326
LIONEL ABEL
Moreover, the consciousness of Captain Vere is not expressed
in
his action, which is simply a mirror reflecting the regulations of the
Mutiny Act. Melville was only able to get to the externally tragic
ending of his story by depriving Captain Vere, at a crucial
moment, of the very kind of self-consciousness he has throughout
his work led us to believe Captain Vere possessed. Now for a char–
acter not to have self-consciousness is one thing; for a character
to be deprived of self-consciousness by the author
in
order to
be
capable of representing some implacable value is quite another.
Melville, if Captain of the
Indomitable,
would
not
have sentenced
Billy Budd to hang. Of course, one can only speculate, but I think
Sophocles would have buried his brother in defiance of the State.
The Greek playwright's heroine is of the same culture as her
creator. So, of course, is Creon, but Captain Vere, at the moment
of his dramatic decision, belongs to a world not Melville's. This
is one of the superiorities of
Antigone
(it has others) over
Billy
Budd.
But to come back to the metaplay. It is the necessary form
for dramatizing characters who, having full self-consciousness,
cannot but participate in their own dramatization. Hence the
famous lines of Jacques, Shakespeare's philosopher of metatheater,
"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely
players." The same notion is expressed by Calder6n, who entitled
one of his works
The Great Stage of the World.
For both the
Spanish and the English poet there could not but be an essential
illusoriness in reality. We cannot have it both ways: a gain for
consciousness means a loss for the reality of its objects, certainly
for the reality of its main object, namely the world. Obviously
it takes a high degree of consciousness to become aware that the
world cannot be proved to exist. However, I shall not insist on
this point, for I think the objectivity of the world is maintained
not by logic, but, like some fabled treasure which dragons guard,
by those monsters to the sensitive and sceptical mind: implacable
values. Thus it is that if, in Greek tragedy, the hero is defeated,
on the other hand the world of the reality is underscored; in the
metaplay, the hero, however unfortunate, can never be decisively
defeated, perhaps he can never even be heroic (as Kleist's wonder–
ful the
Prince of Homburg
suggests); but on the other hand, the
