© Columbia University Press
Tattooing the World: Pacific Designs in Print and Skin
Paper, 304 pages, 24 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-14369-1
$27.50
March, 2008
Cloth, 304 pages, 24 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-14368-4
$79.50
/ £55.00
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INTRODUCTION
Living Scripts, Texts, Strategies
The 1830s castaway James F. O’Connell sported a full-body tattoo. In the Pacific’s Caroline Islands, the traditional patterns gave him his life and made him fully human. In the streets of New York, on the other hand, women and children ran screaming from his presence, while ministers warned from the pulpit that viewing O’Connell’s tattoos would transfer the marks to any woman’s unborn baby. O’Connell identified himself as an Irishman and gained fame as the first man to display his tattoos in the United States. In an important way, he exemplifies the story this book tells: how tattoo moved from the Pacific into the rest of the world.
Modern tattoo begins in the Pacific. The Tahitian word ta¯tau was first im-ported into English in 1769 by Captain James Cook, whose traveling compan-ions incorporated the designs into their skin. Traditional Pacific tattoo patterns are formed using an array of well-defined motifs; they place the individual in a particular community and often convey genealogy and ideas of the sacred. Outside the Pacific, meaning is created by tattoo bearers and viewers who in-terpret the designs in new ways. The same marks that initiated O’Connell in Pohnpei made him an outcast in New York.
In his autobiography, O’Connell offers an exemplary (if not completely ac-curate) attempt to decipher the designs he wears on his body. Like many ob-servers, he believed that the tattoo formed a text that could be read if only he could learn a new language. O’Connell, who acquired Pohnpeian tattoos but not the art of interpreting them, presents the tantalizing idea that patterns in skin may be equated with pictograms or logograms.
He compares his own attempts to read tattoo with Pohnpeian attempts to read a book he brought with him, Scottish Chiefs, written by Jane Porter:
I never learned to read their marks, but imagine they must be something like the system of the Chinese, from this circumstance: before Miss Jane Porter was washed away in a rain-storm, many of the natives had learned the alphabet; that is to say, they “knew the letters by sight,” but, counting large letters and small, figures, points of reference, points of punctuation, and every other printer’s character, they gave us many more than twenty-four letters. When they saw these repeated, they signified that it was superfluous; they had no clear idea of the combinations, but said there was too much of the same thing, evidently imagining that each letter conveyed in each place one and the same idea.
The passage at first appears to authorize O’Connell’s narrative by presenting parallel cross-cultural readings: O’Connell’s encounter with the tattoo, the Pohnpeians’ encounter with the book.
But instead, the passage relies upon parallel forestalled readings. O’Connell, whose body has been marked by women tattoo artists, remains imprinted with patterns whose meanings he cannot understand and that he assumes may be deciphered by a viewer literate in that language. Similarly, it is the Pohnpeians’ inability to read the English letters—which they apparently perceive as pic-tograms or logograms—that he invokes to support his claim that Pohnpeian tattoo motifs are similar to “the system of the Chinese.” Rather than use one reading to support another, he offers one unreadable text to support another.
That the texts go undeciphered in his scene, of course, does not make them indecipherable. O’Connell’s readers are able to interpret the same English let-ters whose meaning the Pohnpeians cannot comprehend, much as a reader of Chinese interprets that mostly phonetic system of writing; so, too, the promise is that a reader literate in Pacific tattoo design could read O’Connell’s tattooed body as if it were a book. This extended metaphor underwrites his own nar-rative; the Pohnpeian women who tattoo O’Connell appear in his account as “savage printers” (Residence, 115). They make of his body a book, and the tat-too patterns they imprint upon him propel the protoethnographic narrative he subsequently creates.
James O’Connell was a showman who displayed his thoroughly marked skin to all paying comers across the United States. Imagine him sitting before a mirror in a dressing room somewhere in Buffalo or New Orleans, preparing for an exhibition. There he sits, the tattooed man, contemplating the patterns a group of tattoo artists have placed on him, wondering what the marks say, what claims they make. As “the tattooed Irishman,” O’Connell finds in the motifs an identity, not just a job, and creates his own account of life in Pohnpei as a result of the apparent script the women have impressed upon him.
Of course, now that he is in the United States, no one within three thou-sand miles can tell him what his tattooers meant by the highly patterned lines that adorn his hands, arms, legs, and thighs. But the tattoos still speak, even in North America. They mean what O’Connell says they mean. They also mean what his audience and other North Americans think they mean. So O’Connell’s story offers at least three interpretations of tattoo, which can overlap: the Pa-cific, the personal or performative, and the social. The Pacific interpretations remain inaccessible to him; he determines the personal or performative inter-pretations by choosing how to reveal and define his tattoos; and first Pohnpeians and then North Americans assign to him the social interpretations of tattoo. These structures of interpretation apply to many other tattoos on many other bodies.
Through his narrative and his two decades onstage in the United States, he proposes that tattoo patterns form a legible Pacific language, but one that nei-ther he nor his audiences can interpret. In his account, the would-be Pohnpeian readers remain similarly frustrated by printed English. Even the warrant for their attempted reading washes away: Pohnpeian women take apart the book by Jane Porter and weave its pages into a cloak that dissolves when it rains.
The tattoo designs, like the print characters, appear to be the stuff on which meaning is made. But just what do the patterns signify? O’Connell’s story rep-resents a vibrant example of the way one individual may encounter Pacific tattoo and its meanings, and his book in turn brings the designs beyond the Pacific for wider audiences to consider. O’Connell exemplifies tattoo’s travels, from the time artists apply the patterns in the Pacific to the time audiences read them on skin and in books, in Pohnpei and New York. His story thus serves to introduce further this book’s approach to tattoo.
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