So Billy goes to his Reward by answering their brute sentences of doom in blessing them all - echoing Rilke’s Duino Elegies in which a released Arrow chooses Life over Death - and finds Peace.Īnd Billy Budd is just such an aporetic work for which the only solution is in blood sacrifice.īecause the staged shifting of guilt will wreak total Misrule.Īnd then - the ultimate space of Final and Irrevocable Apocalyptic Divine Justice -įor the Daemon, too, is liquidated in the end.īut we readers, renewed by Melville’s massive Catharsis, are FREED. The inevitable storm of justice in action.įor as in a bloody Jacobean tragedy, when justice is done, ALL the actors are cut down. One selected raw-spirited Ancient Mariner would be dressed in a robe, crown and mitre, and paraded about the deck of the Man ‘o War, as the young bucks partied with their generous tots of rum and perhaps a pipe and fiddle tune: a traditional seagoing perk on the crossing.īut the Lord of Misrule - like his inspiration, Neptune, god of the sea - has a highly hazardous side, when mankind’s good and evil sides clash in a fictional typhoon.Īnd when Billy Budd crosses Claggart, King Neptune lets loose with a storm composed of all the furies of Hell. Now, the Lord of Misrule was a theatrical custom created by the old salts in bygone days, on crossing the Equator…. and ends in appropriate tragedy.įor a nautical Daemon is also a Lord of Misrule. Neither man is the picture of a stalwart seaman - they are both Odd Men Out.įor just so the clash of Good and Evil Daemons within us evokes a veritable supernatural storm of Misrule.
On one side, the dumbstruck adherence to painful honesty and virtue in young Billy, whom the captain of this 18th century Royal Navy Man ‘o War calls “the Angel of God,” and on the other, the slimy and envious maleficence of Master of Arms Claggart. Such is the title of a book on the enormous influence of an ancient Gnostic tenet on American writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by our preeminent critic, Harold Bloom.Īnd two faces of the Daemon rule this short but unfinished masterpiece by Melville. And, with Edgar Allan Poe, to Descend into the Maelstrom. To read Melville, as the Buddha once said, is to finally Join the Stream.
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