“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins?”
—Herman Melville, Billy Budd
—Herman Melville, Billy Budd
The plot of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd can be summarized in a single sentence: A handsome sailor at the turn of the 18th century is falsely accused by his unpopular master-at-arms, accidently kills the man, and is hanged by the ship’s captain according to the requirements of maritime law. But these three characters, points in a triangle, find themselves unmoored in archetypal space, unable to cast anchor in any fixed epistemological spot—Billy Budd the “cynosure” foretopman; Claggart the wicked master-at-arms; and Captain Vere, caught between the competing sign systems each represents. They are not really people at all. Rather, they read like moving points in a geometric arrangement that is only partially legible to readers because of the coy circumspection of the novella’s narrator. Melville, through sleight of hand, weaves a roiling story beneath the becalmed surface of the plot. He is preoccupied with parsing an anxiety that thrums at its heart—the sense that the homeostatic and self-regulating ecosystem of naval life, personified in the beautiful body of Billy Budd, is being contaminated by a malignant external force, embodied in the person of Claggart, whose vague “unnaturalness” defies description. While the text reads “queer” on many levels, the threat on board the Bellipotent is not homosexual desire; rather, it is the intrusion of a new, prurient semiotics into the lives of sailors that upsets the purity and balance of its otherwise healthy cosmology.
Claggart is so odious in the text that the narrator can approach him only obliquely, as though afraid of contamination himself. Claggart is described as “the direct reverse of a saint,” though the narrator’s reasons for applying such a sobriquet is hardly explicated by the text, for “the adequate comprehending of Claggart by a normal nature” is unimaginable: “To pass from a normal nature to him one must cross ‘the deadly space between.’ And this is best done by indirection” (Melville 308). We must assume that the narrator’s nature is baseline “normal” or “normal-adjacent”—Melville’s use of the word is ambiguous—and that he assumes our natures to be similarly normal, and so neither he nor we are able to gaze directly into Claggart’s iniquity. Each piece of evidence for the prosecution is indirect, but taken together they do manage to anecdotally suggest that Claggart experiences and is angered by homosexual desires, a sin among many others. We are told that a man like him “is a nut not to be cracked by the tap of a lady’s fan” (Melville 308), a phrase that suggests homosexuality, but is so leavened with ambiguity that it provides the narrator plausible deniability. To read homosexuality into the phrase thus becomes a transgressive act on the part of the reader. Eve Sedgwick frames Melville’s evasions in violent terms: In Epistemology of the Closet, she notes that the narrator’s apprehension enacts “terrorism” on the re[1] [2] [3] ader, for “the narrator’s mystifications [make] the role of ‘normal’ incomprehension at once compulsory and contemptible” (Sedgwick 98). As readers we are baited with worldliness, invited to transgress, and prevented from transgressing in the same breath.
The narrator anxiously wants to name the enemy, but must not speak its name. He develops a kind of semantic “stutter” around the exact nature of the enemy, just as a stutter prevents Billy Budd, an otherwise perfect male specimen, from self-advocating later in the story. The narrator’s stutter (and ours—and maybe Billy’s) is, of course, one of surfeit knowledge. To not know is to be innocent, the way Billy, the crew, and the domain of Billy’s previous ship, the Rights-of-Man were innocent before Claggart, whatever behavior the sailors get up to in their isolated world. But to name, to know is to risk: It requires “the emergency rescue of some yet more ineffable form of cognition to prevent the direst reversal of the violent power relations of knowledge” (Sedgwick 99). Billy Budd and Claggart are incompatible systems of discourse more than they are characters. We, Vere, and the narrator are caught between innocence and a perilous kind of knowledge. Vere, the captain with knowledge of both epistemological systems, has to make the decision to side with Claggart, and his decision haunts him until his death. We must watch in horror as the wrong side prevails, for knowledge, once learned, cannot be unlearned.
What are these two systems of discourse? The binary here is more complex than homosexual/heterosexual, natural/unnatural, or good/evil. The prose is electric with sexually-charged descriptions of Billy Budd’s face and body. Billy Budd’s own sexuality remains a cipher, and there is even the implied sexlessness of a boy on the precipice of sexual awakening, but the sexuality projected on him by everyone else is no mystery. The narrator’s descriptions are far from neutral, and the Bellipotent’s sailors aren’t neutral about him either. Moreover, Melville assumes that his readers, whoever we are, would be similarly affected by the likes of the titular hero in the context of the Royal Navy: The whole world of the novella responds to the gravitational pull of Billy Budd’s sexual charisma:
He was young; and despite his all but fully developed frame, in aspect looked even younger than he really was, owing to a lingering adolescent expression in the as yet smooth face all but feminine in purity of natural complexion but where, thanks to his seagoing, the lily was quite suppressed and the rose had some ado visibly to flush through the tan. (286)
The text lingers again and again on the physical form of the Handsome Sailor. This erotic response to cynosures in the all-male world of sailing is not transgressive. It is presented as a natural law that is an inbuilt part of a ship’s operational equilibrium, balancing the power of the commander with the natural physical command of the cynosure, for “the moral nature was seldom out of keeping with the physical make” and Billy Budd’s simple morality is part of his beauty: without it, “[t]he comeliness and power, always attractive in masculine conjunction, hardly could have drawn the sort of honest homage the Handsome Sailor… received from his less gifted associates.” Billy Budd’s sexual magnetism is tied to the proper apportionment and expression of power on the ship, a form of informal naval jurisprudence. When Billy Budd is conscripted away from the Rights-of-Man, the merchant captain remarks to the lieutenant of the Bellipotent that he is “going to take away my peacemaker!” He describes the peacemaker’s effect on his shipmates:
“Some of ’em do his washing, darn his old trousers for him; the carpenter is at odd times making a pretty little chest of drawers for him. Anybody will do anything for Billy Budd… Not again very soon shall I… lean over the capstan smoking a quiet pipe… aye, Lieutenant, you are going to take away the jewel of ’em.” (Melville 280, 283)
Billy Budd’s nature pulls others into erotic orbit so that the text’s lingering on his virile beauty becomes just an aspect of the specialized lexicon of life at sea. The Venn diagram of the world of the Royal Navy overlaps only slightly and provisionally with heterosocial life on land. The narrator, acting as intermediary between the two worlds for the benefit of his readers, assures us (but does not show us) that the “queer” of Billy Budd is not the same varietal as Claggart’s.
Claggart is the text’s other queering agent, but his queerness is run through with the contaminants of the polis, which Sedgwick calls “paranoia,” the “wracking juncture of same-sex desire with homophobia” (100). Unlike the erotic charge Billy Budd inspires in others, Claggart’s desire is yoked to a self-hatred that he projects onto its object. Melville’s narrator struggles to find the line of demarcation between these two erotic touchstones, the precise spot in the rainbow “where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins” (334). Claggart is, anyway, morally unfit for the world in which he finds himself, though he is endowed with marshal power from the mainland, both, in Sedgwick’s words, a “stigmatized agent and stigmatized object of military compulsion” (103). Billy Budd and Claggart are cast as opposites, but both exert, from different quadrants, philosophies of desire and power; nature and society; innocence and knowing on the world of the text. Sedgwick refers to the two sides of Claggart’s paranoia—his attraction to and hatred of Billy Budd—as “two mirror-image men, drawn together in a bond that renders desire indistinguishable from predation” (100). But this mirror image could describe Billy Budd and Claggart as well, for at the climax of their enmity, when Claggart makes his false accusation and the Handsome Sailor strikes and kills him, the two trade places, or cancel each other out. Both men are destroyed by the clash of these erotic forces (forces that do not end with their deaths), but, worse, the naval way of life, presented by the narrator as literally and figuratively prelapsarian, is staggered by the fatal blow. The relationship between the two men becomes a chiasmus, predator and prey look alike, and the captain and crew watch in horror as this new kind of knowledge spreads like a viper’s poison from the two doomed men through the rest of the ship, into the rest of the shipping industry, on Vere’s tongue in his dying breath. Billy Budd, as the narrator drives home on multiple occasions, is Adam to Claggart’s serpent. Their mutually-assured destruction is inevitable, but, like humans after the biblical fall, the novella’s other characters must likewise pay for Claggart’s sins.
The story, so vague and indirect in character and threat, is situated in a very specific time and place—at a point of described rupture. The setting is a British man-o-war in “the summer of 1797,” which is the year of the historic Nore Mutiny (Melville 290). Mutiny is the pretext for decisions Vere makes later about Billy Budd’s fate, but, more than that, it becomes the societal analog to more personal attitudes toward homosexuality. Sedgwick points to the equivalency between mutiny and homosexual desire: Because impressment is immoral by nature (like Claggart’s brand of homosexuality), “There is no right way of treating such information, and every way of treating it becomes charged with excess meanings” (102). Knowledge, again, is dangerous—it requires the wary delicacy of the narrator to walk the line for us between orange and violet. We might see the point of rupture in the text as parallel to the time of rupture in which Melville wrote (albeit 100 years prior). In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault asserts that “the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality” was invented a scant 20 years before Melville wrote Billy Budd. “Homosexuality” transformed male-male sex from a quotidian sin to the symptom of a specific, aberrant personality. The body and soul of the sinner, not the sin, became the focal point of prurient fascination. As Foucault notes:
Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. (43)
In this context, we might see Billy Budd and the all-male world of ships as protected from this new semiotic system, and Claggart as an invasive “species” that infects the crew: not with sin but with rhetoric—a new, hazardous form of knowing.
The narrator makes the reader’s job difficult. He exerts such anxious control over what we see that the reader experiences the geometry of the story as a kind of tesseract: the “deadly space between” might be a definite fixed point. But a normal nature lacks the perception to apprehend it without risking hazard to author, narrator, and reader. Melville reveals part of his meaning, then backtracks, then pulls our attention to something else, then reveals again, then buries what has been revealed beneath heaped clauses of rhetorical barbed wire. Contemporary readers might chafe at all the subterfuge, but our safety no longer depends on this level of discretion. Vexing as the prose is at times, it ends on an unambiguously chiastic note: the naval chronicle reports the murder of faithful Claggart at the hands of wicked Billy Budd. The story’s hero—his body and reputation—dies for its sins. But the sailors have the last word on the intrusion of this modern toxin: the final chapter transcribes a sea shanty memorializing the saintly, welkin-sent Billy Budd.
Claggart is so odious in the text that the narrator can approach him only obliquely, as though afraid of contamination himself. Claggart is described as “the direct reverse of a saint,” though the narrator’s reasons for applying such a sobriquet is hardly explicated by the text, for “the adequate comprehending of Claggart by a normal nature” is unimaginable: “To pass from a normal nature to him one must cross ‘the deadly space between.’ And this is best done by indirection” (Melville 308). We must assume that the narrator’s nature is baseline “normal” or “normal-adjacent”—Melville’s use of the word is ambiguous—and that he assumes our natures to be similarly normal, and so neither he nor we are able to gaze directly into Claggart’s iniquity. Each piece of evidence for the prosecution is indirect, but taken together they do manage to anecdotally suggest that Claggart experiences and is angered by homosexual desires, a sin among many others. We are told that a man like him “is a nut not to be cracked by the tap of a lady’s fan” (Melville 308), a phrase that suggests homosexuality, but is so leavened with ambiguity that it provides the narrator plausible deniability. To read homosexuality into the phrase thus becomes a transgressive act on the part of the reader. Eve Sedgwick frames Melville’s evasions in violent terms: In Epistemology of the Closet, she notes that the narrator’s apprehension enacts “terrorism” on the re[1] [2] [3] ader, for “the narrator’s mystifications [make] the role of ‘normal’ incomprehension at once compulsory and contemptible” (Sedgwick 98). As readers we are baited with worldliness, invited to transgress, and prevented from transgressing in the same breath.
The narrator anxiously wants to name the enemy, but must not speak its name. He develops a kind of semantic “stutter” around the exact nature of the enemy, just as a stutter prevents Billy Budd, an otherwise perfect male specimen, from self-advocating later in the story. The narrator’s stutter (and ours—and maybe Billy’s) is, of course, one of surfeit knowledge. To not know is to be innocent, the way Billy, the crew, and the domain of Billy’s previous ship, the Rights-of-Man were innocent before Claggart, whatever behavior the sailors get up to in their isolated world. But to name, to know is to risk: It requires “the emergency rescue of some yet more ineffable form of cognition to prevent the direst reversal of the violent power relations of knowledge” (Sedgwick 99). Billy Budd and Claggart are incompatible systems of discourse more than they are characters. We, Vere, and the narrator are caught between innocence and a perilous kind of knowledge. Vere, the captain with knowledge of both epistemological systems, has to make the decision to side with Claggart, and his decision haunts him until his death. We must watch in horror as the wrong side prevails, for knowledge, once learned, cannot be unlearned.
What are these two systems of discourse? The binary here is more complex than homosexual/heterosexual, natural/unnatural, or good/evil. The prose is electric with sexually-charged descriptions of Billy Budd’s face and body. Billy Budd’s own sexuality remains a cipher, and there is even the implied sexlessness of a boy on the precipice of sexual awakening, but the sexuality projected on him by everyone else is no mystery. The narrator’s descriptions are far from neutral, and the Bellipotent’s sailors aren’t neutral about him either. Moreover, Melville assumes that his readers, whoever we are, would be similarly affected by the likes of the titular hero in the context of the Royal Navy: The whole world of the novella responds to the gravitational pull of Billy Budd’s sexual charisma:
He was young; and despite his all but fully developed frame, in aspect looked even younger than he really was, owing to a lingering adolescent expression in the as yet smooth face all but feminine in purity of natural complexion but where, thanks to his seagoing, the lily was quite suppressed and the rose had some ado visibly to flush through the tan. (286)
The text lingers again and again on the physical form of the Handsome Sailor. This erotic response to cynosures in the all-male world of sailing is not transgressive. It is presented as a natural law that is an inbuilt part of a ship’s operational equilibrium, balancing the power of the commander with the natural physical command of the cynosure, for “the moral nature was seldom out of keeping with the physical make” and Billy Budd’s simple morality is part of his beauty: without it, “[t]he comeliness and power, always attractive in masculine conjunction, hardly could have drawn the sort of honest homage the Handsome Sailor… received from his less gifted associates.” Billy Budd’s sexual magnetism is tied to the proper apportionment and expression of power on the ship, a form of informal naval jurisprudence. When Billy Budd is conscripted away from the Rights-of-Man, the merchant captain remarks to the lieutenant of the Bellipotent that he is “going to take away my peacemaker!” He describes the peacemaker’s effect on his shipmates:
“Some of ’em do his washing, darn his old trousers for him; the carpenter is at odd times making a pretty little chest of drawers for him. Anybody will do anything for Billy Budd… Not again very soon shall I… lean over the capstan smoking a quiet pipe… aye, Lieutenant, you are going to take away the jewel of ’em.” (Melville 280, 283)
Billy Budd’s nature pulls others into erotic orbit so that the text’s lingering on his virile beauty becomes just an aspect of the specialized lexicon of life at sea. The Venn diagram of the world of the Royal Navy overlaps only slightly and provisionally with heterosocial life on land. The narrator, acting as intermediary between the two worlds for the benefit of his readers, assures us (but does not show us) that the “queer” of Billy Budd is not the same varietal as Claggart’s.
Claggart is the text’s other queering agent, but his queerness is run through with the contaminants of the polis, which Sedgwick calls “paranoia,” the “wracking juncture of same-sex desire with homophobia” (100). Unlike the erotic charge Billy Budd inspires in others, Claggart’s desire is yoked to a self-hatred that he projects onto its object. Melville’s narrator struggles to find the line of demarcation between these two erotic touchstones, the precise spot in the rainbow “where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins” (334). Claggart is, anyway, morally unfit for the world in which he finds himself, though he is endowed with marshal power from the mainland, both, in Sedgwick’s words, a “stigmatized agent and stigmatized object of military compulsion” (103). Billy Budd and Claggart are cast as opposites, but both exert, from different quadrants, philosophies of desire and power; nature and society; innocence and knowing on the world of the text. Sedgwick refers to the two sides of Claggart’s paranoia—his attraction to and hatred of Billy Budd—as “two mirror-image men, drawn together in a bond that renders desire indistinguishable from predation” (100). But this mirror image could describe Billy Budd and Claggart as well, for at the climax of their enmity, when Claggart makes his false accusation and the Handsome Sailor strikes and kills him, the two trade places, or cancel each other out. Both men are destroyed by the clash of these erotic forces (forces that do not end with their deaths), but, worse, the naval way of life, presented by the narrator as literally and figuratively prelapsarian, is staggered by the fatal blow. The relationship between the two men becomes a chiasmus, predator and prey look alike, and the captain and crew watch in horror as this new kind of knowledge spreads like a viper’s poison from the two doomed men through the rest of the ship, into the rest of the shipping industry, on Vere’s tongue in his dying breath. Billy Budd, as the narrator drives home on multiple occasions, is Adam to Claggart’s serpent. Their mutually-assured destruction is inevitable, but, like humans after the biblical fall, the novella’s other characters must likewise pay for Claggart’s sins.
The story, so vague and indirect in character and threat, is situated in a very specific time and place—at a point of described rupture. The setting is a British man-o-war in “the summer of 1797,” which is the year of the historic Nore Mutiny (Melville 290). Mutiny is the pretext for decisions Vere makes later about Billy Budd’s fate, but, more than that, it becomes the societal analog to more personal attitudes toward homosexuality. Sedgwick points to the equivalency between mutiny and homosexual desire: Because impressment is immoral by nature (like Claggart’s brand of homosexuality), “There is no right way of treating such information, and every way of treating it becomes charged with excess meanings” (102). Knowledge, again, is dangerous—it requires the wary delicacy of the narrator to walk the line for us between orange and violet. We might see the point of rupture in the text as parallel to the time of rupture in which Melville wrote (albeit 100 years prior). In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault asserts that “the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality” was invented a scant 20 years before Melville wrote Billy Budd. “Homosexuality” transformed male-male sex from a quotidian sin to the symptom of a specific, aberrant personality. The body and soul of the sinner, not the sin, became the focal point of prurient fascination. As Foucault notes:
Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. (43)
In this context, we might see Billy Budd and the all-male world of ships as protected from this new semiotic system, and Claggart as an invasive “species” that infects the crew: not with sin but with rhetoric—a new, hazardous form of knowing.
The narrator makes the reader’s job difficult. He exerts such anxious control over what we see that the reader experiences the geometry of the story as a kind of tesseract: the “deadly space between” might be a definite fixed point. But a normal nature lacks the perception to apprehend it without risking hazard to author, narrator, and reader. Melville reveals part of his meaning, then backtracks, then pulls our attention to something else, then reveals again, then buries what has been revealed beneath heaped clauses of rhetorical barbed wire. Contemporary readers might chafe at all the subterfuge, but our safety no longer depends on this level of discretion. Vexing as the prose is at times, it ends on an unambiguously chiastic note: the naval chronicle reports the murder of faithful Claggart at the hands of wicked Billy Budd. The story’s hero—his body and reputation—dies for its sins. But the sailors have the last word on the intrusion of this modern toxin: the final chapter transcribes a sea shanty memorializing the saintly, welkin-sent Billy Budd.
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Vintage Books, 1990.
Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor. Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 279-362.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press, 2008.
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Vintage Books, 1990.
Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor. Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 279-362.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press, 2008.
Saramanda Swigart has a BA in postcolonial literature and an MFA in writing and literary translation from Columbia University. Her short work, essays, and poetry have appeared in Oxford Magazine, Superstition Review, The Alembic, Fogged Clarity, Ghost Town, The Saranac Review, and Euphony to name a few. She has been teaching literature, creative writing, argumentative writing, and critical thinking at City College of San Francisco since 2014.