ROGER SHATTUCK
449
The two novels I have been discussing, particularly
The Stranger
with
its suggestive title, lead us to one of the more distressing categories of for–
bidden knowledge. The closer one approaches to an event or to a person,
the less securely one seems to know it. The trees obscure the forest. The
more one knows the less one knows. Perception itself requires a certain
distance. Empathy hides more than it reveals.
More than most modem philosophers, Isaiah Berlin strives to recon–
cile empathy for others with reasonable standards of decency and moral
behavior. But when in "Historical Inevitability" he carefully glosses the
proverb, "To understand is to forgive," Berlin has the honesty to write,
"To understand
all
is to see that nothing could be otherwise than as it is."
That proposition precisely describes the character of Pangloss in
Candide.
What Berlin presents discursively in his essays, Melville and Camus ap–
proach very differently in their fiction. In both kinds of writing the
author is thinking in terms of imaginary situations, conducting thought
experiments in order to reflect upon the meaning and worth of human
actions. The difference is that whereas Berlin carries out the crucial parts
of his thought experiments in terms of freedom, authority, natural rights,
and other abstractions removed from persons and from time, Melville and
Camus create their thought experiments on empathy (particularly on the
reader's empathy) in terms of fully conceived characters subject to all the
contingencies of time and mortality. They stage an action to show how
knowing too much can affect us, perhaps blind us, even when we have
gained that knowledge from the essential faculty of empathy. The double
bind of empathy as laid before us by
Billy Budd
and
The Stranger
points us
finally in the direction of a middle way between moral certainty and
moral ignorance.
In the opening pages of
The Myth
if
Sisyphus,
Camus speaks of seek–
ing to know people by analysis of their actions, both sincere and
insincere. Then he concedes, "The method defined here admits to the
feeling that any true knowledge is impossible." But Camus exaggerates.
He and we know the truth that Meursault murders a man and deserves
punishment. But we shall never know exactly
why
he did it. In trying to
fathom that mystery of iniquity we can lose our way and come to find no
fault and no guilt in so sincere and so unassuming a temperament.
Melville's novel helps us to see in Camus's tale the severe interference
between two types of knowledge, inside and outside. Between them, the
two stories offer a striking moral education.
