“Melville unflinchingly represents to us the moral horror of what Captain Vere does to Billy, and yet he also depicts Vere himself with a respect that borders on admiration” (273).
“Billy Budd is about the inescapably dilemmatic nature of certain choices” (273).
“In our world, outside narratives sometimes usurp the position of inside ones” (275).
“the treatment of consciousness as perspectival, as consisting of a multiplicity of clashing perspectives, pervades Billy Budd and lies at its heart” (275).
“What drives the doubts and, evidently, what drives moral scruple itself is nature, a causal power that is present in all of us, regardless of the position we choose to take on the matter of Billy’s execution” (276).
“The clash to which Vere has traced the officers’ hesitation is a collision between two distinct and sharply opposed perspectives: mili- tary duty on the one hand, and moral scruple vitalized by compassion on the other” (276).
Vere “points out that both the English and the French are at this moment killing each other without any regard to whether their victims’ participation in the war is voluntary or the result of impressment and, consequently, without any regard for whether they are responsible for their status as combatants or not” (276).
speculative (truth-seeking): “Once questions about these deeper facts have been opened, we can see the deed of the wrongdoer in a new light, even see things from his point of view. Mercy and sympathy become possible” (277).
“The idea seems to be this: the perspective of natural morality is appropriate to beings of a certain sort, while the military perspective is appropriate to beings of another sort. We, he is saying, are the latter sort of being” (278).
“we can think of ourselves as corporals, privates, and powder-monkeys, what we really are is human beings” (279).
“The sort of reasoning that Bentham represents lies at the foundation of Vere’s view of the issues at stake in his speech” (280).
Vere “opposes the Revolution because of its foreseen effects in the interests, not of one class, but of everybody. This of course is the sort of consequentialist reasoning of which Benthamite utilitarianism is the most famous example” (280).
“There is something in human beings that, like a wild beast, cannot be reasoned with, but must be tamed. In this quite literal sense, there is a crucial element of human nature that is bestial” (281).
So, Vere is a consequentialist and he believes in a certain wildness to mankind. Thus, his two choices—natural or naval law—are decided through consequentialist reasoning. The consequences of natural ruling are worse than those of naval ruling, and since “human beings . . . like a wild beast, cannot be reasoned with” (281), Vere must necessarily take the naval perspective.
“What [Thoreau] says about such [utilitarian, consequentialist] thinking is that it consists, simply, of appeals to “expediency.”” (282).
“Expediency is nothing more than consequentialist thinking in the wrong place” (282).
“Vere is arguing for injustice on grounds of expediency” (282).
“There are three ways in which Nelson, as depicted by Melville, contrasts with Vere, and all three are obviously important” (283).
- “The virtue that Nelson is faulted for lacking [—prudence—] is however one that Vere seems to have in abundance” (283).
• prudence: “an application of reason to the direction of human affairs, and it is aimed at achieving what is deemed to be good on balance, all relevant things considered” (283).
- “Vere’s secrecy, then, involves him in the sacrifice of one of the fundamental values of a liberal society: respect for the reason and will of the individual” (283).
• “Whereas Vere has promoted secrecy, Melville promotes the opposite value, one he has explicitly associated with Nelson: publicity” (285).
- Vere “maintains power by the use of fear” (287).
Three binaries:
- prudence vs. glory
- secrecy vs. publicity
- fear vs. presence
“The colossal figure of Nelson reminds us that an antipodal solution exists, but Vere is no colossus” (287).
So the question: “is ordinary humanity, as it faces this problem, reliably able to respond without resorting to stealth and brutality?” (287).
“The impression given is that Vere’s adversary, ultimately, is the human capacity or tendency to behave in this way: his opponent is, in other words, human evil” (288).
SO. Evil.
“Claggart is understood by his author in terms of a single fundamental principle, to which all of Chapter 12 is devoted: envy” (288).
“What he envies about Billy is something he sees as good” (289).
“precisely because his response to Billy’s goodness is envy, what it produces in him is hatred” (289).
“as long as we only know that the consciousness involved has perceived something good, and perceived it as good, we cannot yet explain the antipathetic response. The explanation does not lie (entirely) in the object of the envy-experience, it must lie (at least partly) in its subject, in the individual envier” (289).
“envy . . . [has a] tendency . . . to conceal itself from view. . . . [Claggart’s] disdain is a mask behind which his envy is hidden from him. He is self-deceived about his own envy” (289-90).
THUS: “An emotion that consists in part in one’s recognition of one’s own deficiencies will be a peculiarly painful one, and that will give one a powerful motive to sweep it out of consciousness, both one’s own awareness and that of others” (290).
“the explanation [[of] “why the envious perception of the good results in the additional negative affect of antipathy”] lies buried in the envious person’s passions, apparently among the darker and more paralogical affects” (290).
“To the extent that envy is not born of reason or anything that partakes of the rational, there will be limits to what reason can do to deal with it. To the extent that envy typifies the nature of evil, reason will be incapable of solving the problem of evil itself” (290).
“Because the source of his own passion is hidden from him, he is unable to rationally evaluate either the source or the passion itself. The goal of that passion, however—the destruction of Billy Budd—is present in his consciousness, and his reason, unhampered by criticisms of its source, has a free hand in fashioning means to achieve it” (291).
“If Melville’s understanding of natures like Claggart’s is fundamentally right, then, just as such people are not susceptible to the control of their own reason, so they are beyond the reach of society’s reason as well. That is, the rest of us, and the state as our representative, cannot hope to influence their behavior by methods that appeal to their reason. Unless we have the great good fortune to be able to rule them through someone like Nelson, the best we can hope for is to terrorize them into mere submission. In so far as they represent what humanity is like, the only way to rule humanity would be through the blunt instrument of brute force. This, of course, is Vere’s method. To the extent that it represents humanity in general, then, Melville’s representation of Claggart supports Vere” (291).
“To the extent that it is shared by the rest of humanity, the evil of Claggart presents a problem for the maintenance of basic social order” (291).
Three solutions:
- Nelson: rare
- Billy: inadequate
- Vere: last resort
“Claggart’s antipathy, like that of Red Whiskers, arises from envy” (292).
- “The evil that characterizes Claggart is deeply rooted: it characterizes nature itself” (293).
- “However, it does not characterize human nature in general, only the nature of some individuals” (293).
- “Such individuals are not typical of those who are caught and punished for crimes” (293).
- “On the other hand, the austerer sort of civilization . . . actually encourages it” (293).
“What is the ultimate significance of all these qualifications?” (293).
“we could resolve it if only we knew whether this mysterious sort of malice typifies the human condition. On that point, however, the state of our knowledge is radically indecisive” (293).
“Billy Budd resembles nothing so much as a zen koan: a problem that one feels compelled to solve in spite of a growing conviction that it has no solution” (293).
“In the world of Billy Budd, the lunatic irrationality of Claggart is a thing of horror, and the purity of Billy is unserviceable, and the reason in both cases is that the traits involved are not founded on the intellect” (294).
“Between monstrous distortion of reason in Claggart and its near absence in Billy, the doggedly utilitarian ratiocination of Vere looms very large” (294).
purgation