Billy Budd: The tragedy of justice

Billy Budd: The tragedy of justice

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This demands to feel an intense and indelible sense of helplessness and agony.  A youthful sailor loved by his shipmates for his natural goodness, is put to death for the sake of seemingly formalistic insensate law. Law and society are portrayed in fundamental opposition to natural man.

The confrontation takes place in a stark and sombership board drama. Billy, the handsome sailor, is falsely and maliciously accused of muting by Claggart, the master-at-arms. Momentarily losing the power of speech while trying to answer, Billy strikes out at Claggart, and the blow kills him. Captain Vere, who witnesses the act must judge it, is caught in "a moral dilemma involving angst of the tragic", knowing full well Billy’s goodness, and that he didn’t intend to kill, Vere sees no choice but to apply the inflexible law of a military ship in time of war. Billy is hanged.

The problem of BillyBudd has produced many arguments. Some critics have considered it Melville’s “Testament Acceptance,” a peaceful, resigned coming –into –port after a stormy lifetime. Some have thought that Billy, though deed, triumphs because his sacrifice restores goodness to the world. Others have found the novel a bitter and ironic criticism of society. Most recently and persuasively, it has been called a Sophoclean tragedy, a contemplation of life’s warring values. All of these views have merit. But there is still more to be seen in Billy Budd.

            Melville’s last book seems clearly to be different from his earlier work. It is true that Billy and Claggart are archetypal Melville figures. But in Billy Budd neither of these characters is developed or explained, each remain static. Instead, the focus is upon a new kind of character the civilized, intellectual captain Vere. He is the only character whose feelings we are permitted to see, and his is the only consciousness; which seems to grow divining the action. In addition, the book’s focus is upon a new situation; not the old clash of good and evil, but an encounter of these natural forces, on the one hand, which society and law on the other. Significantly, Vere, and the dilemma of this encounter were, were the last elements to be added when Melville was writing, as if he had started out to repeat an old drama but ended up with something new and unexpected. Billy Budd is also different in that the central there is presented through the medium of a problem in law. And “law” is used not merely in the general sense of order as oppose to chaos. Instead, we are given a carefully defined issue. This issue receives an extra- ordinarily full treatment, which, together with its crucial position in the story, makes it the major focus of action and conflict.

            In approaching Billy Budd almost all critics whatever their ultimate conclusions, have started with the assumption that Billy is innocent, and that the issue is an encounter between innocence and formalistic society. But to say that Billy is innocent is a misleading start, for it invites a basic confusion and over simplification. By what standard is he innocent? Is it by law deriding from nature, from God, or from man? And to what is the concept of innocence applied-to Billy’s act or to Billy himself? Billy is innocent in that he lacks experience, like Adam before the fall, but he is not necessarily innocent in that he is not guilty of a crime. The problem of justice in the book is a profoundly difficult one; its possibilities are for richer than is generally recognized. In turn such recognition affects the reader’s view of Vere and, ultimately the understanding of the novel as a whole.

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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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