Giono and Melville: A ‘voyage imaginaire’ through nineteenth-century England

Abstract

Giono’s novel of 1941, Pour saluer Melville, was initially conceived as a biographical essay to accompany the author’s translation of Moby Dick, which appeared the same year, but, in its final version, it is a complex work of fiction which evokes Giono’s own passionate affair with Blanche Meyer, his native Provence, the nature of artistic vocation and, political issues of injustice, imprisonment, democracy and freedom, embodied in France in the Revolution of 1848 and in England by Chartism. This article explores how Giono uses the techniques of the ‘voyage imaginaire’ to follow Melville on a fictitious journey through nineteenth-century England, with references to the Irish famine, and to reflect on his own pacifism and pursuit of justice in the climate of German occupation and Vichy France. Finally, the novel asserts its own autonomy by providing a Borgesian invention of alternative sources for the creation of Moby Dick.