I. The Sense of an Ending
Testament of Acceptance comes from E. L. Grant Watson, The New England Quarterly , 6 (1933), 319-27. Resistance, P. Withim Modern Language Quarterly, 20 (1959), 115-27.
“all critics seem to agree in considering it as Melville’s “last word”” (568).
“To regard a story as its author’s last will and testament is clearly to grant it a privileged, determining position in the body of that author’s work. As the word implies, the “will” is taken to represent the author’s final “intentions”: in writing his “will,” the author is presumed to have summed up and evaluated his entire literary output, and directed it—as proof against “dissemination”—toward some determinable destination. The “ending” thus somehow acquires the metalinguistic authority to confer finality and intelligibility upon all that precedes it” (568).
“this sense of Melville’s ending is so central to to Billy Budd criticism” (568).
“Billy Budd ends not once, but no less than four times” (568).
Story ends with his life, and then three more time: 1) death of Vere, 2) the news report, 3) Billy’s mythification
“Billy Budd’s last words, like Melville’s own, are thus spoken posthumously” (569).
“The story ends by fearlessly fraying its own symmetry, thrice transgressing its own “proper” end: there is something inherently improper about this testamentary disposition of Melville’s literary property” (569).
“Indeed, far from totalizing itself into intentional finality, the story in fact begins to repeat itself—retelling itself first in reverse, and then in verse” (569).
“The ending not only has no special authority: it problematizes the very idea of authority by placing its own reversal in the pages of an “authorized” naval chronicle” (569).
“The sense of Melville’s ending is to empty the ending of any privileged control over sense” (569).
II. The Plot Against the Characters
the “discrepancy between character and action that gives rise to the critical disagreement over the story: readers tend either to save the plot and condemn Billy (“acceptance,” “tragedy,” or “necessity”), or to save Billy and condemn the plot (“Irony,” “injustice,” or “social criticism”) (571).
“Allowing for the existence of personification but reversing the relation between personifier and personified, positioning an opposition between good and evil only to make each term take on the properties of its opposite, Melville thus sets up his plot in the form of a chiasmus:
Billy Innocence X Claggart Guilt ” (571-72).
“This story, which is often read as a retelling of the story of Christ, is thus literally a cruci-fiction—a fiction structured in the shape of a cross” (572).
“At the moment of the reversal, an instant before his fist shoots out, Billy’s face seems to mark out the point of crossing, bearing an “expression which was a crucifixion to behold” (p. 376). Innocence and guilt, criminal and victim, change places through the mute expressiveness of Billy’s inability to speak” (572).
“It would thus seem that to question the continuity between character and action cannot be done with impunity, that fundamental questions of life and death are always surreptitiously involved” (572).
“Billy seemingly represents the perfectly motivated sign; that is, his inner self (the signified) is considered transparently readable from the beauty of his outer self (the signifier) (573).
“As a reader, then, Billy is symbolically as well as factually illiterate” (573).
“In the incompatibility of his attributes, Claggart is thus a personification of ambiguity and ambivalence, of the distance between signifier and signified, of the separation between being and doing” (573).
“He is properly an ironic reader, who, assuming the sign to be arbitrary and unmotivated, reverses the value of appearances” (573).
“it is precisely this opposition between the literal reader (Billy) and the ironic reader (Claggart) that is reenacted in the critical readings of Billy Budd in the opposition between the “acceptance” school and the “irony” school” (574).
“What the reader must do is to analyze what is at stake in the very opposition between literality and irony” (574).
III. The Fiend that Lies Like Truth
“He is a sign that does not mean to mean” (575).
“Billy who cannot understand ambiguity, who takes pleasant words at face value and then obliterates Claggart for suggesting that one could otherwise, whose sudden blow is a violent denial of any discrepancy between his being and his doing, thus ends up radically illustrating the discrepancy he denies” (575).
Think about Brook Thomas. How Billy, in wanting to prove his innocence, becomes guilty, his need to be innocent his implicit acceptance of an unjust system. The system of justice cannot accept Billy’s motivationless sign.
“The story thus takes place between the postulate of continuity between signifier and signified (“handsome is as handsome does”) and the postulate of their discontinuity (“a mantrap may be under the ruddy-tipped daisies”) (575).
“The proverbs “handsome is as handsome does” can thus also be read as statement of the compatibility between the constative (“being”) and the performative (“doing”) dimensions of language. But what Billy’s act dramatizes is precisely their radical incompatibility” (575).
“Melville’s chiasmus thus creates a reversal not only between the places of guilt and innocence, but between the postulate of continuity and the postulate of discontinuity between doing and being, performance and cognition” (575).
“Far from being simply and naturally pure, he is obsessed with maintaining his own irreproachability in the eyes of authority” (577).
“Billy does not simply exclude the negative: he represses it” (577).
“It is as though Claggart as analyst, in attempting to bring Billy’s unconscious hostility to consciousness, unintentionally unleashes the destructive acting-out of transferential rage” (580).
Johnson thus sets up two critical schools: psychoanalytical and metaphysical (580).
meta: “If Billy represents pure goodness, then his act is unintentional but symbolically righteous, since it results in the destruction of the “evil” Claggart” (580). “murder”
psycho: “If Billy is a case of neurotic repression, then is act is determined by his unconscious desires, and reveals the destructiveness of the attempt to repress one’s own destructiveness” (580). “fulfilment of a wish”
psychoanalysis vs. metaphysics: “chance and determination, the willed and the accidental, the unconscious and the moral” (580).
IV. The Deadly Space Between
With understanding Claggart, “one must cross “the deadly space between”” (581). Billy does: “It is by means of a deadly chiasmus that the spatial chasm is crossed” (581).
“From the very beginning, Melville admits; “His portrait I essay, but shall never hit it” (p. 342).What Melville says he will not do here is precisely what Billy Budd does do: hit John Claggart. It would seem that speaking and killing are thus mutually exclusive: Billy Budd kills because he cannot speak, while Melville, through the very act of speaking, does not kill. Billy’s fist crosses the “deadly space” directly; Melville’s crossing, “done by indirection,” leaves its target intact” (581).
“If to describe perfectly, to refer adequately, would be to “hit” the referent and thus annihilate it; if to know completely would be to obliterate the very object known; if the perfect fulfilment of the constative, referential function of language would consist in the total obliteration of the object of that function; then language can retain its “innocence” only by giving up its referential validity. Melville can avoid murder only by grounding his discourse in ineradicable error. If to cross a space by indirection—that is, by rhetorical displacement—is to escape deadliness, that crossing can succeed only on the condition of radically losing its way” (581-82).
“the “deadly space” that runs through Billy Budd is located between cognition and performance, knowing and doing, error and murder” (582).
“Directness and indirectness are equally suspect, and equally innocent” (582).
“the moral status of rhetoric” (582, my emphasis)
“The place of explanation and definition is repeatedly filled, but its content is always lacking. What the progress of Melville’s description describes is an infinite regress of knowledge. The “deadly space” is situated not between Claggart and his fellow men, but within Melville’s very attempts to account for him” (583).
“The space opened up by the stutter is the pivot on which the entire story turns” (583).
“At all the crucial moments in the drama—in the origin of evil, in the trigger of the act, in the final assessment—the language of Billy Budd stutters. At these moments, the constative or referential content is eclipsed; language conveys only its own empty, mechanical functioning. But it is precisely these very gaps in understanding that Melville is asking us to understand” (583).
“The divine and the satanic can thus be seen as metaphysical interpretations of discontinuities in knowledge” (584).
“If this is an over-reading, it is important to note that the critical tendency to see sexual to religious symbolism in the soup scene operates on exactly the same assumption as that made by Claggart: that what appears to be an accident is actually motivated and meaningful” (585-586).
“The opposites that clash here are not two characters but two readings” (586).
V. Three Readings of Reading
“It is no doubt significant that the character around whom the greatest critical dissent has revolved is neither the good one nor the evil one but the one who is explicitly presented as a reader, Captain Vere” (586).
the “opposition between “acceptance” and “irony” quite strikingly mirrors, as we mentioned earlier, the opposition within the story between Billy’s naiveté and Claggart’s paranoia” (587).
“Billy takes every sign as transparently readable as long as what he reads is consistent with transparent peace, order, and authority” (587).
“Claggart, for whom every sign can be read as its opposite, neglects to doubt the transparency of any sign that tends to confirm his own doubts” (587).
“The naive believer thus refuses to believe any evidence that subverts the transparency of his beliefs, while the ironic doubter forget to suspect the reliability of anything confirming his own suspicions” (587).
“Naiveté and irony thus stand as symmetrical opposites bonded by their very incapacity to see anything but symmetry” (587).
“Each character sees the other only through the mirror of his own reflection” (587).
“What can be said of a reading [Vere’s] whose task is precisely to read the relation between naiveté and paranoia, acceptance and irony, murder and error?” (588).
“But how does the same character provoke such diametrically opposed responses? Why is it the judge that is so passionately judged?” (589).
“While the naive/ironic dichotomy was based on a symmetry between individuals, Captain Vere’s reading takes place within a social structure: the rigidly hierarchical structure of a British warship. While the naive reader (Billy) destroys the other in order to defend the self, and while the ironic reader (Claggart) destroys the self by projecting aggression onto the other, the third reader (Vere) subordinates both self and other, and ultimately sacrifices both self and other, for the preservation of political order” (589).
Vere “subordinates character to action, being to doing” (589).
“For Vere, the functions and meanings of signs are neither transparent nor reversible but fixed by socially determined convention” (590).
“Vere’s very character is determined not by a relation between his outward appearance and his inner being but by the “buttons” that signify his position in society” (590).
“While both Billy and Claggart are saw to owe their character to “Nature,” Vere sees his actions and being as meaningful only within the context of a contractual allegiance” (590).
“While the naive and the ironic readers attempt to impose upon language the functioning of an absolute, timeless, universal law . . . the question of martial law arises within the story precisely to reveal the law as a historical phenomenon” (590).
“Melville indeed shows history to be a story not only of events but also of fluctuations in the very functioning of irony and belief” (591).
“The opposing critical judgements of Vere’s decision to hang Billy are divided, in the final analysis, according to the place they attribute to history in the process of justification” (591).
“the conception of history as an interpretive instrument ermines the same: it is its use that is being judged” (591).
“the very fact that Billy Budd criticism itself historically moves from acceptance to irony is no doubt itself interpretable in the same historical terms” (591).
“The effect of these explicit oscillations of judgement within the text is to underline the importance of the act of judging while rendering its outcome undecidable” (591).
VI. Judgment as Political Performance
“While Billy kills through verbal impotence, Vere kills through the very potency and sophistication of rhetoric” (593).
“Judgement is precisely cognition functioning as an act” (593).
“It is this combination of performance and cognition that defines Vere’s reading not merely as historical but as political” (593).
“Before deciding upon innocence and guilt, Vere must define and limit the frame of reference within which his decision is to be possible. He does so by choosing the “legal” context over the “essential” context” (593).
“it is precisely this determination of the proper frame of reference that dictates the outcome of the decision: once Vere has defined his context, he has also in fact reached his verdict. The very choice of the conditions of judgement itself constitutes a judgement” (593).
“the two alternative frames of reference within which judgment is possible are not Nature and the King, but rather two types of textual authority: the Bible and the Mutiny Act” (594).
“The final frame of reference is neither the heart nor the gun, neither Nature nor the King, but the authority of a Sacred Text” (595).
“In his median position between the Budd/Claggart opposition and the acceptance/irony opposition, Captain Vere functions as a focus for the conversion of polarity into ambiguity and back again” (595).
“Just as Melville’s readers, faced with an ambiguity they themselves recognize as being provided by Vere, are quick to pronounce the Captain vicious or virtuous, evil or just; so, too, Vere, who clearly perceives the “mystery” in the “moral dilemma” confronting him, must nevertheless reduce the situation to a binary opposition” (596).
“It would seem, then, that the function of judgement is to convert an ambiguous situation into a decidable one” (596).
“it does so by converting a difference within . . . into a difference between. . . . A difference between opposing forces presupposes that the entities in conflict be knowable. A difference within one of the entities in question is precisely what problematizes the very idea of an entity in the first place, rendering the “legal point of view” inapplicable” (596).
“the plays of both ambiguity and binary . . . precisely in the very question of the relation between the two as the fundamental question of human politics” (596).
“War, indeed, is the absolute transformation of all differences into binary differences” (596).
“It would seem, then, that the maintenance of political authority requires that the law function as a set of rules for the regular, predictable misreading of the “difference within” as a “difference between”” (596).
“Like Billy, the law, in attempting to eliminate its own “deadly space,” can only inscribe itself in a space of deadliness” (596).
“In seeking to regulate the violent effect of difference, the political work of cognition is thus an attempt to situate that which must be eliminated. Yet in the absence of the possibility of knowing the locus and origin of violence, cognition itself becomes an act of violence. In terms of pure understanding, the drawing of a line between opposing entities does violence to the irreducible ambiguities that subvert the very possibility of determining the limit of what an “entity” is” (597).
“What every act of judgement manifests is not the value of the object but the position of the judge within a structure of exchange. There is, in other words, no position from which to judge that would be outside the lines of force involved in the object judged” (597).
“Are we, as Melville’s readers outside the arena in which power and fees are exchanged?” (597).
“is it possible to read ambiguity as such, without that reading functioning as a political act?” (597).
“it is precisely through the impossibility of finding a spot from which knowledge could be all encompassing that the plays of political power proceed” (598).
“The political reading, as cognition, attempts to understand the past; as performance, it attempts to eliminate from the future any necessity for its own recurrence” (599).
“every judge is in the impossible position of having to include the effects of his own act of judging within the cognitive context of his decision” (599).
“authority consists precisely in the impossibility of containing the effects of its own application” (599).
“Billy Budd is thus much more than a study of good and evil, justice and injustice. It is a dramatization of the twisted relations between knowing and doing, speaking and killing, reading and judging, which make political understanding and action so problematic” (599).
“the “deadly space” . . . that runs through Billy Budd . . . is that which, within cognition, functions as an act: it is that which, within action, prevents us from ever knowing whether what we hit coincides with what we understand” (599).