Billy Budd

Billy Budd.

Impressions of Billy Budd as Melville's impressions of the impossibility of innocence.

Barbara Johnson does a wonderful job of tearing this apart. Billy is typically taken, one way or another, as Melville's innocent. But to be innocent, Billy must repress various perceptions as evil. Thus we find his remarkable absence of apparent resentment or criticism when he's pressed into service, insulted, plotted against and so forth. Johnson puts it so:

Fra from being simply and naturally pure, he is obsessed with maintaining his own irreproachability in the eyes of authority. After witnessing a flogging, he is so horrified that he resolves 'that never through remissness would he make himself liable to such a visitation or do or omit aught that might merit even verbal reproof'" (2326).

Now, clearly this is not edenic. Johnson further correlates this to Billy's stuttering, of course, and of course the stuttering's key incorporation in the story's critical act, Billy's murder of Claggard.

Now, is Billy innocent? A more significant question, given that this piece arrives to its readers as fiction, is what does innocent mean? And if one cannot arrive at an innocent, can one arrive at a guilty? Of course, justice fallas in sequence, but that does leave us with practical problems of administration.

Administration, and the administration of what's called justice in particular, involves applying a quality -- good or evil, innocent or guilty -- to an object, generally a person. As always, the quality does not pertain to its object of attribution, but bears the kind of contextual relationships we associate with semantics and linguistic systems. One consequence of this is that guilt must be read -- and read partially, as Johnson points out (2336). That is, a defendent will be found guilty with respect to and only with respect to a generalized context related to the perspectives of the judge, not the perpetrator or the victim.

Now, this is not the same as saying that judgment is as the judge prefers; the judge may dislike his verdict, as in Billy Budd yet see it as the will of law from his own perspective. Here's Johnson on issues of context in judgment:

Tje [p;otoca; cpmtext om Billy Budd is such that on all levels the differences within (mutiny on the warship, the French revolution as a threat to 'lasting institutions,' Billy's unconscious hostility) are subordinated to the differences between (the Bellipotent vs the Atheé, England vs France, murderer vs victim). This is why Melville's choice of historical setting is so significant: thewar between Frane and England at the time of the French Revolution is as striking example fo the simultaneous functioning of diffrerences within and between as is the confrontation between Billy and Claggart in relation to their own internal divisions" (2335).

Johnson, Barbara. "Melville's Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. (2316-2337).