Free Billy Budd Essays: A Deconstructive Reading :: Billy Budd Essays

A Deconstructive Reading of Billy Budd Billy, who cannot understand ambiguity, who takes pleasant words at face value and then obliterates Claggart for suggesting that one could do otherwise, whose sudden blow is a violent denial of any discrepancy between his being and his doing, ends up radically illustrating the very discrepancy he denies. - Barbara Johnson, p. 86 With Barbara Johnson's splendid Critical Difference we are willy-nilly plunged into deconstruction. At the moment I shall not attempt to explain this radical and highly subversive critical mode, except to say that what you are about to see is an example of it. At the moment you may well ask (being, as you undoubtedly are, still very impressed by Dryden's splendidly anti-naïve reading), "you mean it is possible to be even more intelligent about Melville's story?" I remember asking myself the same thing when I first noticed the chapter in Barbara Johnson's book on Billy Budd. But I began to read it anyway and I soon found myself in the throes of a critically different excitement! The first thing that truly grabbed my attention was a remark Johnson makes apropos of the following quotation from Melville's story: "innocence and guilt personified by Claggart and Budd in effect changed places" (62). The narrator says this apropos of Billy having killed Claggart. This is what Barbara Jo hnson says apropos of the passage in question: "Interestingly enough, Melville both invites an allegorical reading and subverts the very terms of its consistency when he writes of the murder: 'Innocence and guilt . . .'" (83). Now that's deconstruction, folks! "Both invites . . . and subverts"? Wow! Needless to say, ALL CLAIMS JOHNSON MAKES FOR HER READING ARE SUPPORTED BY MELVILLE'S TEXT. What does Johnson, then, claim? I shall try to be as brief as possible about this splendidly anti-naïve reading. Johnson's first item on the agenda is to put into question Billy's innocence. (Melville himself tells us that "innocence was [Billy's] blinder" 49.) She asks us to consider Billy a kind of "reader" (Johnson calls him a "literal reader" 85). Billy is a "literal reader" in that he seems to take things at face value. He seems to believe, in fact, that things are what they seem to be. If Claggart appears to be nice to Billy (and he does) then Claggart must be nice to Billy (he isn't, of course).