초록보기
Facing the environmental destruction committed globally in size and degree, the late twentieth century has observed the emergence of environmental-related movements in various fields. Humanities including literary criticism and literature, for example, have shown a great concern in environmental degradation, and revealed the fact that Western industrialized civilization is the root cause of the environmental ruins. As a reaction to the growth-oriented civilization, some ecological movements like deep ecology and ecofeminism and environmental literature have shown a tendency of going back to the primeval age, in order to gain an ecological wisdom that we desperately need for a human-nature harmonious culture. This primitive urge originated in Rousseau whose motto is known as the "Return to Nature." Since contemporary primitivism owes Rousseau a debt of its general definitions a great deal, it has been identified with Rousseau`s primitive urge, which is called Rousseauism. Both Rousseau and the post-1960s environmental-related movements and literature that have adopted the tendency of Rousseauistic primitive urge, however, have been criticized, because they give the impression that, relying on primitive urge alone, they avoid the hard reality of environmental illness. Herman Melville seems to be fascinated by primitivism in the Rousseauistic sense. Based upon his own experience, he portrays the Edenic primitive people and culture of a South Pacific island in his first novel Typee. The author-narrator Tommo deserts the whaling ship which is "the floating ambassador of civilization," and escapes into the primeval village of Typee Valley. There he finds a paradise. He is well treated by the natives and is satisfied with himself there. However, being a civilized man, he cannot endure the primitive life any longer and must finally escape back into the civilized world. Melville`s Typee bears out the fact that in reality we cannot go literally back to the "good old days" of primeval life, and that, instead, we need to rehabilitate what Rousseau calls "inner naturalness" or "primitive sensibility" in our mind. Since this sensibility exists in the human mind diachronically, we do not need to fall back on primeval culture, the primitive urge which has been blamed for its naive, retrogressive, and escapist tendency in time of environmental crisis. Once primitive sensibility is restored in the human mind, chances are that we can live harmoniously with nature without totally giving up our civilized culture. All in all, primitive sensibility rather than primitive urge has to be the real meaning of primitivism.