From the moment that Jean Giono first came across the writings of Herman Melville in the early 1930s, he was consumed. Reflecting on that revelatory period a decade later, he recalled:
For at least five or six years, [Moby-Dick] was my foreign companion. I took it with me regularly on my hikes across the hills. As soon as I entered those vast, wavelike but motionless solitudes, I’d sit down under a pine and lean against its trunk. All I needed was to pull out this book, which was already flapping in the wind, to sense the manifold life of the seas swell up below and all around me. Countless times I’ve felt the rigging hiss over my head, the earth heave under my feet like the deck of a whaler, and the trunk of the pine groan and sway against my back like a mast heavy with wind-filled sails.
Heady stuff to be sure, but the affinity was real. Drawn intuitively to Melville’s pursuit of the metaphysical, his interest in the possibility of a world of meaning beyond the thin scrim of the visible—even as, or especially because, that meaning is as likely to be monstrous as it is regenerative—he would soon embrace the writer’s work directly. After musing on Melville’s masterpiece for a half-decade of rambling hilly hikes, Giono embarked on the first French translation of the book, completing the project, with the help of a pair of collaborators, in 1939. Alongside this effort, he would also bring out Pour saluer Melville, a weird biographical sliver of a novel that spun a highly fictionalized account of Melville’s 1849 trip to London. Giono’s version of Melville seems to share little with the actual man, apart from the obvious biographical details, but it establishes Giono’s vision of the American author (and, by implication, himself) as a poet who can pierce beyond the surface of life and get at the dark heart beneath, transforming the world around him through the powers of language.1 Comparing Melville and his French translator, Edmund White, Giono’s most visible English-language commentator, would write that both Giono and Melville “were pantheists, or animists, if that means they intuited a god in every tree and a goddess in any lake.” In a number of Giono’s novels, though, the discoveries behind the natural surfaces are far less celestial in origin. In his first book, Colline (originally appearing in English as Hill of Destiny and later translated simply as Hill), for example, the narrator presents a natural world alive with sinister purpose, a sort of Ahabian fever dream brought to life and transported to rural France. Published in 1929, a year or two before Giono came across Moby-Dick, the book found the French author, as if by supernatural affinity, already exploring Melvillean themes.
Colline was the first of what Jean Giono referred to as his Pan trilogy, a series of otherwise unrelated novels that evoke the wild energies associated with the Greek god—half-man, half-goat—of untamed nature. These novels, which do not explicitly mention Pan but rather are infused with his metaphysical presence, are lyrical conjurings of a natural world that is in every way alive. Although that world is one of overwhelming menace in Colline, in the two other novels of the cycle, Un de Baumugnes (1929; Lovers Are Never Losers) and Regain (1930; Second Harvest), as well as the handful of books that followed, these Pan-like energies are often positive and regenerative, working in harmony with those who live in harmony with their environments, even if violence, in some form or other, is never far from the surface. In writing these early novels, Giono drew on his reading of Greek and Roman classics as well as his studies of Walt Whitman to shape his view of the natural world, but he also betrayed a Melvillean interest in pushing deeper, past the surface of his surroundings, an interest that he would continue to develop throughout his career.
After the outbreak of World War II, Giono’s career would take some odd turns. A committed pacifist, he was twice imprisoned, in 1939 and 1944, as a suspected Nazi collaborator, although he was no such thing. Coming in between these harrowing confinements, Pour saluer Melville stands as a pivot-point in his output. Just as that book follows its master’s example in mixing modes—partaking, by turns, of realism, the lyrical imaginary, and odd bits of surrealism—so would the post-war Giono work in several different genres, from Stendhalian epic to picaresque road novel, moving away from the strict engagement with the rural environment that marked his earlier work. Nonetheless, his interest in the natural world as seen through a Melvillean lens never faded, and in 1948, he published his own sea epic, Fragments d’un paradis (Fragments of a Paradise), a fanatical Moby-Dick reader’s very different version of his favorite novel. In that book, Giono’s imagining of a nautical voyage of discovery, the author applies his hallucinatory imagination to reveal, as he has throughout the earlier part of his career, as he has continually glimpsed in the writings of Melville, the simultaneous wondrousness and ghastliness of the natural world.
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To hear Giono tell it, that sense of wonder giving way to a darker frame of mind, a Melville-induced sounding of his own personal depths, was chiefly what characterized his prolonged experience with Moby-Dick. In his brief introduction to Pour saluer Melville, Giono explains how his hillside ramblings with Melville’s novel took on more sinister shadings as soon as the sun went down. “At twilight,” he writes, “when darkness deepens our inner dimensions, this pursuit of mine, into which Melville drew me, became at once more general and more personal.” Walking home, he feels the presence of Ahab accompanying him, until the two merge into a single being. Soon, he begins to sense that he himself is apart from the rest of humanity, an Ahabian seer whose gaze extends further than anyone else’s, a poet who is not afraid to look into the sinister heart underlying the surface of the natural world. “He’s far away, he haunts forbidden seas,” he writes generally of the visionary type, while transparently referring to both Ahab and himself. “That gaze of his—the one you caught a moment ago, the one that plainly couldn’t serve any earthly purpose and passed through material things without passing—he was gazing that way because he’d just clambered down from the crow’s nest. He’s the kind of man who was born to survey uncommon spaces.”
In Giono’s imagining, Melville, like his greatest creation, is such a type, and in Pour saluer Melville, Giono not only offers up a portrait of the Moby-Dick author as an idealized Jean Giono, but one whose dark poetic sense, his ability to both probe the depths of the surrounding world and to transform that world through language, are his chief and deathless attributes. The book, however, was not initially intended to be a standalone item or even a fiction. From 1936 to 1939, Giono was involved in producing the first French translation of Moby-Dick, along with his friend Lucien Jacques and an English antique dealer, Joan Smith. Asked to contribute a preface to the translation, Giono instead dreamed up something bigger: a short, odd little novel about a trip Herman Melville made to London in 1849 that soon outgrew its proposed format. Originally serialized in three issues of the Nouvelle revue française in 1940, it was published as a separate volume in 1941 alongside the translation. According to scholar Kevin J. Hayes, the translation received instant acclaim, earning plaudits from the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Blanchot, while Pour saluer’s reception was more modest. It retained a selective readership over the decades, despite falling out of print during the 1950s and ’60s, and it only appeared in an English version in 2017, after New York Review Classics brought it out as Melville: A Novel in a translation from Paul Eprile.
The Herman Melville presented in Pour saluer bears some resemblance to the historical man, sharing, to be sure, many biographical details with the actual Melville and something of his searching temperament. Giono’s Melville, however, is largely his own creation, part brash, outgoing man’s man, part society-scorning visionary. As Edmund White put it, “Instead of the tormented, introspective, somewhat homosexual real Melville, deeply disappointed in the reception of his work, Giono names a character ‘Melville’ who is burly and sleeps in the nude, is proletarian, bristling with self-confidence, successful, a smooth operator with the ladies, and tirelessly eloquent.” Rather than the actual Melville then, Giono’s version far more resembles assertively masculine literary figures like Whitman or Hemingway.2 More so than any other model, though, Giono’s Melville seems to be an idealized picture of its creator. Husky and rugged, this version of the Moby-Dick author glides through the world with confidence. If he turns away from that world with distaste—as did Giono, by remaining in his native Manosque for his whole life, by rejecting much of the modern world—it is a choice, not a temperamental necessity. Ultimately, what matters to Giono, and what matters to his version of Melville, is his artistic vocation, his engagement not with any form of polite society but with the transcendental mysteries to be found only outside its confines.
In fact, these transcendental mysteries, rather than any of Moby-Dick’s other elements—its microcosmic social panorama, its detailed depiction of industrial whaling—are what seem to preoccupy Giono. As a result, after being sure to assert Melville’s masculine bona fides, he describes his hero in visionary terms, as a “poet,” an appellation that Giono keeps in lowercase but which might as a well be capitalized, since, for Giono, it is to the visionary that Melville’s achievement runs. Early in the book, when Melville goes to sign up for the whaleship Acushnet, the drummer senses it just by looking into his eyes. “They have that sort of otherworldly keenness that can’t be mistaken,” he tells Melville of his limpid orbs, before switching to an extended polo metaphor and noting that Melville’s “gaze goes ever so slightly beyond the spot where the ball lands.” But this isn’t enough for Giono, whose narrator soon offers his own commentary. “Yes, the horse trader in him has it right,” he says of the drummer. “But he’s too polite. It isn’t only by a few fractions of an inch that Herman looks past the mark, it’s by several nautical miles. He’ll never be able to fit in with the other players. He plays a game out of proportion with human powers.”
Melville is still just a young man when the drummer first discerns this quality in him, but his powers of vision will continue to develop throughout the course of the novel, culminating in a romantic (in all senses of the word) encounter in the country outside London. After beginning with several pages of biographical background, the book jumps ahead to 1849, with Melville in London to deliver the manuscript of his fifth book, White-Jacket, to his English publisher. He schedules a two-week stay in the capital, but his business quickly concluded, he finds himself going mad, unable to give free play to his wild nature in the civilized metropolis. Much of the book, then, takes place outside the city, as Melville boards a mail coach and heads to the countryside. Along the way, he meets an (entirely fictional) young woman named Adelina White, whom he feels instinctively drawn to and with whom he carries on a chaste affair as they ride together atop the carriage. Adelina’s chief function, as the coach pushes deeper into the natural world and Melville begins to pepper her with lyrical discourse, is as a foil for the writer, a receptive audience who allows him to exercise his advanced poetic faculties without the pressure of facing down the blank page.
The two ride along and a storm peeks through the edges of the horizon. Melville picks out an indentation in the middle of the sky, a burst of green between two clouds that looks like a leaf and allows the poet to pierce behind the visible and see the “infinite depths” beyond. Calling Adelina’s attention to the scene, he asks her if she has ever held a bay leaf in her hands, and when she says she has, he describes the quality of green shared by the leaf and the sky. With just these few words from the poet’s mouth, Adelina’s world is transformed:
And so, suddenly, she had that indentation of the sky in her hand; she felt the chasms in the sky grow deeper in her hand; she saw them right before her eyes. The world wasn’t the same anymore: She knew that she was very small, that the sky was infinite; but now it was she who was infinite, and the sky very small. Small because she had once held in her hand a bay leaf, whose flesh is the same as that vast, dusty cloud of dark, green sand: the night. And above all, because a voice had just named it for her, had fused the two images, had shed light on them.
These almost mythical powers that Giono ascribes to his favorite author are, in his version of Melville’s literary odyssey, a pivotal fulfillment of his poetic function, but it will not be the final one. That will only come with the writing of Moby-Dick, a monumental task on which he will finally embark as soon as he returns stateside. As befitting a book that began as a translation of that novel, Pour saluer serves as a wholly imagined backstory to the writing of that book, with much of the early pages finding Melville verbally sparring with a literal angel who taunts him with his inability or unwillingness to write a true book, which is to say Moby-Dick. It is only after exercising his transformative linguistic powers with Adelina that he is ready, and then it only remains for him to write the thing. When he finally does, Giono incorrectly tells us, it is universally acclaimed, and in his reading of Melville’s life, it stands as the only worthwhile thing he ever does, apart from his—again, fictional—coach-top orations, which continue to loom large in his memory. In the final pages of the book, Giono dismisses the rest of Melville’s oeuvre, having Melville himself scorn Pierre, the author’s fascinating Moby-Dick follow-up that Giono does not find fascinating, and falsely claims that the final thirty-four years of Melville’s life amounted to “total silence” on the literary front. He dies in 1891, still thinking of Adelina, desperately wondering if she ever read the book she inspired.
In the introduction to Pour saluer, Giono recalls that he and Lucien Jacques were mulling over the possibility of translating Moby-Dick, when they came across a passage in the book that settled the matter and set them off on their monumental task. “There are some enterprises,” Melville writes, “in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.” This claim on Melville’s part—borne out by the variousness of modes, genres, and tones that he would expertly deploy in the book from which this quote comes—not only became the guiding principle of their translation, but it would seem, of that project’s offshoot as well. Pour saluer, like Moby-Dick, is an odd amalgam of genres, mixing biographical fiction with all sorts of odd bits of business, including lyrical rhapsodies, essayistic asides, and bizarrely surreal moments, as in one anecdote where Giono informs the reader that an anonymous “they” had once placed a crown of thorns on Melville’s head. When Melville removed the crown, Giono relates, a single thorn scratched his forehead. The wound healed, but a sticky, soft little spot remained on his head, a mark of difference setting apart this exceptional man from the world.
But what Giono seems to value most in Melville is not his omnivorous multi-genre embrace (which is perhaps why he dismisses the entirety of his multifarious post–Moby-Dick output—he does not seem to find its disorderliness to be so very “careful”), nor his tortured reckoning with his fraught historical moment, and even less his group portrait of an earthy, disparate collection of men. Instead, Giono focuses his attention strictly on his poet’s ability to make the ineffable graspable. In this, Giono’s Melville is not so much like his real-life counterpart whose own book grappled with the desperate need to find deeper meaning, rather than taking this meaning for granted. He is instead like a less sinister version of Janet, the old man from Giono’s first book, Colline, who sees farther than everyone else and who, his fellow villagers suspect, is directly responsible for the sinister machinations of the natural world. He is also, of course, like Ahab, looking past the surface of the visible to the wondrous (or horrible) beneath. If, in reading Moby-Dick in the darkening woods, Giono had felt himself at one with Ahab, it is because he shares that character’s desire for and ability to peer beyond the mere façade of a picturesque natural world. Ahab, like Giono’s idealized version of himself, is a true poet. It is not Melville the writer that Giono identifies with, but Melville-as-Ahab, which is to say Melville-as-Giono.
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In 1929, when Colline was first published, the American author Giono was most absorbed by was Whitman. According to Edmund White, Giono first discovered Whitman through French translations in the 1920s, before later reading him in English. “He loved Whitman’s all-embracing egalitarianism and his pantheism,” White noted, and his influence in Colline is felt in Giono’s nose-to-the-dirt portrayals of the peasants who populate the desolate farming community where the book is set. A year or two before he discovered Moby-Dick, though, Giono was also unknowingly treading Melvillean ground, undertaking his own explorations of “the ungraspable phantom[s] of life,” a hidden world of meaning resting just beyond reach. Set in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence département where Giono was born and lived his entire life, Colline presents a baker’s dozen of characters, all living in a tiny settlement of four houses, as well as a teeming world of natural life surrounding and running throughout the village. The men work the ground, are close to the land that they rely on for their sustenance, are attuned to its rhythms. But they are also aware of the menacing side of this semi-animate earth, the possibility that it could wake up at any moment and smite them. As Janet, the scabrous, half-paralyzed father-in-law of one of the farmers, and a mysterious presence who seems to embody the sinister natural world around him, prophesizes, “For the time being our hill’s lying down like an ox in the grass, and only its back is showing. . . . For the moment it’s lying down, but if it ever gets up . . .”
Get up it does, following the precipitating event of the book, a villager’s killing of a lizard, and the remainder of the novel follows the villagers’ efforts to contain the subsequent environmental catastrophes that the now-animate earth visits on its inhabitants. Giono’s chief achievement in Colline is to render the natural world as a living mass of dormant power, monstrous to those that are monstrous to it—or even those who offer it slight, unknowing provocation. To achieve this effect, Giono creates a figurative scheme in which living creatures, particularly humans, are described in metaphors drawn from their only seemingly inanimate surroundings, while conversely, the land is often described in terms that render it human. Commenting on Giono’s technique, cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram notes that while “it has become a facile commonplace to say ‘the earth is alive,’ the meaning becomes far more compelling when we speak of the visible terrain as flesh—as a living, breathing body.” This is just how Giono renders the suddenly threatening natural world, as in a pivotal moment where he describes the villagers experiencing “a terrible rumbling [that] makes the sky shudder. The earth monster is awakening. It’s making its massive, granite limbs grind to the very center of heaven.”
Eventually the town is saved, the earth satiated, but the villagers decide further action is needed to prevent a reawakening, and this action soon centers on the community’s elder member. Among his neighbors, Janet is regarded as a prophet. In an early scene in the book, Gondran, Janet’s son-in-law, consults him after killing a lizard, an act which he correctly senses will have dire consequences. Janet confirms his suspicion, quickly prophesizing doom as the hill’s revenge for its ill-treatment at the hands of the men—even if it does not seem like they treat the land particularly poorly. No matter. They do not see far enough. “So you think you know, do you, you sly devil,” Janet says to Gondran, “what’s on the other side of the air?” knowing full well that he doesn’t.
Janet’s quizzical response pushes the book into Melvillean territory early on—betraying the author’s nascent interest in a hidden world of meaning, only discernible to those who are attuned to its invisible frequencies—but that man’s constant pronouncements also make him a suspicious figure to the fellow farmers, and a natural scapegoat for the recent disturbances. Declaring Janet inhuman, Jaume, the most respected of the farmers, decides that the old man is not simply a prophet but the source of their doom, an active manipulator of fate. In his telling, Janet’s words have the ability to conjure up worlds, to transform the environment around him, a literalized and far more malevolent version of Melville’s own revelatory powers of speech in Pour saluer. “Where before I used to see a tree, a hill,” Jaume says, “[after hearing Janet], there was still a tree, still a hill, but I was seeing right through to the terror of their essence. Power in the green branches, power in the clay-red folds of earth, hatred that mounts up in the green streams of sap, and hatred that trembles in the wounds of the furrows.” The true state of nature may be terror, with or without Janet’s interventions, but Jaume then makes it clear that he thinks Janet is no mere prophet. “And then I saw someone”—Janet—“holding a thorn in his hand,” he continues, “who was ripping open the wound to heighten the anger.” Soon, the men decide he is not merely heightening the earth’s anger but causing it all himself and the only solution is to do away with him for good.
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Is Janet the cause of the earth’s uprising or merely its prophet? It’s a very Melvillean question. In fact, it’s one raised by Ahab himself about that other dense repository of meaning, Moby Dick. In the pivotal Chapter 36 of Melville’s novel, “The Quarter Deck,” Ahab calls the entire crew on deck and tells them that the purpose of their voyage will not to be to hunt whales for commercial purposes but to hunt a single whale for their captain’s vengeance. After making this declaration, Ahab goes off on a long soliloquy, unfolding the metaphysics behind his quest. For the mad captain, there is meaning in the world simmering, sinister, just below the surface. “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks,” but behind the mask, there is something more, “some unknown but still reasoning thing.” For Ahab, the whale that dismasted him, with his “outrageous strength, with his inscrutable malice sinewing it” is either the mask or the thing behind the mask, but either way, it has become the object of all his hatred and dissatisfaction. “That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate,” he says, “and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.” Which it is might not matter to Ahab—his course is set. But it might matter to the reader. If the whale is principal, the source of all the universe’s malevolent forces, then Ahab’s mission is considerably more substantive than if it is a mere agent of those forces or, of course, if it is simply a whale, and Ahab’s quest a suicide/mass murder without larger metaphysical purpose outside of his own brain (and, in a different way, Ishmael’s too).
Either way, Moby-Dick raises the question of an active malevolence in nature, which as picked up by Giono in Colline, is not really a question at all. In Colline, the world is turning against the villagers and the only thing to be settled is Janet’s role. The men decide, rightly or wrongly, that Janet is the principal and not merely the agent behind their own misfortunes and seek to wreak their revenge on him, not out of a deep-seated hatred for the elderly man but out of an instinct for self-preservation. In the end, Janet—who is part white whale, part Ahab (all the book’s hatred comes from him), and part Fedallah (in his prophesizing)—stands as the book’s central figure and Giono’s first great creation. Whether he is ultimately principal or mere agent, he perfectly embodies an environment that is as menacing as it is sustaining, and is everywhere alive. Giono’s attitude toward the natural world of his native Alpes-de-Haute-Provence shifts in ways large and small throughout his ample body of work, but his engagement with the frequently animate landscape would remain one of the defining features of his oeuvre.
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Just as the Melville of Pour saluer flees London at the first chance for the bucolic pleasures of the surrounding landscapes, so Giono remained committed to the primacy of the rural provinces, and particularly Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. The flipside of this commitment was a disdain for the great European capitals, which represented the contemporary, mechanized civilization that he so despised. Here, for example, is Giono describing the motivations behind the writing of his 1934 novel Le Chant du monde:
I have tried to make a story of adventure in which there should be absolutely nothing “timely.” The present time disgusts me, even to describe. It is sufficient merely to endure it. . . . At this very time when Paris flourishes—and that is nothing to be proud of—there are people in the world who know nothing of the horrible mediocrity into which civilization, philosophers, public speakers, and gossips have plunged the human race. They think only of adding to their comfort, heedless that one day true men will come up from the river and down from the mountain, more implacable and more bitter than the grass of the apocalypse.
Chant, one of his less successful novels, imagines what this race of “true” men would be like, but his anti-modern pique, exacerbated by his dual imprisonments during World War II, would find more fertile ground in later novels. During the wartime occupation of his country, Giono began work on a new book, one which would eventually appear four years later (after his second imprisonment led to a multi-year publishing ban) as Fragments d’un paradis. A sea tale of extraordinary imagination and commitment, clearly inspired by Moby-Dick, Fragments would represent one of Giono’s most serious efforts to grapple with the problems of modernity, contrasting the allegedly civilized world with a natural world once again replete with a sense of wonder that rubs up uncomfortably with a monstrousness, albeit a monstrousness of a completely different and far more awe-inspiring breed than the human-made variety then unfolding on the European battlefields.
Fragments d’un paradis, which was originally published in 1948 and didn’t appear in English until 2024 (in a Paul Eprile translation as Fragments of a Paradise), is the story of a sea voyage of discovery undertaken not by untutored “real” men but by a captain disenchanted with the contemporary world and a small crew of various levels of education and philosophical acumen. Written in a range of styles—the straightforward sequencing of captain’s log extracts, tagged dialogue, hallucinatory descriptions of natural phenomena—and taking place more or less contemporaneously with its writing, the book details the voyage of two ships as they head south from Europe for Antarctica on a mission of discovery. With one ship moving quickly ahead, the captain of the other ship, L’Indien, lets it go on, wending his way down the South Atlantic at his own unhurried pace, and the book remains with him and his crew.
The expedition’s stated mission is to “explore the Western part of Graham Land [in Antarctica] and to carry out studies in Zoology, Botany, Geology, Paleontology, Bacteriology, Hydrography, Oceanography, Meteorology, planetary Magnetism, atmospheric Electricity, and Gravity,” and indeed the various experts on board the ship perform experiments in many of these areas along the way. But the unnamed captain has other ideas about what the true purpose of the voyage is to be. In his log, he writes that what he’s “searching for is the unknown. I don’t really care about bringing back new classifications. . . . Everything we already know along these lines is of no avail as a possible remedy.” A remedy, that is, for the numbing, soul-annihilating state of modernity and which is the eternal object sought by both the captain in his seafaring quest and Giono in his literary one. Setting aside any contemporary technology—he keeps the ship’s radio system boxed up, reasoning that “it’s not part of our mission to stay in touch with the world in upheaval”—the captain pushes on, eloquently describing his philosophical rationale in both his log and his conversations with his crew. Sounding a lot like Giono himself, the captain delivers a withering denunciation of the world he has escaped:
To spin round and round like tops . . . to get excited by political regimes that consist, most of the time, of the most despicable murderers, the most despicable because they set themselves beyond the reach of any punishment and pass laws that give themselves free rein. To exhaust one’s curiosity—such a fresh, enticing feeling—on puny objects offered up by the so-called progress of civilization. To circle through the interminable, barren corridors of this strange segment of the earth that consists of the inhabited continents, and most of all, to accept losing touch with the real world: hasn’t all this brought you to this arid state, full of sarcasm and disgust?
It is this sense of aridity, of unreality, that the voyage is undertaken to dispel.
In writing Fragments, Giono draws heavily on the work of French naturalist Louis Roule as well as other sources both literary and scientific, but the one inescapable text that haunts the book is Moby-Dick. From the fact of the ship’s name, L’Indien, echoing that of the Pequod, to detailed descriptions of a giant squid whose astonishing whiteness recalls Ishmael’s disquisitions on the “Whiteness of the Whale” to the captain’s Ahabian counter-mission, the book is a collection of strands lifted from Melville’s book and filtered through Giono’s vision in much the same way that Giono’s Melville in Pour saluer is really a filtered-through version of Giono himself. Although Ahab’s quest is a metaphysical journey to “strike through the mask” of the visible world and extract revenge for all his woes, he can also be taken, like L’Indien’s captain, as a figure fatally at odds with his time, one who deliberately abjures the capitalist mission of violently extracting resources from the natural world in favor of a more meaningful quest. This is the reading offered up by Trinidadian historian and critic C. L. R. James in his study Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, begun when he was imprisoned on Ellis Island and privately published five years after Fragments appeared. In the aftermath of both Stalin’s reign of terror and the Holocaust, James was primarily concerned with the question of totalitarianism, and for him Ahab represented the perfected literary type of this figure. But Ahab is not a tyrant born of simple psychological need. His rise is a direct response to the coming dominance of industrial capitalist society. Ahab is a man who has assumed power within his society but who ultimately rejects that society, and in his need to establish a new order, he draws those under his command, whether the masses of workers or disillusioned intellectuals like Ishmael, to their own destruction (although Ishmael escapes). Ahab’s totalitarian turn is, according to James, “the end reached by the mechanization through science and industry which he so hates but which he, and no other, has carried to its logical extremity.”
The captain of L’Indien’s mission does not induce the same level of destruction as that of his counterpart on the Pequod, but his sense of disgust with the modern world is no less pronounced than that of James’s Ahab or Giono’s Melville or simply Giono himself. Like Ahab, L’Indien’s captain seeks a cure for his sense of spleen in an extraordinary specimen of the natural world—or in his case, as many as he can find. “It’s of the greatest importance,” he tells his men, “that we not be turned into beasts. Our spirit has need of space and light, of fiery skies, and of the exaltation that all of these bestow.” His mission then is finally one in search of wonder, a voyage filled with extraordinary discoveries that the captain hopes will invigorate his and men’s sense of humanity and purpose. But while these discoveries are numerous and indeed extraordinary, they often partake of the monstrous, and they ultimately fill the men with dread as frequently as they stir their souls. And yet, they cannot look away. As Giono had written in his brief introduction to Pour saluer Melville, “Man always craves some monstrous object. And his life has no meaning unless he devotes himself entirely to its pursuit.” By pursuing the wondrous, the captain of L’Indien, like that of the Pequod, asserts his humanity beyond his mere role as a steward of modern industrial society. The wonders he encounters may partake more of the damned than the divine, but the two modes are each other’s inverse, and in discovering the one, he inevitably proves the existence of the other.
The prodigies to be found in Fragments are numerous and are often as bizarre as they are awe-inducing. Whether it’s the cook’s astonishing facial transformation after eating a bird of fiery yellow or the savage interactions between the giant squid and the massive columns of birds drawn to him and thus to their own death, Fragments is a vivid catalog of the wonders of the natural world, glimpsed without the intervening scrim of civilization. Perhaps the most astonishing wonder the crew encounters, though, is a giant ray that rotates through a brain-bleeding range of colors, many of which the men have never before seen. This encounter proves deeply disturbing to all observers:
These hues flowed between the other colors, combined with them, transformed one into the other through a countless number of fleeting modulations, each possessing an unspeakable, awe-inspiring power to provoke revulsion. Sometimes they were so eruptive they obscured the known colors and the men were left, though they were still wholly alive, going through transformations of the kind you can expect to pass through after death.
Immediately afterward, the ship’s naturalist goes inside to fetch his pistol. It is unclear whether he intends to shoot the ray or himself, and we never find out—the gesture is unconsummated. This much, though, we do know: In Giono, as in Melville, pushing beyond the realms of the surface, of the known world, always provokes violence. Whether your motive is revenge, escape, or understanding, it is and will forever be a dangerous proposition. For Melville, the consequences are an annihilating scene of physical destruction. And that is one thing, it is simple, the end. For Giono, writing a century later amidst scenes of violence Melville could not have imagined in the antebellum world, the final result is far more ambiguous and unsettling. The book ends with L’Indien adrift, beyond the powers of any human to steer or to reassert control. The men are at a loss, and it is their souls, not their bodies, that are annihilated. “It’s not a question here of life or death,” intones the collective voice of the crew who assumes the book’s final round of narration, “It’s a question of the most terrifying thing a man can imagine: to be inanimate.”
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*An essay-review of
Melville: A Novel. By Jean Giono. Translated by Paul Eprile. New York: New York Review Books, 2017. 108 pp. $14.00.
Hill. By Jean Giono. Translated by Paul Eprile. New York: New York Review Books, 2016. 115 pp. $14.00.
Fragments of a Paradise. By Jean Giono. Translated by Paul Eprile. Brooklyn, New York: Archipelago Books, 2024. 202 pp. $19.00.
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1. It was also the first of many fictional portrayals of Melville, although it would take more than a half-century for the thread to be picked up. After Charles Busch’s 1999 novel The Night Inspector took a late-in-life Herman as one of its central characters, the floodgates would open, Melville appearing in fictionalized versions of himself in books as diverse as Jay Parini’s historical novel The Passages of H.M. (2010) and Rodrigo Fresán’s time-hopping fantasia Melvill (2022; English translation, 2024).
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2. Giono, midway through the book, explicitly evokes Whitman, attempting to equate Melville with Whitman’s brand of social, inclusive democracy. “[Melville is] an American democrat,” Giono writes. “He’s part of that democracy whose praises Whitman will sing later on, starting with the second poem in his Leaves of Grass.” With a different take on the relationship between the two, Charles Olson offered this comparison six years later: “Whitman we have called our greatest voice because he gave us hope. Melville is the truer man. He lived intensely his people’s wrong, their guilt.”
