The Military Necessity: Billy Budd and Vigny

Abstract

THE LANGUAGE and development of Billy Budd bear great resemblance to the language and terms of religion, ritual, and myth. The resemblance has led many critics to ascribe to the novel a weighty significance. Perhaps because it is a posthumous work there has been attached to it something of the importance given any communication after death. Certainly, many American critics have been unusually anxious to atone for the previous neglect of Melville; the oceanic dimensions of Melvillean commentary attest to this anxiety, as does also the persistent search for the symbol, the ritual, the myth. Melville himself invites overinterpretation. Like other American romantics (and transcendentalists) his tone often becomes strained and inflated; he indulges occasionally in a spurious rhetoric. He often seems more didactic and Victorian-earnest than he is really. In the case of Billy Budd, Melville overburdens it, especially when he is dealing with Billy, with allusions, gnomic sayings, and an amplitude of tone that leads the reader to expect more than he finds; and beneath the overload the spare story seems to sink. He is, ironically, to be partly blamed for those critics who have read the story as full of mysterious teachings, reverberating and, somehow, universal. An orchestra needs more than three pieces unless, as with the Greeks and Milton, there is available a large context. I do not wish to be put in the same camp as the man who, insists Moby Dick is only a good whale story. Billy Budd is enormously subtle. As Melville's last novel (though last does not mean final), it must be read with great care, and must not be reduced to a formula. We need not, however, turn Melville into a prophet, despite Lawrence's attentions. Billy Budd is not a testament, nor does it re-