The Problem of Billy Budd Author(s): Edward H. Rosenberry Source: PMLA, Vol. 80, No. 5 (Dec., 1965), pp. 489-498 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/460840 Accessed: 21/10/2010 08:15 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mla. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA. http://www.jstor.org THE PROBLEM OF BILLY BUDD BY EDWARDH. ROSENBERRY W HEN a monumental new edition of Billy Fogle, who identified two "heresies"of Billy Budd Budd appeared in 1962, it was the hope of criticism and dismissed them with entire the editors that their exhaustive scholarship might justification, in my opinion, but without the for- contribute to a definitive interpretation of the mal refutation evidently needed to lay such stub- novel. Such a wish might seem unnecessarily re- born ghosts.2 He complained of the widespread strictive, but the extreme critical divergence on attribution to Melville of an ironic tone resulting Billy Budd has created a genuine threat to its ar- in a sardonic reversal of the story's ostensible tistic integrity as a result of its apparent failure to meaning; and he complained particularly of Law- support a demonstrable reading. This essay is an rance Thompson's invention (in Melville's Quarrel attempt to end the war, or to make the end more with God) of a quasi-authorial narrator in whose predictable. "bland" and "stupid" vision the apparent Let it be clear at the outset that I am not pro- straightforwardnessof the narration may be con- posing to limit the range of parallel and compat- veniently discounted. Thompson's idea is spectac- ible interpretations. Billy Budd is sufficiently ular enough to deserve special mention, but it is complex to present the many-layered phenomenon basically the ironist heresy tricked out with a sup- which criticism rightly expects in a fine work of porting device which no other ironist has been art. The kind of imaginative but disciplined dis- clever enough to bring to his case. In effect, it cussion which has been generated by, say, "Rap- only postpones the collapse of the case by one paccini's Daughter" is constructive and I have no step, because there is no evidence that such a quarrel with it. The kind which will not do and mediator between author and reader exists. De- which this study is expressly committed to combat spite Wayne Booth's proper insistence on every is the kind that has plagued The Turn of the author's "undramatized narrator" or "implicit Screw: a factious dialog between two mutually second self,"3 never altogether identical with the exclusive points of view, one of which is more in- man behind the mask of art, a considerable bur- genious than the other but less soundly supported den of proof falls on the claim that these psychic by the available evidence in and out of the text.1 twins are militantly opposed, and the obligation is Fundamentally, the problem of Billy Budd is not dischargedby showing that the alter ego must not unlike that of Ivan Karamazov's youthful ar- be present if the meaning of the novel is to be re- ticle on ecclesiastical government, which was versed. Thompson's argument is simply circular taken to favor both churchmen and atheists and and would perhaps have raised more general ob- finally suspected of "impudent satirical bur- jection than it has if he had not invented also an lesque." Billy Budd has been read as a parable of "alert reader" who always adopts his views and God the Father His Son for a fallen sacrificing Alexander Jones's admirable survey of this familiar world, and alternatively of Pontius Pilate selling quarrel in "Point of View in The Turn of the Screw," out Jesus for present and personal convenience; PMLA, LXXIV (March 1959), 112-122, is a model of cor- and finally its sober voice has been taken for a rective criticism. See also Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of mock God and the whole created Fiction (Chicago, 1961), pp. 311-315. dry protesting now reassessment of works scheme of As in the case of Ivan's By any scholarly like these things. article, carries a Bunyanesque burden of prior study which it is the problem hinges largely on the question of impractical to spread out for detailed inspection, even in tone, though there are crucial points of substance footnotes. The latest annotated text of Billy Budd, edited and reasoning to be considered as well. The issues by Harrison Hayford and Merton Sealts (Chicago, 1962), are since after all what to which this study refers throughout, lists 161 items in its intricately interconnected, and a selection of this material edited we have to deal with is in bibliography, by meaning an organic William Stafford under the title Melville's Billy Budd and work of art; but in as orderly a manner as pos- the Critics (San Francisco, 1961) lists nearly a hundred in sible I shall try to analyze the causes of critical addition to the twenty-odd it wholly or partly reprints. Between them these error, as they appear to me, and then to show, by sources (most concisely the former, first the tone of the novel and then its pp. 24-27) tell all that the average reader of the novel or examining of this essay will want to know about the Billy Budd ethical logic, that the plainest reading of this dis- controversy. In the interest of progress and brevity I shall puted book is the only valid reading possible. omit a good deal of the argument and formal documenta- tion accessible in these compendia. I. Delusions 2R. H. Fogle, "Billy Budd: The Order of the Fall," Nineteenth Century Fiction, xv (December 1960), 189- A good starting point for this conservative case 205. was provided several years ago by Richard Harter 'The Rhetoric of Fiction, pp. 151-152. 489 490 The Problem of "Billy Budd" with whom one is instinctively reluctant to disso- victim,"6 a sympathy so strongly generated by ciate himself. The real issue lies behind this little "Baby Budd" as to tempt the most wary of us (in smoke screen: are we to take Melville at his word Merlin Bowen's words) "to risk the luxury of at and read Billy Budd as a parable of the plight of least following our own conscience."7 Abetting innocence in a "man-of-war world," or are we to this reaction is the equal and opposite inclination find beneath its tragic benediction a satiric attack against Captain Vere. Melville, as I shall try to on the complacency of earthly and heavenly au- show, made Vere as attractive as he could in the thority? face of his official austerity; but Billy, just as he Since the latter reading would render the novel, stands, is an AmericanAdam, loved from the start, in Fogle's words, "cheap, puerile, and perverse" and fit to be forgiven anything after he has (witness Pierre), no one entertained that possibil- struck his sacrificial blow at oppressive authority. ity until, in 1950, one adventurous essay4 loosed a We must resent his judge, irrespective of the mer- spate of ironist interpretations from the scholarly its of the case, on precisely the ground Melville presses. The reasons for this, I am convinced, once supposed to underlie the popular opinion of must be sought in the critics and their milieu God: "The reason the mass of men fear God, and rather than in the book. Wayne Booth makes the at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather dis- valuable point that a book tends to mean what we trust his heart, and fancy him all brain like a expect it to mean, "and the last several decades watch."8 It is belief rather than disbelief which it have produced-for whatever reasons-an au- is difficult to suspend in such a story as Billy dience that has been thrown off balance by a bar- Budd. Yet to be ruled by indignation, however rage of ironic works."5 Irony-hunting has joined righteous, is to subvert tragedy to melodrama. It symbol-hunting as a fashionable indoor sport, happens to every freshmanwho lets himself be car- which has so conditioned us to the expectation of ried away by the "injured innocence" of Oedipus obliquity and ambiguity that, as Booth says, "We into the mistake of casting the oracle as villain. It can't accept a straight and simple statement when is instructive to reflect on the critical abuse Billy we read one." The popular mystique of close read- Budd would deservedly draw if it really said what ing inclines us to see weasels in clouds and ex- the ironists claim it says.