Billy Budd

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Manuscript page by Billy Budd with pencil annotations, 1888

Billy Budd is the last prose work by the American writer Herman Melville (1819–1891). Written between 1886 and 1891, the Seenovelle, which in terms of the literary genre is formally somewhere between narrative and novel , remained lost for a long time and was only rediscovered and published in 1924. The manuscript was largely, but not conclusively, completed by the author before his death and raises a number of problems that make understanding and also the interpretation of Melville's prose form difficult.

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The action takes place on the English warship Indomitable in 1797, at the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars . The twenty-year-old sailor Billy Budd is from the merchant vessel Rights-of-Man (named after Thomas Paine's pamphlet, dt. " The rights of man "), where he was honored as "beautiful sailor" by the crew, to serve on the warship Bellipotent has been forcibly recruited and is a top guest there .

Here, too, he is immediately met with respect and a lot of sympathy, not least because of his athletic build and his childlike beauty, although he has a speech impediment and is a foundling and illiterate . It mainly attracts the attention of boatswain John Claggart.

Claggart is friendly and courteous towards Billy Budd, but tries to lure him into a trap by trying to incite him through an accomplice to participate in an alleged mutiny of the seamen forcibly recruited on the ship . When Billy doesn't respond, Claggart turns directly to Captain Vere and accuses Billy of inciting mutiny . Vere, who is convinced of Billy's innocence, arranges a comparison of the two in his cabin . When Billy hears the accusation from Claggart's lips, he is completely disturbed; his speech impediment prevents him from answering, but he knocks Claggart down with his right fist, and the ship's doctor who is called in declares that Claggart is dead.

Captain Vere sees Claggart's death as a divine judgment, but since Billy Budd has risen up against a superior, he has to bring him to a military court because of the law . He warns the members of the court not to let natural feelings guide their decision, and so Billy Budd is sentenced to death. Claggart is buried with full honors, the judgment on Billy is carried out at dawn by the rope in the presence of the entire crew. Before his death, Billy calls out: "God bless Captain Vere" , and the sailors join in the call, although there is subsequently a grumble against the captain.

A short time later, Captain Vere is fatally injured in a skirmish with the French warship Athée (atheist), while dying he speaks the words Billy Budd, Billy Budd . A few weeks later a newspaper report appears distorting the facts. The novel ends with a sentimental sailor ballad Billy Budd in the Darbies, which was written shortly afterwards .

Origin and publication history

The last known photo of Herman Melville from 1885, he worked on Billy Budd from around 1886 until his death in 1891

After Herman Melville retired from his job as a customs inspector in late 1885, he began working on his last important work, Billy Budd . By this time he had written his last prose works three decades earlier and his name had largely been forgotten. Apparently Melville first worked on a poem called Billy in the Darbies, about an elderly seaman convicted of mutiny, from which the poem at the end of the book was later made. Starting with Billy in the Darbies , he developed the idea further. The Melville writing process was arduous and lengthy, as indicated by the long working hours and the manuscript, which has been annotated and improved. Before his death in 1891, Melville was busy refining the work.

After Melville's death, his widow Elizabeth Knapp Shaw (1822–1906) tried to prepare the manuscript for publication, but could not recognize her husband's intentions in key places. The question of what the book should be called was also unanswered. The manuscript fell into oblivion until Melville's first biographer Raymond M. Weaver (1888–1948) found it in his bequest in 1919. Weaver published his adaptation of the manuscript in 1924, after which the work was received by many critics as a masterpiece. However, according to the current state of research, some errors crept into Weaver's arrangement due to misinterpretations and incorrect readings of Melville's complicated handwriting. In 1962, Melville researchers Harrison Hayford and Merton Sealts Jr. published a new transcription that is more careful and correct compared to Weaver's editing. A text edition, improved again on the basis of Hayford and Sealts, was published in 2017 by G. Thomas Tanselle at Northwestern University Press .

Stylistic and structural features of the novel

Billy Budd is - not only for the modern reader who is alien to the terminology of the sailors on a sailing ship - rather difficult to read.

The novella , which is about a hundred pages long and tends towards novels, is divided into thirty chapters, the content of which is in most cases self-contained. Some chapters contain historical digressions - especially on Nelson and mutinies -, other philosophical or psychological reflections, or those in which the narrator tries to comment on the characters, their appearance, their life stories and their motives for action. As a result, the plot is repeatedly interrupted, the presentation remains static, and the reader is not allowed a continuous flow of narrative, he has to familiarize himself with each chapter anew.

The language is compact like in Melville's late poems and contains grammatical peculiarities as well as a multitude of expressions that are difficult to understand or that seem ambiguous or that were archaic at the time of the author. It is also overloaded with metaphors and symbolic references, some of which are difficult to interpret , ambiguities, ironic allusions and references to historical parallels, especially to the Old Testament, Greek mythology and English literature of the 17th century.

More than in other works of the time or even Melville's, the narrator pushes himself between what is depicted and the reader, whom he pretends to have to interpret the events and whom he often confuses.

The novel stands between authorial and personal narrative perspective . Time is narrator omniscient, sometimes he pretends to only uncertain rumors circulate ; He has to leave out crucial things because he supposedly lacks information about them. Incidentally, he claims that this story , which he (probably with reference to the distorting newspaper report) also called Inside Narrative , consists of facts and is not fable or fiction.

The main characters

Charles Nolte as Billy Budd in the 1951 Broadway production

The novel is a love triangle between three contrasting, partly allegorically drawn characters: Billy Budd, Claggart and Captain Vere.

  • The foundling Billy Budd ( bud means bud) with sky-blue eyes ( welkin-eyed ) is also called Baby Budd or the pretty sailor by the sailor . The author calls him a child man , but also compares him to Apollo and Achilles . He associates it with animals, e.g. B. a songbird, horse and dog, at the same time he is an upright barbarian , so the traditional noble savage " older than the city of Cain and the urbanized man." He is obviously the embodiment of natural beauty and innocence, in his ignorance at the mercy of machinations a world corrupted by the fall of man.
At the end of the novel he is transfigured as a figure of Christ as if in an apotheosis , because his body, drawn up on the gallows, is illuminated by the rising sun through clouds of veil " like the Lamb of God" . For the doctor it is a miracle that he dies without the usual brief agony, and the sailors take splinters from the gallows like relics from the cross of Christ.
  • Claggart (the name arouses several negative associations ) calls Billy Budd a mantrap , i.e. a male trap or a bait to tempt a man. Claggart comes from the rumor of the prison environment, he is the representative of a depraved world and the embodiment of evil in nature and thus the opposite pole to Billy Budd. His literary precursors are Iago in Shakespeare's Othello and above all Satan in Milton's epic The Lost Paradise . Because Milton's Satan envies the beautiful world created by God, the envy of Billy's beauty and innocence is given as the mainspring for Claggart's actions ( envy from Latin invidia , one of the seven deadly sins ). Killed by Billy, he lies on the ground like a snake. On the other hand, the narrator suggests (especially in Chapter 10) that Claggart is sexually aroused by Billy's appearance, so he could also be a victim of the unsuspecting Billy Budd.

While Claggart and Billy Budd use a deliberate black and white contrast, Captain Vere is drawn gray on gray, if not contradictingly.

The name arouses associations with Latin verus = true, vir = man and English to revere = to worship, but maybe also to veer = to turn, to turn.

The bachelor Vere comes from the nobility, is a highly educated humanist and avid reader of Montaigne , at the same time a dreamer ( Starry Vere ) and loner, but an unmistakable connoisseur of people (he sees through Billy Budd and Claggart right away), for Billy he is a father figure, and otherwise he is associated with Abraham and God the Father. But his behavior raises questions that lead to very different interpretations of the novel.

In his pertinent book Melville: His World and Work (2005), A. Delbanco emphasizes that under the Mutiny Act and in the face of two mutinies shortly before, Vere had to condemn Billy in the interests of a promising war against the revolution, just as Vere had before Court-martial executes.

Most interpreters disagree: the doctor already points out that a conviction on the spot contradicts the Mutiny Act, and he and the rest of the jury are dismayed and show incomprehension about the conviction and Vere's arguments. The modern critics point out weaknesses in Vere's character: he is too much a book scholar and has no contact with the team. Frightened by previous mutinies, he fails in the moment of crisis. The narrator avoids any direct comment. But at the beginning of the novel he portrays Nelson as the ideal of a captain and emphasizes how the young Nelson was assigned as captain to a team incited to mutiny and averted the mutiny through his charisma . That could also be an indirect criticism of captain Vere. Veres' hasty approach also seems strange to the reader, especially the fact that the sailors are kept secret about Claggart's machinations and the circumstances surrounding his death.

Some critics also believe that they recognize that the homoerotic aura that Billy Budd unconsciously exudes affects the captain and influences his decisions. This assumption is also fed by the fact that a key scene of the event, the conversation between the captain and Billy Budd after Claggart's death, is omitted by the narrator.

The Dansker , an old Dane who sees through everything and seems to know, plays a peculiar role , but remains silent or only makes oracular hints, like the narrator sometimes, as whose mouthpiece he is seen by some critics.

Attempts at interpretation

The interpretations of the novel differ. One has seen in Billy Budd Adam before the fall of man or a figure of Christ, in Claggart the Satan and Captain Vere God the Father and thus wanted to recognize in the novel a turn of the late Melville to Christianity. Accordingly, Melville emphasized the absolute necessity of order and discipline, embodied by Captain Vere, at a time when the destructive forces of the revolution had to be fought. The allegorical character of the characters is emphasized as well as the pessimistic worldview of the late Melville and a shift towards a more conservative attitude.

Melville's pessimism can also be understood to the effect that the world is deeply degenerated through the Fall - and that means for Melville the destruction of natural order and harmony - in an advancing civilizational process and only through rigorous order in a rigid hierarchy , unnatural conventions and military discipline is held together. The warship Bellipotent , on which Billy Budd was forcibly recruited from the human rights ship , is a symbol of the destructive urge of humanity. In such a world dominated by evil passions and war, Billy Budd can still play the angel of peace on a merchant ship, but on the warship he is a disruptive factor, an intruder from another, better world and thus becomes a temptation. Like Moby Dick , he can spontaneously destroy an attacker in times of distress, but he must then inevitably become a victim of this order based on violence and corruption. When Billy struck down his slanderer, Vere exclaims, “Slain by an angel of God. But the angel has to hang. "

In the various adaptations of the novel, Melville has increasingly focused on captain Vere, and perhaps he is the actual tragic character of the novel, because Vere believes that against his better instincts he has to judge Billy. Towards the end, he seems disturbed and like a person who is broken by his moral conflict between human sympathy and the requirements of military discipline.

The end of the novel belongs to the common sailors. They submit to order, but in the memory of Billy Budd the notion that there could be better in the world lives on in them.

Edits

Movie

In 1962, directed by Peter Ustinov, the film The Damned of the Seas appeared , in which he himself appeared as Captain DeVere at the side of Terence Stamp as Billy Budd and Robert Ryan as Claggett. Another, albeit very free, film adaptation was shot in 1999 by Claire Denis as The Foreign Legionnaire ("Beau travail").

Opera

theatre

  • Louis O. Coxe, Richard Chapman: Billy Budd. Based on a novel of Herman Melville (written 1949, then performed on Broadway). Heinemann Books, London 1981, ISBN 0-435-22151-5 .

expenditure

  • Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) . Edited and annotated by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1962, ISBN 0-226-32132-0 .
  • Billy Budd, Sailor . Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York 1998, ISBN 0-19-283903-9 .

There are several translations into German:

  • Billy Budd . German by Peter Gan (di Richard Möring). Goverts, Hamburg 1938. New editions a. a: Reclam, Stuttgart 1963, ISBN 978-3-15-007707-8 and Edition Maritim, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-89225-464-8 .
  • Billy Budd . German by Ilse Hecht. In: Herman Melville: Vortoppmann Billy Budd and other stories . Dieterich, Leipzig 1956.
  • Billy Budd . German by Richard Mummendey . In: Herman Melville: Redburn, Israel Potter and all stories . Winkler, Munich 1967.
  • Billy Budd, sailor . German by Michael Walter and Daniel Göske. In: Herman Melville: Billy Budd - The Great Stories . Hanser, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-446-23290-7

Secondary literature

  • Robert Milder (Ed.): Critical Essays on Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor . GK Hall, Boston 1989, ISBN 978-0-8161-8889-5 .
  • Hershel Parker: Reading Billy Budd . Northwestern University Press, Evanston IL 1991, ISBN 978-0-8101-0962-9 .
    • German edition: Read & understand Billy Budd . Düsseldorf University Press, Düsseldorf 2010, ISBN 978-3-940671-60-8 .
  • William T. Stafford (Ed.): Melville's Billy Budd and the Critics . Wadsworth, Belmont CA 1961.
  • Howard P. Vincent (Ed.): Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Billy Budd: A Collection of Critical Essays . Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs NJ 1971.
  • Russell Weaver: The Moral World of Billy Budd . Peter Lang, New York and Bern 2014, ISBN 978-1-4331-2353-5 .
  • Donald Yannella (Ed.): New Essays on Billy Budd . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2002, ISBN 978-0-511-03939-3 .

Web links

Wikisource: Billy Budd  - Sources and full texts (English)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On the problem of the genre allocation of this prose work, Melville's Klaus Ensslen: Benito Cereno . In: Karl Heinz Göller et al. (Ed.): The American Short Story . August Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1972, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , pp. 103-117, ISBN 3-513-02212-3 , pp. 103f.
  2. ↑ Herman Melville: Billy Budd, Sailor . University of Chicago Press, 1962, ISBN 978-0-226-32132-5 ( google.de [accessed March 18, 2020]).
  3. ^ Hershel Parker: "Billy Budd, Foretopman" and the Dynamics of Canonization. "College Literature Journal, Winter 1990.