The Bellipotent as Heterotopia, Total Institution, and Colony: Billy Budd and Other Spaces in Melville's Mediterranean

The Bellipotent as Heterotopia, Total Institution, and Colony: Billy Budd and Other Spaces in Melville’s Mediterranean RODRIGO ANDRÉS University of Barcelona F rench philosopher and historian Michel Foucault first defined the concept of “Heterotopias” in his 1967 lecture titled “Des Espaces Autres” (“Of Other Spaces”). Unlike utopias, heterotopias are real places that are different from all the sites that they reflect, and they represent a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live. Michel Foucault famously concluded that the best example of a heterotopia is a boat: “The ship is the heterotopia par excellence,” poetically adding: “In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.” In Billy Budd, Sailor, Melville gives us the Bellipotent, the epitome of a negative heterotopia, where dreams dry up—we say goodbye to the Rights of Man—espionage takes the place of adventure, and anxiety is produced although not by pirates but by the police. This ship is a heterotopia not of illusion but of crisis, not of compensation but of deviation. This heterotopia is not a great reserve of the imagination but another real space. Unlike Foucault, Melville is not interested in the discursive nature of heterotopias as “other spaces” but in the material reality of the heterotopia as an actual space, or what Erving Goffman would call “a total institution”: “A total institution may be defined as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life” (xiii).1 For Goffman, such institutions have encompassing tendencies : “Their encompassing or total character is symbolized by the barrier to social intercourse with the outside and to departure that is often built right into the physical plant, such as locked doors, high walls, barbed wire, cliffs, water, forests or moors” (Goffman 4). A ship, for both Foucault and Goffman, can and does become a “space Other” that reflects and contests social and political debates. And Melville reminds us that the driving force behind the naval enterprise is none other than economic. In that sense, the ship as a heterotopia c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 128 L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S T H E B E L L I P O T E N T A S H E T E R O T O P I A of financial interest correlates with another example of heterotopia, according to Michel Foucault, and that is the colony: [C]olonies are . . . extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development . . ., but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. (Foucault) Few writers have been able to make those two heterotopias—the boat and the colony—talk back to back the way Melville does. In Billy Budd, the captain and master-at-arms replicate, in their interactions with the common sailor, the dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized. Those two heterotopias, ship and colony, thus constitute reflections of the space One, the space considered neutral or unmarked, “our” space. And those reflections are not free from the valences of desire. The construction of the colonial subject in discourse and the exercise of colonial power through discourse demand an articulation of forces of difference that is both social and sexual. According to Homi...