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 daze is a violent denial of any discrepancy between his beingness and his doing, ends up radically illustrating the really discrepancy he denies. - Barbara Johnson, p. 86   With Barbara Johnsons sensitive Critical Difference we are willy-nilly plunged into deconstruction. At the moment I shall not attempt to explain this radical and highly subversive vital 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, fluid very impressed by Drydens splendidly anti-naïve reading), you mean it is possible to be even more intelligent about Melvilles story? I hark back asking myself the same thing when I first noticed the chapter in Barbara Johnsons book on Billy Budd. But I began to read it leastways and I soon found myself in the throes of a critically varied excitement The first thing that truly grabbed my attention was a cite 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 pass 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, phratry Both invites . . . and subverts? Wow   Needless to say, ALL CLAIMS JOHNSON MAKES FOR HER READING ARE back up BY MELVILLES TEXT. What does Johnson, then, claim? I shall try to be as outline as possible about this splendidly anti-naïve reading. Johnsons first item on the agenda is to put into question Billys innocence. (Melville himself tells us th at innocence was Billys blinder 49.) She asks us to consider Billy a kind of reader (Johnson calls him a genuine reader 85). Billy is a literal reader in that he bes 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).