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PARTISAN REVIEW
iniquity, with the instantaneous blow which transforms Billy into a mur–
derer and Claggart into a half-innocent victim.
The end of the tale offers us two contradictory versions of the events.
In the official naval records, ordinary seaman Billy Budd becomes a knife–
wielding alien and Petty Officer Claggart a discreet, respectable gentle–
man. In the popular ballad, "Billy in the Darbies," that is, the poem that
generated the whole story in Melville's imagination, the sailor in irons
dreams of his death as a form of sleep. These versions correspond loosely
to the two critical interpretations the novel has inspired, Melville's
Quarrel with God or Melville's Testament of Acceptance.
It
is essential to
point out that the novel does
not
say: choose one interpretation or the
other. Even Captain Vere, whom it is easy to see as an inflexible, unsym–
pathetic martinet, knows that the situation is more complex than his
official conduct can acknowledge. This father figure partially represents
Melville trying to come to terms with the loss of his own two sons, one
to suicide, one to sickness. More profoundly, Vere represents the attempt
of an upright and intelligent man to come to terms with the intellectual
currents of the nineteenth century: irreligion, science, evolution, democ–
racy. The circumstances of Billy's court martial tax Vere to the limit.
Because Vere accepts full responsibility for his ship, his dilemmas carry
the themes of forbidden knowledge a step further than in
Paradise Lost
and
Faust.
Vere has no God figure to help him.
Billy Budd's
probing of unexpressed states of mind may well be what
Melville wished to designate with the startling subtitle he pencilled into
the margin of the manuscript: "An Inside Narrative."
It
doesn't refer to
any form of narrative omniscience in a tale where many crucial events
remain unknown even to the faceless narrator. For us, in the present dis–
cussion, the subtitle looks forward to another novel written fifty years
later.
A Frenchman born and brought up poor and fatherless in Algeria, Al–
bert Camus worked there as a journalist and dramatist before becoming a
major Resistance figure in continental France during World War
II.
His
most haunting work, a short novel called
The Stranger,
published in 1942,
was immediately singled out as a major exhibit of Existentialism. The
philosophical and literary movement which swept Europe for two dec–
ades after the war enshrined Camus as a major hero opposite Sartre, with
whom he broke in 1952 over the latter's Soviet loyalties. Camus received
the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and died in 1960.
The Stranger
has remained an astonishingly timely book for the last
half of the twentieth century. Its popularity reached a peak in the 1960s
and contributed to the formation of the cool, hip, detached hero or anti-
