Toward the Bouddha chrétien

Nearly three decades passed between the stoppage of writing on The Confidence-Man and Melville’s work on Billy Budd, Sailor began in 1885. During that time, particularly after the Civil War, much more of Balzac’s work became available in translation, and numerous important critical works appeared about him, particularly as Henry James began to build his understanding of Balzac’s method into Realism. Moreover, America had taken up New Thought, not the confident cosmopolitan’s “geniality,” and was growing in ideas of spiritualism, paranormal psychology, and most prominently, Theosophy. Melville or members of Melville’s household, bought across this time more than a dozen renditions of Balzac in English along with transatlantic commentaries. Melville himself, in his poetry, began to find particular favor in Eastern thought, and the first successful set of La Comédie humaine in English was made and interpreted through Theosophical Buddhism. Melville read and marked a number of these volumes, particularly Balzac’s personal correspondence, which seemed to affect him profoundly. This combination of reading and rereading opened him to a much deeper resonance with Balzac’s ontological belief than he had comprehended previously: the Christian Buddha of the “Avant-propos.”

Networked Melville

Conventional academic criticism of the works of Herman Melville does not include agreement that the author knew or was influenced by the contemporary and popular French writer Honoré de Balzac until very late in his life. However, the nature of the literary and technological networks of the mid-nineteenth century, along with an examination of important texts, suggests that Melville was not only seeking to rival the Frenchman as a competitor in book sales, but through study and guidance from his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, attempting to infuse Balzac’s vision of unity of composition into a new American proto-Realist genre.

The Clue in the Labyrinth

While Melville was composing Billy Budd, Sailor he was reading, according to witnesses, Balzac’s Séraphita, an important mystical Etude Philosophique introduced to him at least by Hawthorne. In it, the innocent and suffering main character is resigned to die in order to fulfill a higher role in humanity. Hawthorne is referenced in Billy Budd, Sailor twice as is his story “The Birth-Mark,” one of the first he wrote under the influence of unité de composition in 1846. In this case, Melville employs the magnetism of forces in perfect balance – instinctive, abstractive, angelic – as Balzac does in Séraphita. In its simplicity the story reflects the profoundest understanding of unitism expressed by Schopenhauer as well, whom Melville was also reading as recommended by the Theosophical commentator in his volume. This process of writing and understanding gave Melville the power to close his life in peace with creative Will, which Balzac maintained was what “the savants called the soul.”

American Comédie

After several years as a writer of short fiction, during a time when Balzac was receiving increasing reader attention and realism was beginning to change its responses in America to the changes of Balzac’s inheritors in France, Melville wrote The Confidence-Man, a much shorter version of La Comédie humaine where Balzac attempted to be the historian of French morals as secretary. This Melville wanted to do for the United States, and he uses many of the same techniques as Balzac, such as recognizable traits from celebrities, biting satire, and humor worthy of Molière. He as well has his own “Avant-propos” in three intrusive authorial chapters where he discusses the theoretic nature of realistic characters in fiction. Both in language and example the commentary echoes Balzac. Moreover, Melville clearly borrowed the character and situation from Balzac’s Jésus-Christ en Flandre, another story known by Hawthorne, to suggest his “man in cream colors.” Both stories explore the loss of Christian faith in Providence.

Physiology of Thinking

After completing Moby-Dick and proceeding further in his collaborative months with Hawthorne, Melville began to feel that the mixed narrative was a sort of “botch,” probably because he tried to overlay his new vision of the novel on top of a manuscript already “mostly done,” and the unevenness and structural awkwardness affronted many readers. Therefore, even while he was still finishing Moby-Dick, he began carefully planning Pierre. In this instance he was attracted to a model extremely popular and more inclined, he thought, to growing female readership. Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin was a famous novel internationally and was, to our knowledge today, the first Balzac novel translated into American English (1843). In it, Melville found a model for his locations, characters, psychology, and even scenes to build a thoroughly American sensational romance of a failed abstractive writer.

International Balzac

Balzac’s “planetary” accessibility during Melville’s early life and travels make it unlikely that he could have avoided awareness of the Frenchman’s popularity and contributions to literature. Melville’s had French relatives, his father brought home French books, Melville travelled in French territory as a sailor and in France as an author, and he even refers to learning French by travel. Additionally, there were many renditions of Balzac’s stories and novels in English and numerous articles about his genius in English that were available in reading rooms and on the shelves of both in-laws and friends.

M. de l’Aubépine

Nathaniel Hawthorne is recognized as having been weightily influenced by Balzac and openly connected in both France and England with the Frenchman’s moral blackness. His sister indicated that he made an “artistic study” of contemporary novels, and his sister-in-law reported that he had read all of the works of Balzac by 1837; and it is suggested he continued to collect volumes of La Comédie humaine until the Frenchman’s death in 1850. Definite incorporations from Balzac can be identified in Hawthorne’s works, and even American contemporaries classed him in the “French school” of Poe and the popular anglicized Eugene Sue and Georges Sand. Hawthorne himself even developed his own pseudonym, M. de l’Aubépine (hawthorn), in self-mockery of his critics’ literary complaints.

Balzac’s Types at Sea

After and during discussions with Hawthorne, Melville apparently revised his unfinished whaling story through correcting two recurring weaknesses in his narratives cited by Howard P. Vincent: not having a central character to build around nor a similar sort of villain; repeating a tendency to limit dramatic conflict between two individuals only, usually an officer and a common sailor. The first difficulty he corrected by creating Ahab, a version of Balzac’s famous villain Vautrin from Le Père Goriot, a superior criminal genius of godlike intensity. The second he solved by the formula of Balzac’s Unité de composition and creating not one or two forceful characters but an entire range of mankind reflecting instinctive, abstractive, and genius forces. Examples of similar discourse, actions, and perceptions are reviewed through comparisons of characters between Moby-Dick and Balzacian types, particularly Vautrin.

Transvisionary Translating

By 1850 Hawthorne had developed the ideas he took from Balzac into his first novel and best seller, The Scarlet Letter. Melville, who was exploring similar traits in Redburn and White-Jacket became inspired by Hawthorne’s financial success and took the opportunity through an idea afforded by common affiliation with Young America to review Hawthorne’s work in the context of a unique national literature. His essay emphasized the “blackness” then attributed to Balzac with Hawthorne and hinted that an American author should not “write like a Frenchman,” suggesting Hawthorne may have only adopted this affectation to create “wondrous effects” in his writing. Simultaneously with the publication of Melville’s essay, Balzac died; and French laureate Victor Hugo praised him in a remarkable eulogy of consecration retranslated worldwide. After having met with Hawthorne on a few occasions, Melville decided to move near him and continue literary/ontological discussions. Over the next eighteen months, Melville modified the whaling novel he was composing to reflect as much unité de composition as he could. Together they worked on novels developing the first experiments in what would develop into American Realism twenty years before it articulation by Henry James and William Dean Howells.

Hawthorne’s Secret?

Hawthorne’s profound understanding of Balzac’s method developed from his close reading of the “Avant-propos” to La Comédie humaine (1842) and a study of the philosophic novels, Etudes Philosohiques, particularly Louis Lambert and La Peau de chagrin. Comprehending the vision of unité de composition, the consistent makeup of universal forces of consciousness in human and animal life reflected in fictional characters, he developed realistic plots that elevated his popularity and effectiveness as a writer. Of particular importance in this scheme is the place of the genius, a sort of “monster” capable of intense conscious influence but lacking altruistic moral elevation. Examples of the application of unity of composition in Hawthorne are presented in contrast with Balzac.