Hanging Utopia

The “New Israel” Melville proclaimed in White-Jacket “had failed” (102). 

“The Pilgrim Fathers’ hope of the nation being the fulfilment of divine sanction, along with the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, underpin much of the exploration of nationalism and religion in Melville’s later works. . . . hope deferred” (102).

“In Billy Budd, however, that ambiguity, I believe, makes the hope deferred a deliberately intolerable one. For the novel is his [Melville’s] final word, at the end of the century, after a Civil War fought, at least superficially, for moral reasons, on the claims of the state to be sanctified” (102).

“Inasmuch as the “Father” may be interpreted as a version of the Law, or the History dictated by that Law, and inasmuch as the Father may also be the Head, demanding obedience of the heart or body, and inasmuch as silence may be a figure for those cast out by the Father, these three themes are central to that of Sacred History” (102).

Melville’s reading of Sacred History, from letter to Hawthorne: “I would rather be a fool with a heart than Jupiter Olympus with his head. The reason the mass of men fear God and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch” — In Vere, Melville “associates the institution, and the History it engenders, with Reason” (103).

“The father past meets the son, promise of the future. Unlike the standard oedipal saga, where son overcomes father to begin a new order, here the opposite occurs. Father prevails and re-institutes the old” (103).

“Melville’s question is about the image into which men will fashion God, and how they will use that image to their own ends” (103).

1. Confined Heads and Confining Histories

“Vere ends the line of Melvillean “fathers”” (103).

Melville invites us to read “the action in terms of sacral history, engendered by the Fathers. It is the habit of those Fathers to lose or sacrifice their children, as God the Father himself does with Christ” (103).

“Tocqueville and Lincoln find virtue in the body’s acceptance of the head’s control, as Isaac would accept Abraham’s demand for his death” (104).

“White America has lost the faith of Abraham, but kept the name of his children” (106).

“Lincoln himself, father Abraham, had become the first son sacrificed to his own ideal of a unified nation, joining his body to the countless others, when he was assassinated” (106).

“A united social body, founded on sacrifice, would be rejoined to the head, the ideal, re-enacting the founding of the nation” (106).

Goddard sees Vere in a theocratic lineage: Winthrop and his “city on a hill” to Edwards where “Justice is no issue for him, only punishment” to Vere, who makes no “recourse to religious sanction” (107).

Lincoln: “Both [North and South] read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged” (108).

Vere takes his name from a poem that “eulogizes the human ordering of Nature by the new military aristocracy,” where the “Mind controls the body of Nature in the garden by ensuring it remains within its carefully ruled bounds. Such control combines sacred and secular powers by assuming the sacred right to control the land” (108).

Captain Vere’s namesake, Fairfax, “represents Cromwell’s joining of sacral and secular histories in Cromwell’s takeover of the English parliament as Protector” (108).

“Cromwell’s agenda would drive the Pilgrim Fathers to their New Israel. Now, Melville suggests, Vere brings that Israel full circle” (109).

Billy Budd, as the “typological predecessor of Christ, is the flower in the new garden who is to be sacrificed” (109).

“The early settlements of the American utopia . . . will finally crucify the very symbol of Eden to which they seek a return” (109).

“The claim to sacral status or to objective justice on the part of the American fathers becomes tainted by the secret of ambition and self-service” (111).

1. The Heart of Billy Budd

Vere replaces “evangelical democracy . . . with a version of social engineering through institutions” (111).

“Billy concludes that other line of history Melville has traced through all his works, that of liminal outcasts who remain fatherless and in so doing are silenced by social constraints” (112).

“There is an ambiguity, [Melville] suggests, at the heart of a sacral history which sacrifices its own for its cause” (113).

“The leprosy of whiteness turns out to be the equivocal speech wherein lies the satanic power of white America, making its false accusations against the innocent and illiterate, nor ever fulfilling its, apparently fatherly, promises of care” (114).

“If sacred history demands that the descendants of Adam and Eve “bruise” the snake’s head (Gen. 3. 15), and Christ becomes, typologically, the final bruiser (as Billy is a “bruiser” of sorts), then Billy’s punch against Claggart’s head fulfils its typological role” (114).

“In [Billy] body speaks where tongue cannot” (114).

“In Vere and Claggart, tongue speaks where desiring body cannot” (114).

1. Vere’s Code

“If the one who “bruises the snake’s head” is meant to inaugurate a new version of history, a “Reconstruction” based on knowledge of and adherence to moral virtue, then Billy’s hanging represents a silencing of that new history” (115).

“Like the other “bruiser of the snake’s head” in biblical typology, Christ, he is silent before his judge. Christ’s silence before Pontius Pilate is one based on knowledge. Knowing his innocence he cannot defend himself before a judge who represents untruth” (115).

“Sacrifice . . . has ambiguous value for Melville, and the “smoke” of war is something of which to beware” (117).

“If sacrifice is meant to cement secular history as something sacred then the question which remains to be answered, and to which Melville devotes a large portion of the narrative, is whether Billy’s death may be read as sacramental” (117).

1. But There Is No Telling the Sacrament

“inviolable privacy to the one (Vere) becomes holy oblivion to the other (Billy). And oblivion, the sequel to any divine magnanimity, is ultimately what covers all” (118).