Billy Budd

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:48 pm by Peter Leithart

Billy Budd 2017-09-06T22:48:22+06:00 Peter Leithart

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Some notes from a lecture on Melville’s Billy Budd.

Billy Budd was written in the last few years of Melville’s life, and was not published until three decades after his death. It has been common to interpret the novel as a final testament that indicates a shift in Melville’s outlook. After kicking against the pricks for much of his life, here was a novel, it is said, that indicates his final resignation to the world, his final acceptance that evil was simply going to exist. One might put a particular spin on this, a somewhat allegorical and autobiographical spin: When Billy Budd speaks his word of forgiveness – “God bless Captain Vere” – just before he is hanged, it might be taken as the words of Melville himself, breathing at least his forgiveness of the God who threw him into the world without his wanting it.

Along these lines, it is often interpreted as a dramatization of perfect goodness v. perfect evil and natural depravity. Billy Budd is an innocent in a world of evil, and cannot cope with it. He is like Adam before the fall, without knowledge of good and evil, and incapable of dealing with the causeless malignancy that comes from Claggart. He is the innocent sacrificed to a world of law and order, caught in the necessities of social and political life. He is a Christ figure in this sense.

During the 1950s, it was suggested that Melville intends the resolution ironically. Joseph Schiffman points to the continuity of Budd with earlier work: It is set at sea; rebellion is a theme; Melville again focuses on ordinary seaman; he is interested in the new institution or practice of impressments. Schiffman suggests that Melville in his old age was undiminished in his skepticism and hostility to life.

A more recent treatment has been more thorough-going in its treatment of Melville’s ironies and ambiguities. The narrator is unreliable, and even the apparently most obvious features of the story are ultimately lost in ambiguity. There are questions and ambiguities at every point. Billy is supposed to be the perfect, unfallen Adam, but he’s known to have beaten a sailor, Red Whiskers, on a previous ship, and he does kill Claggart. And he does lie about his knowledge of the plot for mutiny during his trial.

The notion that Claggart is “down on Billy” is first suggested by Dansker, and it is never clearly established whether this is true or not. Claggart’s villainy is evident in the fact that it is a “secret” hostility, but his ability to mask his hostility behind a show of friendliness could either by a sign of his thorough hypocrisy or a sign of his actual innocence. Possibly Claggart is simply acting patriotically to save the ship. Vere is sometimes seen as a balanced character, between the natural innocence of Billy and the natural depravity of Claggart. But Vere covers up for Billy in the trial scene, focusing attention on Billy’s killing of Claggart and dismissing the relevance of the claims that Billy was part of a conspiracy.

All of this is in service of the theory that Melville intended Billy Budd as an ironic or parodic gospel story. What Melville gives us is not a straightforward Christ story, but a Christ story as it might have been told by the higher critics with which Melville was familiar. The story of an “innocent” scapegoat is pieced together from unreliable and fragmentary witnesses.

Now, with these parameters in mind, I will examine some aspects of Billy Budd. I want to examine it as a contribution to the American literary depiction of the twin themes of God and America. And specifically, I want to examine the answers that Melville gives to the question of what the problem with America is. Why is it that America fails to be the model of charity? Answering this question from Billy Budd means trying to grasp more than a bit of the ambiguity of the book.

In a number of respects, Melville associates Billy Budd with innocence, nature, the unfallen state of Adam. This is both implicit and explicit. His very name connotes innocence. He is “Billy,” not William or even Bill. And he is a “bud,” a sprout, not a full flower, not a full fruit, only a bud. Billy Budd has come from the ship “Rights of Man” and has been impressed to serve aboard the Bellipotent. The “Rights of Man” is of course named for a tract by Thomas Paine which defends the notion of natural rights and liberty. The fact that Billy is taken from this ship and placed aboard another is a sign of his transition from the state of nature to a state of civilization. This is made explicit in the reference to Thomas Paine and the departing cry of those who leave the ship: “Good-bye to you, old Rights of Man!” As soon as they step aboard the Bellipotent, natural rights are gone. Law, justice, and order become the rule, embodied in Captain Vere.

Billy is a “Handsome Sailor” with a physical appearance, strength, and beauty that evokes comparisons with Hercules. And a bit later, the narrator compares Billy explicitly with the unfallen Adam, an “upright barbarian.” One of the characters comments, rather awkwardly, that Billy could have posed nude for a sculpture of Adam.
The Christological references that surround his character add to this aura of Billy as an Adamic figure. He is falsely charged of conspiring a mutiny, condemned by a captain who knows he’s innocent, and his death is a kind of ascension.

All this might suggest that Melville is following something like Hawthorne’s lead in seeing the corruption of the American Adam as a product of civilization itself. Hawthorne has an almost Freudian sense of the “discontents” of civilization. The city constrains and forces the deepest passions into hiding, but for all that the city is inescapable. The city is a necessity, but a tragic necessity. The problem with America is the universal problem of human society.

Yet, this is not what Melville is doing, despite the appearances. Instead, he retains a “Calvinistic” understanding of the inherent evil and depravity of man. This is evident, of course, in his depiction of Claggart, whom he explicitly describes as a man who is “naturally depraved.” Claggart is a Iago, motivated by unmotivated malice, envy of Billy’s ability and beauty (though Claggart himself is a fine physical specimen). Melville explicitly distances this depravity from the depravity described by Calvin. He opts instead for a Platonic form of depravity, which is not universal but particular. Only certain people are naturally depraved on this Platonic view, and Claggart is one of them.

But it is also evident in the ambiguities of the character of Billy Budd himself. He is not nearly as straightforwardly innocent as he might appear. He is not a pure and undefiled Adam. Melville makes this clear in the passage that describes the origin of Billy’s stutter, a tic that finally leads to his striking out at Claggart, which leads to the trial. His stutter, Melville says, is a sign that everyone who is thrown into this world is somehow tainted by the serpent. Billy is not an unfallen innocent Adam, but already marked by depravity, already imperfect.

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