Melville Incomplete

The final volume of Melville's uncompleted writings by the Northwestern-Newberry edition (hereafter NN) is a monumental achievement. Monumental but also vexed, and vexing. Melville's unfinished poetry and especially his unfinished novella Billy Buddchallenge traditional editorial theories of eclectic editing that have guided the NN editions for decades. Although the NN series has stood out among its peers of print editions informed by the ideas of W. W. Greg, Fredson Bowers, and G. Thomas Tanselle (among others), the final volume remains beholden to a theory of critical editing that is less suited to the purpose of editing unfinished manuscripts than of works that exist solely in print versions. This dilemma makes the volume a fascinating instance of the choices editors must make in the era of digital editions, a development that in principle aspires to greater transparency, computational efficiency, and multidisciplinary collaboration. Some of Melville's unfinished manuscripts require editorial intervention for the purposes of making a coherent reading text, but the NN edition under review shows the risks of presenting an eclectic reading text of an unfinished work. A manuscript is a physical manifestation of shifting intentions. A clear, eclectic text will by its nature privilege its version over other versions (whether of other previous editions or of the manuscript itself), while distancing readers from the dynamics of revision that are on display in the surviving manuscripts. The reading texts give the illusion of completeness, regardless of the editors' acknowledgments of its incompleteness in the back matter. One assumes that the reading texts will eventually be reprinted without the textual notes in future editions.

Billy Buddwas rushed into publication as part of the Melville revival in the 1920s to complete the Constable edition of the author's works, despite the challenges of assembling a text from an unfinished manuscript that was left in a container on his desk. Thus began the canonization of Billy Budd, a text-inprogress, halted by mortality, that occasioned flawed editions beginning with Raymond Weaver's Constable edition in 1924 and followed by F. Barron Freeman's 1948 Harvard University Press edition. Flawed, because they not only were riddled with transcription errors but also gave the wrong impression of a finished text, which was perhaps best evidenced by Weaver's decision to print a discarded section following chapter 19 as the preface. Billy Buddtherefore came before the public as an apparently finished work for decades before Merton Sealts, Jr., and Harrison Hayford published their extraordinary study of the manuscript in the 1962 University of Chicago Press genetic edition. And their reading text and genetic transcription continue to be the reliable standard. The resulting situation is a canonical but imperfect text with an irrational historical (and sometimes market-driven) mandate in place for a clean copy of Melville's final masterpiece. Building on Sealts, Jr., and Hayford's work, the NN edition provides a new, critical, unmodernized text of Billy Budd. One admirable improvement is that, instead of regularizing aspects of Melville's punctuation and copyediting his phraseology as the Hayford-Sealts edition does to the reading text, the NN edition generally attempts to preserve the rough quality of the manuscript. The NN edition, while mainly improving upon the Hayford-Sealts text, still takes some perplexing liberties with the manuscript.

The general editor Hershel Parker has been an effective explicator of Billy Budd, not only showing that it is unfinished but also arguing that it is impossible to interpret as a complete text (see his Reading Billy Budd[1990]). Wyn Kelley put it best, that it is "one story, multiple versions, not a few bypaths," evoking Melville's narrator's own apologia for the "literary sin" of his digressive style (128). In 1888 Melville attempted a fair copy in ink of an expanded prose story which had preceded a ballad he had originally composed about a sailor facing execution. He revised this new story in the...