A Political Companion to Herman Melville

Chapter 13. The Lyre of Orpheus

13 The Lyre of Orpheus Aesthetics and Authority in Billy Budd Jason Frank Be a man’s intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick “With mankind,” he [Vere] would say, “forms, measured forms, are everything ; and this is the import couched in the story of Orpheus, with his lyre spellbinding the wild denizens of the wood.” And this he once applied to the disruption of forms going on across the Channel and the consequences thereof. —Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) Herman Melville worked on Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) for the last five years of his life—between 1886 and 1891—and since its posthumous discovery and publication in 1924 Billy Budd has often been read as Melville’s last will and testament, the most mature articulation of his social and political thought. There is, of course, little agreement over the meaning of this subtle and enchanting testament, although past interpretations typically cluster into two competing approaches. The “testament of acceptance” school associates Melville’s own position with Vere’s and emphasizes the novella ’s concluding affirmation of necessity in this “moral dilemma involving aught of the tragic.”1 The opposing “testament of resistance” school exposes the irony of Melville’s unreliable narrator and identifies a skeptical rejection of Vere’s claims of authority, even to the point of doubting Vere’s sanity.2 The Lyre of Orpheus 359 Billy Budd, one critic has recently noted, “taps commitments of ethical, political, and philosophical value that make its criticism peculiarly confessional and urgent.”3 At the center of these controversies is the contested meaning of Vere’s famous judgment near the novella’s conclusion: “Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!” (1406; emphases in original). These interpretations often turn on the vicissitudes of legal judgment, in other words, and situate Melville’s “inside narrative” within a broadly juridical, if not narrowly procedural, frame. Judging Vere’s judgment has also been the guiding hermeneutic of most of the political theory scholarship dedicated to the novella. Hannah Arendt, for example, embraces the wisdom of Vere’s decision to “punish the violence of absolute innocence,” represented by Budd, as an exemplification of her theoretical insight that “the absolute spells doom to everyone when it is introduced into the political realm.” Arendt contrasts Budd’s otherworldly “innocence” and “goodness” to Vere’s personification of worldly “virtue,” a political principle “which alone is capable of embodiment in lasting institutions .”4 Michael Rogin, by contrast, rejects Vere’s decision as a grotesque sanctification of the state, which returns man to the unthinking nature of “beasts” rather than the “rights-granting nature of the Declaration of Independence .” “Like Melville’s fiction of the 1850s,” Rogin writes, “Billy Budd confines us in a denuded, mundane world, from which all possibility of transformation has fled. But unlike the earlier stories, Billy Budd gives that world its blessing.”5 Arendt and Rogin judge Vere’s judgment differently, but they agree that the political theory of the story is located primarily in its dramatization of judgment. Even for these political theorists Billy Budd remains very much a “judge’s story.”6 It is as if most of what is of political theoretical significance in the novella were confined to three of its thirty chapters. This essay takes a different approach. While the familiar focus on Vere’s judgment provides an illuminating example of the dilemmas of legal and moral judgment in times of political crisis—in light of contemporary theoretical preoccupations, Melville’s story may be said to dramatize the fraught exposure of procedural norms to the sovereign “state of exception”—this focus also quietly displaces another, perhaps deeper dilemma posed by the novella.7 Melville situates the story’s dilemma of judgment and legal procedure within a broader and more worldly theoretical rubric: the constitution and performative maintenance of political authority. Melville makes a political spectacle of legal judgment in Billy Budd, and even though Vere’s 360 Jason Frank drumhead court is “summarily convened,” and even though Budd is secretly tried belowdecks in the commander’s chambers, it retains aspects of a show trial. The many irregularities of Budd’s improvised court-martial are as much a part of the political spectacle orchestrated by Vere...