***** It was the summer of 1797. In the April of that year had occurred the commotion at Spithead followed in May by a second and yet more serious outbreak in the fleet at the Nore. The latter is known, and without exaggeration in the epithet, as 'the Great Mutiny.' It was indeed a demonstration more menacing to England than the contemporary manifestoes and conquering and proselyting armies of the French Directory. To the British Empire the Nore Mutiny was what a strike in the fire brigade would be to London threatened by general arson....Such an episode in the Island's grand naval story her naval historians naturally abridge, one of them (William James) candidly acknowledging that fain would he pass it over did not 'impartiality forbid fastidiousness.' And yet his mention is less a narration than a reference, having to do hardly at all with details. Nor are these readily to be found in the libraries. Like some other events in every age befalling states everywhere, including America, the Great Mutiny was of such character that national pride along with views of policy would fain shade it off into the historical background. Such events cannot be ignored, but there is a considerate way of historically treating them. If a well-constituted individual refrains from blazoning aught amiss or calamitous in his family, a nation in the like circumstance may without reproach be equally discreet....
...If possible, not to let the men so much as surmise that their officers anticipate aught amiss from them is the tacit rule in a military ship. And the more that some sort of trouble should really be apprehended, the more do the officers keep that apprehension to themselves. (Herman Melville, _Billy Budd_, Chapters 3 & 23) *****
***** The particular form of the open secret on the _Bellipotent_ is the potential among its men for mutiny. Not an alternative to the plot of male-male desire and prohibition in _Billy Budd_, the mutiny plot is the form it takes at the (inseparable) level of the collective. The early evocations of mutiny in the novella suggest that the difficulty of learning about it is like the difficulty of leaning about such scandalous secrets as proscribed sexuality. Both are euphemized as "aught amiss." As with that other "'deadly space between'"..., the terms in which mutiny can be described must be confined to references that evoke recognizant knowledge in those who already possess it without igniting it in those who may not....
Specifically, in Captain Vere's exposition and orders around the disciplining of Billy Budd, "the word _mutiny_ was not named"....
The potential for mutiny in the British navy fed, of course, on the involuntarity of the servitude of many of the men aboard; and the question of impressment, which is to say of the entire circumstances by which these men come to be under the authority they are under, represents the open secret writ...large. A "notorious" matter about which there was "little or no secret," nevertheless "such sanctioned irregularities, which for obvious reasons the government would hardly think to parade...consequently...have all but dropped into oblivion"; "it would not perhaps be easy at the present day directly to prove or disprove the allegation".... "The fact that nobody could substantiate this report was, of course, nothing against its secret currency".... There is no right way of treating such information, and every way of treating it becomes charged with potent excess meanings....
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, _Epistemology of the Closet_, Berkeley: U of California P, 1990, pp. 101-102) ***** -- Yoshie
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