Znaš li da se u Americi ovaj roman sada tumači kao knjiga homoseksualne tematike? Kao, kapetana je Bili seksualno privlačio itd. Meni to nije ni palo na pamet dok sam čitao knjigu.
Znam, i meni jest palo na pamet. No, to je samo jedna sastavnica, ne
važna (kao kod Prousta), a kamoli presudna.
Ključno je 11. poglavlje, opis "depravity according to nature" i Claggarta.
Sjećam se kad sam, davno, pročitao taj kratki roman,...i znao
da je to među najvećim stvarima, uz Eshila, Dostojevskog ili Prousta.
Kao i uvijek Forster (koji je bio pederast), u pravu je kao kritik:
It is to his conception of evil that Melville's work
owes much of its strength. As a rule evil has been
feebly envisaged in fiction, which seldom soars above
misconduct or avoids the clouds of mysteriousness.
Evil to most novelists is either sexual and social or
is something very vague for which a special style with
implications of poetry is thought suitable. They want it to exist, in order that it may kindly help
them on with the plot, and evil, not being kind,
generally hampers them with a villain—a Lovelace
or Uriah Heep, who does more harm to the author
than to the fellow characters. For a real villain we
must turn to a story of Melville's called Billy Budd.1
It is a short story, but must be mentioned because
of the light it throws on his other work. The scene
is on a British man-of-war soon after the Mutiny at
the Nore—a stagey yet intensely real vessel. The
hero, a young sailor, has goodness—which is faint
beside the goodness of Alyosha; still he has goodness
of the glowing aggressive sort which cannot exist unless
it has evil to consume. He is not aggressive himself.
It is the light within him that irritates and
explodes. On the surface he is a pleasant, merry,
rather insensitive lad, whose perfect physique is marred by one slight defect, a stammer, which finally
destroys him. He is "dropped into a world not without
some man-traps, and against whose subtleties
simple courage without any touch of defensive ugliness
is of little avail; and where such innocence as
man is capable of does yet, in a moral emergency,
not always sharpen the faculties or enlighten the
will." Claggart, one of the petty officers, at once sees
in him the enemy—his own enemy,
for Claggart is
evil. It is again the contest between Ahab and Moby Dick, though the parts are more clearly assigned,
and we are further from prophecy and nearer
to morality and common sense. But not much nearer.
Claggart is not like any other villain.
Natural depravity has certain negative virtues, serving
it as silent auxiliaries. It is not going too far to say that
it is without vices or small sins. There is a phenomenal
pride in it that excludes from them anything mercenary
or avaricious. In short, the depravity here meant
partakes nothing of the sordid or sensual. It is serious,
but free from acerbity.
He accuses Billy of trying to foment a mutiny. The
charge is ridiculous, no one believes it, and yet it
proves fatal. For when the boy is summoned to declare
his innocence, he is so horrified that he cannot
speak, his ludicrous stammer seizes him, the power
within him explodes, and he knocks down his traducer,
kills him, and has to be hanged.
Billy Budd is a remote unearthly episode, but it is
a song not without words, and should be read both
for its own beauty and as an introduction to more
difficult works. Evil is labelled and personified instead
of slipping over the ocean and round the world,
and Melville's mind can be observed more easily.
What one notices in him is that his apprehensions
are free from personal worry, so that we become bigger
not smaller after sharing them. He has not got
that tiresome little receptacle, a conscience, which
is often such a nuisance in serious writers and so contracts
their effects—the conscience of Hawthorne
or of Mark Rutherford. Melville—after the initial
roughness of his realism—reaches straight back into
the universal, to a blackness and sadness so transcending
our own that they are undistinguishable from
glory. He says, "in certain moods no man can weigh
this world without throwing in a something somehow
like Original Sin to strike the uneven balance." He
threw it in, that undefinable something, the balance
righted itself, and he gave us harmony and temporary
salvation.