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

3 Billy Budd: A Symptomatic Reading

75 WWWWWWWWWW chapter three Billy Budd A Symptomatic Reading Be it here, once and for all, understood, that no sentimental and theoretic love for the common sailor; no romantic belief in that peculiar nobleheartedness and exaggerated generosity of disposition fictionally imputed to him in novels; and no prevailing desire to gain the reputation of being his friend, have actuated me in anything I have said, in any part of this work, touching the gross oppression under which I know that the sailor suffers. . . . Nor . . . is the general ignorance or depravity of any race of men to be alleged as an apology for tyranny over them. On the contrary, it can not admit of a reasonable doubt, in any unbiased mind conversant with the interior life of a man-of-war, that most of the sailor iniquities practiced therein are indirectly to be ascribed to the morally debasing effects of the unjust, despotic, and degrading laws under which the man-of-war’s man lives. — herman melville, White-Jacket Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. — w. b. yeats, ‘‘The Second Coming’’ The Narrator’s Identity Who is the narrator of Billy Budd? Given the astonishing indifference to or the willful marginalization of this question in most previous criticism of the novella, asking this admittedly difficult question should not be taken as an impertinence. Indeed, one of the fundamental and, in my mind, immensely 76 the exceptionalist state and the state of exception productive, lessons about reading that the poststructuralist revolution has taught us is that an author is never in total command of his/her representation , that his/her agency is always in one degree or another adulterated by a system of discourse—an ideology that has become hegemonic, a construction that has become naturalized—and that, therefore—and here I invoke Louis Althusser’s particular version of this lesson—reading must be ‘‘symptomatic ,’’ a lecture symptomale.∞ Granted, this ‘‘lesson’’ has been called into question in the wake of Edward Said’s influential and justified critique of the poststructuralists’ radical ‘‘textualization’’ of the ‘‘worldliness’’ of the literary text. But this admission should not diminish the urgency of the question: ‘‘Who is the narrator of Billy Budd? For, besides the poststructuralist imperative , what makes this question especially necessary is the inescapable fact that Melville left his tale unfinished. In other words, he left his readers, not simply with a text in which the conflicts or ambiguities are apparently unresolved, but, beyond that, with the uncertainty as to whether or not he even intended to resolve them. Seen in this obscured light, Melville’s novellaleavesusnootherchoicebuttoreaditsymptomatically .Everyreading Irefertointhepreviouschapter,especiallythoseassociatedwiththe‘‘testament of acceptance,’’ has been, in fact, a symptomatic (and ideological) reading. The difference between them and the one I undertake in this chapter is a difference in the degree of awareness. Despite the lip service paid to the incompleteness of Melville’s text, the vast majority of earlier studies, as I have shown, were undertaken in the name of disinterested inquiry into a completed and therefore self-identical, that is, nameable, text. Mine, on the other hand, like the recent deconstructionist readings, is undertaken in full awareness of its ambiguities, its ultimate unnamability. It is, therefore, an openly interested (ideological) reading, but one, unlike those of the deconstructionists, that attends as faithfully as possible, not simply to the ambiguities as such (as if they were equal in authority), but to the different degree of power or weight that accrues to each side of the ambiguity in the process of the telling. The first ambiguity has to do with the national identity of the narrator of Billy Budd—given that the story, although ostensibly about naval warfare between Britain and France, was written by an extremely self-conscious American writer. Significantly, none of the vast number of critics of the novella, British and American, have addressed this fundamental question, Billy Budd: A Symptomatic Reading 77 as, for example, many have done in writing about Henry Adams’s chapters on Britain’s policies during the American Civil War in The Education of Henry Adams. As I noted in chapter 1, a few have suggested that Melville was alluding to contemporary events in America...