A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

All the anthologized texts and authors mentioned have one thing in common: they
are participants in the advancement of the American Frontier, the movement westward,
the fulfillment of the ‘Manifest Destiny’ concept. They are the pioneers and settlers of a
literary Frontier that ran alongside the actual, physical one. If unconsciously, or even
unwillingly, these writers have nevertheless become stepping stones for the masses that
followed in their wake, businessmen as well as tourists and other writers. Furthermore,
their works have formed the mainland’s perception of Hawai’i, creating both the place
and its people. More than all the aforementioned writers and texts, however, it is probably
James A. Michener’s bulky bestseller Hawaii that has shaped the world’s idea of what the
islands are like. This monumental historiography portrays Polynesian voyagers,
missionaries and whalers, sugar and pineapple, Chinese and Japanese laborers, royalists
and republicans, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the patriotic AJA soldiers, and a post-war
Hawai’i of labor unions, a beginning mass tourism, and the Hawaiians being reduced to
‘beach boys.’ Michener had finished his epic history before statehood, but his optimistic
close, envisioning the glorious Golden Men who may wear colored skins but bear
American souls, anticipates this move quite clearly.
Especially the beginning of the novel, a prologue dealing with the evolution of the
Hawaiian Islands, is deceptively lyrical, thus masking what Paul Lyons terms a
“histouric” ideology: 234
For nearly forty million years, an extent of time so vast that it is meaningless, only
the ocean knew that an island was building in its bosom, for no land had yet
appeared above the surface of the sea. […] Stubbornly, inch by painful inch, it
grew. In fact, it was the uncertainty and agony of its growth that were significant.
The chance emergence of the island was nothing. […] Locked in fiery arms,
joined by intertwining ejaculations of molten rock, the two volcanoes stood in
matrimony, their union a single fruitful and growing island. […] and what a
heavenly, sweet, enchanting island it was […] These beautiful islands, waiting in
sun and storm, how much they seemed like beautiful women waiting for their men
234 Lyons 1997: 49. A pertinent example of enacted histouricism in Hawai’i is the Polynesian Cultural
Center in Laie. For an analysis of the Mormon-owned PCC see Andrew Ross, “Cultural Preservation in the
Polynesia of the Latter-Day Saints,” in The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society,
London 1994: 21-98. Ross also mentions Margaret Mead and Thor Heyerdahl as other writers that mix
touristic and scholarly writing. Ross and Lyons both venture that the two might be inherently connected,
especially in popular science works.
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