One Hundred Years, and Counting: Billy Budd

Abstract: A brief (and therefore inadequate) summing of the first fifty years of the critical reception, editing, and adaptation of the posthumously published novella Billy Budd introduces certain critical challenges still unmet regarding the radical instability of Melville’s “inside narrative” and his narrator who never gets fully “inside” his characters. In giving readers access to Melville’s manuscript revisions, the Melville Electronic Library’s 2019 fluid-text edition of Billy Budd offers a platform for studying the roll of revision in the development of Melville’s aesthetics of incompletion. A cluster of revisions featuring Liverpool offers evidence of the narrator’s struggle to get “inside.” Further critical problems are articulated in two final “user cases”: 1) Did Melville “invent” the Handsome Sailor trope? and 2) Should a scholarly edition like MEL invite artists to contribute new (and long overdue) adaptations of Billy Budd in play, film, and opera?