MELVILLE’S RAGGED TEXT

 

BILLY BUDD was Herman Melville’s last prose work, though he passed in 1891 and the work wasn’t published until 1924. He spends most of the story relating to his readers the intensely mythopoeic story of the sailor Billy Budd, a good-hearted sailor who undergoes a Christ-like sacrifice. After Billy’s death, Melville then devotes the final three chapters of the book to various aftermaths. Chapter 29 shows the ambiguous fate of Captain Vere, the man who officiated over the sacrifice, Chapter 30 “reprints” a biased journalistic account of the execution, and Chapter 31 has Dead Billy immortalized in a sea-shanty. All three narratives seem devoted to chronicling the various ways factual events may become distorted by later misprision, and the opening paragraph of Chapter 29 seems to be taking the side of immutable fact over “fable:”

The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial. --Herman Melville, BILLY BUDD.

Now, the most amusing thing about this observation is that the novel is related by an unknown narrator as if said narrator were reporting an actual event, when in fact the book is complete fiction. I don’t know if Melville might have used some real incident as a jumping-off point for the events of BILLY BUDD, much as he used the reports of the whale “Mocha Dick” as a template for MOBY DICK. But there is no sense in which BILLY BUDD has “less to do with fable than with fact,” nor is it in any sense “truth uncompromisingly told.” The three aftermath-chapters are meant to lend the novel the appearance of real-world verisimilitude insofar as readers recognize how real-world events can be distorted by later narrators. But even if in the very unlikely event that some reader might credit Melville’s narrative as a factual chronicle, Melville knew that it was nothing of the kind. Thus even the aftermath-chapters are part of the overall “fable-like” design, not least when the final section discussed how sailors prize fragments of the spar from which Billy was hanged, the narrator comparing the fragments to pieces of the True Cross.

Why does Melville create a “fable” and claim that it is “fact?” It may be that literary priorities changed so much by the end of the 19^th century that serious authors usually had to qualify anything that seemed in any way “fabulous,” and that this is why Melville threw in these supposedly verisimilitudinous chapters. There are other appeals to “life the way it really is” throughout the text, but the Christian parable is so overt that one cannot really take seriously any attempts to show reality’s “ragged edges.” Ironically, because Melville passed before he could produce a final draft of BILLY BUDD, the work we read today was compiled from the “ragged edges” of an incomplete draft by Melville’s widow and by literary scholars. Yet, Melville’s “symmetry of form” evidently overshadowed whatever rough elements he might have chosen to smooth over in a final draft. BILLY BUDD, even in its qualifying moments, has nothing whatever to do with “fact,” but to the extent one finds “truth” in the concept of literary symmetry, the novel certainly is “truth uncompromisingly told.”