THE LIBERAL MIND
651
for is that rago is a classic study of certain kinds of behavior which on
the whole liberalism has been unable to face or understand. My sug–
gestion is that our liberal thought might benefit by being tested against
the evidence offered to us by the spectacle of Iago, as Swift tested the
theories of the Laputians against the spectacle of the prime minister's
wife who chose to leave Laputa and live on earth with a deformed and
ragged footman who beat her. Mr. Barrett supposes that the character
of Iago has no reference to anything outside the pages of Shakespeare's
play, an idea from which even Cleanth Brooks, for all his concern with
"the text," might well draw back. Sharing Mr. Barrett's recently enun–
ciated desire for a "productive" or "programmatic" literary criticism,
as opposed to an autotelic or Alexandrian criticism, I am yet at a loss
to see how such a criticism is possible once you have severed as many
cultural arteries as he severs.
Again, one of the critics writes that in my essay on
Billy Budd,
I
present Claggart as "a personification of the liberal." I wrote that
"Claggart is another version of Melville's self-righteous Liberal, the
Confidence Man." Since I regard myself as a liberal, I naturally do
not think all liberals are self-righteous. But some are, and Melville's
confidence man, whatever else he may also be, is one of them. I do not
equate Claggart with the confidence man: he is "another version"-a
further turn upon the archetype.The connection between Claggart and
the confidence man, so far as I make it, can be well supported by textual
citation, as I have shown elsewhere. Versions of the confidence man ap–
pear in several of Melville's books, including
Israel Potter
and
Clarel:
one is the master-at-arms, Claggart; another is Bland, the master-at-arms
of
White Jacket,
a smooth-talking swindler with a remarkable array of
masks and guiseful personalities. I do not think, then, that my interpre–
tation is a "violent wrenching" of Melville's text, or that, having some–
what examined the literary structure of
Billy Budd,
I was indulging
in unwarranted moral preachments when I suggested that Claggart re–
sembles a modern type, the fake liberal and Pharisee who delivers the
"common man" over to the man of power, or when I suggested that
our understanding of this type might be enhanced by reading Melville.
In speaking of Claggart as I did at the end of my essay, I was trying
to seek out those areas wherein life and literature mingle and vitalize
each other. Mr. Barrett, strangely taking up the very critical doctrine
which the New Criticism already begins to outgrow, denies that there
are any such areas, preferring to imagine instead an unpassable abyss.
Indeed Mr. Barrett's ideal intellectual leads an amazingly schizophrenic
life: he admires both Sidney Hook and Kafka, but he identifies Hook
