Camus on Melville

[Clare Spark]

Dear list,  here are a few choice quotes from Albert Camus's essay "Herman Melville" (1952), published in English translation by Ellen Conroy Kennedy. He read lots of HM, all, I would gather, in French translation. "His admirable books are among those exceptional works that can be read in different ways, which are at the same time both obvious and obscure, as dark as the noonday sun and as clear as deep water. The wise man and the child can both draw sustenance from them. The story of captain Ahab, for example, flying from the southern to the northern seas in pursuit of Moby Dick, the white whale who has taken off his leg, can doubtless be read as the fatal passion of a character gone mad with grief and loneliness. But it can also be seen as one of the most overwhelming myths ever invented on the subject of the struggle of man against evil, depicting the irrestistible logic that finally leads the just man to take up arms first against creation and the creator, then against his fellows and against himself.

...It seems to me (and this would deserve development) that Melville wrote anything but the same book, which he began again and again....[Hence Melville is] the Homer of the Pacific...."

   (The article was originally published in _Les Ecrivains celebres_,_Editions Mazenod_, Volume III, 1952) [add accents to the "e"s in celebres]

   Camus at first adopts the conservative reading of Billy Budd: "...With this flawless story that can be ranked with certain Greek tragedies, the aging Melville tells us of his acceptance for the first time of the sacrifice of beauty and innocence so that order may be maintained and the ship of men may continue to move forward toward an unknown horizon. [Camus goes on to question his own reading: "At the height of consent, isn't _Billy Budd_ the worst blasphemy? This we can never know whether Melville did finally accept a terrible order, or whether, in quest of the spirit, he allowed himself to be led, as he had asked, 'beyond the reefs, in sunless seas, into night and death.' But no one, in any case, measuring the long anguish that runs through his life and work, will fail to acknowledge the greatness, all the more anguished in being the fruit of self-conquest, of his reply."

 

    Camus loved _Mardi_ and identified with Taji. Says _Pierre_ is an "unsuccessful masterpiece."

    Does anyone on this list recall citations of this short essay in subsequent Melville criticism? I don't remember seeing a word about it.

 

Clare Spark

[tamar cummings]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,366145,00.html   I don't have access to Clarel, but there is a passage in"Concerning Hebrews" re seeds that no matter how old they are, perhaps even the term germinate is used? will grow when planted....and here we have it, Jewish seeds grow after 2,000 years.   I can't help but relate Melville's words to this ancient seed found at Masada where we just were...what a view! what a place! No wonder the Holy Land so inspired Melville to write at such great length and detail about its mysteries.   Of course, this seed comment is a metaphor for a different seed, but anyway....

[Ffrangcon Lewis]

Dear Clare,

Thanks for the quotations from the Camus essay on Melville, and to Alex for forwarding the post. I'm not sure that I can add anything useful on Camus, but, since you also ask for reactions to the quotations themselves, here is my penny's worth.

I am selfishly pleased that Camus praises 'Mardi', since, when I first read it I was enormously impressed by its devil-may-care vigour, but found it quite difficult to get others to agree. His fondness for 'Mardi' and qualified admiration for 'Pierre' might be thought to be the opposite of much later critical opinion, do you think? ('Pierre' has seemed to me somewhat flawed at times, though that may well be the result of my owned failed readings of it. Certainly, Scott's most recent quotation from it delighted me: what subtleties of wit Melville manages in that passage!) I found it interesting that Camus seems to try to rescue himself from what you term a conservative reading of 'Billy Budd' by returning to the concluding gesture of 'Mardi', and perhaps, by implication, to radical political commitment.

I am not wholly sure about Camus' contention that Melville always began again to write the same book. Clearly, it certain respects that seems both true and illuminating, and possibly offers some sort of bridge between Ahab the heroic obsessive and Melville the persistent analyst. However, I would set against that the diversity of Melville's oeuvre as a whole. Do we know how much of Melville Camus in fact had read?

I hope this is of some use,

best wishes,

Ffrangcon Lewis

[Stephen Hoy]

I'm with Ffrangcon that there's something odd about Camus' statement
that Melville wrote the same work repeatedly. What strikes me as more
odd is that he doesn't elaborate the point. This leaves a reader in
the same state as sun-struck Meursault "wandering through these
deserts" (Hawthorne's conception of HM), commuting the complexities of
his guilt into the benign indifference of the universe.

Nevertheless, we can agree that Melville does follow a simple pattern
in his narratives, but, as gemologists will point out, an intricate
and fascinating complexity can emerge from a simple but precise
arrangement of facets. I suspect one facet of Melville which
fascinated Camus would be Melville's repeated employment of a naive
wanderer--whether isolato, peregrine, pilgrim, or soldier.

Another oddity in Camus' essay is his depiction of Billy Budd as a
'flawless story'. In 1952 or whenever this essay was written, Camus
could only have been reading a translation of a flawed text pieced
together by either Weaver or Freeman. My only view of BB is through
the Hayford-Sealts text, so I am left to wander in the desert
considering what Camus may have experienced when he read BB--at least
until my fascination commutes into benign indifference.

[Clare Spark]

In his essay he mentions Typee, Omoo, Mardi, MD, Pierre, Benito Cereno, The Confidence-Man, and Billy Budd.

   It used to be the case that Melville scholars grouped Mardi, MD, and Pierre as a trilogy. I myself have written (in an unpublished essay on Clarel) that Clarel may be the promised sequel to Confidence-Man, which will startle some here. I know he read Mumford's biography, which is interesting because LM said that the test of the reader's sanity was to recognize Ahab's insanity. Camus also reportedly told German Bree that MD was an "open allegory" which is born out by the quote where he admits several possible ways of reading the novel.

   He also puts HM up there with the Bible and Shakespeare as a master of language.

   One thing I found out in my scanning the biographies and Camus criticism: if you are an ardent anti-imperialist, you may rather dismiss Camus as an engaged writer, for he fought with Sartre over Algerian separation from the culture of France (the West). My theory is that his reading of MD and Pierre, for instance, are dismissed along with his politics. I am just a beginner in this exploration, so correct me if I am on the wrong track. But I do admire him. My psychological exploration would have to treat his relations with women, traceable perhaps to his inability to separate from his mother, and accept his genius. He really did arise from the most humble and materially deprived circumstances, and battled with tuberculosis for most of his productive life. The Plague inspired me, more than I can say. The Stranger I found astoundingly well wrought but very different in his philosophy.

   Again, I would love to hear more from list members, including Stephen and Ffrangcon.

   Finally, I know what Camus meant when he says that HM wrote the same book over and over, because he could not resolve certain contradictions or find peace with his own volcanic character and its ambivalence. I would guess that Camus shared the same internal turmoil.

 

Clare

[finkuoo stein]

Christine,

    I had read about this a few days ago. It is truly amazing. Last January I was in the Coachella Valley of California. Indio is the principal date growing area with the surrounding towns. I like fresh dates. We get date shakes, well, actually just one---it is enough to consume. But the date shake is delicious. Otherwise, store bought dates from around here just don't seem to be the same.   John

[tamar cummings]

John,   You will have to sample the dates in Israel. Simply scrumptious! They do make the dates we buy here in the stores look like , hmmm, mummified Israeli dates? ---Hard and dry versus plump, juicy and sweet. There are a lot of date  trees not too far from Masada.   I wonder why they had the date seeds up on top of Masada? Perhaps for future use elsewhere? I don't think they were going to grow date trees up there. It is interesting they were using dates for medicinal purposes.   --- On Sat, 6/14/08, finkuoo stein <stein....@gmail.com> wrote: