Billy Budd: The tragedy of justice

Billy Budd: The tragedy of justice

Continued… from the previous

          This keynote is consistently echoed in Melville’s portrayal of his principals. Capping his introductory sketch of Captain Vere in chapter Vii, Melville emphasizes that nature like Vere’s are rare in that “honesty prescribes to them directness”. Characterizing the common seaman in chapter xvi he writes with simple nostalgia of the “old fashioned sailor” whose “frankness” stands in contrast to the landman’s “finesse,” “long head” “indirection”, and “distrustfulness”. In describing the life ashore Melville anticipates our popular concepts of gamesmanship, “an oblique, tedious, barren game hardly worth that poor candle burnt out in playing it”. In the following chapter he appeals for acceptance of his simple protagonist by disarming the anticipated skepticism of the sophisticated reader and demanding in its place “something else than mere shrewdness”. His only devious and ironical character is the Villain Claggart, and to him he has Captain Vere say, “Be direct, man”. Here in short, is an internal scale of values as poorly contrived to nourish an ironic tone as can well be imagined.

            As the story develops, it becomes steadily plainer that the irony is all in the case and not in the author’s attitude toward it. Into his climactic episode in chapter xxi Melville built a classic Aristotelian irony by which “innocence and guilt ­­… changed places” and it became a fact as unalterable as the parricide of Oedipus that Billy had killed an officer in performance (however badly) of his duty. Then in the next breath, Melville extended his donnee to include the inevitable judgement of the captain, who “was not authorized to determine the matter on [the] primitive basis [of] essential right and wrong”. At the end of the chapter, as a further inducement to our acceptance pass judgement on the actions “under fire” of “the sleepiness man on the bridge”. In the face of such rhetoric one might rather expect to find on author reproached for excessive explicitness than debated as an enigma.

            On the other hand, if it seems impossible for the ironists to be right, it is not wholly their fault that they are wrong. The seal of reconciliation which the condemned Billy is made to place upon his captain’s intransigent sentence is mystical and as hard to accept as the forgiveness of Christ on the cross. On such a scene as their final interview in chapter xxii, the author felt obliged to draw the curtain and to content himself with hinting at the passionate consonance supposed to have welled up in the spirits of these two “phenomenal’ natures. This allusion to them as Abraham and Isaac is a clue to both his sincerity and his difficulty. The originals are accepted  (when they are accepted) by a suspension of disbelief in which poetic faith is immeasurably assisted by religious faith, Melville can only invoke his biblical counter parts by allusion and hope for the best. That he fears the worst, however, is apparent from the nervous manner in which he reminds us of the “rarer qualities” in the natures of his “Abraham” and “Isaac” “so Vere indeed on to be all but incredible to average minds however much cultivated” (Rosenberry  489- 92).

Continued…