< dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Billy
Budd: Review of Literature
Billy Budd, Sailor is the last masterpiece of Melville.
Many critics have expressed their feelings in various ways. Billy Budd,
Sailor is based on Melville's service in Sea-voyage and embodies
tragic ideas. In this novel he rejects the classical tragic unity in the
catastrophic defeat of Billy who has unpredictably got away to safe destination
to face the cruel futility of his fatal demise in the court. Warner Berthroff
writes in "The Example of Melville" that Billy Budd brought tragedy
by himself since he is very straightforward who doesn't possess any sort of
malice upon others.
>
Melville here returns to a favorite early conceptions, of the
Iago-figure, malign individual (Blandin White-Jacket and Jackson in Red burn)
who acts from a pure sense of evil, and is therefore not the orthodox villain
of fiction. Claggart, the master-at-arms, who falsely accuses the poor young
Billy Budd of inciting mutiny, is struck dead by Billy, and therefore Billy is
paired with him in retributive death. Claggart is evil, but his hatred for
Billy is a subtly stated ambivalence. Perhaps, too much has been made of the
Christ-like nature of Billy, and of the father attributes of captain Vere in
order to prove that Melville had finally reached a Christian heaven. No doubt
Billy is supposed to be innocent, and Vere just. But Billy is too elementary a
character to bear all the burden that commentators have put upon him; perhaps
Melville, his taste for excess having gone, performs to express the predicament
of innocence in a historical parable of the imposition of order after
egalitarian excess. (192)
For E.L.G. Watson, Billy seems so innocent that he could not understand the
microcosm of the Indomitable. Lack of protest is the main cause of his falling.
He further writes in "Melville's Testament of
Acceptance".
div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
Billy represents a kind of divine innocence unmarked by doubt, a
Christ not yet aware of his own divinity who is opposed by maniacal malice. But
the theme encompasses more than this. The Indomitable is microcosm of the
world, with threatened mutiny and war a recognized part of existence. However,
rebellion is absent from this novel. Billy is too free a being to need to rebel
or resist his fate. But his accepting nature arouses to action its evil
opposite, and there arises battle between unuttered virtue and the perverted,
bitter nature which must be destroy in order to find solace. (329)
Billy possesses rare qualities that are difficult to be found in this world.
Wendell Glick in "Expediency and Absolute Morality in Billy Budd"
writes:
Billy belongs to heaven, not earth; his hanging illustrates that
absolute morality doesn’t work in this world, Vere-representing Melville is a
realist; on the basis of hi readings and experience he makes a rational,
discriminating choice, sacrifices absolute morality for the higher ethic,
absolute necessity, and preserves civilization. (103)
Billy's death is not normal one. He faced death with smile. Giovannini G. and
H.M. Campbell write in "The Hanging Scene in Melville's Billy Budd":
There is no simple conflict between optimism and pessimism,
orthodoxy and unbelief, but rather a complex transcending all these. The
religious symbolism supports an optimistic reading of the story, but equally
significant suggestion that Billy ironically cheats the gallows by dying a
providential death moments before the exception. The religious symbolism
surrounding the hanging suggests a divine tableau in which nature intervenes
and protests the injustice of Billy’s death by allowing him a providential and
painless death before being hanged. The Lamb of God symbolizes not only the
sacrificial victim but also liberation from pain and death. (491)
Melville used the phrase "an inside narrative" as a subtitle.
Braswell in Melville's Billy Budd "As an Inside Narrative" refers to
this and writes:
Billy Budd symbolizes Melville’s own heart in mutiny against his
head; his is the “ Inside Narrative”, Billy is the heart and Claggart the
head, able (like Vere) in this depraved world to understand but never to be the
innocent, Christ like heart. Young Melville maintained a healthy balance
between them; heart strolled gaily above-deck while head schemed below. The
rebellion arose, from Mardi through Moby Dick, climaxed by Billy’s blow to the
head. Melville sympathized with the heart’s Christian idealism, but recognized
its folly, when the good heart (Ahab, Billy) struck at evil (Whale, Claggart).
It also blasphemed and mutinied against agents of divine authority. Melville
formed Christ’s wisdom unsuited to earth. The heart’s rebellion had run wild
and threatened to destroy state, ship and self. (133)
Noone John B.Jr in "Billy Budd: Two
concept of Nature" portrays the mechanical concept of law, which do not
dare to understand the intention of Billy Budd. The verdict of the court should
be just not on the ground of crime but on intention of the criminal. Though
Billy Budd was a 'naïve criminal' there is a tragedy of justice which accuses
Billy as a mutinous fellow. Noone further writes:
In Billy Budd, Melville seeks an ideal suited to actual men and
finds it in history, not in Utopian theories. No single Panacea suits the
worlds completely. Billy exemplifies Rousseau’s noble savage, able through
instinct alone to flourish in a pure state of nature (aboard the Rights of
Man). But he is morally immature, innocent not by choice but by ignorance of
good and evil and unturned to this world. Paradoxically, what guarantees his
freedom is his enemy, Hobbe’s Leviathan. Claggart exemplifies Hobbe’s depraved
primitive, able only through rational rules to impose peace in savage world,
for total war characterizes man’s natural, instinctive state. Peace, the
highest good of which man is capable, is gained through war against bestial
instinct; only reason, working through obstacle forms, ruthless discipline, and
technology-the seventy-four gun indomitable-guarantees peace. But if Billy or
Claggart was given command, either one would destroy the ship, since in this
world, neither concept of nature- innocence or depravity- offers a possible
ideal. The next possibility is detachment; Vere seeking ultimate laws and
forms, exemplifies Newton’s mechanical reason. Yet Vere’s reason, not Billy, is
on trial; his irrelevant arguments trap the intellectually innocent court with
reason, and Vere is insane for equating his sterile, rationally ordered world
with that of living man. (249)
The system of power is inevitable which,
is accepted by this universe. Roland Duerkson further writes in"The Deep
Quandary in Billy Budd:"
Melville’s Billy Budd is neither a call to violent rebellion nor a
declaration of preference for established law over individual choice. Instead,
it essentially embodies a basic question about a power system that has almost
universal acceptance despite its diametric opposition to society’s highest
moral values. (51)
Melville chose the naïve hero for his novel Billy Budd, Sailor, who
deserves to be a tragic hero. Francis Otto Matthiessen in American
Renaissance further writes:
Melville chose for his hero a young sailor, impressed into the
king’s service in the later years of the eighteenth century, shortly after the
great mutiny at the Nore. By turning to such material Melville made
clear that his thought was not bounded by a narrow nationalism. That the
important thing was the inherent tragic quality no matter when or where, it was
found. (261)
Melville, himself involved in Sea-voyages gives an outline to prepare this
novel. His three years sea-experience is traced in this novel. It is supposed
that if he were not in sea-business, he would not be able to expose these
ideas. Vanwyck Brook and Otto L. Bettman in Our Literary Heritage further
write:
His three years and more at sea had awakened in Melville a feeling
for the mysteries and marvels of the ocean that recalled the old maps of the
days of Columbus and their portents and monsters of the deep. No writer had
ever more fully conveyed that sense of the awfulness of the sea which as
Melville said, “ aboriginally belongs to it.” while his account of a savage
society that missionaries and traders had scarcely disturb bad struck the
American mind at the psychological moment. With his great power of description,
he offered lovely primitive landscapes, buff and glens, green orchards of
banana and palm, gently rolling hillsides visiting to majestic heights and
crags pouring over with leafy cascades and vine. One witnessed the pagan heaver
there, the test of calabashes and the gatherings of the talkative elders in
their club; the nymphs always ready for a frolic. (56)
From his earlier age, a kind of tragic
sense of life implanted in his mind when he came into 'impressment' in the
Bellipotent, Brook and Bettman, further portray the gloomy picture of
Melville's life in Our Literary Heritage.
The signs of growing introspection were hardly visible in the
Melville of this period, a lively agreeable young man. Yet in his mind there
loomed already a tragic sense of life, a gloomy view of man, no doubt implanted
by certain experiences of his earlier years. As a young boy he had set out from
home, dressed in his brother’s cast-off shooting jacket, and feeling, as he
said, like an infant Ishmael stunt as he was in muscle and bone, with physical
coverage to spare, he had never imagined a forecastle and the horrors that
occurred in that gloomy hole where sailors burrowed like rabbit in a warren.
The eager, romantic, sensitive boy, friendless and alone was shocked to the
core. Murder, suicide and syphilis throne among these rogues of all nations who
have shut up together with the cockroaches and the rats and he saw suffering on
every hand and evil at war with the good. All these barbarity of civilization
its vices and its cruelties, had made the savages seen all the admirable in
contrast. He saw them innocent and happy in the light of the baseness of the
inmates of ships, these sons of adversity and clarity, the offspring of sin,
and no wonder the savages impress him as amiable, delightful and humane.
(110-111)
E.L.G. Watson in" Melville's
Testament of Acceptance" estimates Melville as an equal literary figure to
Shakespeare and Milton. Melville's outstanding personality in fiction writing
appears in this novel. He further writes:
The late story Billy Budd demonstrates
persuasively that he retained his power as a writer of narrative fiction to the
end of his life. Here innocence stutters and evils speak loud as the
simplicities of an eighteenth-century world give way to the battleship of
nineteenth-century life. Adamic Billy dies at the yardarm, nonetheless
stoically affirming the rule of the ship of state and the inhumane forms of
society; his legend, Melville says, survived, to be read in many ways. So did
Melville manuscript, left unfinished when he died unknown in 1891 and
continuing to haunt readers with its conflicting and unresolved meanings since
its recovery in 1924. It remains as well an eloquent indictment of American’s
inability to recognize and support a major literary talent who now sense to us
what he wished to be: his nation’s candidate for rivalry with Shakespeare or
Milton. (163-4)
The literary height of Melville is in
comparable both from moral point of view as well as literary point of view.
Eugenio Montale in "An Introduction to Billy Budd" writes:
By all these things Melville raised the
story of Billy Budd not only to a moral but also to an artistic height, which
is but rarely reached. Billy, to put it simply, is a great subject in the hands
of a powerful poet who has concentrated into it all the phantasms, all the
idols and the secret of a whole lifetime. Certainly the story lends itself to
the most diving interpretations: I need only mention one that sees the three
characters as narcissistic projections of the three ages of the author. But
this explanation, like the one, which sees Melville in terms of neuroses and
traces the work to an unconscious Oedipus complex, seems to me sterile. In
Billy Budd the life which gives expression with equal violence to good and
evil, right and wrong, tries, but without success, to be found in turn into the
sacrificial purity of the victim and in the austere rigor of Vere, and even
(without dismissing it as conventional Mephistophelianism) in the mad and
criminal magnetism of Claggart, the master at arms, a fallen angel, but an
angel still; and who scans the horizon with sibylline words (“A cat’s paw”).
But it is hard to say. Because not even in this story has Melville sacrificed
to a tidy ending, not even to a negative ending, what has been called by a
well–known writer the cry of his purity. (421-422)
Likewise Edward H. Rosenberry in "The
Problem of Billy Budd" accepts it as the parable related to the story to
Bible.
Billy Budd has been read as a parable of God the father
sacrificing his son for a fallen world, and alternatively of Pontius Pilate
selling out Jesus for present and personal convenience and finally its sober
voice has been taken for a dry mock protesting God and the whole created scheme
of things. The problem hinges largely on the question of tone, though there are
crucial points of substance and reasoning to be considered as well. The issues
are intricately inter connected, since after all what we have to deal with is
meaning in an organic work of art. (489)
Many critics accept the name of captain
Vere as symbolical figure. Alice Chandler in the "Name Symbolism of
Captain" Vere further writes:
Melville chose the name Vere to suggest either truth (veritas) or
man likeness (Vir). However, the character of captain Vere lends itself to no
such simplistic explanation, and the name Vere may have other connotations.
Although Vere, as the family name of the Earls of Oxford, did suggest chivalry
in the nineteenth century, the name was often used pejoratively. Novels by
Scott, Lever and Hood all use the name Vere unfavorably, as does Tennyson’s
familiar poem, “Lady Clara Vere de Vere, “ which tells how a highborn dame
drove her lowly lover to suicide. Thus Melville may have unconsciously chosen
the name for its popular connotations of snobbishness and cruelty rather than
those of nobility and honor. Such a reading would support the democratic
interpretation of Billy Budd. (86-89)
About the matter of verdict how the
materialistic society fails in Billy Budd and how we have to witness the
conflict between natural and social law. Charles A. Reich in "The Tragedy
of Justice in Billy Budd" further writes:
Rationale, materialistic, society fails to accept as Melville
finally did, the mixture of good and evil which is man’s nature and which gives
life its fullness. In Billy Budd, Melville examines this there in terms of a
three-part problem in law, legal standards. Representing natural forces, Billy
and Claggart must inevitably clash, thus Billy kills through necessity, not free
choice, and under natural law is innocent. Yet natural law neither supports
order nor checks chaos; if society is to be protected from savage nature, then
man’s law must reject necessity, must assume free choice (the exercise of free
will) therefore judge appearances- the objective act rather than man’s nature;
Vere’s Reactions. Faced with the conflict between natural and social law, Vere
has no choice. He would prefer to spare Billy but feels compelled to quell
latent mutiny, and the Mutiny Act allows no exceptions. But his reactions are
in no way rigid. Vere is unusually sensitive, from holding pat convictions; he
grows into an agonized awareness that, in executing the law which duty
dictates, he must sacrifice values higher than man’s laws. His suffering leads
to the third problem; Society’s Standards. The executions scene focuses on
society’s rejection of human nature; its blindness to the fact that both nature
and men are flawed. Society’s law mistakes the flaws (acts) for the whole man
and to protect man against savage acts destroys him. But these who witness
Billy’s hanging still recognize and feel his humanity and thereby reveal the
gulf between their spiritual knowledge and their practices. They feel
compassion and know his innocence yet blindly act according to artificial,
utilitarian standards and narrow extremes of right and wrong. This two-valued
orientation alienates social man from natural man. Lest we forget, Melville
reminds us that there is more to man than laws or reasoned forms allow. By such
reminder and by opening our eyes to our self-made prisons, Melville fulfills
the artist’s role in modern society. (368-389)
Melville here tries to draw a
parallel line between crucifixion of Christ in the Bible and Billy Budd.
Christopher W. Sten writes in "Billy Budd: Adam or Christ":
Although the Christian parallels need not signal Melville’s
endorsement of Vere’s decision, it may signal his larger intact. By focusing on
the means-and–ends dilemma through this secularized version of the crucifixion
story, Melville makes us sensible of the price of civilization. And he reminds
us that the responsibilities of the survivors like the “agony” of authority and
the passion of the victim, are features of our everyday lives, not antique
curiosities. Civilized beings bear a responsibility to the sacrificial victim
who, as an “ upright barbarian”, symbolizes the natural in every man; thus they
bear a responsibility to themselves to make their civilized lives worthy of the
ideal in whose name the sacrifice is made. First Adamic, then Christ-like, this
“child –man” whose life was taken in his twenty-first year is finally a type of
us all. His fate is the human fate. It is because Melville sought to awaken us
to the common fate and its attendant responsibility that he could go no further
in his defense of Vere; he had to stop where he did in order to prevent this
work of imaginative literature from becoming the political treatise it is often
taken to be. (237)
Thus
in this novel, each of the central issues of tragedy is resolved so far as
human insist will permit. All these issues are harmonized in Captain Vere's
speech to the doubtful officers who hesitate to condemn and convict Billy. It
is Melville's own version of tragedy, constructed after years of painful
thought, and the chief enterprise of his maturity and old age. In Chapter 11,
the author confirms the old Dansker’s view that the master-at-arms has been
feeling inwardly hostile to Billy. The author also tells us that it was a
mystery why Claggart should have begun to feel secretly hostile to Billy. Billy
had in no way provoked him or done anything to offend him. The author then
proceeds to probe the mystery of Claggart’s antagonism to Billy. He explains
Claggart’s seemingly causeless antagonism to Billy by attributing it to
Claggart’s natural depravity. This is a wholly psychological chapter in which
the story does not move forward. In Chapter 12, the psychological analysis of
Claggart is continued; and in Chapter 13 an external cause for Claggart’s
antagonism towards Billy is provided when we are informed that a sailor
by the nickname of Squeak had been carrying certain false reports against
Billy’s behavior to the master-at-arms.
Then the story moves when an event of some importance takes
place. Billy is approached by an afterguardsman with an offer of a bribe of two
guineas if Billy would join a conspiracy being hatched by a group of
disgruntled sailors. Billy angrily rejects the offer, and in Chapter 15 the old
Dansker’s reaction to Billy’s encounter with the afterguardsman is described.
Here it is hinted that it was Claggart who had sent the afterguardsman to Billy
with an offer of a bribe, Claggart’s object being to trap Billy and then wreak
his wrath upon Billy by reporting to the further analysis of Billy’s mind and
nature. In chapter 17 a further analysis of Claggart’s mind is given to us. We
are here informed of a certain positive quality in Claggart. On certain
occasions, while gazing at Billy’s withdrawing figure, Claggart would look like
“the man of sorrows”. In other words, on certain occasions he showed a
Christ-like perception of the misfortunes of human life. On such occasions it
also seemed that there was a yearning in Claggart’s eyes and that he wanted
really to love Billy if fate had not ordained otherwise. Billy’s total
ignorance of Claggart’s secret antagonism towards him is also emphasized.
Matters come to a head in Chapter 18 so far as the plot of the novel is
concerned. A lot of suspense is here created in our minds when Claggart goes to
Captain Vere and says that a sailor by the name of Billy Budd is a dangerous
man who might instigate his fellow-sailors to do much light on the characters
of both Claggart and Captain Vere. In Chapter 19, the plot moves rapidly, and certain
dramatic developments take place. Accused directly by Claggart of mutinous
intentions in the very presence of Captain Vere, Billy reacts by giving a
severe blow to Claggart who drops down dead. A lot of suspense is here
experienced by us. The events of the story have now reached a climax. But the
happenings in this chapter throw also a good deal of light on all the three
major characters, but chiefly on the characters of Billy and Captain Vere.
Captain Vere now decides to hold a court-martial. In Chapter 20, the view of
the ship’s surgeon regarding Captain Vere’s decision to hold a court-martial
given. Chapter 21 is the most important so far as plot is concerned. It
contains the most significant event of the entire story. Billy is put on trial
before a court-martial by Captain Vere. The court-martial might have taken a
lenient view of Billy’s misdemeanor in giving to his superior officer a blow,
which proved fatal. But Captain Vere insists that this is a case in which the
military law must operate, and in which there is no room for any private
feelings of mercy. Captain Vere virtually coerces the court-martial into
convicting Billy and sentencing him to death. This does not, however, mean that
Captain Vere himself feels no pity for Billy. He has already told the ship’s
surgeon that Billy was “an angel of God” who had dealt divine justice to
Claggart, a villain resembling the Biblical Ananias. But Captain Vere pushes
his private feelings into the background, and rigorously upholds the military
law. This chapter is important equally from the point of view of both plot and
characterization. It is in the light of this chapter that we have to reach our
conclusions about the true character of Captain Vere. In Chapter 22, we are
told that Captain Vere himself communicated the findings of the court to Billy
and that, at this time, Captain Vere was experiencing an indescribable agony
caused by the judgment which the court-martial had delivered, even though the
judgment had almost entirely been determined by Captain Vere himself. In
Chapter 23, the crew of the ship are summoned and informed by Captain Vere of
the circumstances of the case and the judgment delivered by the court-martial
against Billy.
In Chapter 24, the ship’s chaplain tries
to offer spiritual solace to Billy, the condemned man; but Billy is not a
religious man in the conventional sense, and he hardly pays any heed to the
chaplain. In Chapter 25, the execution of Billy is described. The description
of the execution is suggestive of the Crucifixion. There
is some symbolic imagery in this chapter which gives rise to a feeling in our
minds that the author regards Billy not as an ordinary human being but as an
angel of God. Billy’s last words were: “God bless Captain Vere!” These word
show that Billy died without any grudge or grievance against Captain Vere. At
the end of this chapter we are also told that, when the noose was tightened
round Billy’s neck, Billy’s body did not quiver or tremble at all. This was
indeed some thing mysterious. In Chapter 26, this mysterious phenomenon is
discussed by the ship’s surgeon and the ship’s purser. The surgeon adopts a
scientific approach, saying that he cannot at this stage explain why Billy’s
body had not given a shudder and why any spasmodic movement in Billy’s body had
not occurred at the time of the hanging. The ship’s purser attributes the
absence of any spasmodic movement in Billy’s body to Billy’s will-power. In
Chapter 27, the burial of Billy’s body in the sea is described. A strange
phenomenon is witnessed when a large number of sea-birds come flying to the
spot where the burial is taking place, and keep circling over place and
screaming. In Chapter 28, the death of Captain Vere is described in a moving
manner. Chapter 29 shows how the government officials distort and twist actual
historical facts. A government report depicts Billy as a potential mutineer who
was executed in time, while it depicts Claggart as a hero who had prevented the
mutinous intentions of Billy from taking a practical shape. Chapter 30
describes the attitude of the sailors towards the dead Billy. They regard him
as a great hero and as a martyr. One of the sailors has written a poem called
"Billy in the Darbies," in which Billy is immortalized. The
attitude of the sailors is diametrically opposed to that of the government
officials.
This survey of the plot clearly shows that the structure of the novel is
compact and close-knit. There is no beating about the bush, no unnecessary
details, and no prolixity. Indeed, economy and conciseness are the keynote of
the novel. The plot does not move as briskly as we would have desired, but the
chapters in which the plot stands still are those which contain character-
portrayal and psychological analysis, and these are in themselves not only
interesting but also integral to the story. The plot is not hindered or impeded
by any extraneous matter. Indeed, in its clear mastery of literary
technique, Billy Budd has been ranked by some critics on
higher level than even Moby-Dick, although in bulk it is less
impressive and in mood less violent.
There is, indeed, and abundance of psychological analysis in the novel, and
this psychological analysis is intended to show us the working of the human
mind and the motives which prompt human actions. Chapters 11 and 12, for
instance, are wholly devoted to a probing of the mind of Claggart. And these
chapters are a marvelous specimen of psychological analysis in which Melville
shows himself to be and expert. In these two chapters Melville tries to reach
the depths of Claggart’s mind. Then there is Chapter 14 in which also we have
some psychological analysis. Here Billy’s mind vis-à-vis the
afterguardsman is analyzed to show what a simple nature Billy had. In Chapter
18 the mind of Captain Vere is analyzed to explain why he did not take
Claggart’s report against Billy on its face value. Indeed, these chapters and
passages of psychological analysis do obstruct the narrative. But what is a
narrative without psychological analysis? A mere narrative of events would be a
highly superficial and shallow account. It is psychological analysis which
lends weight, solidity, and meaning to a story. Without psychological analysis
or a probing of mind and motive, a story would be very thin and bloodless.
This does not, however, mean that the
structure of Billy Budd is perfect or flawless. A reference has already been
made to an early chapter (4) dealing with Nelson. This chapter is surely a
digression from the main story, though even this chapter has been justified by
some critics on the ground that the portrayal of Nelson was essential in order
to provide a picture of the ideal naval commander so that we might not
automatically accept Captain Vere’s judgment as perfect or final. With Nelson
in our minds, says this critic, we would not regard Captain Vere’s handling of
Billy’s case as unexceptionable or unquestionable. But this plea offered by
critics is unconvincing. There is no link at all between Nelson’s greatness as
a naval commander and Captain Vere’s handling of Billy’s case. Nelson certainly
does not provide any measure or any standard by which Captain Vere’s arguments
during Billy’s trial can be tested or judged.
But the chapter about Nelson is the only digression. To regard the two concluding
chapter of the novel also as a digression would be a grave error. These two
chapters are essential to complete the story. If the story had ended with the
death of Captain Vere in Chapter 29, we would have experienced a sense of
incompleteness because we would definitely have wanted to know the public
reactions to the sentence of death which was meted out to Billy. The two
concluding chapters provide the two opposite versions of how Billy’s case was
received- the version depicted Billy as a potential mutineer and as a
Christ-like figure worthy of adoration. The ballad written by one of the mates
of Billy immortalized the dead man by making a legendary hero of him.
Some readers are likely to be irked by the frequency of authorial comments
which occur in the course of the narration. We repeatedly come across remarks
which the author makes in his own person about the characters, the events, and
affairs in general. For instance, at the end of Chapter 2 the author says that
what he has written above shows that the Handsome Sailor in the novel is not
being presented as a conventional hero and that, furthermore, the story in
which the Handsome Sailor is the main figure is no romance. Now, some readers
may say that such a comment by the author is uncalled-for. At the beginning of
Chapter 4, the author says that he is now going to leave the main road and
stray into a bypath. What he means to say is that he is going to digress from
the main story. Now, here is another comment introducing Claggart to us, says:
“His portrait I essay, but shall never hit it.” In Chapter 11, the author tells
us of what an honest scholar had once told him about a certain man. Now, we may
or may not justify authorial comments in a novel. It is a matter of opinion.
Some readers believe that the author should not intrude or project himself into
the story; others hold the view that authorial comments elucidate and illumine
the story. Every reader has a right to hold his own view in this respect.
Authorial comments may not always be very interesting or enlightening. But in
the case of Melville, we can definitely say that most of the comments which he
has made in Billy Budd are of an enlightening and
illuminating kind. Even if they are artistically a flaw, they are a welcome
flaw. In fact, the plot of this novel is very thin. It is by virtue of the
detailed psychological analyses and the numerous authorial comments that the
novel gains substance and weight.
Billy Budd: Melville’s conception of tragedy
When Moby-dick and Pierre were conceived, Melville was incapable of writing
tragedy, though both those novels have tragic implications. But the situation
changed when he came to the writing of Billy Budd, Sailor. In this story, each
of the central issues of tragedy is resolved so far as human insight will
permit, and all these issues are harmonized in Captain Vere’s speech to the
doubtful officers who hesitate to condemn and connect Billy. Yet it is
Melville’s own version of tragedy, constructed after 5 years of painful thoughts,
and the chief enterprise of his maturity and old age, Claggart is the
representative of evil, but this time Melville knows where evil comes, and why
it is loose in the world. Men like Claggart are sick with “depravity according
to nature”, Billy, on the contrary, is a perfectly innocent men, however, in
leaving the merchant ship rights-of-man and becoming a sailor on the battleship
called the Bellipotent, Billy has entered a world at war, a world where
monomaniac depravity like Claggart’s is free to roam and destroy but where,
too, men like Captain Vere are sometimes in commenced Melville drops the mantle
of tragedy on Billy. He gives him a tragic flaw in his symbolic inability to
speak and try to answer Claggart’s accusation. Billy goes to his death courageously
with a cry of blessing for captain Vere.
The agony in this tragedy is Billy’s, but
only captain Vere is capable of understanding the law which couples his
suffering, Captain Vere explains to the perplexed
officers of the court the law under which they must act as its agents. And here
in lies the tragedy of captain Vere. He cannot escape the predicament in which
he finds himself; and he feels compelled to adopt a course, which is wrong in
terms of absolute justice, but which is right if discipline in the armed
forces is to be maintained and if the
stabling of society is to be ensured.
0 Comments
Post a Comment