In “Melville’s Fist”, Barbara Johnson takes Billy Budd and the subsequent body of criticism as a point of departure to make a series of arguments about reading as judgement and the irresolvable ambiguities inherent in language which reading navigates. Removed from plot, the characters appear like Barthes’ wrestlers, a series of ideal types and perfect signs whose physical qualities map their character. Billy appears to be innocence and truth embodied in a good natured soldier, while Claggart’s untrustworthiness is literally written in his descriptive traits (or lack thereof) . The moment of intersection that reverses these roles and leads Johnson to describe the plot as a chiasmus or “cruci-fiction” occurs when Billy is accused of ‘plotting’ mutiny and strikes Claggart, unintentionally killing him. Captain Vere, “the third reader” of the plot, must make a judgement which goes against his sentiment. He feels that Billy is innocent of wrongdoing, but must be put to death in light of recent history and possible futures resounding from his ‘reading’ or judgement of Billy’s act. In the criticism Johnson surveys, this apparent “gap between being and doing” has been read in two main ways: “the ‘testament of acceptance’ school on the one hand and the ‘testament of resistance’ or ‘irony’ school on the other” (2330). Johnson notes the way in which these camps mirror the reading style of Budd and Claggart in the text, either refusing to see any disjunction between signifier and signified, or reading all signs as arbitrary, with an ironic chasm between signifier and signified.

For Johnson, Captain Vere’s mode of reading is distinct in the way that it is determined not by a characteristic attitude towards signs as motivated or arbitrary, but through his understanding and direct reference to social/martial structure, his role in said structure, recent events, and textual allusion. For Johnson, as for Vere, “arbitrariness and motivation, irony and literality, are parameters between which language constantly fluctuates, but only historical context determines which proportion of each is perceptible to each reader” (2332). Vere is not ex-culpated from his role in the plot’s crucible though, bringing together Budd and Claggart before the blow which makes Vere take on his role as “a reader who kills… precisely by means of speaking” (2333), seeking to bring ambiguity out only to reduce it back into a polarized, and deathly definitive, judgement. 

I’m particularly interested in the way in which Johnson plays these polarities of character and critic to bring out the role of history in ‘reading’ (which may take the form of more ideological criticism, legal judgement, “playing the text” à la Barthes, adaptation, etc.) It seems that these histories can be equally personal or social, with great impact on any interpretive act. A reader familiar with Melville’s earlier work Benito Cereno (which also deals with mis-/reading, mutiny and murder through law) will note that Billy Budd opens with the “handsome sailor” archetype introduced anecdotally through an African sailor the narrator saw fifty years prior, before this archetype is transferred to Budd himself. This reader might reasonably take that as a sign to carry a certain reading through the course of the text simply by virtue of foreknowledge and a reasonable invocation in the opening pages.

*spoiler alert for the excellent film Beau Travail (1999) below*

 

Similarly, in reading Johnson this week, I found it hard not to wonder if Claire Denis had read the piece prior to writing her film Beau Travail, which is loosely adapted from Billy Budd. Denis’ film reads the text for ambiguity. Set in a French Foreign Legion outpost in Djibouti and presented with minimal dialogue, the plot is reduced in concrete facts if not in intensity (the Claggart figure does not die when struck, the Billy figure likely survives his punishment). While the film raises queer and post-colonial aspects latent in Melville to the fore, they are presented without marshaling us towards a singular reading. The film achingly depicts these gaps and ambiguities, which Johnson describes in BB as “…that which, within cognition, functions as an act; it is that which, within action, prevents us from ever knowing whether what we hit coincides with what we understand.” (2337)

In the film’s final scene, the Claggart figure, Galoup, has been removed from his post due to his actions, he makes his bed and lays in it, clutching a pistol to his chest, a closeup of his twitching bicep cuts to black as “The Rhythm of the Night” by Corona begins. Galoup dances beautifully, violently and ecstatically in an empty night club, in a sequence that could be a dream, a recollection, or an experience of death. The viewer is left with no conclusive ‘blow’ to close the gaps within cognition as act and cognizance in action, instead we are thrown into the space between as the credits roll.

 

Beau Travail (1999) – Ending

The famous dance scene from Claire Denis’s movie Beau Travail (1999)