budd 5

Billy Budd, Claggart, and SchopenhauerAuthor(s): Olive L. FiteSource: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Dec., 1968), pp. 336-343Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2932562 .

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336 Nineteenth-Century Fiction

ration than selection. Given his conception of the Italian back- ground as a mirror image of Donatello, Hawthorne, to judge from the performance, must have felt that everything Italian was equally relevant when, in fact, only those details that delineate and deepen the mirror image could be relevant. If Hawthorne had been completely successful in realizing this intention, Donatello and back- ground would have been as intimately related as shadow and sub- stance, so that whatever criticism was made of Donatello's moral development on the level of myth would unavoidably be a criticism of Italy's moral development on the level of fact. That this is not the case suggests the nature of Hawthorne's failure. That the intention is nevertheless implicit throughout the novel suggests the nature of Hawthorne's monumental effort.

SIDNEY P. MOSS Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

BILLY BUDD, CLAGGART, AND SCHOPENHAUER

SINCE THE PUBLICATION of the Hayford-Sealts definitive edition of Billy Budd,' with its genetic text and helpful introduction and notes, the amount of criticism of that Melville novella has to some extent fallen off. Those critics who have continued to try to fer- ret out the meaning of the old author's final fiction have been influenced by the discovery of Hayford and Sealts that in the third and final stage of revision of his manuscript, Melville bent his efforts on the full development of the portrait of Captain Vere, rather than on that of Billy Budd or of Claggart. A number of the recent criticisms concentrate upon Vere as the key figure in Mel- ville's dramatic story.

It should be noted, however, that Melville named his short novel Billy Budd, Sailor-not Starry Vere, Captain. One name would have been as acceptable as the other from the standpoint of attractiveness. Furthermore, the story ends with a ballad about the sailor instead of one about the captain whose fatal decision brought about the hanging of the ship's favorite. Both of these facts seem to me to have significance. This is certainly not to deny the importance of the Hayford-Sealts findings. Indeed, what these scholars discovered from their careful study of the revisions in the

1 Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., eds., Billy Budd, Sailor (Chicago, 1962). All page references to the novel are to this edition.



Notes 337

manuscript has brought into question a great deal of previous Billy Budd criticism. I am merely suggesting here that for Melville the meaning in the story was somehow bound up with the personality of the handsome sailor. That Captain Vere was very important to this meaning goes without saying.

Van Wyck Brooks once declared that Melville was always "at the mercy of the last book he ... [had] read." 2 Whether the influence of his reading was that strong or not is somewhat questionable; nevertheless, his reactions (in the form of markings or annotations) to what he read are certainly significant as indica- tions of his attitudes and ideas at the time of his reading. The check list of Melville's reading compiled by Merton M. Sealts, Jr.3 supplies us with the information that Melville was reading Scho- penhauer, among other authors, at the time he was composing Billy Budd. Only a few commentators have seen a possible con- nection between the strangely quiescent Billy in the pre-hanging scenes and the hanging scene itself, and the Schopenhauerian philosophy expressed in The World as Will and Idea.4 Billy's behavior following his unfortunate felling of Claggart does give some evidence that he accepted the death sentence with complete resignation and came to his death with astonishing cheerfulness. It has been noted that possibly Melville was impressed with Scho- penhauer's discourse on the denial of the will to live and in his last story explored Billy's behavior as one more way to face the harsh necessities of a naturalistic universe.5

Walter Sutton has advanced the thesis that Melville, long in- terested in the concept of ultimate nothingness, found in the "concepts of Buddhism, as interpreted by Schopenhauer" a means of viewing the "opposed patterns of rationalization of the human predicament-the rational-scientific and the conventionally re- ligious"-as equally chimeric.6 Some of the problems of Billy

2Emerson and Others (New York, 1927), p. 182. "Melville's Reading: a Check-List of Books Owned and Borrowed," Harvard

Library Bulletin (1948-1950). "Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and

J. Kemp, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (Boston, 1887). My references throughout are to this edition, which appears in all essentials, including pagination, to be exactly like the second edition used by Melville.

6 For a full explanation of the possible influence of Melville's reading of Schopen- hauer see my unpublished dissertation, "The Interpretation of Melville's Billy Budd" (Northwestern University, 1956).

""Melville and the Great God Budd," Prairie Schooner, XXXIV, No. 2 (Summer, 1960), 128-133.




Budd-problems of motivation and problems in consistency-can thus be solved, Sutton maintains.

Schopenhauer, however, denied that he had been influenced in the conception of his philosophy by Buddhism. Indeed, he insists that his work appeared before any full accounts of Buddhism could be found in Europe (II, 371). He does, of course, concede that his teaching is in very close agreement with that religion.

Another critic, Kenneth Ledbetter, also suggests that Melville was influenced by his reading of Schopenhauer and "tried in his final work to accept and to define the dark necessity that he found there." 7 Ledbetter thinks the ambiguity of Billy Budd may be the result of Melville's inability to repudiate completely "the trans- cendental-mad Ahab, Taji, or Pierre" though he recognized without being able to accept it the "inevitability of Schopenhauer's necessity" (p. 134).

It is not my purpose in this paper to submit another interpretation of either Captain Vere's action or the story as a whole. Instead I should like to present other evidence, not mentioned by Sutton or Ledbetter, that Melville was perhaps influenced in his composition of Billy Budd by his reading in Schopenhauer. Specifically, I should like to explore the possibility that the figures of Billy and of Claggart may have grown out of what he found in Schopen- hauer's exposition of the will to live. The contrast between these two is such that they come near at times to being abstractions that seem to act in an allegory to represent good and evil, respectively. In his copy of The World as Will and Idea Melville had marked the following statement (which is embedded in a discussion of the bad and the good man): "For opposites always throw light upon each other, and the day at once reveals both itself and the night, as Spinoza admirably remarks" (I, 474). And again in a succeeding volume he had penciled a mark beside the latter part of the following passage:

But in order to understand problems in their full extent it is sometimes necessary to oppose opposites sharply to each other. In this case, then, let one recall how incredibly great is the inborn difference between man and man, in a moral and in an intellectual regard (III, 414).

7"The Ambiguity of Billy Budd," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, IV, No. 1 (Spring, 1962), 130-134.



Notes 339

First, it is necessary to remind the reader that Schopenhauer based his pessimistic philosophy upon the concept that the prin- cipal essence of life is the will to live-a blind impelling force, which appears in all matter, the persistence toward growth and being, the insistent urge which makes the plant come to flower, fruit, and seed, which, in turn, starts the cycle again. As an abstract the will is free, but its manifestations in the forms of individuals, animals, plants, and the remainder of creation are not free. Rather, they are frozen in a chain of necessity.8 Schopenhauer says,

A man soon accommodates himself to the inevitable-to something that must be; and if he knows that nothing can happen except of necessity, he will see that things cannot be other than they are, and that even the strangest chances in the world are just as much a product of necessity as phenomena which obey well-known rules and turn out exactly in accordance with expectation... all things are inevitable and a product of necessity.9

Furthermore, he claims, "The character is inborn and unalter- able; ..." (III, 67). Though Schopenhauer's system denies the intellect the ability to change the character of human beings, it provides for the possibility of change, or, more accurately, suppression, of the character. Translated into the terms of Christian theology, this would be rebirth or salvation. According to Scho- penhauer's system, the change, which will be complete and therefore comparable to being reborn, comes about by means of knowledge, but knowledge which is not voluntarily sought. This knowledge, or full self-consciousness, a complete understanding of the nature of the will itself and what it wills, is the means of attaining freedom from that will. From such knowledge comes the ability to deny the will to live. Schopenhauer asserts,

... that denial of will also, that entrance into freedom, cannot be forcibly attained to by intention or design, but proceeds from the inmost relation of knowing and volition in the man, and therefore comes suddenly, as if spontaneously from without (I, 523).

He explains that this knowledge of the nature of the will provides a quieter, by which the motives, that ordinarily cause us to act of necessity, are deprived of their effect (I, 522). Thus denial of the

8 In the index of Melville's volumes of The World as Will and Idea there is a check mark by the word "necessity," presumably put there by Melville himself. It bears mute evidence of his continued interest in this subject even in old age.

9 Counsels and Maxims (London, 1890), p. 121.




will to live is brought about. If we are to suppose that Billy Budd became an example of the denial of the will to live, it is important to realize that the knowledge-which Schopenhauer in at least one place equates with faith (I, 526)-that makes the denial possible is not the result of intellect; for Billy is pictured by Melville as an illiterate innocent.

In Billy, then, we see the conduct of the "beautiful soul" (I, 495) described by Schopenhauer. The philosopher states the belief that the good man lives in a world of friendly individuals, whose well-being he regards as his own. This man is close, at least, to the level of self-denial and has reached the understanding that his wel- fare and that of others is one and the same since all are a part of the same unity: the world spirit, nature, the in-itself of the will. Schopenhauer says,

He sees that the distinction between himself and others, which to the bad man is so great a gulf, only belongs to a fleeting illusive phenomenon. He recognizes directly and without reasoning [italics added for emphasis] that the in-itself of his own manifestation is also that of others, the will to live, which constitutes the inner nature of everything and lives in all; ... (I, 481).

All partake of the unity of the whole. To clarify, the philosopher says,

... the will is the in-itself of every phenomenon but ... is free from the forms of the phenomenal, and consequently from multiplicity; a truth, which, with reference to action, I do not know how to express better than by the formula of the Vedas ...: "Tat twam asi! (This thou artl) (I, 483).

Since every individual is a manifestation of the same entity and thus lives in every other manifestation, death, which is certain and never distant, does not disturb the average person, who lives, as Schopenhauer explains, as if he would live forever. In him is a "certainty that springs from his inmost consciousness that he himself is Nature, the world..." (I, 363). Death merely destroys the illusion which separates his consciousness from that of others. This, says the philosopher, is immortality. Melville says of Billy Budd:



Notes 341

... Billy himself freely referred to his death as a thing close at hand; but it was something in the way that children will refer to death in general....

Not that like children Billy was incapable of conceiving what death really is. No, but he was wholly without irrational fear of it, a fear more prevalent in highly civilized communities than those so- called barbarous ones which in all respects stand nearer to un- adulterate Nature (p. 120).

Here, it seems, Melville hints that Billy "understood" his part in the whole of Nature (or, as Schopenhauer would call it, the thing- in-itself). Having denied his will to live, he could see his death as an event of importance only as it served a purpose for the whole community. That Billy consciously understood this transcenden- tal idea seems unlikely from Melville's description of him; however, his acceptance of Captain Vere's explanation of his guilt before the law and of his coming death as matters of course indicate at least unconscious recognition of these concepts.

The evil man, on the other hand, feels himself surrounded by strange and hostile individuals and his only hope is centered in his own good. Schopenhauer describes him thus:

If, now, a man is filled with an exceptionally intense pressure of will, -if with burning eagerness he seeks to accumulate everything to slake the thirst of his egoism, and thus experiences, as he in- evitably must, that all satisfaction is merely apparent, that the attained end never fulfils the promise of the desired object, the final appeasing of the fierce pressure of the will, but that when fulfilled the wish only changes form, ... and indeed that if at last all wishes are exhausted, the pressure of will itself remains without any conscious motive, and makes itself known to him with fearful pain as a feeling of terrible desolation and emptiness; if from all this, which in the case of the ordinary degrees of volition is only felt in a small measure, and only produces the ordinary degree of melancholy, in the case of him who is a manifestation of the will reaching the point of extraordinary wickedness, there necessarily springs an excessive inward misery, an eternal unrest, an incurable pain; he seeks indirectly the alleviation which directly is denied him, -seeks to mitigate his own suffering by the sight of the suffering of others, which at the same time he recognizes as an expression of power. The suffering of others now becomes for him an end in itself, and is a spectacle in which he delights; ... (I, 470).

It is not difficult to recognize here a picture of Claggart, the mas-



342 Nineteenth-Century Fictioni

ter-at-arms whose glance followed Billy with a melancholy expression, and who at such times looked "like the man of sorrows" (p. 88).

In his copy of Schopenhauer Melville marked the following passage:

... because much intense suffering is inseparable from much intense volition, very bad men bear the stamp of inward suffering in the very expression of the countenance;.... From this inward torment, which is absolutely and directly essential to them, there finally proceeds that delight in the suffering of others which does not spring from mere egoism, but is disinterested, and which constitutes wickedness proper, rising to the pitch of cruelty. For this the suffering of others is not a means for the attainment of the ends of its own will, but an end in itself (I, 469).

Schopenhauer goes ahead to explain how envy develops-envy being one of the characteristics Melville attributed to Claggart's relationship with Billy. Melville also wrote that the antipathy of Claggart for Billy was "spontaneous and profound" (74) and apparently without reason. Billy had given no cause for offense. Indeed, Melville states that Claggart might even have loved Billy "but for fate and ban" (88). Schopenhauer-had Claggart been a real person as indeed his model may have been-would have said that the master-at-arms acted from necessity, each act having a cause, which in turn had had a previous cause.

As has been previously noted, only by an involuntary instream- ing of knowledge of the will could an individual free himself from this chain of necessity and deny or suppress the very will to live. This Billy seems to have achieved. Melville shows his readers on the one hand the extreme wickedness of Claggart, who, feeling himself an island of existence, could only "act out to the end of the part allotted" him (78), and on the other the "moral phenomenon" of Billy (78), in whom we see a suppression of the will, a feeling of kinship with all other human beings, in whom Billy senses (if he does not perceive) the essence of his own being.

It thus becomes obvious that the figures of both Billy and Clag- gart could very well have been shaped by what Melville read in Schopenhauer concerning the "beautiful soul" and the evil man. Other factors that unquestionably went into the composition of



Notes 343

Billy Budd have been noted by many critics and commentators: the personality of Jack Chase, to whom the book is dedicated; the relevance of the Somers incident; the figure of Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost; and the author's observation of Claggart's proto- types-Jackson (in Redburn) and Bland (in White-Jacket). These undoubtedly were a part of the melange of ideas for which his reading in Schopenhauer perhaps served as a catalyst.

OLIVE L. FITE

Western Illinois University, Macomb

DICKENS' FLORA FINCHING AND JOYCE'S MOLLY BLOOM

THERE ARE ONLY two references to Dickens in Joyce's published writings. In a review of T. Baron Russell's Borlese and Son Joyce writes that the "landladies" of the novel "may be reminiscent of Dickens." 1 In a postcard to his brother Stanislaus, dated April 25, 1912, he writes: "Today I had to write my English theme-Dick- ens." 2 As yet, Joyce's reading of specific Dickens novels has not been verified, though it is quite obvious from his parody of Dickens in "the birth-of-the-language" section in Episode 14 of Ulysses that he was well aware of Dickens' style. And James Ather- ton detects allusions in Finnegans Wake to the titles of six Dickens novels and to Pip and Estella of Great Expectations.3 Stanislaus Joyce writes of his own reading of David Copperfield that "in the attempt to cast the parts among the people I knew, the one about which it seemed to me there could be no discussion was that of Steerforth for my brother. But my brother never cared for Dick- ens." 4

In recent years critics have been paying increased attention to Dickens as a conscious artist, commenting on the remarkable mo-

1 Originally published in the Daily Express, Dublin, November 19, 1903. Repub- lished in Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, The Critical Writings of James Joyce (1964), pp. 139-140.

2 Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959), p. 331. This postcard is included in Ellmann, Letters of James Joyce (1966), II, 294-295.

3James S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake, A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1959), p. 245. The titles alluded to are Bleak House, Cricket on the Hearth, David Copperfield, Old Curiosity Shop, Our Mutual Friend, and Pickwick Papers.

4Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper, James Joyce's Early Years (1958), p. 61. He repeats the point on p. 79: "(My) questionable taste included Scott and Dickens, whom my brother could not stand."



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