Bringing out the Beast in Melville's Billy Budd: The Dialogue of Darwinian and "Holy" Lexicons on Board the Bellipotent.(Herman Melville)

Since its posthumous publication in 1924 by Raymond Weaver, Melville's last novel has been read as a Manichean portrayal of the conflict between good and evil; an illustration of the dialectical materialism of Marxism; a testament to Melville's "acceptance" of fate or moral relativism; a modern allegory of the Crucifixion; a deconstructive "allegory of reading"; and a psychodrama about repressed homosexual desire. (1) Critics have also begun to investigate Billy Budd vis-a-vis the historical time frame of its composition, the late nineteenth century. (2) Although several have considered the evolutionary aspects of antebellum works such as Moby-Dick (1851) and "The Encantadas" (1856), (3) only one scholar, Bert Bender, has considered the significance of Darwinian discourse in Billy Budd--Melville's only prose work written in the midst of the era Melville referred to in his long poem Clarel (1876) as "Darwin's year." (4) In Sea-Brothers Bender notes that Claggart is compared to several animals and that the new Darwinian vision of "nature at war with herself in evolutionary time" leads Melville to conclude that "we had come to train our 'murderous guns inboard'" (66). Yet more careful investigation of Melville's engagement with Darwinian discourse in Bill), Budd is necessary.

As difficult as it may be to distinguish "the Darwinian" in this novel from the ideas of other evolutionary thinkers, or even the suggestions of Puritan authors such as John Winthrop that humans were in many senses no better than animals without the restraints of civil authority, (5) I argue, nevertheless, that Melville's Billy Budd--much more so than Moby-Dick or "The Encantadas"--is indeed implicitly engaged with a Darwinian discourse that threatened the formerly exceptional status of the human will at the end of the nineteenth century. This discourse manifests itself not in overt exposition, but instead as one of the novel's implicit "languages," in the Bakhtinian sense of the word. As Gillian Beer has observed, the valence of a number of words "shifted" after Darwin's Origin of Species and Descent of Man, "words like development, generation, variety, inheritance, kinship, transformation" (13). Beyond the striking prevalence of such "weighted" words in Billy Budd, though, the novel is more generally preoccupied with the philosophical implications of a Darwinian perspective of human beings; in particular, Billy Budd broods over the shrinking possibility of free will in the apparently deterministic universe unveiled by Darwin.

I discern two conflicting "languages" in Billy Budd: that of Darwinian discourse, and that of antebellum, transcendent views of the human mind. The language of Billy Budd oscillates between a Darwinian, scientific vocabulary and a transcendent one; and the novel's consequent shifts of tone, language, and perspective betray anxiety about the tension between two conflicting worldviews. In Billy Budd, this linguistic and perspectival restlessness is transferred to readers, who hover between irreconcilable views of, for example, an animalistic and an angelic Billy Budd; and a scorpion-like, instinctive Claggart and a Satanic Claggart whose destructive purpose is deliberate, willful, and patently evil. The perspectival anxiety of Billy Budd concerns the degree to which human beings still can possess and exert free will in an age in which the "lexicon of science" (BB 125) was categorizing them as animals. In conflict with this perspective is an older one that preserves man's angelic "descent" and privileges human beings with a transcendent "force lodged in will power" (BB 124).

With Billy's final, seemingly miraculous act of will power--his defiance of his autonomic reflexes themselves--Melville preserves the possibility of transcendent free will in a looming, deterministic universe where people seem guided less by "the force lodged in will power" (124) than by the "brute Force" (122) of their animal instincts. Yet the dialogue between the novel's two major lexicons, like that of the surgeon and the purser in the twenty-sixth chapter, ultimately remains unfinished, and readers are left suspended between Darwinian and transcendent languages for understanding the minds and actions of Billy Budd and Claggart. Discerning the dialogue between those languages in Billy Budd requires a brief foray into late-nineteenth-century cultural discourse.

In writings after 1855, we observe the radical de-emphasis of the importance of the will, and the corresponding increased understanding of and interest in reflex and instinct. In Principles of Psychology (1855), Spencer demoted the seemingly transcendent human "will" to just another function of the environment. For him, mental categories such as "Reason ... Memory, Imagination, Will, etc." are nothing but "particular ways in which the adjustment of inner to outer relations is achieved" (389). Spencer proudly admitted that his biologized view of the human mind was "at variance with the current tenets respecting the freedom of the Will" (500) and opposed a conception of the will as an independent, active, and self-determined "power." He compares the seemingly "free" motions of will to those of the planets: both, for Spencer, are illusions created by the inability of viewers to discern the complex interaction of forces that determine them (503). Thirteen years later, another landmark in thought about the human mind, Alexander Bain's Mental Science; A Compendium of Psychology, and the History of Philosophy (1868), forwarded a similarly deterministic account of the will that consciously sought to supersede older, transcendent conceptions. Like Spencer, Bain asserted that the will is continuous with the laws governing the physical world. Like Spencer, too, he likened the movements of the will to those of planetary bodies that seem to move on their own power, but ...