Review of Thomas J. Scorza: In the Time Before Steamships: Billy Budd, the Limits of Politics, and Modernity. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1979.
Published May 1980: Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Republished with permission.
Revised February 2016
“Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges,” Melville’s narrator intones–himself a character in a novella purported to be “an inside narrative” of the secret trial of an innocent man. The story’s surface nonetheless presents a simple set of events in which a few characters take a few actions, make a few speeches, and are done.
In his preface the narrator frames his account, dating it in the year 1797 during “a crisis for Christendom”–the aftermath of the French Revolution and the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars. Adopting the language of Hegel, the narrator asserts that “the opening proposition of the Spirit of that Age involved rectification of the Old World’s hereditary wrongs,” but in France “the revolution itself became a wrongdoer, one more oppressive than the kinds” followed by re-imposition of monarchy (indeed, despotism) under Bonaparte. The Enlightenment had attacked Christianity and the doctrine of the divine right of kings to rule only to ignite wars as ferocious as any seen since the Wars of Religion. This notwithstanding, in an example of what Hegel called the cunning of history, this age of ferocity “turned out to be… a political advance along nearly the whole line for Europeans.”
For England, off the shores of the continent, sailors in the navy inhaled these vapors, with similar effects: disastrous rebellions in the short term, solid reforms in the treatment of crews in the end. The narrator seems enamored–complacently so, perhaps–with these happy endings. Yet the yarn he will spin gets weaved into a more complex moral and political lesson. What begins with conventional prose ends with a poem challenging conventions.
The story concerns Billy Budd, aged 21, impressed into the British Navy, who strikes and unintentionally kills the master-at-arms, John Claggart and is hanged at the behest of the Captain Edward Fairfax Vere. The longest of the book’s 31 sections consists of Vere’s speech to the officers of the drumhead court he hastily calls, in which he persuades the officers on the jury (against their better judgment) to return the death penalty.
What has this to do with the crisis for Christendom? Despite the simplicity of the actions narrated, their significance, the arguments the characters make (and do not make, in the case of Billy Budd), and the spirits (the word the narrator repeatedly uses) of the characters themselves have sparked controversy among readers. A scholar is expected to demonstrate his knowledge of what’s called (academia is nothing if not witty) `the literature’ on the subject–meaning, a summary of the interpretations of previous scholars. On the basis of that knowledge the scholar can then claim that he adds to the sum (academia is nothing if not modest) of human knowledge. Thomas J. Scorza makes this exercise as painless as he dares, sketching the two principal interpretations of Billy Budd. One holds that the book is Melville’s Christian, politically and socially conservative “testament of acceptance,” a document revealing a once-rebellious writer’s apology to, and for, God. The other holds that Melville remains a rebel, that the conservative narrator is the author’s foil. Scorza finds neither reading adequate.
He also discusses Milton R. Stern’s more recent interpretation, in his critical edition of Billy Budd, published in 1957 and integrated into his contemporaneous critical study of Melville’s writings, The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville. Finding himself “in broad agreement with Stern’s analysis as far as it goes,” Scorza faults it for its vague use of such notorious words as “classic” and “romantic.” Stern uses the former in such a way as to blur the distinctions among ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy. And as for “romantic,” the very nature of the sentiments it attempts to identify tend to preclude exact definition.
Again yielding to academic expectations, Scorza `states his thesis’ (the sum of human knowledge dislikes being taken unawares). The Melville of Billy Budd, he contends, is neither a classicist nor a romantic; he is a poet in the Aristophanic mold, believ[ing] that the moderns were merely the final, horrible product of the rationalistic project which they shared with the ancients.” Preliminaries accomplished, Scorza get to the book itself, intending to understand Melville’s teaching “on its own terms” and thereby to do “justice to the intention of his work.”
Scorza titles his first chapter, “An Inside Narrative,” the subtitle of Billy Budd–Sailor. The historicist explanation of this phrase refers to the Somers trial of 1842–famous in its day–wherein three United States Navy men were convicted of mutiny; a cousin of Melville’s served as the presiding officer at the trial, and scholars have claimed that Melville wrote Billy Budd as an apologia. Scorza has little difficulty showing that Melville has more than in mind, and spends most of the chapter discussing the more important problem of defining a Melvillean narrative–specifically, how Melville’s narrators relate to Melville himself. On the basis of the texts of Billy Budd and of some of the earlier fiction, Scorza concludes that Melville’s narrator here is neither the author’s double nor his foil, and that the truth which Melville, aided by his narrator, intends to portray goes well beyond the journalistic/historical attempt to present facts.
In addition to Scorza’s numerous, convincing arguments, one can illuminate these points by contrasting the narrator’s claim that Billy Budd “is no romance” with certain undeniably romantic features of the narrative–that is, descriptions of real-world events that defy common-sense impressions of physical reality. Melville knew Hawthorne’s distinction between the genres of romance and the novel, outlined in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables. The novel, Hawthorne writes,
… is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience. The [romance]–while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart–has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing and creation…. He will be wise, no doubt, to make a very moderate use of the privileges here stated.
In view of the fact that Billy Budd includes a character whose eyes change color in moments of fury, and another character who, upon being hanged, is not convulsed, we may assume that its author knows he has written what Hawthorne calls a romance. But the narrator is not Melville, or, if he is, he chooses his word with something else in mind; Billy Budd is no romance, he says, because the innocent Billy is not perfect. His imperfection–he stutters under stress–proves that “the arch interferer, the envious marplot of Eden, still has more or less to do with every human consignment to this planet of Earth.” Billy Budd is no romance, not in Hawthorne’s sense (Hawthorne knew a lot about evil, and puts it into his own romances), but in the sense that Melville depicts characters who are types–neither simple, incarnate ideas or sentiments nor highly individualized `selves.’ He thus avoids both novelistic and romantic excesses. That is to say, with Scorza, that Melville would depict truth, as distinguished from fact and fantasy.
“Upright Barbarians” are one aspect of the truth concerning human things; the title of Scorza’s second chapter refers to Billy Budd in particular and the character-type of “The Handsome Sailor” in general. Unlike Rousseau, Melville thinks that the human “state of nature” is social and even (at least nascently) political. Simple men naturally defer to “Handsome Sailor” types: defined as men of physical and moral virtue. Such men were often seen in “the time before steamships”–that is, before ships became self-propelled, in the days when the activity of sailing brought human nature and nature embodied by the sea and the wind into more intimate relation. This relation brought out human nature more fully. You would see, among sailors on shore–“at liberty”– groups of men revolving around this man of “natural regality.” Liberty under those conditions evoked not anarchy or libertinism but the rule of men naturally excellent in body and soul. The narrator emphasizes that this excellence had nothing to do with race; the example he cites was a black Handsome Sailor he saw in Liverpool, a half century back, whose racially heterogeneous friends paid “spontaneous tribute” to his somewhat godlike “moral stature,” which “was seldom out of keeping with the physical make.
Billy Budd matches the “Handsome Sailor” type physically and, in most ways, morally, “with important variations,” Melville cautions. Billy is Melville’s version of Rousseau’s noble savage, a “baby bud of humanity” who “lacks something of the `Handsome Sailor’s’ ability to master his own immediate fate.” His speech defect reminds Scorza of the noble savage’s difficulties with language; it is “the symbol of [Billy’s] existence outside of the city of men.” While Billy flourishes on the merchant-ship, the Rights-of-Man, he is doomed on the warship, HMS Indomitable. Commercial society can honor the Rousseauan ideal (if it never embodies it), but on a warship the noble savage finds himself the target of a deadly enemy. The politics of commercial society can tolerate the ingenuous Handsome Sailor–indeed, honor him as a peacemaker. His one enemy, a sailor called “Red Whiskers,” suffers a quick drubbing from Billy, after which they befriend one another, letting bygones be. Under pressures of war, modern societies brush their Rousseauan daydreams aside and think harsher thoughts. Or so the un-Rousseauan Scorza seems to imply.
Two points should be added. First, Melville explicitly links Billy’s speech defect not to Rousseau’s political philosophy but to the Biblical story of the Fall, the workings of Eden’s sinister marplot. While Scorza expends ink and energy to insist–correctly, I think–that Melville is not a Christian, it is also fair to say that Melville shares beliefs propounded in the Gospels. He does not regard the human heart itself to be desperately wicked, but he does think that some human hearts are–citing not only the Bible but Platoon the tyrannical soul’s “natural depravity.” His very portrait of the `Rousseauan’ Billy Budd contains this important qualification of Rousseauan doctrine: even Billy has a flaw, by nature.
Also, Scorza may take the narrator’s portrait of the Handsome Sailor a bit too solemnly. He quotes the passage describing “the motley retinue” surrounding the Handsome sailor, who take “that sort of pride” in him as that “which the Assyrian priests doubtless showed for their grand sculptured Bull when the faithful prostrated themselves.” Scorza soberly comments that this reveals the human excellence and divinity of Handsome Sailors; it also shows that the narrator, like Melville, has an ironic touch, directed not only at sailors, not only at the people they hope to impress, but at the objects they worship, too. As Shakespeare’s readers know–and Melville was decidedly one of them–“motley” is associated with clowns, fools. One needn’t consider this simple mockery (Shakespeare’s fools, like Christ’s, often turn out to be the wisest men), but we needn’t assume that Melville’s heart beats with an unqualified reverence for a pre-philosophic past, either.
Along with savage or barbaric virtue there is “Aristocratic Virtue,” embodied in the person of Captain Vere. The archetype here is the “Great Sailor” who acts for the commonwealth’s preservation and for his own glory: a patriotic version of Aristotle’s great-souled man. Commander Horatio Nelson was the most recent “Great Sailor,” and Vere resembles him to some degree; in Scorza’s equation, Vere is to Nelson as Billy is to the Handsome Sailor–a modernized, somewhat vitiated metamorphosis thereof. One might say that Nelson is an aristocrat of the old regime, whereas Vere is a gentry-man or gentleman of modernity–the kind of human type John Locke sought to educate in Some Thoughts Concerning Education. “Just as the nature of Billy Budd is a refracted image of the `Handsome Sailor’ through the prism of Rousseauan philosophy, so also is the character of Captain Vere a refracted image of the Great Sailor through the prism of Burkean philosophy.” Animated by Burke’s respect for law and custom, Vere shares Burke’s distrust of radical change for the sake of abstract `rights.’
Scorza regards Vere as Billy’s moral superior, and believes that Melville does, too. Billy is only a peacemaker, Scorza argues, and can only make peace in the world of commerce, the world of natural rights protected by a spirit of toleration; Vere, whatever his limitations, can act more or less effectively in what Melville calls “the ampler and more knowing world of a great warship.” Scorza ingeniously observes that “Vere” seems a combination of vir (as in virtue) and veritas, truth. However, he ignores the fact that vere means “to fear”–a fact that becomes the moral crux of the story. And although he sees that to Melville knowledge is at best a morally ambiguous thing (as it is in Scripture), he assumes that the ability to function in the knowing world is a sign of virtue and truth.
Nonetheless, there should be no carping when Scorza writes that “Melville will test modern politics by testing the models of Rousseau and Burke, both of whom, though in different ways, also attacked enlightened philosophy.” This testing, he continues, will reveal the limitations of both models, along with the even greater limitation of `enlightenment’ and utilitarianism.
Completing his analysis of Melville’s triptych, Scorza describes the “Natural Depravity” embodied in the Indomitable‘s master-at-arms, John Claggart. Jesus adjures His followers to be wise as serpents, innocent as doves. Billy Budd has no serpentine wisdom, but he is usually, if not always, harmless as a dove. Melville wonders, “What can more partake of the mysterious than an antipathy spontaneous and profound such as is evoked in certain exceptional mortals by the mere aspect of some other mortal, however harmless he may be? if not called forth by this very harmlessness itself.” Like the marplot of Eden, Claggart envies the innocent man to the point of madness, planning his ruin.” If askance [Claggart] eyed the good looks, cheery health and frank employment of the young life in Billy Budd, it was because these [went] along with a nature that as Claggart magnetically felt, had in its simplicity never willed malice or experienced the reactionary bite of [the] serpent.” Claggart’s conscience being “but a lawyer to his will,” he “justified [his] animosity into a sort of retributive righteousness”; while angered by Billy’s innocence, he could “form no conception of an unreciprocated malice.” He thus works himself up into a sort of moral indignation by assuming that the innocent Billy must now partake of evil because he, Claggart, boils with malice towards him.
Scorza observes that the modern Satan owes his power to technological civilization; in earlier times a master-at-arms had the duty of instructing men “in the use of arms, sword or cutlass,” but with the advance of gunnery, the post’s original purpose was lost, and masters-at-arms became chiefs of police “charged among other matters with the duty of preserving order on the populous gun decks.” No creeping democracy escapes Mr. Claggart’s unbenevolent eye. Scorza writes that “The apparently irresistible advance of civilization and the undeniable possibility of an innate capacity for human evil combine to limit the possibilities of political justice because the former necessarily provides for the latter to operate from a position of strength.” Because civilization (technological or other) presupposes intelligence, and because the naturally depraved Claggart is a man of considerable intelligence, Scorza argues that for Melville science and philosophy are themselves evil products of evil intellectuality. The intellectual Vere might find that disconcerting, but so would Melville, who explicitly describes Claggart as a being whose intellectuality serves his passions–a Hobbesian man animated by an un-Hobbesian mania. In the following chapter, Scorza quotes the relevant passage, commenting that “Rational relationships are not necessarily good ones; indeed they may be a mere façade, concealing hatred and violent antipathy.” But in that case, they are no longer truly rational; perhaps Scorza supposes that Melville agrees with what Friedrich Nietzsche was arguing about the same time: that the rational philosopher, Socrates, actually seethed with plebeian envy and wasn’t truly rational at all. It is a fascinating speculation; Scorza will return to it, with additional evidence to offer.
But now he turns to “A Deplorable Occurrence,” the book’s central action or series of actions, which occurs in Vere’s cabin. Claggart first attempts to draw Billy into a conspiracy of rebellion against Vere’s rule. The plot fails, as Billy indignantly rejects an overture from a man Claggart sets to the purpose. An old sailor who has befriended Billy sees Claggart’s malice and tries to warn him, but although Billy can identify Claggart’s accomplice when he sees him in the light of the next day, he cannot `see’ the man as part of a plot, cannot connect him to Claggart. In addition to his inability to speak under stress, Billy lacks serpentine prudence because he cannot follow a serpentine train of thought. If the marplot Claggart would mar the life-stories of others, if he mars his own plots with over-complication and implausible claims (as readers soon see), Billy neither plots nor perceives the plots of others. In their opposite ways Billy and Claggart both contrast with Melville, the superior plotter.
Frustrated by Billy’s innocent and straightforward rejection of what was supposed to be a tempting proposal, Claggart decides to invent a plot that has no foundation in reality at all. In serpentine language, he tells Vere that Billy plots mutiny. Vere doubts the story, undertaking to test it by calling both men to his cabin for questioning. When Claggart repeats his accusation in Billy’s presence, Billy (predictably) cannot speak, cannot defend himself with words; Vere immediately understands this, but he does not anticipate Billy’s next reaction. As he had done to “Red Whiskers,” Billy strikes Claggart on his prominent forehead, this time killing his victim. Vere recalls “the divine judgment on Ananias,” stricken dead by God for lying (Acts V. 1-5); Billy is “an angel of God.” “Yet the angel must hang!” he decides, mindful of military discipline.
Scorza argues that Billy cannot defend himself lawfully against Claggart’s machinations because his capacity for speech and reason is too weak; morally, “his child-like innocence is… the reason for his inability to protect himself.” Because “human innocence cannot defend itself”–in speech and law, although quite readily so in action–it “cannot be the basis for the conduct of human affairs.” Politics is the realm of survival by civil means. In extreme conditions of war, where action supersedes speech, the self-sacrificing Great Sailor, Nelson, dies to preserve the regime of speech, and his glory educates the generations that follow him. In arranging the confrontation between evil and innocence that produces “the deplorable occurrence,” Vere unwittingly demonstrates the limitations of political prudence–especially those of Burkean political prudence, with its “reflexive reliance upon… apparently reasonable legal convention.” And (it should be needless to say) Claggart’s fate reminds us of his limitations, as well.
Scorza then turns to a critique of Billy Budd. “Billy becomes merely an instrument of destruction because he is unable to use his tongue to defend himself against evil.” Billy’s violent act is an “ignoble” way of dealing with evil, contrasting with Vere’s civil way and Nelson’s martial and glorious way. Billy wins and deserves no political glory his for his (unintentionally) self-sacrificing act.
There are problems with this reading. Neither Melville nor his narrator suggests that Billy’s act is ignoble. Nor does “Starry” Vere. Billy’s inability is “a crucifixion to behold,” and Vere pronounces Billy angelic. The fact that the angel must hang doesn’t reflect on Billy’s nobility, or lack of same; Christ, after all, defeated Satan on the Cross. If crucifixion was intended by the Romans to be an ignoble way to die, Christians think otherwise. One might try to explain this as Melvillian irony directed at Christianity, but Scorza does not. Further, if intellectuality is somehow evil in itself, as Scorza’s Melville believes, why would a rational self-defense, were Billy capable of one, yield justice? And finally, Billy does achieve a kind of glory, albeit not such glory as may be had by the grace of the British Navy’s “authorized weekly publication,” which celebrates Claggart’s life as an eternal reproach to “that peevish saying attributed to the late Dr. Johnson, that patriotism is the last resort of the scoundrel.” That is where Melville directs his irony.
Billy has killed a man; he must stand trial. In his account of the trial by the drumhead court, Scorza emphasizes, with Vere, that Billy has committed a crime. Vere refuses to imprison Billy and postponed the trial until the admiral of the fleet can investigate the incident–a course of action recommended by the ship’s surgeon, called to the scene to confirm Claggart’s death, as well as by Vere’s lieutenants, during the trial itself. Like Vere, Scorza observes that a ruler must concern himself not merely with the law itself, abstracted from all else, but with the public consequences of that law and its violation. He lucidly insists that “the ironist case against Vere must sooner or later arrive at the argument that Vere should not have proceeded with Billy’s trial. But in terms of the story itself, what Vere might have done is `but boggy ground to build on’; the narrator himself presents Vere’s rationale as reasonable and, in fact, `too true.’ Vere’s judgment is the only really authoritative one offered; since he considers but dismisses lieutenants’ more cautious proposed policy, he can only be said to have erred if his fears of rekindled mutiny can be shown to be ill-founded.” Precisely. And, I add, it can be so shown, on the basis of the text, that “ragged” but not “boggy” thing, which will refute Vere’s judgment in its own time.
Meanwhile, Scorza accurately describes Vere’s speech to his lieutenants, the jury, as rhetorical, observing that Vere “admits that what the law specifically requires is not really clear.” Vere also admits that Billy did not mean to kill Claggart, so there is no controversy over motive. One must also emphasize that Vere puts himself successively in the role of witness, prosecutor, and judge charging the jury, as he tells the lieutenants, his subordinates in any event, that they must judge Billy not by his motives but by his act and its consequence. Scorza recounts that when Vere’s lieutenants ask–with what Vere considers their natural compassion and, more than that, conscientiousness–if they can convict but mitigate the penalty, Vere resorts to his own extra-legal judgment that “You know how sailors are.” If you don’t convict Billy Budd, will that not embolden them to commit their own illegal acts, seeing no penalty for this one? (“Will they not revert to the recent outbreak at the Nore? Ay. They know the well-founded alarm–the panic of it struck throughout England. Your clement sentence they would account pusillanimous. They would think that we hinch, that we are afraid of them….”) Scorza does not suggest that in appealing to his lieutenants’ fear of being thought afraid, and perhaps to their fear of another Nore mutiny, Vere reflects his own fear; hence the significance of Vere’s name. Scorza takes Vere’s arguments simply as one of those sensible anti-Enlightenment arguments that Melville endorses. “The reader is not asked to accept or resist those later events and decisions”; rather, “Vere’s modern axioms” are what undermine “those natural standards by which the virtuous can be measured as truly glorious.” Scorza correctly cites the narrator’s argument that it’s too easy for outsiders to criticize such difficult decisions made in emergencies, which does mitigate what will presently be seen as the “insider” Melville’s tacit criticism of the decision, of the “axioms,” and of the decider.
That criticism extends to the narrator’s account of “An Execution at Sea.” Vere tells Billy of the decision Vere effectively made for the jury. “He was old enough to have been Billy’s father: indeed, at age 40 now, he would have been nineteen when the foundling, Billy, was left on the doorstep in a silk-lined basket. Were this a romance, the ill-born, well-born Billy would indeed be discovered as the long-lost some of Captain Vere. But this is no romance. Nor is the narrator’s Biblical comparison exact. “The austere devotee of military duty letting himself melt back into what remains primeval in our formalized humanity may in the end have caught Billy to his heart even as Abraham may have caught young Isaac on the brink of resolutely offering him up in obedience to the exacting behest.” But of course it was not Abraham but God who granted Isaac his reprieve. And it was God who had commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac in the first place. Vere, however, obeys not God but the human laws of the human king. And even in doing that he substitutes his own political judgment of his men for the legally permissible course of imprisoning Billy pending review by the Admiral. He too is a marplot, albeit a well-intentioned one, acting under the pressures of revolutionary circumstances.
Vere’s judgment turns out to be somewhat inflammatory, not reassuring, when he announces the jury’s decision to his men. “A confused murmur went up,” silenced only when “the shrill whistles of the Boatswain and his Mates pip[ed] down” the men on watch. Convention rules: “the mechanism of discipline.” At the public hanging, when Billy says–without stuttering–“God bless Captain Vere!” the crew’s reaction reflects their true nature, how they really are: “Without volition, as it were, as if indeed the ship’s populace were but the vehicles of some vocal current electric, with one voice from a low and aloft came a resonant sympathetic echo: `God bless Captain Vere!’ And yet at that instant Billy alone must have been in their hearts, as in their eyes” (italics added). Billy’s act of forgiveness of what stands at least as an act of private and natural injustice provokes an entirely natural (likened to electricity) and conscientious response from the crew; no willfulness is involved. If, as Scorza argues, Billy “grants to Vere the divine approbation and natural legitimacy which [Vere’s] own trial arguments undermined” then Billy, speaking for God and nature, ios finally Vere’s moral superior. But in fact Vere is not legitimated if, as the narrator says, it is Billy who must be in their hearts. The “populace” obeys out of habitual duty to enforced convention combined with natural and conscientious devotion to Billy. They `do it for him,’ not for the Captain. Although Scorza quotes another passage which mentions the crew’s recognition of Billy’s innocence–mirroring Vere’s recognition–he does not apply it to Vere’s speech at trail, in which the Captain suggested to his lieutenants that they “know what sailors are.” Indeed they do not, and the rulers’ ignorance of the nature of their subjects prevents them from making a courageous and statesmanlike decision.
Billy’s execution, described in terms of Christ’s Ascension, doesn’t legitimate Vere, either; it undermines his legitimacy. Seafowl fly “screaming to the spot” of Billy’s at-sea burial. The prosaic significance of this, as the narrator says, is “the mere animal greed for prey”; the non-prosaic significance is not specified. Prosaic significances do not quite explain the event, as in the following chapter the narrator relates a comic dialogue between the Purser and the ship Surgeon, in which the latter cannot explain the fact that Billy’s body did not undergo a spasm at the hanging. The lesson Vere sententiously draws–that “With mankind, forms, measured forms are everything, and that is the import couched in the story of Orpheus with his lyre spell-binding the wild denizens of the wood”–therefor takes on a striking irony. Orpheus used Music; Billy, not Vere, is described as musical. Orpheus’s music did not owe its power to being “long continued,” thereby “superinduc[ing] a sort of impulse… much resemble[ing] in its promptitude the effect of an instinct” which is the narrator’s description of the `conditioned response’ evoked by Verean discipline. If one argues that technology is bad (as scorza has Melville do, accurately) one’s suspicions ought to be aroused by such a phrase as “the mechanism of discipline,” especially when that mechanism is described as overriding nature. Poetic forms may differ from mechanical forms.
Scorza recognizes many of Vere’s limitations. He rightly interprets Vere’s death-bed cries of “Billy Budd, Billy Budd,” as Vere’s recognition “that nature, not man-made `measured forms,’ should ultimately guide `everything.'” We differ on a matter of emphasis. I rate Billy and the sailors somewhat higher, Vere somewhat lower than he does. And there is also a sense in which Orphic forms are important, although not in the sense Vere takes them to be. This becomes clear at the end of the book.
“Ragged Edges” is Scorza’s title or his final chapter, referring to the narrator’s statement that “the symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.” This, incidentally, implicitly distinguishes Verean formalism from truth (as Scorz hinted when he criticized Vere’s “Burkean conventionalism”). But Scorza has another thing in mind: an explanation of Billy Budd‘s “abrasiveness to modern readers.” Melville’s “ragged” book abrades moderns of all sorts. Conservatives, who would applaud Vere, find Melville applauding the Captain rather too weakly for their taste; liberals and radicals find Melville’s “aristocratic opposition” to “enlightened egalitarianism” beyond the limits of their rational discourse. A modern could hardly endorse the assertion that “Tragedy is endemic to modern politics because attractive romantic innocence is too fragile in a man-of-war world, because modern conservative conventionalism is too limited in vision and scope, and because natural evil is too effective in the complex civilizations of modernity.” Still less could he endorse the assertion that modernity itself is radically defective, that Claggart, with his “prideful knowledge,” is modernity in its worst aspect.
Is he also the as-it-were logical conclusion of rationality itself, of philosophy? Scorza argues that Claggart is Melville’s Socrates-figure, the evidence being that, like Socrates in the Symposium, Claggart “never allows wine to get within his guard; that he has the “torpedo fish’s” numbing effect on speech, like Socrates in the Meno; and that the narrator compares him to a snake, echoing Alcibiades in the Symposium, who compares the “bite” of philosophy with the bite of a serpent (“the reactionary bite of the serpent” is the narrator’s phrase). An awkwardness arises, here. Melville alludes specifically to the Bible–Billy and Claggart, Billy being a Christ and Claggart being a Serpent. If Scorza means to say that Billy represents religion and the poetic, Claggart philosophy, what needs explaining is Claggart’s much clearer resemblance to a romantic hero/villain. Claggart does not attempt to defeat Billy with reasoning but with lies–ignoble ones, at that. The telltale pallor, the dark hair, the fiery eyes, the prominent forehead, “the hint of something defective or abnormal in the constitution and the blood” of the man, the rumor that he has a Crime in his Past; one thinks of Heathcliff, or of the personae invented by Lord Byron and Edgar Allan Poe for themselves. The parallels to Milton’s Satan, mentioned by Scorza, harmonize with this; the Satan of Paradise Lost was a hero to some of the English Romantics. Where does this leave Claggart-the-philosopher?
Another way to approach the question is to ask: What do Claggart, Socrates, the Romantics, and Satan have in common? It isn’t a commitment to reasoned inquiry into the truth. But they might be said to share a touch of rebelliousness against the ruling beliefs of the regimes under which they live–more than a touch, several cases. Melville had of course seen the malign effects of rebellion in the United States. Without objecting to philosophy as such–he endorses Plato’s teaching on human depravity–he may have concluded that even rational questioning of established forms of conduct might need indirect, even poetic, presentation. In his own way, Plato did that.
It is true that Melville is an artist, not a philosopher. Not so much Aristophanes mocking Socrates in defense of the gods, as Scorza claims, but rather more like Shakespeare, a poet capable of mixing Plato and the Bible for his own, frequently enigmatic, purposes. A poet not necessarily unfriendly to philosophy or religion, insofar as both uncover human nature. And given the unfinished character of the novella, the Melville’s somewhat confusing set of allusions respecting Claggart may be one ragged edge that needed trimming in a final draft.
But neither Shakespeare nor Aristophanes would give his final lines to an anonymous sailor. Billy, learn, does achieve fame, not `officially’ but among the sailors, who superstitiously and rightly treasure pieces of the spar from which Billy was hanged as relics from a Cross. One of them, “with an artless poetic temperament,” composes a ballad, “Billy in the Darbies.” This poetic account, ragged edges and all, is more accurate than the official journalistic/historical account; it is a poetic reproach. Its last three lines evoke Billy’s predicament accurately:
Just ease these darbies at the wrists,
And roll me over fair!
I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.
Caught between the iron bands of law and the lower parts of nature–the snake-like Claggart in the story, the serpentine “oozy weeds” in the ballad–Billy requests an act of compassion from his jailer. There is thus a discrepancy between the poem and the event. In the hanging scene, we understand that Billy transcends the realms of law and malice; he “ascends.” Here, he is trapped, and soon will be “drop[ed] deep.” This does not undercut the executed Billy because the poem isn’t really in his voice; it portrays him more accurately than the report does, but it isn’t really about him. this lament in reality describes the predicament of such ordinary men as the sailor who wrote it and his fellows,. Like Plato, Melville saw that the city and man–man in the best sense–are not quite compatible. In this inevitable tension there is always the potential for tragedy. Which is why Vere’s fear, though understandable, is for Melville a lesser thing than Billy’s forgiveness. It is not in politics but in poetry that Melville finds the true Orphic voice; in poetry’s realm, not in politics, truth can be uncompromisingly told. Plato would say it differently, noting that poetry is itself a compromise.
Scorza may care more about politics than Melville does. And Melville’s politics partake less of the aristocratic cast that Scorza claims for them, more of a very tough-minded republicanism. He writes about the English, cites the Bible, Plato, Greek myths, French philosophes. But in the end, in his choice of regimes, he really is an American.
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