Billy Budd: The tragedy of justice

Billy Budd: The tragedy of justice

Continued… from the previous

Despite the many indictments, it is remarkable that those who condemn Vere's decision seldom offer more than adhominem arguments based upon ironic readings of the text. Vere is viewed as a tyrant who blindly or weakly or insanely followed, rather than manfully defied, the “Forms, measured forms” of the muting act which demanded death as the penalty for striking an officer. Thus he is supposed to have violated those “primitive instincts”, forming the basis of natural law, which demand merely for one who wasn't only innocent of intent but as even Vere felt sure, had also rid the world of an “ananias”. To condemn Vere on such grounds, however, is in itself to violate the principles of natural law. It is to look but to the “frontage” as war and the Mutiny Act do, and to judge Vere by the consequence of his decision rather than by his intent as Vere said the court must judge Billy.

Yet Vere’s decision invites condemnation, as surly as it was meant to. Melville knew it would because he knew from the experience of his cousin, Guert Gansevoort, that the comparable conduct of the Somers affair hid been condemned. Moreover the Bellipotent’s surgeon, the court, and later “some officers” criticized vere’s handling of the case. While Melville was concerned to demonstrate the need for compassion, for Vere no less than for Billy, he was equally concerned to demonstrate that compassion will suffice for neither of these tragic figures. The power of compassion cannot exceed the power of historical circumstance to create the tragic necessity for in human action and in this Melville could rely on the authority of the father of the crucified Christ. Sympathetic understanding of Vere’s rationale is warrantable, but so is indignation at the necessity of Billy’s death. One must feel both pity and fear in response to this tragedy. In Billy Budd ,Sailor  Melville writes:

Now Billy, like sundry other essentially good natured ones, had some of the weaknesses inseparable from essential good nature, and among these was a reluctance, almost an incapacity, of plumply saying no to an abrupt proposition not seriously  absurd as the face of it, nor obviously unfriendly, nor iniquitous. And being of warm blood he hadn’t the phlegm tacitly to negative any proposition by any unresponsive inaction. Like his sense of fear, his apprehension as to ought outside of the honest and natural was seldom very quick. Besides, upon the present occasion, the drowse from his sleep still hung upon him. (43)

Some of the critical confusion, which has beclouded Billy Budd, has arisen out of an initial failure to define the “irony” which is supposed to throw its belief-making mechanism into reverse. So far as the ironic concept of Billy Budd is concern it is ironic enough in the Aristotelian sense (reversal of fortune, the irony of fate”) it is not ironic in the rhetorical sense (reversal of meaning, the irony of satire). Unhappy the presence or absence of this latter irony is difficult to prove, and proof has so far been largely limited to assertion and counter assertion. The critic peers into the text and sees, like Thurber at the microscope, his own eye. It helps but it doesn’t solve all problems, to say that irony is grounded absurdity. In much contemporary literature absurdity is the norm, and even in fiction best on traditional norms, the author’s notion of what is out of joint or his way of expressing it, may differ sharply from the reader’s. One can only inspect what close the text provides with an impartial eye and in the perspective of a scale of values as nearly exempt from the dangers of subjective manipulation as possible.

           

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