[Back in December 2024, I dedicated a weeklong series to histories from our 50th state. This week, in honor of the 75th anniversary of James Jones’s debut novel From Here to Eternity, I’ll offer a complementary series on Hawaiian stories!]
[NOTE: The first four posts in this series expand on texts I discussed briefly in this weekend post concluding that 2024 series.]
On what the historical novelist got really right about Hawaii, and why two lesser film adaptations make that especially clear.
I wrote briefly about James Michener’s Hawaii (1959) in this post for a 2020 series on historical fictions. I stand by both of my points there, which you can check out at the second hyperlink above if you want to read a bit more: that the novel, like all of Michener’s (at least all of those I’ve read, which I believe is all of his big epics), fits most clearly into the category/subgenre that I define as “period fiction”; but that its coverage of a number of distinct such periods across its thousand-plus pages (again, as is the case with all of those Michener epics) means that it opens up a multilayered historical lens on its subject (and many other related ones) nonetheless.
But there’s a third main point to make about Michener’s novel, and I think I took it for granted in that prior post and don’t want to do the same here. After a briefer introductory section about the natural formation of the islands, the book features five main chapters (each really a novel in its own right), and three of those five focus on non-white characters as their primary protagonists: the Polynesians who first settled the islands; and then the Chinese and Japanese immigrants who became such central communities there in the 19th and 20th centuries. Of course those multicultural communities and histories are absolutely defining ones in Hawaiian history, but I would say it was far from a given that a 1950s white novelist would represent that fact in the structure and stories of his book. And given that his book was first published just a few months after Hawaii became the 50th state, we can see it as a foundational Hawaiian American story, which makes it that much more impressive and important that Michener foregrounds all these Hawaiian stories and communities so fully and thoughtfully.
Don’t believe me? Try watching either of the film adaptations of Michener’s novel: Hawaii (1966), starring Max von Sydow, Julie Andrews, and Richard Harris; and The Hawaiians (1970), starring Charlton Heston. Of course those aren’t the only actors in either film, but they are unquestionably the stars, which reflects how much both films lean into stories of white characters and communities (the 1970 sequel does feature non-white characters in somewhat more prominent roles, but still far, far less so than does the novel). I get that Hollywood realities might have dictated casting and thus focusing on these big-name white performers, given that both of these films were far from cheap. But the contrast with the novel is nonetheless striking, and really highlights how successful Michener was, a decade earlier than the films and as just a single white creator, at including and engaging with the diverse stories that are at the heart of Hawaii.
Next Hawaiian story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Hawaiian texts or contexts you’d highlight?
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