A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Wilson regrets that Sumida’s book has accepted a mainland view, interpreting Hawai’i as
“comprising a rather recognizable literary territory after all.” He identifies pastoralism as
“the dominant ideology of liberal Americanists such as Sumida’s mentor at Amherst, Leo
Marx, who hovers over the central terms and literary mythology of this study.” 275 Indeed,
Sumida introduces paradise myth and pastoral mode together in his first chapter with
reference to Marx, when he mentions Cook’s ships as representing “the European marine
technology of their time: […] they themselves were the machines in the garden, as they
sailed ominously and imperiously into Hawaii’s calm, blue bays.” 276
The book’s title is designed as a counter-position to the desiring one-way gaze of
explorers, settlers, and tourists, from ships and planes (and the continental United States)
toward their imagined paradise, from the outside looking in. By contrast, the introductory
chapter of the study’s ‘first version,’ Sumida’s dissertation, reveals what Wilson
criticizes, namely a non-native perspective that aims at containing, and thus, ‘civilizing’
Hawai’i to make it comply with the Euro-American myth of a “recuperated Eden:” 277
Sumida argues that in order to become a pastoral paradise, the Hawaiian Islands had to be
discovered – which in turn constituted a heroic undertaking. He claims that “The
contrasting ideas of repose and adventure embrace somewhere in our dream of
islands.” 278 Regardless of his rejection of a pastoral/heroic model of interpretation,
Wilson agrees with Sumida, Bushnell, and others, that an unearthing of and a creative
engagement with Hawaii’s history remain necessary undertakings for Local writers:
This place of Pearl Harbor still has much to teach any American Adam Innocent
how fully and how early the United States already was grounded in the history of
colonial appropriation and the policing of the South Pacific into so-called paradise
of national profit and Edenic retreat. 279
275 Wilson 1993: 121-2. Indicting the pastoral as a possible “literary-scholarly way to contain the historical
pressures of how nuclearized, ecologically threatened, and transnationally commodified Hawaii and the
‘American Pacific’ already are,” (122) he recommends more critical readings of the mode, such as
Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City (New York 1973), or Lawrence Buell’s “American Pastoral
Ideology Reappraised,” in American Literary History 1(1989): 1-29.
276 Sumida 1991: 5.
277 Wilson 1993: 122.
278 Sumida 1982: 1, emphasis mine. A Dream of Islands: Voyages of Self-Discovery in the South Seas (New
York 1980) had been the title of a study written by historian Gavan Daws, whose Shoal of Time: A History
of the Hawaiian Islands (Toronto 1968) has earned him canonical status.
279 Wilson 1993: 123. Wilson’s scholarly (and editorial) work can be counted among the first attempts to
bridge the national separations between Hawai’i and the rest of the Pacific. See also Hereniko/Wilson 1999,
and Wilson 2000.
86