Skip to main content

Billy Budd



I'm still working my way through Leon Chai's book on the relationship between Europe's Romantics and America's mid-19th century Renaissance.

I'll say something today about Chai's take on Melville's novella, Billy Budd, Sailor.

We begin, as usual in this book, with the relevant European, Balzac. Chai writes about Balzac's attachment to a particular understanding of the "great chain of being," and of how it implied that matter is continuous with spirit, animal nature continuous with that of humans, etc.

In this connection, Chai alludes to Balzac's tale, Une passion dans le désert, published more than half a century before Billy Budd.  the passion between panther and soldier is plausible on the assumption that there is a smooth continuum, no sudden break separating soul-endowed humans from organic-but-mechanistic felines.

Related: in Seraphita Balzac writes of the body and the spirit in these terms, "The body has redemanded the flame which consumes it, and the flame has seized its prey again." The mixed nature of human beings due to our position on the Great Chain, is an inherently troubling one, in which part of our nature is always in danger of consumption by the other.

This same broad way of understanding the place and nature of humans in the cosmos, Chai sees in Billy Budd.  Consider a brief bit of description. The skeleton in Billy's cheekbone "at the point of its angle was just beginning delicately to be defined under the warm-tinted skin. In fervid hearts self-contained, some brief experiences devour our human tissue as secret fire in a ship's hold consumes cotton in the bale."

Chai juxtaposes those two passages. He also looks to the three central characters in Billy Budd, and sees in each a different link, so that the chain of which humanity itself is a link is reproduced within humanity in different types, and each man: Budd, Vere, Claggart, represents one of those, respectively moving from the most angelic to the most bestial.

----------------

But enough about Chai. That is Benjamin Britten's photo above this entry, because when I think of Billy Budd I can't help but think of the Benjamin Britten opera, with the following amusing bit of (sung) dialog:

"Can you read?"
"No, but I can sing."
"Never mind the singing...."

And I've decided to close this superficial blog entry by linking you to a YouTube clip of ten minutes from that work.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
9 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
17 comments
Read more