Article published in Les Ecrivains célèbres. Editions Mazenod, Volume III, 1952.
1 For a long time, Moby Dick was thought of as an adventure story suitable for school prizes.
2 In passing, let me advise critics to read page 449 of Mardi in the French translation.
3 As an indication, here are some of the obviously symbolic pages of Moby Dick. (French translation, Gallimard): pp. 120, 121, 123, 129, 173–7, 191–3, 203, 209, 241, 310, 313, 339, 373, 415, 421, 452, 457, 460, 472, 485, 499, 503, 517, 520, 522. Camus probably read Moby Dick in the French translation by Lucien Jacques, Joan Smith, and Jean Giono, which was published by Gallimard in 1941. If this is the case, then the page numbers correspond to these page numbers in the Everyman edition and refer more or less to the following episodes:
120—p. 114: of chapter XXX. Ahab’s leg.
121—p. 115: beginning of chapter XXXI.
123—p. 117. Whether a whale be a fish.
129—pp. 122–3. Black Fish—Narwhal.
173–7—pp. 163–7: chapter XLI. The Whiteness of the Whale.
203—p. 192. “Now the advent of these outlandish strangers …”
209—p. 197. Queequeg as the standard bearer “hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair.”
241—p. 227: chapter LIII. The Town-Ho’s story of how the mate Radney was eaten by Moby Dick.
310—p. 290. The Right Whale’s Head.
313—end of chapter LXXIV. Resolution in facing death.
339—pp. 317–18: end of chapter LXXXII, beginning of chapter LXXXIII.
373—p. 350: chapter XC. The smell of the Rosebud.
415—pp. 393–4: chapter CIII.
452—p. 420: chapter CXXII. The tempering of the harpoon.
457—p. 425. The meeting with the Bachelor.
460—p. 248: beginning of chapter CXVI.
472—pp. 438–9: chapter CXX.
485—p. 451: end of chapter CXXV.
499—p. 463: beginning of chapter CXXX, “The Symphony.” Ahab weeps into the sea.
503—p. 480. Moby Dick breaks Ahab’s ivory leg.
520—end of chapter CXXXIII.
522—p. 482. “I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick.” It should be noted that there is a difference in the chapter numberings between the French translation and the Everyman edition referred to here. Thus, the French edition is consistently one chapter number ahead, so that chapter CXXXIV in the Everyman edition is chapter CXXXV in the French edition. The chapter headings here refer to the Everyman edition. —P.T.
4 In Melville, the metaphor suggests the dream, but from a concrete, physical starting point. In Mardi, for example, the hero comes across “huts of flame.” They are built, simply, of red tropical creepers, whose leaves are momentarily lifted by the wind.
On the Future of Tragedy1
An oriental wise man always used to ask in his prayers that God spare him from living in an interesting age. Our age is extremely interesting, that is to say, it is tragic. To purge us of our miseries, do we at least have a theater suited to our time or can we hope to have one? In other words, is modern tragedy possible? This is the question I would like to consider today.
But is it a reasonable question? Isn’t it the same type of question as: “Will we have good government?” or “Will our authors grow modest?” or again, “Will the rich soon share their fortunes with the poor?”—interesting questions, no doubt, but ones that lead to reverie rather than to thought.
I don’t think so. I believe, and for two reasons, that one can legitimately raise the question of modern tragedy. First, great periods of tragic art occur, in history, during centuries of crucial change, at moments when the lives of whole peoples are heavy both with glory and with menace, when the future is uncertain and the present dramatic. Aeschylus, after all, fought in two wars, and Shakespeare was alive during quite a remarkable succession of horrors.
Both, moreover, stand at a kind of dangerous turning point in the history of their civilizations. It is worth noting that in thirty centuries of Western history, from the Dorians to the atomic bomb, there have been only two periods of tragic art, both of them narrowly confined in both time and space. The first was Greek and presents remarkable unity, lasting a century, from Aeschylus to Euripides. The second lasted scarcely longer, flourishing in the countries bordering the edge of western Europe.
Too little has been made of the fact that the magnificent explosions of the Elizabethan theater, the Spanish theater of the Golden Age, and French seventeenth- century tragedy are practically contemporary with one another. When Shakespeare died, Lope de Vega was fifty four and had already had a large number of his plays performed; Calderón and Corneille were alive.
Finally, there is no more distance in time between Shakespeare and Racine than between Aeschylus and Euripides. Historically, at least, we can consider them a single magnificent flowering, though with differing aesthetics, of the Renaissance, born in the inspired disorder of the Elizabethan stage and ending with formal perfection in French tragedy. Almost twenty centuries separate these two tragic moments.
During these twenty centuries, there was nothing, nothing, except Christian mystery plays, which may be called dramatic but which, for reasons I shall explain, cannot be considered tragic. We can therefore say that these were very exceptional times, which should by their very peculiarity tell us something about the conditions for tragic expression.
I think this is a fascinating subject for study, one that should be thoroughly and patiently pursued by real historians. But this is not within my competence and I would simply like to enlarge on what I think about it as a man of the theater.
Looking at the movement of ideas in these two periods, as well as at the tragic works that were written at the time, I find one constantly recurring factor. Both periods mark a transition from forms of cosmic thought impregnated with the notion of divinity and holiness to forms inspired by individualistic and rationalist concepts. The movement from Aeschylus to Euripides is, roughly speaking, the development from the great pre-Socratic thinkers to Socrates himself (Socrates, who was scornful of tragedy, made an exception for Euripides).
Similarly, from Shakespeare to Corneille we go from a world of dark and mysterious forces, which is still the Middle Ages, to the universe of individual values affirmed and maintained by the human will and by reason (almost all the sacrifices in Racine are motivated by reason).
It is the same transition, in short, that links the passionate theologians of the Middle Ages to Descartes. Although the evolution is more clearly visible in Greece, because it is simpler and limited to one place, it is the same in both cases.
Each time, historically, the individual frees himself little by little from a body of sacred concepts and stands face to face with the ancient world of terror and devotion. Each time, literarily, the works move from ritual tragedy and from almost religious celebration to psychological tragedy. And each time the final triumph of individual reason, in the fourth century in Greece and in the eighteenth century in Europe, causes the literature of tragedy to dry up for centuries.
What can we draw from these observations on the subject that concerns us? First of all, the very general remark that the tragic age always seems to coincide with an evolution in which man, consciously or not, frees himself from an older form of civilization and finds that he has broken away from it without yet having found a new form that satisfies him. It seems to me that we, in 1955, have reached this stage, and can therefore ask whether this inner anguish will find tragic expression in our world.
However, the twenty centuries separating Euripides from Shakespeare should encourage us to be prudent. After all, tragedy is one of the rarest of flowers, and there is only the slimmest chance that we shall see it bloom in our own day.
But there is another reason that encourages us to wonder about this chance, a very particular phenomenon that we have been able to observe in France for some thirty years now, which began with the reform carried out by Jacques Copeau.2 This phenomenon is the advent of writers to the theater, which up to then had been the exclusive domain of theatrical brokers and business interests.
The interference of writers has led to the resurrection of the tragic forms that tend to put dramatic art back in its rightful place, at the summit of the literary arts. Before Copeau (except for Claudel, whom nobody performed) the privileged place for theatrical sacrifices in France was the double bed. When the play was particularly successful, the sacrifices multiplied, and the beds as well. In short, it was a business, like so many others, in which the price of everything was marked—with, if I may say so, the mark of the beast. This, moreover, is what Copeau used to say about it:
… If we are asked what feeling inspires us, what passion
