"Speak, man!": Billy Budd in the Crucible of Reconstruction

Billy Budd, at once a relic and a recantation of American Romanticism, is the hardest of all Melville's fictions to historicize. Most readers would probably agree with the judgment, from a recent guide to the novelist's career, that "workable analogies between text and context" are difficult to draw (Milder 33). The tale distances itself by almost a century from the postbellum US, and its deliberately crafted web of mythological, religious, and literary allusions seems to lift it out of its particular historical moment and to invest it with timeless significance.

A new attentiveness to Melville's connection to Frederick Douglass has tried to correct this erasure of the topical. Relevant studies reinstating the late Melville into the world of Reconstruction fill out the picture of a writer who affirms the desideratum of white kinship. In the wake of fraternal slaughter, he also draws near to pragmatism, entertains a skeptical or comparative patriotism, and nurtures suspicion of imperial designs. An essay by Gregory Jay on Billy Budd in particular proposes the further idea that the Handsome Sailor's fate reprises the lynching of black men in the American fin de siècle. Jay, following Toni Morrison's lead in Playing in the Dark (1992), seeks to restore the "Africanist presence" to Melville's text.¹

All these readings shed light on Melville's thinking, but none addresses what is, by critical consensus, a salient issue in the novella: the valences of language and silence. This concern, ostensibly ahistorical, has an unmistakable relationship to Melville's milieu in the late 1880s, when he resumed writing prose fiction. While he himself said little about contemporaneous issues, the language theme announces a continuing preoccupation with the slavery controversy and its long aftermath: the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the abandonment of the freedmen to the exigency of national stability. Captain Vere's moral position in the narrative, which turns on his speech to the drumhead court, reveals itself most sharply, and most ambiguously, through this nineteenth-century prism. When the undeniable linguistic emphasis is restored to history, it becomes possible to see Melville's work in a fresh way: as a participant, along with postwar fiction generally, in the paradigm shift that demoted language from potency to morally problematic irrelevance. Billy Budd not only enacts this change, but it also offers an explanation of why the cashiering came about. On this view, the saga of the Bellipotent proves to be a good deal more laden with Melville's social and political setting than we have imagined.

1

What caused the Civil War? There is no shortage of answers: the aggression of the slave power in forcing its "peculiar institution" into the territories; the "irrepressible conflict" between two opposed labor systems; the election of Lincoln in 1860, in defiance of Southern vows to bolt the Union if he won. Besides such familiar explanations, many nineteenth-century Americans-and many twentieth-century American historians as well-would have mentioned another possibility: language. According to these commentators, it was the extremity of language on both sides that ignited sectional hatred: the "incendiary" rhetoric of the abolitionists and the no less provoking discourse of pro-slavery "fire-eaters." Or as Melville himself reminded his readers in 1866, the "unfraternal denunciations, continued through years, and which at last flamed to deeds that ended in bloodshed, were reciprocal" (Battle-Pieces 162).² At least two of the "causes" listed above could be seen as inextricable from the verbal's efficacy and culpability; certainly most Democrats-and Melville's family had close ties to the Democratic Party-would have held that view. The idea of an "irrepressible conflict" between free and slave labor, the coinage of New York Senator William H. Seward, Lincoln's main rival for the 1860 Republican nomination, was a gauntlet thrown down to Southerners, a declaration of war against the plantation system. As for Lincoln's victory, it was the culmination of a decades-long campaign, waged in newspapers, books, pamphlets, and party speeches, to discredit the way of life of half the states.

If language caused or even contributed...