ROGER SHATTUCK
447
When I saw an external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it remained
between me and it, outlining it with a narrow mental border that prevented me
from ever touching its substance directly; in some way the object volatized before
I could make contact, just as an incandescent body approaching something moist
never reaches moisture because of the zone of evaporation that always precedes
such a body.
In
this description our isolation is inescapable. But a few pages later
Proust made an exception for works of literature: their transparency per–
mits us miraculous entry into other lives composed not of opaque flesh
but of comprehensible words. Thus we can pose the fundamental ques–
tions again and with different results concerning the two literary works
Billy Budd
and The
Stranger.
Their carefully composed sentences manipu–
late our attention and our understanding and our sympathy in very
specific ways. And now we must acknowledge, as I have suggested earlier,
two markedly different senses of the word to
know
or to
understand.
Though Billy is given stronger status as the legendary Handsome
Sailor than as a realistic particularized individual, the essentially third–
person narrative approaches very close to his consciousness. We feel the
menace behind the triviality of the soup-spilling scene; we share Billy's
impatience with the after-guardsman's attempt to talk to him alone in the
lee forechains. But by the time we read the central scene of Claggart ac–
cusing Billy in the captain's presence of conspiring to mutiny, we have
enough familiarity with Billy's temperament and vocal handicap to un–
derstand his striking Claggart a blow that turns out to be fatal - a blow in
the name of simple truth. Captain Vere's first response - "Fated boy," he
breathes - informs us both that he understands Billy's explosive outburst
well enough to forgive it and that nevertheless Billy will have to suffer the
full legal consequences of his insubordination and homicide. Melville ad–
justs the story line so as to carry us just far enough inside Billy and Vere
to allow us to deplore and to accept the tragic outcome. Claggart remains
a "mesmeric" mystery. Our understanding of Billy and ofVere does not,
in an intelligent reading, paralyze our judgment. Our understanding
complicates and enlarges our judgment.
The
Stranger
has the opposite effect on most of its readers. By the time
we reach the central scene of the shooting on the beach, our point of
view has adapted itself to Meursault's passiveness before other people's
initiatives and before the sheer momentum of an episode once started.
We probably accept the metaphor that the whole landscape heaves up
("C'est alors que tout a vacille.") and propels him toward the fatal act.
Weare seduced and blinded by the circumstantial narrative to the point
of overlooking the pit of monstrosity that opens up around his action.
