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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.

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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.

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