Written late in the 1880's, _Billy Budd_ turns to an event more than a generation earlier, the Somers Mutiny of 1842, in which a member of Melville's family joined the tribunal in sentencing to death a young offender against the ship's military discipline. ...[T]he story of the "fated" Billy, a common sailor consigned to death by a possibly deranged captain during the navel wars between revolutionary France and counterrevolutionary England, also reflects on the turbulence of Melville's own times. The tale is set amid a turbulence which Melville is at pains to describe as not so much an external threat of French victory over England, "a Power then all but the sole free conservative one of the Old World," but an internal one of "insurrection" in the British fleet. Just months before the events, British sailors had rebelled at Spithead and Nore, signaling their mutiny by running up the royal flag "with the union and cross wiped out," thus "transmuting the flag of founded law and freedom defined, into the enemy's red meteor of unbridled and unbounded revolt." Growing out of "reasonable discontent" over "glaring abuses," the revolt flamed ito an "irrational combustion," a "distempering irruption of contagious fever." It was a time, like the days and months following the summer of 1877, or Haymarket in 1886, when the red banner terrified established authority, portending even further unbounded revolt. Officers at sea felt compelled "to stand with drawn swords behind the men working the guns."
...Billy's story begins with an act--his impressment in the open sea--pointedly described as an example of abuse not redressed by the settlement at Nore. Snatched from the _Rights-of-Man_, a homeward-bound merchant ship named in honor of Thomas Paine, Billy is coerced into the King's service aboard the outward-bound HMS _Bellipotent_, a 74-gun warrior ship rushing to join the royal fleet awaiting battle with the French. The "inside narrative," writes Melville, will have "little concernment" with the actual maneuvers of the ship, but surely the revolutionary moment, and especially Britain's fear of the Red Flag, will contribute in no small way to Billy's end. The larger history will fade imperceptibly but nonetheless decisively into the drama of Billy, Claggart, and Starry Vere. ...The tale recounts an act, a doubled act within an outside history: Billy's killing of Claggart, Vere's killing of Billy. ...When Billy strikes out in speechless rage at [master-at-arms] Claggart's false accusation that the young sailor had plotted mutiny, and kills his superior officer at one blow, Captain Vere grasps instantly the fatal conjunction of fable and fact. "Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!" He must hang, moreover, and hang at once, as Vere would argue before his own disbelieving officers, precisely because of those angelic features which arouse so powerful a current of sympathy. Vere had witnessed the false accusation and the deadly blow with rising fatherly feelings. But then, momentarily "eclipsed" by emotion, he emerged from his spell "with quite another aspect." "The father in him...was replaced by the military disciplinarian."
...Vere meets...objections [to the killing of the angelic Billy Budd] without flinching. What springs to our attention in the following passage is not only a grim justification but its basis in a distinction of realms uncommon in popular American political thought:
How can we adjudge to summary and shameful death a fellow creature innocent before God, and whom we feel to be so?--Does that state it aright? You sign sad assent. Well, I too feel that, the full force of that. It is Nature. But do these buttons that we wear attest that our allegiance is to Nature? No, to the King. Though the ocean, which is inviolate Nature primeval, though this be the element where we move and have our being as sailors, yet as the King's officers lies our duty in a sphere correspondingly natural? So little is that true, that in receiving our commissions we in the most important regards ceased to be natural free agents... Our vowed responsibility is in this: That however pitilessly that law may operate in many instances, we nevertheless adhere to it and administer it.
Not "nature" but "king" defines duty, not natural reason or natural law but the _state_, the arbitrary power whose authority, signified by the officers' buttons, runs like the King's yarn throughout the society....
...As Michael Rogin has argued cogently about this very political tale, the state no longer promises redemption. "Lying between two guns, as nipped in the vice of fate," Billy lies a victim of an order which, in the face of his utter innocence, cannot justify itself except by evoking "order" itself, form and symmetry for their own sake. And is not Vere himself also caught in that same nipping vice?
...There is a deeper message in Billy's fate. Just as the state no longer grounds itself in natural reason, neither does it even claim to represent a shared community of interest. That commuity known in the tale as "the ship's populace" finds itself utterly separate from the ruling state, subordinate to it, coerced by exteral law, the apparatus of the master-at-arms and his unholy crew of enforcers and spies. The populace is free only to obey or disobey, accept or rebel. ...What survives in the tale, then, is not the power of the guns or of the coercive yardarm, but "Billy in the Darbies," the concluding ballad, a "rude utterance" from an "artless _poetic_ temperament," testifying in "low" art to the separate and enduringly compassionate vision of "the ship's populace." Under the strict governance of the state, yet distinct from it in a very profound way, the sailors appear in Melville's narrative as a community of work and play in which a mutual predicament fostered a law of its own, a social law of sympathy and compassion. Billy Budd is their hero, the human image of their own precarious history. (202-7)
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