DISSENT ON BILLY BUDD
The trouble is that he is not in any meaningful sense what Claggart
says he is: "deep" and a "man-trap." He
ought
to be "deep" and
in some inescapable human way a "man-trap." Otherwise he can–
not function meaningfully in a tragedy which tries to demonstrate
the opposition between human nature and the heart on the one hand
and law on the other. Otherwise he cannot possibly be the Hand–
some Sailor. It is surely significant of uncertainty that Melville,
though outwardly identifying Billy Budd with the Handsome Sailor
throughout the novel, actually hedges on this point when he first
makes it. The fact is that Billy Budd is the final, and almost the
first-first crucial-self-indulgence of a great intelligence.
Melville makes an attempt to show that in the course of the
story Billy Budd finds the consummation of
his
destiny. Having been
sentenced to die by the man who may possibly be his father, Billy
Budd, Melville intimates, can at last drop the role of Ishmael, the
disinherited son, and become Isaac, the lawful heir. In
White-]ac–
ket
the recognition and final meeting of father and son was sym–
bolized as an act of maturity on the part of the son, a recognition
of human depravity, an admission of law, form, and patriarchal
majesty, and a consequent liberation of the son's creative energy.
In
Billy Budd,
Melville insists on trying to have it both ways. There
are suggestions that Billy Budd has experienced a metamorphosis
of character through his suffering. The reader accepts this grate–
fully and with belief. And he reflects that after all Melville is going
to say that Billy Budd is now the Ishmael who has become Isaac,
the harmless Adam who has become the fallen Adam, the foundling
of noble antecedents who has become Oedipus the tragic hero. But
not so. Billy is hanged after sleeping the night out with the serene
light of babyhood playing over his features. When a man is hanged,
certain involuntary spasms take place in his body during which there
may be an emptying of the bowels and an ejaculation of semen.
When Billy Budd is hanged, there is a total "absence of spasmodic
movement." The tragedy of Melville's heroes had always been that
they were "unmanned" by circumstances or the effects of their own
moral decisions. Billy Budd is unmanned by Melville himself.
By portraying Billy Budd, not as Isaac or the fallen Adam or
Oedipus, but as the innocent hermaphrodite Christ who ascends
serenely to the yardarm of the frigate, Melville made it impossible
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