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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
When a monumental new edition of Billy Budd appeared in 1962, it was the hope of the editors that their exhaustive scholarship might contribute to a definitive interpretation of the novel. Such a wish might seem unnecessarily restrictive, but the extreme critical divergence on Billy Budd has created a genuine threat to its artistic integrity as a result of its apparent failure to support a demonstrable reading. This essay is an attempt to end the war, or to make the end more predictable.
1 Alexander Jones's admirable survey of this familiar quarrel in “Point of View in The Turn of the Screw,” PMLA, lxxiv (March 1959), 112–122, is a model of corrective criticism. See also Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), pp. 311–315.
By now any scholarly reassessment of works like these carries a Bunyanesque burden of prior study which it is impractical to spread out for detailed inspection, even in footnotes. The latest annotated text of Billy Budd, edited by Harrison Hayford and Merton Sealts (Chicago, 1962), to which this study refers throughout, lists 161 items in its bibliography, and a selection of this material edited by William Stafford under the title Melville's Billy Budd and the Critics (San Francisco, 1961) lists nearly a hundred in addition to the twenty-odd it wholly or partly reprints. Between them these sources (most concisely the former, pp. 24–27) tell all that the average reader of the novel or of this essay will want to know about the Billy Budd controversy. In the interest of progress and brevity I shall omit a good deal of the argument and formal documentation accessible in these compendia.
2 R. H. Fogle, “Billy Budd: The Order of the Fall,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, xv (December 1960), 189–205.
3 The Rhetoric of Fiction, pp. 151–152.
4 Joseph Schiffman, “Melville's Final Stage, Irony: A Re-examination of Billy Budd Criticism,” American Literature, xxii (May 1950), 128–136.
5 The Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 366. The entire section labeled (after Saul Bellow) “Deep Readers of the World, Beware!” is worth reading on this topic.
6 Ibid., p. 132. Booth is referring here specifically to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, but the problem of sympathy is explored at large in Chs. v, ix, and x.
7 Merlin Bowen, The Long Encounter (Chicago, 1960), p. 233. The full case against the argument from conscience will be made from another point of view further on.
8 Letter to Hawthorne, June 1851.
9 Good discussions of both issues may be found in the notes to the Chicago text, pp. 157, 181–183.
10 Fogle, op. cit. (note 2, above); Lawrence Barrett, “The Differences in Melville's Poetry,” PMLA, lxx (September 1955), 606–623.
11 R. H. Fogle, “Billy Budd—Acceptance or Irony,” Tulane Studies in English, viii (1958), 109–110, 112.
12 Among the many pertinent studies listed in the bibliography of Hayford and Sealts, I have found especially useful those of Berthoff (1960), Braswell (1957), Fogle (1958, 1960), and Miller (1958). A very important contribution of W. G. Kilbourne, Jr., will be discussed in another connection.
13 Some of this very evidence is used by Wayne Booth, p. 178, in citing Billy Budd as an example of “reliable” narration.
14 Cf. Shaw's Candida, in which everyone thinks everyone else “mad” for precisely these reasons.
15 Walter Blair, Mark Twain and Ruck Finn (Berkeley, Calif., 1960), pp. 280, 329.
16 F. M. Cornford, Microcosmographia Academica, 5th ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1953), p. 11.
17 “Of Custom, and Not Easily Changing an Accepted Law,” Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford, Calif., 1957), i.xxiii. The conservative implications of this and certain other passages have been explored by W. G. Kilbourne, Jr, “Montaigne and Captain Vere,” American Literature, xxxiii (January 1962), 514–517.
18 Lawrance Thompson takes the observation that Vere found in Montaigne “confirmation” of his inmost thoughts as evidence that he was reading his own opinions into the text. I think that the “shock of recognition” was probably what Melville had in mind—Keats's “almost a remembrance,” or Emerson's own experience with Montaigne, as recorded in Representative Men: “It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience.”
19 Melville labeled this sentiment “Montaignism” in the margin of his Shakespeare: Jay Leyda, The Melville Log (New York, 1951), p. 291.
20 “Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions,” ii.i.
21 “Of Custom,” i. xxiii.
22 See the discussion of this controversial passage, with a review of the principal scholarship on it, in the notes of Hayford and Sealts, pp. 195–196.
23 The point is interestingly made in Paradise Lost xii. 300–306, as quoted and discussed by Norman H. Pearson, “Billy Budd: ‘The King's Yarn’,” American Quarterly, iii (Summer 1951), 99–114. Another valuable essay on Melville's conservative and anti-romantic conception of law is Frederick I. Carpenter, “Melville and the Men-of-War,” American Literature and the Dream (New York, 1955), pp. 73–82. Carpenter quotes an instructive passage from Mardi (Ch. clxi): “Though an army be all volunteers, martial law must prevail.”
24 The groundwork which Melville laid for acceptance of Vere's alternatives is most clearly seen in the second paragraph of Chapter xviii, where, as prelude to Claggart's accusation, he describes the dangerous situation of the Bellipotent and the unique qualification of her commander to exercise “prompt initiative” in “unforeseen difficulties.”
25 Melville's general opposition to absolutism and idealism is admirably analyzed by Milton Stern in the opening chapter of The Fine-Hammered Steel of Herman Melville (Urbana, Ill., 1957). The Plinlimmon case is most fully argued by Wendell Glick, “Expediency and Absolute Morality in Billy Budd,” PMLA, lxviii (March 1953), 103–110; and James E. Miller, Jr., “Billy Budd: The Catastrophe of Innocence,” MLN, lxxin (March 1958), 168–176.
26 Notes to his edition of Pierre (New York, 1949), p. 477. Recall also the quotation from Bread and Wine, above, p. 493: “These rules are often very close to those which moral sentiment inspires in every man.”
27 There are congruities between Kafka and the Melville of “Bartleby” and The Confidence-Man which deserve their own study, but they are beyond the scope of this one.
28 Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (Ithaca, N.Y., 1962), p. 183. Cf. Vere's remark to the court in Chapter xxi: “For that law and the rigor of it, we are not responsible.”
29 William York Tindall, “The Ceremony of Innocence,” Great Moral Dilemmas in Literature, ed. R. M. MacIver (New York, 1956), p. 80.
