ABlog

Today was all green and blue and pink and white like a present waiting to be unwrapped. The lilac in my back yard, planted a dozen years ago as a tiny slip of a bush, has gotten so tall I have trouble reaching to cut the blossoms, but I love looking down on them from my window at dusk, seeing the luminescent purple-gray clouds floating there on darkness.

Amid the beauty of drifting cherry blossoms, I’m obsessed with John McCain. Or rather: not with John McCain at all, but with the effects of John McCain upon my work environment; with my efforts and those of other faculty and students at the New School to challenge the almost unbelievable degree of institutional authoritarianism that has given us John McCain for a commencement speaker. The process is familiar from national politics: at the top of everything, there sits a “decider” (in other times and places, he would be called a king or dictator, but this, after all, is the 21st century, and he is called a president) whose prerogative it is to determine what’s good for the rest of us and ram it down our throats. And just as the country must contend with whatever George W. Bush dishes out, at the New School we are expected to smile collegially and munch the shit served up by Bob Kerrey. (Bob says he invited his fellow war hero (criminal)-political careerist to speak because of McCain’s sponsorship of anti-torture legislation.)

How appropriate, then, that I’m reading (with my Queer Renaissance class) Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, whose hero, an impressed sailor aboard the H.M.S. Bellipotent, is sacrificed so that the order represented by kings (and presidents)—by war and potency-- may thrive.

Herewith, some reasons why I’m madly in love with this novella:

1. Because it offers an amazing dramatic representation of so much that is integral to patriarchy—the erotics of sacrifice, the allure of authority, the veering of rationality toward what is most irrational, the Stockholm Syndrome binding Isaac to Abraham.

2.Because of this wonderful image, used to describe how Billy, under sentence of death, receives the chaplain’s homily: “[T[his sailor-way of taking clerical discourse is not wholly unlike the way in which the pioneer of Christianity, full of transcendent miracles, was received long ago on tropic isles by any superior savage so called—a Tahitian, say, of Captain Cook’s time or shortly after that time. Out of natural courtesy he received, but did not appropriate. It was like a gift placed in the palm of an outreached hand upon which the fingers do not close” (78).

3. Because as I read Captain Vere’s exhortation to the drumhead court—he urges them to follow the letter of the law, no matter what they know of moral complications or feel in their hearts—I found myself thinking of Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice, work on which began when she noticed that girls regularly scored lower on a scale of moral reasoning than boys (due, she would argue, to girls’ frequent impulse to find some compromise solution to moral problems rather than simply obeying an ethical rule). No sooner had I made that association than I read the following: “‘But the exceptional in the matter moves the hearts within you. Even so too is mine moved. But let not warm hearts betray heads that should be cool. Ashore in a criminal case will an upright judge allow himself off the bench to be waylaid by some tender kinswoman of the accused seeking to touch him with her tearful plea? Well the heart here denotes the feminine in man, is as that piteous woman and, hard though it be, she must here be ruled out’” (68).

4. Because the novella’s resolution—the descent from a “climax” represented in terms almost offensively exalted and sublime—rescues the melodrama from itself by being vernacular, mordantly satiric, ironic.

5. Because the merciless machinations of the plot make such a strange and wonderful alloy with the fevered excess of the language used to describe Billy’s beauty (he is an Angel, Christ, a Saxon barbarian, a beauty out of classical Greece, a Tahitian or perhaps an African “savage so-called”).

6. Because the novella manages somehow to eroticize (or perhaps it is always already eroticized?) the myth of the fatherly authority figure who punishes you for your own good (or, in this case, the good of the polity).

7. Because Billy Budd is about what really happens in wars, when parents sacrifice their most beloved "objects," their children, to what they believe is the greater good of their community or nation; Captain Vere is in this sense a true “good father” (never mind the narrator’s hint that he may quite possibly be mad)

8. Because Billy Budd demonstrates conclusively that the destructive power of the devil (Claggart) is as nothing when set beside the destructive power of God and his representatives—those who discipline, punish, and deprive of life in the name of absolute values that must not be questioned.

9. Because it contains this passage about war and religion: “Bluntly put, a chaplain is the minister of the Prince of Peace serving in the host of the God of War—Mars….Why then is he there? Because he indirectly serves the purpose attested by the cannon; because too he lends the sanction of the religion of the meek to that which practically is the abrogation of everything but brute Force” (78).

10. Because, with a heart evenly split between a reluctantly Christian sensibility and a move toward something that it can only denominate pagan (lacking a term for whatever might move beyond this duality), this text re-enacts the obscene mystery of human sacrifice that is codified in the Jesus myth, but in so many other mythic traditions as well—the terrible obsession with turning our propensity to destroy our own likeness in the other into a magical mechanism for transformation or rescue.

11. Because it gives poor Billy a voice at last, in the funny, pathetic, touching coda of a poem, “Billy in the Darbies,” said to be the work of a fellow foretopman possessed of an “artless poetic temperament”—thereby returning the Handsome Sailor to the company of his peers, a sort of posthumous antidote to his fatal apotheosis.

Quotations are from the Signet Classic/New American Library edition of Billy Budd and Other Tales.