Richard Chase
DISSENT ON BILLY BUDD
Melville's last book, a short novel written between 1888
and 1891 and called
Billy Budd, Foretopman,
has generally been
praised for qualities it does not possess.
It
is natural, of course, to
wish to see in this book the last ripe word of the aged Melville.
And there has been a great temptation to see in
Billy Budd,
as one
writer says, Melville's final "testament of acceptance"-his final
acceptance of a "tragic" view of life involving an apotheosis of the
common man as Christ and an assertion that what
is
needed in
American life
is
a leavening of individualism and law by the sym–
pathetic passions of the heart. And
Billy Budd
is
said to be Mel–
ville's definitive moral statement. But it
is
my impression that Mel–
ville made
his
definitive moral statement in
Moby Dick, The Con–
fidence Man,
and
Clarel,
and that the moral situation in
Billy Budd
is
deeply equivocal.
In Melville's writing there move through the consciousness of
Ishmael two basic kinds of hero, both akin, in their several varia–
tions, to the central figure of Prometheus. The first kind of hero
is the false Prometheus, who in one way or another violates the deep–
running natural and psychic rhythms of life which are necessary
for all creative enterprise. The second kind of hero is the Hand–
some S.ailor: the true hero in whom Prometheus tends to put on the
full tragic manhood of Oedipus. This second kind of hero
is
briefly
sketched or symbolized in
Typee
as Marnoo, in
White-jacket
as Jack
Chase, in
M oby Dick
as Bulkington, and in
Israel Potter
as Ethan
Allen. In each case, he
is
a full-statured man, great in body, heart,
and intellect, a man with great pain of experience behind him, a
young man, but still so fully created a man that, in the case of Jack
Chase, Ishmael
is
moved to call him "sire."
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