In Nomine Diaboli: An Extreme Interpretation of Billy Budd

Abstract

“Melville is Shakespearean in the energies of his prose,” notes Geoffrey Hartman in The Fate of Reading, “and in him too there is a strange fire in the form of pun and wordplay. But what if an entire story, and one as moving as Billy Budd, were basically derived from a pun or quibble? Would our astonishment survive our distaste?” And Hartman continues by uncovering a radical link between trivial wordplay and the trivial sublime:

Billy Budd is, probably, so entrenched as a modern classic that the extreme interpretation can only honor it. Vilest things become themselves in it. Yet so much remains unresolved, or hinges on what seems like an accident, that the whole thing quizzes us in an uncomfortable way. Thomas Rymer averred that too much depended on Othello’s loss of a handkerchief; and too much, it can be argued, turns on Billy’s tendency to stutter.

But the relation of trivial to important is always problematized in fiction. The Biblical drama revolves around “An Apple,” as Milton’s Satan disdainfully points out. The Rape of Troy seems very different from the Rape of a Lock; but did not both “mighty contests,” as Pope suggests, spring from “trivial things,” that is, “amorous causes”? And what is smaller yet more charged than verbal signs, so that, as the Talmud says, “Life and Death are in the hands of the tongue”?

We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.

Hamlet V.i.129

And though all evils may be assuaged; all evils can not be done away with. For evil is the chronic malady of the universe; and checked in one place, breaks forth in another.

Herman Melville, Mardi