Billy Budd [Paperback]

 

 

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Though this fine collection contains the justly famous work, Billy Budd, and the amazing story of Bartleby, I would like to focus on Benito Cereno. This story is less well-known than these others, but it is equally great. And I want to focus on it also because I noticed a review here that stated that this story reveals that Melville was indifferent to the horror of slavery. It is difficult for me to read such a view without distress. This is not only not true, but nothing could be further from the truth. A more compassionate and profound commentary on slavery and on human blindness has never been written and never will be. Please consider my view of this story:
First of all consider the seeming irony of the title, Benito Cereno. In the story itself all the direct focus is on Captain Amasa Delano. He is seen here endlessly as the embodiment of large-minded nobility and generosity. He seems to be the real hero of the story, (just as Babo, the negro who master-minds the mutiny, seems to be a stereotypical villain). But the story is not called, Amasa Delano, it is called, Benito Cereno. Why? Because the ultimate subject here is what happens inside Benito Cereno. The surface focus on Delano is a distracting screen that Melville deliberately and carefully constructs. Melville allows this screen to distract us because the type of 'decency' that Delano represents in real life is exactly what allows people who consider themselves 'civilized' and basically 'good' to be blind and distracted from the real horror of slavery or any other evil. Please recall that Delano " took to negroes, not philanthropically, buy genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs." And consider the scene where Babo is shaving Captain Cereno. Delano thinks he is watching an agreeable but basically simple-minded negro doing a job that perfectly suits his one-dimensional, inferior being. And in reality we are watching a charade devised by Babo's brain, a "hive of subtlety" that has Delano fooled. When Delano notices that Babo has used the Spanish flag as a barber towell to cover Cereno, he comments on it in a forgiving, playful way and Babo laughs and plays the clown, but in fact it is a revelation of how painfully aware Babo really is. Delano can not quite see the truth about anything. All of his confusion and uncertainty throughout most of the story, and the vaporous mists of the sea-scape, are meant by Melville to be reflective of Delano's deeper blindness. Delano has one moment in the story where he almost sees reality and says, "Ah, this slavery breeds ugly passions in man...," but he slips back again into his smug blindness. And his certainty and cheerfulness at the end of the story are part of this blindness. No, he is not the hero of this story. The real hero is the feeling/consciousness that rises in the heart of Benito Cereno. Delano thinks, and the reader may think with him, that what afflicts and almost paralyzes Cereno through most of the story is that he is simply afraid that if he makes the wrong move then Delano will be killed. But this is only a fraction of what really afflicts Cereno. Cereno, through his experience with Babo, sees the truth about slavery and he can never be blind again. Look at the last part of the story: After the mutiny has been crushed and the negroes are brought to 'justice' and Delano is then out of danger Cereno is still buried in shadow and pain.
Why? Please read very carefully the last conversation between Delano and Cereno here. Cereno explains so movingly how Delano is blind, but Delano still does not see. Delano asks why he, Cereno, is so melancholy. Cereno answers simply,"The negro." At the trial Cereno refuses to identify Babo and faints when he is forced to look at him. Three months later Cereno dies of inner pain and darkness in a monastery. The monastery is on Mount Agonia. Agonia gives us the English word, agony, and in Greek in means a wrestling contest. Here the struggle is between tuth and falsehood. Crereno dies in the struggle, but he dies on the right side. This is why the story is called Benito Cereno.

A great book, though it often drags on into multiple-paged tangents. I feel that if Melville had lived long enough to truly edit through Budd, or if he had the gumption to, it would have been much smoother. Some of the detailed descriptions, such as that of the Noor mutiny, truly added to the complexity of the diegesis, though I think had they'd been edited down, they would have been more effective. Regardlessly, the novel is truly about character development and moral choices, so these tangents don't really hinder the book's effectiveness. The plot itself is also somewhat incidental, as not much truly happens in term of story. It's how the various characters, be it Budd, the not-so-intelligent, and non-verbal man, Veer, the educated captain, Claggart, the wise man who takes a disliking to Budd, or even the Dansker. Every character makes odd choices that aren't fully explained, and it is in these choices that "Billy Budd, Sailor" gains its power.

Authors really have a hard time avoiding the fact their stories nearly always mirror their most closely guarded personal concerns. But the writers who care deepest about the messages they're sending are usually the hardest hit. "Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories"--a Penguin Classic pairing of both well-known and comparatively obscure short stories by America's ultimate "writer's writer"--details the immense artistry, messianic eccentricity and wounded vanity of a deeply troubled man who toiled--unsung, ridiculed--long before his time ever could have come.

This particular collection, refracted as it is by a heartfelt introduction by contemporary American author Frederick Busch, highlights both author and character in alienated reserve in the well-known "Bartleby, Scrivener"; exhibits the writer's knowing infatuation with the great satires of Swift and allegories of Milton in "The Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids" and "The Encantadas"; his obsession with the interplay of virtue and pragmatism in "Billy Budd, Sailor"; and reveals even prophetic intonations in a story about race, "Benito Cereno." Some seem little more than amusing studies, but even the least in this collection testifies to Melville's eternal ability to astonish and take your breath clean out of your body. Indeed, Melville's shorter work reveals just how far he was from the day's critical appraisal of him as an unsuccessful writer of mere adventures that simply didn't fit the bill.

"I would prefer not to," Bartleby, a lawyer's scrivener who ostensibly is hired to copy--by hand--the long-winded motions, quotidian depositions and byzantine judgments that pass through a New York corporate law office, tells his employer when he's needed to fill his role as a drafthorse of a copyist. While he's otherwise a model employee--nearly perfect handwriting, implacably accurate, always on time, never blotches the page, devoid of the scurrilous habits of his two oddball coworkers--Bartleby nevertheless stands out like a mythical portrait of Thoreau, cast upon the 19th Century urban business world, a conscientious objector, civil disobedient, a taciturn young man who, for unknown reasons, has chosen to literally step out of this world without leaving the office. Regardless of his employer's kindhearted attempts to convince Bartleby to "get with the program," Bartleby's unspoken show of both defiance and questionable sanity should tell us that, even then, individual sovereignty was being held hostage at the office.

This archetypically American conflict between ideals of freedom and practicalities of work--one more fully covered by the likes of Europeans such as Kafka, Sartre and Beckett, perhaps due to American considerations of "market forces"--is pallid in comparison to an epic tale of piracy and mutiny told in "Benito Cereno." An encounter in the South Seas between an American clipper and a wayward, sail-shorn Spanish slave galley--ostensibly a story of rescue--in the end turns into a timeless assessment of pan-Atlantic political and cultural affairs, and of the hypocricy of a young democracy's dependence on the slave trade. The ancient Mediterranian powers--Spain and the Catholic Church (itself a subject of widespread controversy in Melville's America...)--serving as puppets for those in the Third World who are determined to choose death before they lose their liberty in the service of commercial interests...well, imagine that! Did Melville ever feel himself a slave to the interests of literary commerce? Could he have been speculating on the ultimate fate of one of those Old World entanglements the nation midway through its first century obsessed over?

Like many American transcendentalists of the day, literary executors who found the world upon a doorstep, Melville's writing often takes a turn to the avant-garde as he stretches his themes--and the constraints of realism--to embrace much broader themes, many of them pitting Enlightenment bred values with Christian-borne systems from the decaying Old World of European monarchism. Nowhere in this collection is this more evident than in the gentle delight, "The Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids"--a short dyptich that pairs (and obliquely seems to betray some of the secrets of) a masonic men's club with the unmentioned women in their orbit. According to Melville, it's high time the democracy criticizes--rather than continue to play along with--the suffocating heirarcy in which man's role is to have a breezy go at enjoying obscure rituals rich with wine--while women supply the paper upon which to write.

Although Melville, like most great writers, was a real stickler when it came to asking his world to live up to its own standards and ideals, readers can get whatever they put into relating to his stories. "Billy Budd," for example, is one of America's finest adventure tales. You can leave it at that, too. Beyond that, Melville asks if it is even possible to believe that the virtues of character can protect a man from those whose main conceit stems from an underhanded contempt of those very virtues. Even though this era's preoccupation with the barest of bones of very real values that underpinned Melville's times is usually uncultivated and malinformed, the ridiculous paces through which we take our own cultural values do not in any way detract from two important messages about Melville's life and times to remember: first, Melville seems to remember for us far more effectively--and more subtly, too--than many of today's more high-profile commentators; and second, Melville was, more than anything, a victim of the failure of those very values. Had those values been real--even in the mid-19th Century--Melville would doubtless have been recognized as the genius we rever today.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Don't listen to the first rating!!!!!
Billy Budd is NOT a story of "good versus evil"! If you read it and only get that out, you're an idiot. Read more

Published on Nov 25 2003 by Vishad

1.0 out of 5 stars Billy's Not MY Buddy
If you are an English teacher who is looking for a good punishment for their students, I highly recommend that you assign them 'Billy Budd. Read more

Published on April 4 2003 by Kima6

5.0 out of 5 stars An investigation of evil and innocence
The nearby review by "brothersjuddotcom" is excellent, and will introduce you to many of the issues and opinions on this text. Read more

Published on Dec 16 2000 by bryan12603

5.0 out of 5 stars Bartleby the Scrivener
I got this collection because it contains one of my favorite stories, "Bartleby, the Scrivener". Read more

Published on Aug 20 2000 by Faye Ku

5.0 out of 5 stars later day melville still challenging, insightful
billy budd feels remarkably closed for an unfinished work. yes, the story could have been told in a few pages, but it would totally lose the biblical feel and psychological... Read more

Published on Dec 30 1999 by vic spicer

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