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435
Melville's novel and wondered whether Billy's death represents a protest
against a blasphemous violation of human justice, or a resigned assent to
the terrible order of Providence. Those are the two standard interpreta–
tions already mentioned. We have seen Providence before in story after
story; it is one of the guises of forbidden knowledge.
It
is surprising that
Camus did not refer to the arresting similarity between
Billy Budd
and
The
Stranger.
They are like two mineral specimens, different in color and
texture, yet whose crystalline structures resemble one another. The two
narratives tum on essentially the same situation. From one point of view a
violent, lethal deed, not of passion or premeditation but of impulse, is
described from inside as an innocent act. From an opposed point of view
a rigid system of justice finds the same deed to be criminal enough to
merit the death penalty. Neither man defends himself against the charges.
Neither man feels remorse or moral anguish even though each accepts his
guilt. It is, I believe, this sustained moral ambivalence that makes it diffi–
cult to deal adequately with these two books.
As Camus points out in his essay on Melville,
Billy Budd
presents its
moral dilemma with the starkness of a classic tragedy. Confronted by the
two nearly stereotypic figures of good and evil in Billy and Claggart,
Captain Vere presents to his fellow officers sitting in judgment a case
against Billy that he supports with the responsibilities of his rank. Order
must be maintained, even in the face of his own inclinations to favor
Handsome Billy. In The
Stranger,
the place of Captain Vere is occupied
not by any corresponding character, not by the three judges and the jury,
but by the reader. It is a vast difference. The reader must decide between
Meursault's seemingly candid inside account of how the awful events
somehow produced themselves through no fault of his, and the prosecu–
tor's wandering and sometimes odiously righteous account of Meursault's
criminal behavior. Still, the prosecutor shows Meursault to be unwilling
to face the consequences of his acts and bereft of moral awareness. The
jury remains remote; its decision barely concerns us as we contemplate
the original events and the trial and make up our own mind about them.
Writing about
Billy Budd
in
Beyond Culture,
Lionel Trilling felt the
need to report that most of his hundreds of students over the years con–
demned Captain Vere for condemning Billy Budd. After teaching
The
Stranger
off and on for thirty years I must report a similar response among
students to Meursault and to the guilty verdict pronounced against him.
At first I partly agreed with the students. Later, after shifting my position,
I began keeping track of their reactions. In 1975, on the midterm exami–
nation of an undergraduate French course, I asked whether the
prosecutor was justified in calling Meursault's behavior "monstrous."
