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Billy Budd and Melville's Philosophy of War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Joyce Sparer Adler
Joyce Sparer Adler*
Affiliation:
North Bennington, Vermont
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Abstract

Billy Budd concentrates Melville's philosophy of war and lifts it to its highest point of development. The themes of the work extend ideas he had developed since his youth, and its poetic conceptions are the offspring of earlier ones expressive of his thought on “the greatest of evils.” In Billy Budd the philosophy is conveyed entirely by poetic means—conceptual imagery and form; symbolic characters, actions, questions, contrasts, and contradictions; interplay of sight and sound; and pictorial representations of social realities. The work conveys both the abhorrence of war underestimated by those who, in the classical argument about Billy Budd, interpret it as Melville's “testament of acceptance” and the nonironic, even luminous, affirmation of man's latent humanity overlooked by those who read the book as irony, rejection, or darkness alone. In the course of his last artistic exploration Melville discovered that within the most cruel contradictions of the world of war lies the potential for its metamorphosis.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 91 , Issue 2 , March 1976 , pp. 266 - 278
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by Modern Language Association of America

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References

Notes

1 Melville Herman, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), reading and genetic texts edited from the manuscript with introduction and notes by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962). All references to Billy Budd will be to this edition; chapter numbers do not correspond in every instance to those in other editions.

2 Omoo (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press and The Newberry Library, 1968), p. 108, n. (Ch. xxix).

3 A full-length study by the author of this article developing the idea of war as a major dynamic in Melville's imagination is in progress. See sections already published: “Melville on the White Man's War against the American Indian,” Science & Society, 36 (Winter 1972), 417-42; “Melville and the Civil War,” New Letters, 40 (Winter 1973), 99-117; and “Melville's Benito Cereno: Slavery and Violence in the Americas,” Science & Society, 38 (Spring 1974), 19-48.

4 See “The Haglets” for reference to “holier palms” in contrast with war's trophies, in Selected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Hennig Cohen (New York: Doubleday, 1964), p. 113.

5 See pp. 2 and 28 in the introductory material by Hayford and Sealts in Billy Budd, Sailor on the growth of the manuscript and the history of BBS criticism.

6 Above all I refer to these additions and amendments: modifications in the characters, their roles, and their interrelationships; the naming of the Rights-of-Man and the Atheist and the change of name from Indomitable to Bellipotent; introduction of Billy's vocal defect; augmentation of doubts regarding Vere's motivation, along with intensification of his suffering; introduction of the question of his sanity or insanity; addition of the chapter relating Vere's death and the time and manner of it; decisions about title, subtitle, and dedication; the resolution to end with the ballad and the change of the ballad from what Billy thought to what the sailor-poet imagines he thought on the eve of his execution; and the stated rejection of a settled, static “symmetry of form” leading into the “sequel.”

7 White-Jacket (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press and The Newberry Library, 1970), p. 293 (Ch. lxx).

8 The abbreviation of this name to the Rights suggests that Melville had in mind not only those things to which men are entitled but also those things which are morally right, the rights which will be out of place in the environment to which Billy is to be transplanted. See Vere's discussion of their irrelevance, p. 110 (Ch. xxi).

9 Collected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Howard P. Vincent (Chicago: Hendricks, 1947), p. 165. To be referred to in parentheses in the text as CP.

10 Selected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Robert Penn Warren (New York: Random, 1970), p. 109.

11 White-Jacket had found both flogging and impressment to be against God. When a captain flogs a man, he is flogging the “image of his Creator” (p. 142, Ch. xxxiv), and impressment is “an iniquity outrageous and insulting to God and man” (p. 381, n; Ch. xc).

12 Clarel (New York: Hendricks, 1960), p. 427 (Pt. iv, Canto vii).

13 Moby-Dick (New York: Norton, 1967), p. 131 (Ch. xxxiv).

14 The fact that the passage is in the present tense strengthens the impression of this scene as a picture symbolic of what exists in the world, not just a picture of what Billy looked like at that particular past moment.

15 For a discussion of Elijah's role in the Old Testament and the New Testament as the eschatological forerunner of the coming Day of the Lord, see entry, “Elijah the Prophet,” in The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 1962), ii, 88-90.

16 The correspondence that Melville sets up between Billy and Christ (the “Lamb of God”) is not a rigid one. Billy is associated also with the young Adam, Achilles, Apollo, and other non-Christian figures. Only those implications of the Christ story that harmonize with the other associations and implications of Billy Budd can logically be assumed to be Melville's.

17 Because of the valid comments of many (including speakers at recent MLA Conventions) who are concerned with women's liberation from the chains of language, I feel impelled to explain that I use the words man and mankind rather than humanity as a rule in this article because they accord with Melville's imagery in Billy Budd and because I employ the word humanity for the most part in connection with what is human as distinguished from what is mechanical or merely animal in human beings' responses.

18 Despite their differences and the fact that Claggart is naturally distasteful to Vere, Melville subtly links them so that Claggart's warmaking can be seen as one side of present-day civilized man, the side to which he veers: the word austere is repeatedly used in relation to both, and only to them, and civilization, “especially if of the austerer sort,” which Vere represents, is “auspicious” to Claggart-like depravity; both are “discreet”; secrecy is a way both pursue; neither is sociable. Like Vere, Claggart is “zealous in his function” (p. 79; Ch. xiii). Vere's final appeal to fear reminds the court of the dangers of mutiny, the very appeal Claggart had made to him. Claggart's wish for Billy's death is ultimately carried out by Vere. Claggart acts against good; Vere rules out moral considerations. Both know Billy to be innocent yet condemn him; as the devil operates through Claggart, so Mars operates through Vere.

19 Melville had at first made a pencil notation at this point in the book to speak, in the authorized report, of the death of Captain Vere, but he canceled the notation (pp. 269, 420).

20 Selected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Cohen, p. 53.

21 Harris Wilson, Tradition, the Writer and Society (London: New Beacon, 1967), p. 26.