Reading Billy Budd, by Hershel Parker (review)

102Rocky Mountain Review HERSHEL PARKER. Reading Billy Budd. Evaneton: Northwestern University Press, 1990. 190 p. Melville worked intermittently on Billy Budd for six yeeirs, but did not quite complete it before his death in 1891. In 1962, Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., published the first reliable edition of Billy Budd along with a Genetic Text that meticulously charted the growth ofthe manuscript, from a headnote accompanying the ballad "Billy in the Darbies" through a complex sequence of drafts and revisions. Hayford and Sealts expected future commentators to consult the Genetic Text when evaluating and explicating the narrative. Not until now, however, has a Melville scholar attempted to use it as a critical tool. Parker does not wish to dethrone Billy Budd eis a masterpiece, but he believes interpreters have not come to terms with its manifest unfinished status. Parker first situates Billy Budd within the context of Melville's other 1880s writings, in order to debunk the myth that it was the "single obsessive labor of Melville's last lustrum" (32). He then cogently argues how several factors—the New Criticism's preoccupation with absolute coherence; the pedagogical need for relatively short texts; the desire to see a late, especially posthumously published, work as an author's intellectual or spiritual testament—contributed to Billy Budd's canonization and the glossing over of its imperfections. Parker's first several chapters, although valuable in their own right, are prefatory to his main polemic that all critics (regardless ofwhat theoretical bent) "who write about any aspect of Billy Budd without working through the Genetic Text are pretty much wasting their time, or at least wasting pretty much oftheir time, however plausible their essaye may seem" (100). The major crux for criticism has been, of course, the equivocal characterization of Captain Vere. Melville's late pencil insertions altered the previously consistent portrait by casting doubt on Vere's semity. Although Melville was not "reworking pro-Vere passages into anti-Vere passages" (38), the changes make it "extremely difficult if not impossible to interpret" the story "as a whole, since clues as to how to read Vere's behavior were left going in [divergent] directions" (174), Melville having died before he could reconcile them. Beyond helping us to understand which revisions obscured the lineaments of Vere's character, however, Parker's use of the Genetic Text to follow the "vicissitudes of Melville's struggle to tell his story" (98) does not prove especially revealing. His chapter-by-chapter reading often fails to bridge the gap between highlighting the sundry manuscript alterations and indicating, except negatively, their significance. Too frequently, Parker paraphrases the narrative or Hayford and Sealts' own tentative conclusions. He also does not confront what appears to be a problem in his critical procedure. "The method in my reading," Parker summarizes, "is to focus on the story a chapter at a time, yet also to keep in mind what function any particular part of the story had when Melville wrote it and to ask, often, whether that peu-t still retains all (or some of) the same function and (sometimes) if a peu-t of the story heis seemed to gain other functions" (98). Sensible enough; but doesn't our assessment of a draft or revised passage's "function" beg the question of Book Reviews103 intentionality and somewhat depend upon our interpretation ofthe text in its entirety, a text that Parker repeatedly contends cannot be deemed totally comprehensible? Even if we do not find Parker's version of textual criticism troubling, it remains uncertain whether or not the Genetic Text may serve any purpose other than to aid stylistic analysis or to help check unlikely or grossly errant readings. Parker aeserte that Hayford and Sealts "made it clear that some lines of criticism would be dead ends for any critic taking them" (176) emd that we must "acknowledge that there eire limits to what we can responsibly say" (178) about Billy Budd because ofits incompleteness and inconsistenciee. What, of interpretative interest, can responsibly be said about Billy Budd Peirker does not eufficiently articulate. Parker'e etudy ie moet compelling in the early eectione on Melville's late career and the history of...