . . . .

I have protested to Bryant over the years against the use of misleading terms in applications for federal funding. It is a little late now for NEH and all other charitable funding organizations to take notice, but here is a warning: There is no known manuscript of TYPEE.

Can we not define our projects in ways that look less self-aggrandizing or self-magnifying? The work of transcribing and analyzing 16 manuscript leaves should be honorable enough to be described simply and accurately.

Indeed, making a careful transcription and analysis of the surviving leaves from Melville's first draft of TYPEE would have been an honorable enough enterprise for anyone. I thought my chapter on "The Sailor at the Writing Desk" was well worth doing, as an early attempt to make a narrative about young Melville as a working writer. I know very well how happy I would be to see a more minute analysis of the order in which Melville worked and a conscientious transcription of the words he put down on the paper on those 16 leaves, along with a full depiction of his arsenal of symbols for re-arranging bits of prose. Does anyone want a transcription guided by one person's "rhetorical agenda" instead of a determination to find what the author intended by each word?

I note now (16 April 2011) that Bryant's informative "Melville, 'Little Henry,' and the Process of Composition: A Peep at the TYPEE Fragment" is more accurately titled. A title with "Draft Fragment" or some other wording would have been better, but "TYPEE Fragment" gives adequate warning that Bryant is dealing not with a TYPEE Manuscript but just a fragment (a fragment of the first draft, in fact). Honesty in packaging takes thought, and this September 1986 title in Extracts 67 is not perfect but certainly better than the outright misrepresentations in Bryant's later wording.