Abstracts

MLA 2011 | Los Angeles, California

“Billy in the Darbies . . . and on Page, Stage, and Screen:Adaptations of Melville’s Billy Budd”

Co-Chair: Joseph FruscioneGeorgetown University, George Washington University

O rganized and moderated by Joseph Fruscione (Melville Society) andJeff Dailey (Lyrica Society), this collaborative panel brought togetherfive scholar/teachers to discuss adaptations of Billy Budd through

short, focused papers that sparked a lively discussion. This was the MelvilleSociety’s first collaborative panel, one we hope will set the tone for future workwith other author societies and organizations.

In recognition of the fiftieth anniversary of Benjamin Britten’s opera,this roundtable examined musical, cinematic, and aural adaptations of BillyBudd. Two panelists discussed the Britten opera, two the Claire Denis filmBeau Travail, and one a radio version presented by Focus on the Family. Thepanelists moved beyond “fidelity criticism” to examine creative responses toMelville’s novella.

Britten’s “Haunting Melodies”:The Music of Billy Budd as the Universal Language of Human EmotionMarcia GreenSan Francisco State University

Benjamin Britten’s musical-literary theme—the indictment of humanfolly as revealed in the tragedy and wastage of war and in the corruptionof human innocence—is achieved through his extraordinarily wide

orchestral harmonic range. Utilizing a structure that is taut and tense andthemes that are often similar in melodic outline, Britten stresses the obsessivenature of the piece. His opera is rich in variety and polytonality. He usesmusical keys as literary leitmotifs, such as B-flat major in the Prologue and

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Claggart, to convey their conflict. Britten evokes an emotional dimension thatcould not be constructed by words alone and produces an unnerving musicaltension.

“A blur’s in my eyes; it is dreaming that I am”:Revisioning Melville’s Billy Budd from Text to Opera (to Film)Geoffrey GreenSan Francisco State University

Opera and fiction each achieve distinctive artistic statements withintheir individual palettes of expressivity and inherent qualities of rep-resentation. Melville’s symbolic, heavily allusive narrative and its se-

quential unfolding may be compared with the highly psychoanalytic flashbackthat constitutes the frame tale of Britten’s opera. Melville’s text challenges us tointerpret its enigmatic events from some meaningful and ethical perspective.Britten’s reframing of the narrative as the recollections of an elderly CaptainVere displays the profound word-music interactions best achieved by opera,and his Epilogue may compete with the “Billy in the Darbies” conclusion tothe text. Britten’s use of tonality and dissonance enriches our appreciation ofthe ambiguities at the heart of Melville’s narrative.

Weaponizing Billy BuddTony McGowanWest Point

Iexamine the adaptation of Billy Budd that may have reached more earsthan any other. In 2002, Focus on the Family produced Billy Budd, Sailor:A Classic Tale of Innocence Betrayed on the High Seas. Broadcast worldwide

on evangelical radio, this audio drama potentially reached more than 200million people. Representing duty, ignorance, and violence sanctified by God,the handsome sailor directs the Indomitable’s (nee Bellipotent’s) guns againstthe French, personifying military preemption. Where such critics as BarbaraJohnson find a “cruxi-fiction”—Billy’s innocence crosses to guilt by way ofhis fist, while Claggart’s guilt passes to innocence by way of his murder—thisradio adaptation presents instead a simple “collision between moral opposites,”concomitant with the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq. The ambiguities of “Melville’sfist” are converted to the aggressivity of Constantine’s sword, and certain keyambiguities (namely the Vere-Billy conversation on the eve of Billy’s execution)are scripted and included in this radio adaptation. Audio evidence from the

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drama as well as recent criticism on the militarization of American languagecan help unload this weaponized version of Billy Budd.

Redemption Song:Claggart’s Tragedy and Moral Resurrection in Claire Denis’s Beau TravailRichard Middleton-KaplanHarper College

O f all the adaptations that have transformed Billy Budd for page, stage,and screen, surely Claire Denis’s 1999 film Beau Travail ranks amongthe most bizarre. In this adaptation, Billy becomes a new recruit

serving in the French Foreign Legion in the gravelly desert of Djibouti, whileClaggart becomes the unit’s jealous Chief Master. Denis centers a tale ofredemption through remorse around her version of Claggart. In an attemptto avoid lapsing into what film adaptation theorists call “fidelity criticism,”whereby a critic attacks a film for not being sufficiently faithful to its lit-erary predecessor, I assess Denis’s film as a work of art on its own terms.This requires acknowledging that Denis has transformed Melville’s critiqueof military justice and tale of innocence destroyed into a tale of resurrectionand redemption. Crucially, the redemption here is not Billy’s, but Claggart’s.Rooted in a personal connection she feels to the Claggart figure, Denis’sadaptation emphasizes guilt expiated through reflection and repentance, inpart through its shift to a first-person point-of-view.

“I thought about the end”:Rewriting Melville in Denis’s Beau TravailElizabeth AlsopCUNY Graduate Center

C laire Denis’s version of Billy Budd, the 1999 film Beau Travail, endsambiguously, with neither the Billy nor the Claggart figure defini-tively dead. I explore the possibilities engendered by Denis’s diver-

gence from Melville’s text. Through a close analysis of the final sequences, Iargue that Beau Travail shifts attention away from the moral dilemmas raisedby Billy’s crime and punishment and toward other, more submerged tensionswithin the story. In particular, Denis succeeds in dramatizing the conflictbetween desire and its obstruction immanent in Melville’s text, through herrendering of the Claggart character, Galoup. The result is a rewriting of BillyBudd that is less interested in ethical or epistemological questions than inpsychological and phenomenological ones. Both text and adaptation reveal a

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curiosity about the phenomenology of desire. By departing from Melville’s text,Denis is able to offer a profound commentary on it, in part through a kineticrepresentation of the tension between duty and autonomy, which complementsMelville’s rhetorical representation of similar tensions.

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