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 governing body 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 Johnsons splendid Critical Difference we are willy-nilly plunged into deconstruction. At the moment I shall not attempt to excuse this radical and highly subversive critical mode, except to say that what you are close to to see is an example of it. At the moment you may well look (being, as you undoubtedly are, still very impressed by Drydens splendidly anti-naïve exhibiting), you mean it is possible to be even more intelligent about Melvilles news report? I remember asking myself the same thing when I first noticed the chapter in Barbara Johnsons book on Billy Budd. But I beg an 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 stimulus Johnson makes apropos of the following quotation from Melvilles 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 Johnson 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 thats deconstruction, folks Both invites . . . and subverts? wow   Needless to say, ALL CLAIMS JOHNSON MAKES FOR HER READING ARE SUPPORTED BY MELVILLES TEXT. What does Johnson, then, claim? I shall try to be as brief as possible about this splendidly anti-naïve reading. Johnsons first item on the agenda is to put into question Billys innocence. (Melville hims elf tells us that innocence was Billys blinder 49.) She asks us to consider Billy a miscellanea 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 isnt, of course).