The Problem of Billy Budd Author(S): Edward H

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

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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. Weltschmerz has never poses contemporary criticism to what Plinlimmon had much survival value as art. would have called "strange, unique follies and Several allied faults of interpretation,more log- sins." The most conspicuous of these in reading ical than emotional, though perhaps emotionally Melville is mistaking an occasional romantic petu- conditioned, may be briefly added to the indict- lance of temper for a considered philosophic pos- ment. Most basic is the rejection of donnde, the ture. refusal to honor the author's proffered coin of In fact, our expectations of Melville constitute meaning. The critic with a thesis to prove or with as real a source of error as did the very different simply a sophisticated aversion to the obvious- expectations of his contemporaries. For them he pandemic in our time-can follow the bent of his was "the man who lived among the cannibals," ingenuity to any predeterminedconclusion, unde- and the leap from Typee to Saddle Meadows, or terred by patent narrative facts often reinforcedby even to the try-works, was too much for them. pointed authorial comment. Reviewing the noto- For us he is the voice of Ahab and the rious Turn of the Screw case, Wayne Booth hangs Confidence-Man, the sayer of "No! in thunder." between amusementand dismay, "wishing for more We easily forget that the nay-saying he praised signs of respect for standards of proof" (p. 315). was Hawthorne's and not Beckett's or Sartre's, One characteristic misuse of evidence in Billy and that the remark was not made in Billy Budd Budd criticism is reasoning categorically from or within thirty years of it. The ironist critics are at least partly disabled by the same prejudice that 'Joseph Schiffman, "Melville's Final Stage, Irony: A afflicts the anti-Stratfordians: the man in their Re-examination of Billy Budd Criticism," American Litera- minds could not possibly have written this work. ture, xxII (May 1950), 128-136. the idle about the author is an The Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 366. The entire section Reinforcing fixe labeled (after Saul Bellow) "Deep Readers of the World, equally powerful preconception of the characters Beware " is worth reading on this topic. e in Billy Budd. The norms of the novel and the Ibid., p. 132. Booth is referring here specifically to rhetoric that expresses them are clear enough in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, but the problem of sym- themselves, but they encounter resistance in the pathy is explored at large in Chs. v, ix, and x. natural interests and of the reader. 7Merlin Bowen, The Long Encounter (Chicago, 1960), sympathies p. 233. The full case against the argument from conscience Booth has commented on the force in literature of will be made from another point of view further on. "our irresistible sympathy for the innocent 8Letter to Hawthorne, June 1851. Edward H. Rosenberry 491 prior works. White-Jacket, because of obvious re- II. Tone semblances in character and setting, has been a The assumption that a fictional character can fertile field for such deductions. Since the Somers be taken as a reliable spokesman for his author is affair of 1842 is one of the sources of Billy Budd boggy ground to build on. Yet somewhere within (though by no means the primary one, as once every successful fiction there must be adequate supposed), a condemnation of it in White-Jacket clues to that much-disputedbut still indispensable as "murder" has been taken as symptomatic of value, the author's intention. What I mean by in- Melville's attitude toward it in Billy Budd. In the tention, let it be clear, is not belief but tone-that later book, however, the purpose and context of is, the belief-making mechanism of the story as we the citation (Ch. xxi) are totally different: what have it. Does the author's apparent attitude invite was once a loaded exhibit in a reform polemic is acceptance or rejection of the value system on now "history, and here cited without comment," which the story is based? to illustrate the exigencies of naval command. In Some of the critical confusion which has be- the same way, Billy's response to punitive flogging clouded Billy Budd has arisen out of an initial fail- is read in the light of the sensational attack on ure to define the "irony" which is supposed to naval discipline in White-Jacket, while more mod- throw its belief-making mechanism into reverse. erate and pertinent references in both the early So far as I know, R. H. Fogle is the only com- fiction and the late verse are ignored.9The correc- mentator to have illuminated this crucial point by tives are many and evident, not the least of them observing that while Billy Budd is ironic enough the differences among these works as art. White- in the Aristotelian sense (reversal of fortune, the Jacket, like all the early books (until well into "irony of fate"), it is not ironic in the rhetorical has a Moby-Dick), fully dramatizednarrator with sense (reversal of meaning, the irony of satire).1l his own created opinions, attitudes, and purposes; Unhappily, the presence or absence of this latter Billy Budd is narrated by an unmediated author irony is difficult to prove, and proof has so far who, unlike Chaucer, gives no hint that his "wit is been largely limited to assertion and counter-as- short" or his artistic distance great. More defen- sertion. The critic peers into the text and sees, like sible is reasoning from the poems, which both Thurber at the microscope, his own eye. It helps, time and rhetoric link closely with Billy Budd; but it does not solve all problems, to say that and both of the studies I have seen making such irony is groundedin absurdity. In much contempo- conclude as I that Melville's comparisons do tone rary literature absurdity is the norm, and even in in this last novel was affirmative and his point of fiction based on traditional norms the author's no- view conservative.10 tion of what is out of joint, or his way of expressing Most of the I pervasive fallacies have noticed in it, may differ sharply from the reader's. One can the Budd literature is the Billy confusion of dra- only inspect what clues the text provides with an matic facts with the views of author or personal impartial eye and in the perspective of a scale of reader. The whole "testament" controversy is shot values as nearly exempt from the dangers of sub- with this flaw or the threat through of it-the jective manipulationas possible. that of no at danger, is, allowing artistic distance Much of the textual scrutiny has already been all in the narrative or of imposing on the fiction done piecemeal and only needs to be reviewed one's own norms in place of those provided, impli- here.l2 There is first the fact of the novel's dedica- or the author. Much has citly explicitly, by print tion to Jack Chase-simple, direct, reverent, me- been devoted to the of whether problem Billy's morializing the "great heart" of the most admir- benediction to Vere Captain expresses Melville's able man Melville had ever met. It may be, as or its Since is an feeling opposite. Billy imaginary Warner Berthoff has proposed, that this theme of figure in an imaginary situation contrived by a professional novelist who plainly labels the cry 'Good discussionsof both issues may be found in the "conventional,"there is no reason to suppose that notes to the Chicagotext, pp. 157, 181-183. the question is even relevant. In the case of Vere, 10Fogle, op. cit. (note 2, above); Lawrence Barrett, as much time has been wasted the "The Differencesin Melville'sPoetry," PMLA, Lxx (Sep- agitating ques- tember 606-623. tion of whether the reader would have acted as he " 1955), R. H. Fogle, "Billy Budd-Acceptance or Irony," did, or whether Captain Mackenzie of the Somers Tulane Studies in English, vm (1958), 109-110, 112. did so, or whether naval law (British of 1797? u Amongthe many pertinentstudies listed in the bibliog- American of 1842? or 1888?) required a com- raphy of Hayford and Sealts, I have found especiallyuse- mander to act in such a ful those of Berthoff (1960), Braswell(1957), Fogle (1958, way-all matters having and Miller A to do with 1960), (1958). very importantcontribution nothing the self-consistency of the of W. G. Kilbourne, Jr., will be discussed in another fictional character in question. connection. 492 The Problem of "Billy Budd" magnanimity is the central strain of the narrative; as hard to accept as the forgiveness of Christ on at the very least it provides a keynote unmistak- the cross. On such a scene as their final interview able in its sincerity and quite lacking in the ironic in Chapter xxii, the author felt obliged to draw the potential of the dedication of Pierre to Mount curtain and to content himself with hinting at the Greylock or of Israel Potter to the Bunker Hill passionate consonance supposed to have welled up monument. in the spirits of these two "phenomenal"natures. This keynote is consistently echoed in Mel- His allusion to them as Abraham and Isaac is a ville's portrayal of his principals. Capping his in- clue to both his sincerity and his difficulty. The troductory sketch of Captain Vere in Chapter vii, originals are accepted (when they are accepted) Melville emphasizes that natures like Vere's are by a suspension of disbelief in which poetic faith rare in that "honesty prescribes to them direct- is immeasurably assisted by religious faith. Mel- ness." Characterizing the common seaman in ville can only invoke his biblical counterparts by Chapter xvi he writes with simple nostalgia of the allusion and hope for the best. That he fears the "old-fashioned sailor" whose "frankness" stands worst, however, is apparent from the nervous in contrast to the landsman's "finesse," "long manner in which he reminds us of the "rarer head," "indirection,"and "distrustfulness."In de- qualities" in the natures of his "Abraham" and scribing the life ashore Melville anticipates our "Isaac"-"so rare indeed as to be all but incred- popular concept of gamesmanship: "an oblique, ible to average minds however much cultivated." tedious, barren game hardly worth that poor This is diffidence,and well founded, but not irony. candle burnt out in playing it." In the following Melville is not mocking belief but pleading for it. chapter he appeals for acceptance of his simple The ironists are simply those readers with whom protagonist by disarming the anticipated skepti- his appeal has failed. cism of the sophisticated reader and demanding in Finally we must consider the sources of what its place "something else than mere shrewdness." dubious testimony he allowed to stand in his His only devious and ironical character is the vil- manuscript. It is notable that all the reservations lain Claggart, and to him he has Captain Vere about Vere are held by minor characterswith pat- say, "Be direct, man." Here, in short, is an inter- ently inferior vision: his fellow officers, whose im- nal scale of values as poorly contrived to nourish putations of pedantry must be written off to pro- an ironic tone as can well be imagined.13 fessional jealousy; the surgeon,whose suspicions of As the story develops, it becomes steadily plain- his captain's sanity are an almost comical er that the irony is all in the case and not in the reflection of his own lack of information, involve- author's attitude toward it. Into his climactic epi- ment, and insight;14 the chaplain, who is presumed sode in Chapter xxi Melville built a classic Aristo- to disapprove the sentence on grounds of telian irony by which "innocence and guilt . .. higher morality but who lacks perception or au- changed places" and it became a fact as unalter- thority to influence the course of events. Mel- able as the parricide of Oedipus that Billy had ville's attitude toward this chaplain is instructive. killed an officer in performance (however badly) We are not to hold the clergyman accountable, we of his duty. Then, in the next breath, Melville ex- are told, for his failure to protest Billy's sentence, tended his donnee to include the inevitable judg- since such a protest would have been both "idle as ment of the captain, who "was not authorized to invoking the desert" and "an audacious transgres- determine the matter on [the] primitive basis sion of the bounds of his function." On the other [of] essential right and wrong." At the end of the hand, the idea of a chaplain on a warship is treat- chapter, as a further inducement to our accep- ed as an absurdity-"incongruous as a musket tance of that decision, he appended a warning to would be on the altar at Christmas."The contrast the "snug card players in the cabin" not to pass in tone is palpable: Melville is struck by the irony judgment on the actions "under fire" of "the of the chaplain's institutional or symbolic pres- sleepless man on the bridge." In the face of such ence, but not by his personal sufferance of the rhetoric one might rather expect to find an author double standard he is anomalously bound to. This reproachedfor excessive explicitness than debated is not the Melville who once pilloried clerical hy- as an enigma. pocrisy in the Rev. Mr. Falsgrave, but it is a pos- On the other hand, if it seems impossible for the ironists to be right, it is not wholly their fault Some of this very evidence is used by Wayne Booth, that are The seal of reconciliation p. 178, in citing Billy Budd as an example of "reliable" they wrong. narration. which the condemned is made to Billy place upon ' Cf. Shaw's Candida, in which everyone thinks everyone his captain's intransigent sentence is mystical and else "mad" for precisely these reasons. Edward H. Rosenberry 493 sibly more mature writer for whom the eternal di- Vere himself is misunderstood as because Mel- lemma of man's dual allegiance is not resolved by ville's world is mistaken for Hooper's, in which romantic gestures. there is no real moral dilemma at all-in which what poses as moral dilemma is plainly the crown- Outside the text itself, the search for tone is re- ing absurdity of the whole affair. But there is duced to conjecture. The ironists have tried to de- nothing inherently absurd either in the dilemma duce from Melville's earlier writings what his atti- Vere faces or in the choice he makes, as a very tude might have been in this one. It seems to me different sort of touchstone may illustrate. at least as legitimate to apply the touchstone In Chapter xxv of Ignazio Silone's Bread and method instead, holding up to Billy Budd parallel Wine the central character, an erstwhile Commu- passages from works by other authors in which nist named Pietro Spina, hears a confession of po- the intention is not in doubt, and in this way litical duplicity from a young revolutionary torn confining the problem to purely rhetorical between conflicting loyalties. Though he is no grounds. longer an active leader in the movement, it is From the outer limit of the ironic scale we may significant that Spina makes no judgment on the take a piece of gross satire like Some Adventures boy's conduct without first defining the ethical of Captain Simon Suggs by Johnson Jones Hooper posture from which he must speak: The tone of (1845, reprinted 1846, 1848, 1881). "If I were head of a or of a ... this book is the moral code of its fron- party, politicalgroup, signaled by I would have to you accordingto the party's tier anti-hero: is to be in a new judge "It good shifty rules. Every party has its morality,codified in rules. country." Suggs cheats his way through a series of These rules are often very close to those whichmoral escapades, two of which were borrowed by Mark sentimentinspires in every man; but they are some- Twain for Huckleberry Finn,15 and another of times the precise opposite. . . . But here and now which (Ch. viii) bears enough resemblance to the I am just an ordinaryman, and if I must judge crucial episode of Billy Budd to provide a mea- anotherman I can be guidedonly by my conscience." sure of extreme contrast in tone. As self-appointed of the im- Compare the statement of Melville's Vere from captain "Tallapoosa Volunteers," Suggs the alternative pounds a motley group of frightened civilians, de- position: clares martial law, and threatens to shoot anyone "Do these buttons that we wear attest that our who fails to "walk the chalk." When a harmless allegianceis to Nature? No, to the King. . . . We widow sneaks out for a pinch of tobacco, Suggs fight at command. If our judgments approve the convenes a drum-head court, seconded by his war, that is but a coincidence.. . . For [martial]law and the of we are not .... Tell next-in-command ("Lewtenants ought allers to vigor it, responsible me whether or the we do, think jist as their captings do"), and terrorizes not, occupying position private conscienceshould not yield to that imperial the old lady with a death sentence, ultimately one formulatedin the code under which alone we commuted to a fine. His addresses to court $25 officiallyproceed?" and culprit neatly parody Vere's: "It's a painful duty, Lewtenant! a very painful duty, Lewtenant The rhetoric, in context, is decisive. If an author's Snipes; and very distressin'. But the rules of war intention is to ridicule the Organization Man for is very strict, you know! . . . And officersmust do his lack of independence,he will sound something ther duty, come what may. [And to the widow] It like this: "The Roman sword would never have ain't me that's a-gwine to kill you; it's the Rules conquered the world if the grand fabric of Roman of War . . . You've 'fessed the crime, . . . and ef Law had not been elaborated to save the man be- me and the Lewtenant wanted to let you off ever so hind the sword from having to think for himself. bad, the rules of war would lay us liable ef we In the same way the British Empire is the out- was to." Any comparison of such outlandish farce come of College and School discipline and of the with Billy Budd may seem impertinent, but, apart Church Catechism."'1 Nothing resembling this from dialect, nothing really separates them except tone is to be found in either Silone or Melville. On the absurdity built into Hooper's story by a con- the contrary, both were at pains to create strik- scious and exploited incongruity between word ingly non-conformistcharacters, so independent as and fact. to be dramatically isolated from the mass of men. Vere is sometimes treated as if he were a Simon either in not MWalter Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn (Berkeley, Suggs: hypocritical, really believing Calif., 1960), pp. 280, 329. what he says, or cowardly, in not daring to break 1 F. M. Cornford, Microcosmographia Academica, 5th the rules. This is not so much, I think, because ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1953), p. 11. 494 The Problem of "Billy Budd"

But the character of Billy has troubled the dis- we read that what Vere got from the philosopher senting critics as much as that of Vere. After all, was "settled convictions, . . . a dike against [the] they reason, Melville did make his Handsome invading waters of novel opinion." This may be Sailor a kind of Christ figure, innocent of blood thought to smack of rigidity quite alien to the lust if not of blood, and could hardly have con- open-mindedness of the skeptic whose motto was templated such a fate as Billy's without giving it, "Que sais-je?" Rigidity is in fact the chief stick however subtly, the colors of legal murder. Again, Vere's critics like to beat him with.'1 But what my denial of this view may be defended by a com- Vere responds to in Montaigne, Melville makes parison of Melville's story with a parallel tale clear, is not opinions but an attitude-honest, which is clearly activated by irony. The rhetorical realistic, "free from cant and convention"; a mind contrast must speak for itself. In The Brothers not lacking in principles, but proof against convic- Karamazov the story of Richard ("a charming tions resulting from habit thinking and interested pamphlet, translated from the French") is recount- motives. Montaigne argued, on the one hand, the ed by Ivan to his brother Alyosha as part of the kind of moral relativism which Melville saw in psychological preparation for the shattering ironic Hamlet's remark that "nothing is either good or legend of the Grand Inquisitor. Richard, a found- bad but thinking makes it so,"'9 and on the other ling, brutalized by circumstance, drifts into mur- hand the supreme wisdom of ordering human con- der as a young man and is promptly condemned duct by fixed principles-"always to will the same to die for it. ("There are no sentimentalists things, and always to oppose the same things."20 ,there," Dostoevsky's narrator remarks.) Once in He was of course aware that the will cannot al- jail, Richard is suddenly showered with all the be- ways be just, and for precisely that reason he in- nevolent attentions formerly withheld by the sisted that men must live by definite laws superior Christian society that ruined and doomed him; to the will. These laws, it is important to under- and in the end, converted, repentant, and limp stand, are civil statutes, "still supremely the with fear, he faces death parroting,"This is my judges of their judges," as distinct from the so- happiest day. I am going to the Lord!" Then, called "laws of conscience, which we say are born says Ivan, "covered with his brothers' kisses, of nature" but which in fact "are born of Richard is dragged to the scaffold. . .. And they custom."21 chopped off his head in a brotherly fashion, be- This distinction, pervasive in Montaigne, may cause he had found grace." be further instanced in the "Apology for Ray- There is moral absurdity, and there is the rhet- mond Sebond" (ii. xii), from which Melville had oric of irony by which it is effectively exposed. I earlier taken one of his whaling extracts for contend that Melville chose not to use such rhet- Moby-Dick. Here he stresses the common basis of oric because the story he had to tell was not mor- all law in "possession and usage," that is, custom. ally absurd. And custom, like a river, takes its force from in insignificance but in III. Ethics growth, beginning ending sometimes irresistible power (p. 440). This, for Although no one piece of evidence on the norms of the novel is the most to 17"Of Custom, and Not Easily Changingan Accepted conclusive, compelling Works trans. Donald mind is a in vii Mon- Law," Complete of Montaigne, my passage Chapter citing Frame (Stanford, Calif., 1957), i.xxiii. The conservative taigne as one of Vere's favorite authors. In this implicationsof this and certain other passageshave been fact we have not only Montaigne's philosophical exploredby W. G. Kilbourne,Jr., "Montaigneand Captain posture to guide us, but Vere's reasons for approv- Vere," American Literature, xxxIII (January 1962), 514- it as reinforced Melville's own record- 517. ing well, by "Lawrance Thompson takes the observation that Vere ed opinions on the subject. The case has not found in Montaigne "confirmation" of his inmost thoughts been made in detail, and it is one that deserves a as evidence that he was reading his own opinions into the full hearing. The heart of the matter, as a recent text. I think that the "shock of recognition" was probably has is that Montaigne what Melville had in mind-Keats's "almost a remem- pioneer study indicated, Emerson's with as had an for however fal- brance," or own experience Montaigne, overriding respect law, recorded in Representative Men: "It seemed to me as if lible, as against personal judgment, which he held I had myself written the book, in some former life, so to be still more fallible: "Private reason has sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience." only 9 a private jurisdiction."17To this central point the Melville labeled this sentiment "Montaignism" in the returns and refers. margin of his Shakespeare: Jay Leyda, The Melville Log argument constantly (New York, 1951), p. 291. The effort to see Vere's thought through Mon- 20"Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions," n.i. taigne's, however, runs into paradox directly when 21 "Of Custom," I. xxiii. Edward H. Rosenberry 495

Montaigne, was the current of civilization, the or- allegiance, an allegiance reaffirmedin his disputed ganized movement of society, which ought to reflections at the close of Chapter xxvii on the define the general course of a man's moral life human need for "measured forms." Like Hobbes, through the laws which describe it. The alterna- Vere sees unbridled man as a beast, and law (in tive was ethical anarchy: "If it is from ourselves Melville's provocative image) as "Orpheus with that we derive the ruling of our conduct, into what his lyre spellbinding the wild denizens of the confusion do we cast ourselves!" (p. 436). wood."22 Earlier in the same essay (p. 419) he quotes Legality as music is a figure seemingly out of Epicurus and Plato on the necessity of laws, that keeping with the harsh spirit of that "child of even the worst of them are needed to keep men War," the Mutiny Act. Yet in a world in which from eating one another; and the remark is remi- mutiny is a serviceable metaphor for the moral niscent of Hobbes, another philosopher whom and theological condition of man, an imposed Melville quoted on whales and who may have order is the only kind that is possible, and the ar- influenced his thinking. In the Leviathan laws are ticles under which Captain Vere takes his authori- pictured as the "reason and will" of the social ty are not radically different from those under body; without their indispensable controls the life which Moses took his.23 With respect to the tak- of man becomes, in the famous phrase, "solitary, ing of life, neither the military nor the biblical poor, nasty, brutish, and short." In his biting cri- statute goes beyond a general prohibition. The ex- tique of ideal morality Hobbes uses Melville's very tenuations of circumstance, as Melville well knew, image of the unordered society, the "man-of-war are as infinitely adjustable as the "Protean easy- world": men unchecked by civil power "are in chair" of the Confidence-Man, built to "ease that condition which is called war." Society can human suffering [by] endlessly changeable ac- survive only when its members "reduce their wills commodations" in which "the most tormented unto one will" in a surrenderof moral sovereignty conscience must, somehow and somewhere, find which presupposes the unreliability of private con- rest." Billy Budd, I contend, was conceived as the science and the necessity of some personal kind of story in which such accommodations are sacrifice for the general welfare. For Hobbes the not available. It invites comparison in its ethical exercise of private judgment in social decisions is structure, not to "The Birthmark,"the one tale of tantamount to the state of "war" which exists Hawthorne to which Melville acknowledged a when there are no public norms at all. Quite pos- specific debt, but to The Scarlet Letter. Both sibly Melville arrived at this conclusion indepen- stories deal with the collision of private morality dently, but the Leviathan, if only coincidentally, and the law in a tight little community which ad- illuminates the tragic predicament of Captain mits no extenuations. They have a number of fea- Vere, caught between two warring worlds, one tures in common-a devil figure, self-destroyed; a armed by legal tyranny and the other by legal an- child of nature, innocent but flawed-but most archy. Melville criticism has given much senti- importantly a central sensibility impaled on a di- mental attention to the former, and with reasons lemma precisely defined by the opposition of stat- obviously shared by Vere; but it is the latter utory and romantic law. Billy's exoneration, like which the philosopher in him fears more pro- Dimmesdale's marriage, is made in heaven but foundly and is doomed to fear alone. can only be recognized there. One irreducible fact The reader who dismisses Vere as a shallow for- gets all but lost in the personal sympathy generat- malist is taking part of Melville's donnde for the ed by both characters: no law can sanction the whole. When Vere proclaims his unalterable alle- execution of bad officers by their men or the giance to the King's "buttons," it is possible to think of him simply as a man in a sailor suit, "ac- 22 See the discussion of this controversial passage, with a customed," as Melville describes the species in review of the principal scholarship on it, in the notes of Chapter xvi, "to obey orders without debating Hayford and Sealts, pp. 195-196. them." What must be in mind is the hard 23The point is interestingly made in Paradise Lost xin. kept as and discussed Norman H. debate Vere 300-306, quoted by Pearson, prior inside "Starry" which could "Billy Budd: 'The King's Yarn'," American Quarterly, Ini alone persuade a thoughtful man to don the (Summer 1951), 99-114. Another valuable essay on Mel- King's buttons in the first place. What was threat- ville's conservative and anti-romantic conception of law ened in the Nore Mutiny, Melville reminds us in is Frederick I. Carpenter, "Melville and the Men-of-War," was not naval but "the American Literature and the Dream (New York, 1955), pp. Chapter iii, just authority 73-82. Carpenter quotes an instructive passage from Mardi flag of founded law and freedom defined." It is (Ch. clxi): "Though an army be all volunteers, martial this symbol to which Vere has sworn his difficult law must prevail." 496 The Problem of "Billy Budd" extra-marital intercourse of clergymen with their versus relative values. Most of Melville's critics parishioners. have recognized in his work the uneasy co-exis- Vere has been abused for his instant observa- tence of anti-Platonism and romantic idealism, tion that "the angel must hang," as though he and some of them have tried to resolve this discor- were prejudging Billy and making a mockery of dance by appeal to the Plinlimmon pamphlet in his trial. But it is hard to see how such a sentiment Pierre, the one document in which Melville dealt can prevail in any reasoned estimate of the story. with it explicitly, if not in his own voice.25 If one sees a man commit murder, one knows that Broadly, the case rests on a presumed correspon- he ought to suffer the penalty; and one also dence between the alternatives confronting Cap- knows that in a civilized society the guilt, how- tain Vere in the judgment of Billy and the two ever obvious, must be determined and the penalty systems of morality predicated by Plotinus Plin- exacted by due process. Vere's remark may sound limmon. Plinlimmon's "chronometrical"or heav- unsportsmanlike,but it cannot be regarded as un- enly morality is supposed to be the same as Vere's just. If he blunders at all at this point, it is not in "natural law" or the "last assizes" at which Billy anticipating judgment but in assessing character. will be acquitted; and the contrasting "horologi- Here and here only he displays prejudice: he likes cal" or earthly morality is equated with the mar- Billy and dislikes Claggart. The reader allows him tial or statutory law by which Billy is condemned. these feelings because he shares them and has priv- The inference is that the chronometricalstandard ileged information which justifies them. But Vere is an ideal of universal perfection to which Vere does not have this information and decides on in- has not the courage to aspire, and the horological tuition alone that he has seen an "Ananias . . . a temporizing expedient on which he seizes to stay struck dead by an angel of God." If Claggart were out of trouble. a sympathetic character, our indignation would be No doubt the best corrective for this astonish- justly turned against the superior who treated him ing conclusion is to keep the Plinlimmon pamphlet with peremptory contempt, was prepared to take a out of Billy Budd, particularly in view of the un- subordinate's word against his, and laid him open certainty of its tone; but if it is to continue to to a judgment which not only preceded but pre- raise its head it will have to do an about-face. It cluded trial. The death of Claggart is exactly like is not the law which is partial, local, "horologi- that of a soldier Montaigne tells of in "Of Con- cal," but ideal morality. Since the "chronometri- science" (II.v), whose stomach was cut open to de- cal" is a Platonic idea, it can only be imitated, termine whether he had stolen food as charged. It and law is man's imitation of it. Imperfect as it is appeared that he had, but, as Montaigne ironically in operation, law is in principle a universal and remarked, what "an instructive condemnation!" absolute good, and it is the only one we have. The Unwittingly Vere misleads us in the direction of higher morality, on the other hand, by which Vere allegory. His word "angel" too effectively polarizes would presumably free Billy or mitigate his pun- the principals of the drama in his cabin. It is a ishment, is only a benign expedient by which this touch of romance which we can surely forgive in a killer under these conditions is to be exempted character sometimes thought to lack heart; but it from the normal (and normally correct) judg- increases difficulty for both himself and the read- ment. It is, in fact, precisely horological-of this er. Forgetting the patent symbolism of Billy's time, of that place. The advocates of absolute mor- stammer and the reality of the crime it makes him ality are pleading Portia's case: "The quality of commit, and ignoring Melville's explicit disclaimer mercy is not strained." But this means it is not of romantic intentions (end of Chapter ii), we are to mistake a human for the Death of 2The groundwork which Melville laid for acceptance of apt tragedy Vere's alternatives is most seen in Innocence in a And the is clearly the second para- morality play. tendency graph of Chapter xviii, where, as prelude to Claggart's aggravated by an equal and opposite gravitation, accusation, he describes the dangerous situation of the dramatized by the officers of the court, toward Bellipotent and the unique qualification of her commander rather than to exercise "prompt initiative" in "unforeseen difficulties." compromise categorical decision in the 2 matter of What shouldn't to Melville's general opposition to absolutism and idealism punishment. happen is admirably analyzed by Milton Stern in the opening a dog is happening to an "angel," and we quarrel chapter of The Fine-Hammered Steel of Herman Melville with that uncongenial part of the author's donnde (Urbana, Ill., 1957). The Plinlimmon case is most fully expressed in Vere's indubitable mandate to "con- argued by Wendell Glick, "Expediency and Absolute demn or let go."24 Morality in Billy Budd," PMLA, LxvIH (March 1953), and E. All of the of Budd somehow 103-110; James Miller, Jr., "Billy Budd: The problems Billy Catastrophe of Innocence," MLN, LxxIIt (March 1958), converge on the fundamental issue of absolute 168-176. Edward H. Rosenberry 497 codified, it is gratuitous, a product of individual streams immortally from the door." Like Vere, the will and not susceptible to the disciplines of social doorkeeper is compassionate yet intransigent, at architecture. The fact that Portia's problem was once father and enemy. He is somewhat "pedan- solved by the letter of the law demonstrates what tic" in appearance, and "where his duty is con- we have to build on. cerned he is to be moved neither by pity nor rage." At bottom the Plinlimmon argument is radically Disturbingly, he performs a mechanical function misleading because the analogy is false. As Henry without being himself mechanical; it is the para- Murray long ago pointed out, there is no rigid di- dox of his nature that (in the words of one com- chotomy between real and ideal morality,26 and mentator) "he represents without being respon- what discrepancy there is cannot be described by sible for what he represents."28This is the crux of a mathematical differential. An apter image, and the Billy Budd problem as of the problem in one closer to the Melville of Billy Budd, is the Kafka's parable. Among the points of view ex- one Dostoevsky uses in Ivan Karamazov's analy- plained to Joseph K. is one which, despite important sis of the same problem. Drawing his figure from differences in legal circumstance, expresses well geometry rather than chronometry, Ivan describes enough the case for Captain Vere: "that the story man's mind as "Euclidian" and refers to the confers no right on anyone to pass judgment on realms of the ideal and the real as those in which the doorkeeper. Whatever he may seem to us, he parallel lines do or do not meet (v, iii). Melville is yet a servant of the Law; that is, he belongs to evidently had the same idea, and in nearly the the Law and as such is set above human judg- same terms, when he warned in Moby-Dick (Ch. ment." xxxv) against the navigator "who offers to ship Enveloping the parable of the doorkeeper with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his Kafka has created a still more relevant parable in head." Later, in The Encantadas (Sketch Second), the controversy over its meaning. In the crazy a similar thought took form as he watched a Gala- gamut of sophistical interpretations which the pagos tortoise butting patiently against a mast narrator reviews there is parodied every earnest and saw in its hopeless inflexibility "the curse [of] critical battle that has been waged over problem- straightforwardnessin a belittered world." These atical fictions like Billy Budd and The Turn of are figures which keep clear, as the Plinlimmon fig- the Screw. Out of the whole patchwork of plausi- ure does not, the crucial distinction between ex- bility the only statement that emerges with the pediency and practicality. Seen in this light, Vere's sure ring of authorial sincerity is the one that un- problem is one of moral navigation, and its solution dercuts all the others: "You must not pay too is dictated by a respect for his charts which is both much attention to them. The scriptures are unal- characteristicand heroic. terable and the comments often enough merely express the commentator'sbewilderment." IV. A Modern Instance It is not sneering at the great body of Billy My plea for straightforwardnessin literary crit- Budd criticism to suggest, in conclusion, that it icism may be thought to labor under the curse of has expressed bewilderment.It is only saying that the tortoise. In this case, however, it is the some very good thinking has chosen some very "straight" reading which respects the author's bad grounds. Unlike "The Lady or the Tiger?" sensitively wrought image of a tragically belit- Billy Budd was never conceived as a puzzle for tered world. It is the ironists who would oversim- our solution or a choice for our decision, but rath- plify the work of art by stripping it of its mute, er as a course of events for our contemplation. suspended ambiguities, its terribly insoluble per- Unfortunately, the polemical virus runs strong in plexities, and leave us with an underdone sopho- the scholar-critic, and the natural effect of being moric bleat. Notwithstanding the temperamental drawn into the story is to take sides on its war- clarity I have claimed for it, Billy Budd bears an unexpected philosophic and aesthetic-sometimes '2Notes to his edition of Pierre (New York, 1949), p. verbal-resemblance to the 477. Recall also the quotation from Bread and Wine, above, even. provocative 493: "These rules are often close to those which the law" Kafka p. very "parable of with which concluded moral sentiment inspires in every man." Chapter ix of The Trial.27 "There are congruities between Kafka and the Melville In this dream-like tale an official doorkeeperof of "Bartleby" and The Confidence-Man which deserve the temple of Law refuses a suppliant admission their own study, but they are beyond the scope of this one. to the inner sanctum of ideal The Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox justice. sup- (Ithaca, N.Y., 1962), p. 183. Cf. Vere's remark to the court pliant, in consequence, pines away his life on the in Chapter xxi: "For that law and the rigor of it, we are threshold, though he perceives the "radiance that not responsible." 498 The Problem of "Billy Budd" ring values. A firm will is needed to remember, criticism must emulate if it is to get at his meaning. with Tindall, that Billy Budd is "not a conclu- sion, like a sermon, [but] a vision of confronting UNIVERSITYOF DELAWARE what confronts us, of man thinking things out with Newark all the attendant confusions and uncertainties."29 WillamYork Tindall, 'The Ceremonyof Innocence," This is a Sophoclean Melville in Billy Budd, speak- Great Moral Dilemmas in Literature, ed. R. M. Macver ing with a detachment and a respect for fact that (New York, 1956), p. 80.