Return of the Existentialists
; or, the absurd history of Sartre's encounter with Moby-Dick
In my last couple of posts, I looked at Melville’s influence on Albert Camus and what led him to writing an ode to one of the “greatest geniuses” of Western literature. Naturally, while reading up on Camus I couldn’t help but keep an eye on stray search hits in the books and articles I was reading, and sure enough I came across a footnote that I couldn’t help but explore.
As it turns out, Camus wasn’t the only French Existentialist philosopher to heap praise on Moby-Dick in the early days of the Melville revival. Mais non! Also sharing his thoughts about the novel was Jean-Paul Sartre, and as I learned the story of his encounter with the book was, well… kind of absurd.
Sartre and Camus were famously close friends before they even more famously became bitter enemies, driven apart by political and philosophical differences which, in turn, led to years of snippy comments about each other’s work. But Sartre’s rendezvous with the white whale came before the two ever met.
Greetings from Stalag XII-D
First, as ever, some background.
The story begins in the early days of France’s involvement in World War II. Unlike Camus, who avoided conscription into the French Army because of his history with tuberculosis, Sartre was drafted into the war effort in September 1939. But he wasn’t without his own medical issues; in fact, he was partially blind due to a condition called exotropia which left his eyes misaligned.
As a result, he avoided the front lines and was assigned to be a member of France’s meteorology corps for the 70th infantry division based in Tours. There, Sartre learned to use weather balloons, how to measure wind speed with theodolites, and even work with tools like sextants, octants, and compasses which weren’t too far from those used by, say, whaling captains. He later recalled it as “extremely peaceful work” and even a “poetic job” which allowed him ample time to read and write.
Not long after, in 1940, Sartre was captured by German troops and sent via cattle wagon to Stalag XII-D, a prison camp at the top Mount Kemmel in Trier. It might seem like his luck ran out, yet it was a period which he actually remembered fondly, appreciative of the camaraderie, the routine, and — perhaps above all else — the spectacular view from the top of the mountain. He wrote:
In the stalag, I rediscovered a form of collective life I had not experienced since the Ecole Normale—in other words, I was happy. […] The sensation of living on a mountain overlooking a city is very strong in me. . . somehow I confuse the altitude of my location with some sort of moral superiority: everything at my feet. […] It’s odd to think that freedom is down there, below me. To be prisoner on top of a mountain, what a paradox!
Elsewhere, he described his time in captivity almost like a summer camp, taunting the guards and laughing with his fellow inmates when they were caught misbehaving. He even found time to read Heidegger’s Being and Nothingness, published in 1927, which became a major influence on his own philosophical inquiries.
But after nine months of leisurely captivity something strange happened. In an episode not far removed from the pages of Omoo, in March 1941 Sartre seems to have just… walked out of the stalag and returned to Paris. At least, depending on which version of the story you believe.
In the authorised version, as told by Sartre to de Beauvoir, it is said that he was officially repatriated to France as a civilian, after having convinced the camp doctor that he would have been unfit for military service. In a more dramatic version of the escape, as told by a fellow-prisoner, Sartre walked through the prison gates disguised as a local farmer. According to the version of events put about by the communists, Sartre's escape was staged by the Germans. They released Sartre in return for his promise to work for them once he was back in Paris. More intriguing, more plausible, and quite unverifiable is the authentically Kafkaesque possibility that the Germans, unknown to Sartre, acquiesced in his escape. They could have stopped him at the prison gate. Or they could have recaptured him at any time over the next few years, when he was living openly in Paris. But they decided, at some unknown point, that it would be to their advantage to leave him alone, at liberty, writing and publishing and organising. Sartre in Paris, a fully functioning literary intellectual, was evidence that a Nazified France was less oppressive than its critics liked to think.
Whatever the circumstances, when Sartre returned to Paris he immediately became involved in the fight to rid France of the German occupation. Along with a group of likeminded young intellectuals, including fellow philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he helped establish a political activist group called Socialisme et Liberté. Sartre was among the more strident members, cheerfully calling for measures of extreme violence as a means to their end. At one of their meetings he even suggested assassinating French collaborationists who willingly worked with the Germans. Simone de Beauvoir recalled that the group, composed mainly of philosophers, writers, and publishers, passed on the idea. "None of us felt qualified to make bombs or hurl grenades." Another of its members, the writer Nathalie Sarraute, was more direct about how far they really were from violent acts of resistance: “It was supposed to be a resistance group. In fact, we were writing essays.”
Sartre’s Heel Turn
Thus, it was Sartre’s radical political ethos even among his peers which made his next move so surprising and, frankly, incoherent. In that same charged moment, the spring of 1941, Sartre agreed to write an article for Comoedia, one of the many collaborationist newspapers which were just resuming publication under the Nazi regime. Much like the decision to let Sartre live freely in Paris, for the Germans it was a propaganda strategy meant to demonstrate that the French were enjoying a normal cultural life under their control — never mind that these newspapers operated under close watch, prohibited from mentioning the war or occupation, publishing anything harming German prestige and interests, or accepting contributions from Jewish writers.
Yet at the request of Comoedia’s new collaborationist editor-in-chief, René Delange, Sartre agreed to contribute to the first issue of its return, writing a review of — what else? — Jean Giono’s just-released translation of Moby-Dick. Published on June 21, 1941, his essay was printed alongside other innocuous articles such as interviews with writer Paul Valéry and filmmaker Marcel Carné, as well as the not-so-innocuous like an antisemitic article about Bernard Nathan, a Jewish entrepreneur who had acquired the film studio Pathé in 1929. Nathan was later deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. Another page was titled “Knowing Europe,” prepared in collusion with the German Institute and which promoted Germanic values.
Sartre biographer Annie Cohen-Solal calls his decision to work with the paper “a serious mistake.” Simone de Beauvoir, his life’s companion, also seemed to regret his decision, writing in her autobiography that "the basic rule which all the intellectuals of the Resistance were agreed upon was 'No writing for Occupied Zone publications.'" It seems Sartre quickly realized the mistake himself, suggesting that he had been misled by Delange about the nature of the paper’s independence, and promised that he would refuse future invitations to work with collaborationists. Gilbert Joseph, author of a book about Sartre and de Beauvoir during the Occupation, noted that this claim was also untrue. Sartre’s ambition as a philosopher at this period regrettably overrode his commitment to the resistance. “He had the pretension to show the way to others and not to follow it,” Joseph writes, labeling him a “petit bourgeois,” in Sartre’s own words.
“An Imposing Monument”
But putting aside the nature of the publication for the time being, Sartre’s essay is still worth reading to see Moby-Dick through the eyes of the mid-century Existentialist movement, and more generally what made Giono’s translation “the major literary event of 1941.”
Sartre titled the article “Moby Dick d’Herman Melville: Plus qu’un chef-d’œuvre un formidable monument,” or “Herman Melville's Moby Dick: More Than a Masterpiece, An Imposing Monument.” Like Camus, he found the novel to be a singular achievement comparable to the likes of Ulysses, and goes so far to call Melville (who had by this point been dead for 50 years) “the most ‘modern’ writer.” And as seen in a great deal of 20th century analysis of Moby-Dick before and after him, Sartre found that it perfectly illustrated his own philosophical views.
Sartre begins and ends with a comment on Giono’s preface to the translation, a fantasy-biography novella titled Pour Saluer Melville. The New York Review of Books, which republished the essay on its own in 2017 as "Melville: A Novel,” called it “part biography, part philosophical rumination, part romance, part unfettered fantasy.” Without getting too deep into it, Giono essentially imagines whole-cloth the events that enabled Melville to write Moby-Dick. NYRB summarizes:
In the fall of 1849, Herman Melville traveled to London to deliver his novel White-Jacket to his publisher. On his return to America, Melville would write Moby-Dick. Melville: A Novel imagines what happened in between: the adventurous writer fleeing London for the country, wrestling with an angel, falling in love with an Irish nationalist, and, finally, meeting the angel’s challenge—to express man’s fate by writing the novel that would become his masterpiece.
Sartre, beginning his review of the translation, calls the essay a paltry tribute from “a minor rural prophet” to a “major” one. But he also quickly keys in on the major philosophical themes of the novel, such as how Melville uses color theory and the idea of ‘pasteboard masks’ to question the nature of free will and the thing-in-itself.
We haunt the absolute; but no one, to my knowledge, no one except Melville, has attempted this extraordinary undertaking of retaining the indefinable taste of a pure quality—the purest quality, whiteness—and seeking in that taste itself the absolute which goes beyond it.
Sartre is also awed by the way Melville overcomes the insufficiency of the form of the novel, tearing down the walls between disparate forms of writing and communication to capture his meaning.
[T]he novelist's technique seems to Melville to be insufficient to catch this idea. All means are going to seem legitimate to him: sermons, courtroom oratory, theatrical dialogues, interior monologues, real or seeming erudition, the epic—the epic above all. The epic because the volume of these sumptuous marine sentences, which rise up and fall away like liquid mountains dissipating into strange and superb images, is above all epic.
The original issue of Comoedia has been digitized here, if you’d like to read it in its original French. For those of us who can’t or prefer not to, the essay was translated for Selected Prose: The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre Vol. 2, which I’ve copied below. As with the Camus essay, I’ve put some of the more interesting sections in bold in case you’d like to skim.
“More Than a Masterpiece, An Imposing Monument”
GIONO'S SALUTE TO MELVILLE—a peasant saluting a sailor. I confess that I was curious to hear a landlubber—one of those landlubbers Melville had such contempt for—speak to us about this seaman. Would Giono find—among his arsenal of firmly rooted painted images, borrowed from the country landscape's patient shapes, among his store of animistic images (the animism of small-town tales)—the proper ways of speaking of the sea's unending new beginnings and of those geometric skies which spin above our heads like a circle whose center is nimble and circumference elastic? I confess I was disappointed. Giono became a tiller of the fields through a conscious decree, a little like the way Barres became a Lorrainer—and he is still a tiller of the fields. Like a tiller of the fields he looks at the sky to see if the weather will be good tomorrow. If he talks about the sea he does so as a peasant: "He painfully plows and replows the immense fields of the South Seas." (What real sailor could think that he's "plowing" this great barren metal? ) Even when he elevates his tone, he is still a rustic poet, completely surrounded by "living beings" and frozen once and for all into his arrested, anthropomorphic mythology. He'll say that Melville "straddles iron thunderstorms." And when he writes "the sea currents' monstrous mane," he's less like a rustic than a small-town scholar, a notary public dreaming over a map and its big blue-colored spaces.
Luckily we have Moby Dick for every useful bit of information we could want. Let's not call Moby Dick "this masterpiece." Let's call it instead—as we call Ulysses—"this imposing monument." If you enter this world, what will strike you first is its total absence of color. It's a furrowed, battered, bristly world of rugged places and reliefs, enormous fixed or moving waves. But the sea in it is neither green nor blue; it is gray, black, or white. White above all, when the boats are dancing on "the curdled milk of the whale's dreadful wrath." The sky is white, the nights are white, the icicles hang from the ship's poop "like the white tusks of a giant elephant." In Melville's work, whiteness returns like a leitmotiv of demoniacal horror. Ahab, the accursed captain, says of himself, "I leave a white and troubled wake of pallid cheeks and waters everywhere I sail." It's that "nature doesn't fail to use whiteness as an element of terror." Colors are only secondary qualities, trompe-l'oeil. Melville suffers from a very special kind of color blindness: he is condemned to strip things of their colored appearance, condemned to see white. Giono tells us that this sailor "has a precision of gaze which fastens onto every place where there is nothing: in the sky, in the sea, in space. . . ." And it's true that Melville's vision is strangely precise. But it isn't nothingness he's looking at but pure being, the secret whiteness of being; he 'looks upon .. . the universe's leprous skin, the gigantic white shroud that wraps all things, with a naked eye." I am reminded of that contrary yet identical expression of Audiberti's, "the secret blackness of milk." Black and white are the same here, in a Hegelian identity of opposites. The reason is that "the whole of divine nature is painted simply." At their center, on the level of their sheer existence, beings are indifferently black or white: black in their compact and stubborn isolation, white when they are struck by the light's great emptiness. It is on the level of this massive, polar indistinction of substance that the deeper drama of Moby Dick is played out. Melville is condemned to live at the level of being. "All objects," he writes, "all visible objects are no more than cardboard dummies. But in each event .. . in living being . . . behind the incontestable fact, something unknown and reasoning reveals itself, behind the dummy which does not itself reason." No one more than Hegel and Melville has sensed that the absolute is there all around us, formidable and familiar, that we can see it, white and polished like a sheep bone, if we only cast aside the multicolored veils with which we've covered it. We haunt the absolute; but no one, to my knowledge, no one except Melville, has attempted this extraordinary undertaking of retaining the indefinable taste of a pure quality—the purest quality, whiteness—and seeking in that taste itself the absolute which goes beyond it. If this is one of the directions in which contemporary literature is trying in a groping way to go, then Melville is the most "modern" writer.
That is why we should stop seeing a symbolic universe in the tales he tells and in the things he describes. Symbols are attached retrospectively to ideas we begin with, but to begin with Melville has no idea to express. He is acquainted only with things, and it is in the depths of things that he finds his ideas. I am sure that he began by thinking that he would tell the best story of a whale hunt he could. This accounts for a first, heavily documentary aspect of his book. He tries to make even the slightest detail precise; he piles up knowledge and statistics to such a degree that he comes to seem insanely erudite and we think at first—as a result of his naively didactic concerns, the slow peaceful pace of his narrative, and also a certain humor typical of the period—that we are in the presence of some eccentric Jules Verne novel. Twenty Thousand Leagues Across the Sea, or The Adventures of A Whale Hunter. And then, little by little, a cancerous proliferation begins to swell and warp the clean and easy style of this American Jules Verne, just as Crime and Punishment is basically only a cancer eating away Les Mysteres de Paris. The documentary comes apart at the seams. What happened was that Melville suddenly realized that there was an idea in the whale hunt; he saw "in a white heat" that strange tie between man and animal, the hunt. A relationship of dizziness and death. And it is this relationship that is revealed abruptly at the end of the first hundred pages. Hatred. Moby Dick's romantic subject is the exact opposite of that of Une Passion dans le desert: not an animal's love for a man but a man's hatred for an animal. Ahab, the captain of the Pequod, has lost his leg in "the ivory jaws" of a white whale which has escaped his harpoon. Since then he has been consumed with hatred for this monster; he pursues him everywhere across the seas. This demoniacal character, whose role is to bring out what might be called the zoological side of man's fate, man's animal roots, his carnivorous nature, his nature as the scourge of animals, remains in spite of everything at the level of a somewhat outmoded romanticism: Ahab inveigles his harpooners into a solemn oath which reminds us a little of the casting of the bullets in Der Freischiltz and of Weber's music. But this novel of hatred swells and then bursts beneath the thrust of a different cancer. With it, even the novelistic form of the narrative disappears; for there is an idea of hatred just as there is an idea of whiteness or of the whale hunt, and this idea involves the whole man, the whole human condition. From now on the novelist's technique seems to Melville to be insufficient to catch this idea. All means are going to seem legitimate to him: sermons, courtroom oratory, theatrical dialogues, interior monologues, real or seeming erudition, the epic—the epic above all. The epic because the volume of these sumptuous marine sentences, which rise up and fall away like liquid mountains dissipating into strange and superb images, is above all epic. In his best moments, Melville has the inspiration of a Lautréamont. And then, finally, he becomes conscious of writing an epic. He amuses himself writing it, he multiplies invocations to the democratic god and prosopopoeias, he entertains himself by presenting the harpooners as Homeric heroes. But when the reader has finally gotten the idea, when he finds himself at last face to face with the unaccommodated fate of man, when he sees man as Melville sees him—this fallen transcendence in his horrible abandonment—it's no longer an epic he thinks he has read but an enormous summa, a gigantic, monstrous, gently antediluvian book which could only be compared, in its unmeasured hugeness, to Rabelais's Pantagruel or James Joyce's Ulysses. And after that it would be rather tactless to reread the salute which Giono, a minor rural prophet, tosses to the major prophet Melville.
References
Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life: The Autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir (1992)
Annie Cohen-Salal, Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life (1985)
Geoffrey Wall, Sartre: Scenes from a Life, The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume XXIX, Issue 4 (2000)
Emily Temple, “How Jean-Paul Sartre managed to spend his military service working on his novel,” LitHub, September 20, 2022
Gilbert Joseph, “Une si douce Occupation: Simone de Beauvoir et Jean-Paul” (1991)
Jean-Paul Sartre, Selected Prose: The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Vol. 2, eds. Michel Rybalka, Michel Contat (1974)