Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T13:20:52.578Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Definitive Billy Budd: “But Aren't it All Sham?”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Paul Brodtkorb Jr.
Paul Brodtkorb Jr.*
Affiliation:
Hunter College, New York, N. Y
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

There is a sentence in the preface to the Harrison Hayford-Merton Sealts version of Billy Budd that has been quoted before and will be quoted again. It is the one in which the editors hope that their “comprehensive scholarly edition will narrow the ground of disagreement and widen that of understanding.” It is doomed to repetition because it allows any critic who cites it a ready-made rhetorical stance: with its sanction he can assume the posture of the reasonable reader and humbly offer himself as mediator between the various opposing critical armies. Then, having established himself as a man of good will and peacemaker, he can do his best to annihilate at least one of the armies, the views of which, it somehow turns out, he rabidly despises.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 7 , December 1967 , pp. 602 - 612
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 All references in the text of this paper, which is a revised version of an address given before the Melville Society in Chicago in Dec. 1965, are to Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Chicago, 1962). Edited from Melville's manuscript, this edition differs in several substantive ways from preceding ones, as I must assume my readers know.

2 “The Problem of Billy Budd,” PMLA, lxxx (Dec. 1965), 489–498.

3 The author is quoting Richard Fogle's earlier anti-ironist article, “Billy Budd: The Order of the Fall,” NCF, xv (Dec. 1960), 189–205.

4 In “The Ambiguity of Billy Budd,” Texas Studies in Lit. and Lang., iv, 130–134.

5 I do not mean to imply that this is an error of argumentation on a critic's part: the story seems to require such a procedure, since Vere's philosophy (and Billy's and Claggart's) are inseparably connected to their holders and thereby made intensely relative to the individual subjectivities constituting them.

6 Translations of Plato later than the one Melville apparently used (see Hayford and Sealts, p. 162, n. to leaf 130) omit the definitions as apocryphal. Whether or not Melville knew this was a Christianized Plato (see Erich Auerbach's splendid essay “Figura” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, New York, 1959, for an account of why Christian redactors indulged in this sort of thing) is of course not verifiable. But evidently, at least, he found the definition comic, for he changed and shortened his original to emphasize and clarify only its absurd circularity. His reaction is further evidenced by the way he has his narrator refer to the text as “the authentic” translation of Plato: who would have the “authority” to dub a translation “authentic” except the anachronistically bilingual ghost of Plato himself? Possibly Melville's use of the phrase is an indication that the narrator is ironically presented, at least at certain points, for what sort of a man would speak honorifically of the authentic translation of anyone, except where pirated editions of living foreign authors might be involved? The narrator is either obtuse and humorless here or Melville is pulling our leg, though I can see no contextual evidence of the latter.

7 “Billy Budd as Moby Dick: An Alternate Reading,” in Studies in Honor of John Wilcox, ed. A. Dayle Wallace and Woodburn O. Ross (Detroit, Mich., 1958), pp. 157–174.

8 I base my account here on Kierkegaard's famous definition of Angst as a “sympathetic antipathy.” Anxiety underlies all the important human encounters in the text.

9 “Spontaneity” may seem to some readers too elastic a term to fit Billy's instinctual naïveté as well as Claggart's calculation and Vere's political assumptions sifted through reflection and reading. Ordinary denotative language is here perhaps not adequate; one wants a phenomenological description of Vere and Claggart that would, unfortunately, be both inappropriate and too long for the scope of this paper. But, to simplify: my argument above and below is that the personalities of Claggart and Vere express their values, which directly reflect (and are “caused” by) their psychological essences. As characters, they are primarily given, not explained. In Vere's case, the value-determining essence appears structured by experience and reading and reflective thought, and thus Vere is further from primal spontaneity than Billy is. But Vere's experience, reading, and thought have tended to ratify, not modify, what he was born as. His reasoning, like that of Claggart, is self-justifying and a priori even when it believes itself a posteriori; in Sartrean terms, such reasoning is always in bad faith. Therefore, Melville typically gives us Claggart's and Vere's apparently decisive acts as defensive reactions to primitive and unrepressible manifestations of psychological essence called up by disturbing events that seem to Claggart or Vere to jeopardize some of either character's reasoned, structured, but actually quite arbitrary values and ideas about the world, values and ideas that always express their projectors before they reflect actuality. To call such defensive upsurges of primal being “spontaneous” may be to beg psychological questions, but in this area the story offers as alternatives only tautology or infinite regress.

10 P. 162, n. to leaves 129–130.

11 The formulation is taken from Richard Schmitt, “In Search of Phenomenology,” Review of Metaphysics, xv (Mar. 1962), 450–479. Schmitt notes that this idea is part of the common ground between European phenomenology and the philosophy of the British analytic school. Many American critics will be familiar with versions of this idea from the poetry of Wallace Stevens, or the essays in linguistics of Benjamin Lee Whorf. George Orwell's “Politics and the English Language” makes polemical use of the basic notion. It is crucial to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York, 1963).

12 Anthony Flew, ed. Language and Logic, First Ser. (New York, 1951), p. 151; quoted in Schmitt, p. 471.

13 “Billy Budd: Testament of Resistance,” MLQ, xx (June 1959), 115–127.

14 Pierre (New York, 1949), Bk. 19, ii, p. 322.

15 If my contention in the early pages of this essay is right (that Melville's manuscript contains an Ur-Billy-Budd plus incompatible descendants, and that each critic addresses one or another discrete Billy, tending to omit, because unaware of, shadow Billies that stand behind the one he sees) then perhaps, to take only two of the many good published interpretations, a reading such as Milton Stern's in The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville (Urbana, Ill., 1957) is addressed more to what Melville had in mind at the outset; while a reading such as Withim's (see n. 13 above) addresses what Melville's continuing complicating revisions were working toward, whether he really meant them to or not.

16 “Melville's Testament of Acceptance,” NEQ, vi (June 1933), 319–327.

17 Herman Melville (New York, 1929), p. 357.

18 “Melville and the Great God Budd,” Prairie Schooner, xxxiv (Summer 1960), 128–133.

19 See Hawthorne's journal entry for Nov. 1856, quoted in Jay Leyda, The Melville Log (New York, 1951), ii, 529.