The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception: Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor

2 Criticism of Billy Budd, Sailor: A Counterhistory

36 WWWWWWWWWWW chapter two Criticism of Billy Budd, Sailor A Counterhistory In short, with all sorts of cavilers, it was best, both for them and everybody, that whoever had the true light should stick behind the secure Malakoff of confidence, nor be tempted forth to hazardous skirmishes on the open ground of reason. Therefore, he deemed it unadvisable in the good man, even in the privacy of his own mind, or in communion with a congenial one, to indulge in too much latitude of philosophizing, or, indeed, of compassionating, since this might beget an indirect habit of thinking and feeling which might unexpectedly betray him upon unsuitable occasions. — herman melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerades The Conservative Tenor of the Histories of Billy Budd Criticism The criticism and commentary on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor since its publication in 1924 in England have been massive. As much, if not more, has been published on this short novel written at the end of Melville’s life as on Moby-Dick. Like Moby-Dick, furthermore, it has achieved global visibility. It is not my intention in this chapter to undertake a systematic history of this criticism and commentary. That has already been done on at least three occasions, the first, in 1962 by Harrison Hayford and Merton Sealts Jr. in their introduction to what they have called the definitive reading edition of Billy Budd;∞ the second, in 1989 by Robert Milder in the introduction to his edition of Critical Essays on Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor;≤ and the third in 1990 by Hershel Parker, in the chapters entitled ‘‘The Dynamics of the Canonization of Billy Budd, Foretopman,’’ ‘‘Close-Reading a Flawed Text,’’ ‘‘Textual Curiosity in the New Critical 1950s,’’ and ‘‘The Hayford–Sealts Edition (1962),’’ in his book Reading Billy Budd.≥ But since each of these ‘‘disinterested’’ histor- Criticism of Billy Budd, Sailor 37 ical inquiries, in fact, begins from the end, that is, with a formulated question that contains its answer, the narrative they have recuperated has obfuscated rather than retrieved this history’s singularities. Since 1990, moreover, the emergence of the field imaginary called New Americanist Studies—particularly a number of revisionary essays on Billy Budd—has rendered that narrative questionable, if not obsolete, though its influence, I believe, persists among all too many Americanists and Mevillian teachers and scholars. This chapter accordingly offers a counterhistory—or genealogy , in the Foucauldian sense of the word—of this received history, interrogating the more or less systematic conclusions these prestigious Americanist authorities (they call themselves ‘‘Melvillians’’ to distinguish themselves from interlopers) have drawn from their scholarly interpretation of the multitude of essays on Billy Budd written from a variety of critical perspectives from the time of its publication to their respective historical moments: historicist, historicist-textualist, Christian humanist, New Critical, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, New Historicist, Marxist , and so on. More specifically, such a genealogy will disclose that these ‘‘authoritative’’ histories of the reception of Billy Budd, undertaken as disinterested inquiries, are, in fact, ideological: they have been prejudiced especially against that minority commentary that interprets the novella as an act of radical onto-sociopolitical resistance against an onto-sociopolitically conservative worldview that often masquerades as progressive. Despite their emphasis on the unfinishedness of his last fictional work, each of these histories represents the late Melville, as, in one way or another, anti-political, as one who has ‘‘risen above’’ the ‘‘restricted’’ and partial world of political conflict that in some degree, it is reluctantly admitted, limited his earlier work, but that, each seems to imply, he, as the epitome of the universal humanist artist, was striving all along to transcend . America as a political entity, astonishingly, given the fact that Melville was an American writer who thought and imagined America globally , is rarely mentioned in this universalist commentary on the Melville of Billy Budd. Even more particularly, each of these histories represents this late Melville as either giving lie to those politically left-wing critics—they are, it is important to emphasize, far fewer than these historians imply— who have read Moby-Dick, Pierre, ‘‘Bartleby, the Scrivener,’’ Israel Potter, ‘‘Benito Cereno,’’ and The Confidence-Man as the work of a committed (onto)political writer (not to say an ‘‘anti-American’’ American), or as 38 the exceptionalist state and the state of exception abandoning the last vestiges of any radical resistance to onto...