Claggart, the Master-at-arms, official rattan in hand, happened to be passing along the battery in a bay of which the mess was lodged, and the greasy liquid streamed just across his path. The ship at noon, going large before the wind, was rolling on her course, and he, below at dinner and engaged in some sportful talk with the members of his mess, chanced in a sudden lurch to spill the entire contents of his soup-pan upon the new scrubbed deck.
As for Claggart, he desires pretty plainly to possess Billy Budd, as we learn in a passage of extraordinary eroticism: The upshot is that Billy represents unfallen nature, the best of humanity, albeit defective in those two postlapsarian arts of civilization: knowledge and language. Billy Budd is compared to everyone from Christ to Apollo, Adam to Isaac, a rustic beauty to a vestal virgin, a Tahitian “barbarian” to an ancient Saxon. Such a summary, though, does not account for the immense freight of allusion and suggestion with which Melville loads his novella. In short order, Billy is hanged his dying words are, “God bless Captain Vere!” Vere hastily convenes a drumhead court, at which he is the only witness, and ensures that Billy is condemned. When the aristocratic Captain Vere brings Budd before Claggart to answer the charge, the stammering Billy inadvertently kills Claggart with one blow.
In the paranoid atmosphere of mutiny surrounding the French Revolution and its aftermath, Claggart schemes to get Budd accused of conspiring against order. On the ship, he is beloved by all, except for the master-at-arms, one John Claggart. During the Napoleonic wars, a beautiful young sailor, a foundling of mysterious origin and indomitable innocence named Billy Budd, is impressed, forced from a ship called the Rights of Man to one called the Bellipotent. It is a riddling novella to teach it in a literature course is to feel that one is posing a word problem. Its unfinished text remains in an uncertain state its prose is maddeningly involuted, its sentences clogged with historical, religious, and mythological allusion and blunted by circumlocution and periphrasis its theme is desire between men and the perversions created by that love’s interdiction its moral is either fascism-the necessity of order above all and at all costs-or revolution-the absolute primacy of man’s natural right against all prohibition. It seems odd that this novella should ever have been required reading in American high schools and introductory literature courses. Melville’s Short Novels: Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism by Herman Melville
0 kommentar(er)
