A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

joining their forebears. Jess will stay in Hawai’i and write their genealogy down. The
novel’s end leads thus back to its beginning, closing the cycle.
Shark Dialogues contains what the British novelist E.M. Forster has called
rhythm: In both plot and style, thoughts and events echo each other, themes recur and
resurface. 333 The most obvious example is Davenport’s device of relating action,
atmosphere, and feelings in stream-of-consciousness-like sentences that extend over half
a page or more, lacking punctuation, investing those passages with breathless immediacy.
This stylistic technique is used to convey overwhelming experiences in which the person
loses herself and is all moment, out of time. 334 Watching whales mating was such an
instant for Mathys, the family’s ancestor. It will be making love after years of separation
for Pono and Duke, smoking Dragon Seed for Ming, testing her sexual limits for Rachel,
experiencing intercourse as mating with the land itself for Vanya.
The main problem that Lyons identifies about this ethnic ‘herstory’ is its
investment in entertaining and informing a mainstream and mainland audience which its
narrative perspective scorns. There remains an unevenness between the alleged
authenticity and inside view ‘from the shore’ and tendencies toward sensationalism (as in
the terrorist plot) and cliché (e.g. the inscrutable Ming behind her veil of smoke, or the
character of Duke.) The critic concludes that “Shark Dialogues seems researched or
imagined from a distance, more about than from Hawai’i, […] marketing Hawaiian
culture for the outsider.” 335
In 1999 Davenport launched her second novel with a Hawaiian theme. Song of the
Exile traces the lives of Keo, a gifted Hawaiian jazz musician, and Sunny, his part-Korean
lover, who endured the war as a comfort woman. Davenport relates that she was inspired
to write the novel by the same UH lecture of a comfort camp survivor that Keller has
referred to as a source for her book Comfort Woman. From Honolulu in the mid-thirties
through the jazz bars of Paris to Shanghai and a Japanese base at Rabaul in the mid-
Pacific, the story sweeps forward to Honolulu at the time of statehood, to the unlikely
convergence of its key characters, the ever-searching Keo, the prematurely aged survivor
333 E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, London 2000: chapter 8, “Pattern and Rhythm,” 134-50. An example
would also be the thought “She came to me from the sea,” uttered by both Pono’s ancestor Mathys and by
Duke (Davenport 1995: 36, 103).
334 I am reminded of the Goetheian idea of Faust’s ‘eternal moment’ in these passages.
335 Lyons 1995: 267.
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