Using Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, to discuss the nature of the reader’s interpretation, Barbara Johnson starts off her discussion with the characterization of the protagonist, Billy Budd, and antagonist, John Claggart. Billy Budd is the picture of morality; he sees the world as wonderful and straightforward, blocking out anything he witnesses as alluding to the opposite. Claggart, Budd’s foil, is endlessly suspicious, seeing irony and evil in everything. Personifying the two main interpretations of the novel, the first, the perception of Budd’s execution as Melville’s “acceptance” of tragedy, the second, the perception of the execution as an ironic ending alluding to the author’s critique of society, these two characters are only the beginning of a wide range of binaries inside and surrounding the text.

However, Johnson shows us that Melville’s work questions more than the situation it poses when she introduces Captain Vere, the decision-maker in the protagonist’s execution. Yes, Billy has struck Claggart and killed him, but only because he is wrongly accused of conspiracy, of being the opposite of his loyal, straightforward self. Stuck in a dilemma, where he must choose between what feels morally proper (letting Billy go), and lawfully proper (executing Billy, because he has just murdered someone), Vere, Johnson states, is forced to judge, and turn what is quite an ambiguous situation into one of binaries. How does Vere go about this?

Unlike Budd and Claggart, who focus on the intentions of others and the hidden meaning within the world, Vere focuses on what is external in order to back up his decision. The captain is not so concerned with the “why”, but more concerned with how what has happened will affect society. Johnson states that “For Vere, the functions and meanings of signs are neither transparent nor reversible but fixed by socially determined convention“(2270). To determine what this convention is, the captain turns to sacred texts, such as the Bible, and history, eventually coming to the verdict that Budd must be executed.

Johnson shows us that the decision-making process of Vere teaches us something. Although letting Budd go might be morally correct, because the eponymous character has no evil intentions, this does not matter because it is not correct within the society that the novel is situated in. Vere looks towards sacred texts and history not because they offer inherent wisdom, but because they are important in determining the moral culture of the society within which he must make his decision. Vere believes in and understands a concept that the other characters in the novel do not; we should not look towards any sort of inherent standard, but only to that of the current playing field.

Johnson ends her piece with the idea that judgement is in itself a political act, that it cannot be neutral because it naturally references the beliefs of society (usually being history), and drags out the relevant facts of the case that match those beliefs, rather than the full story. However, she only touches upon the idea of leaving a case in ambiguity before her conclusion. Is this the key to objectivity, though?

If judgement is in itself a nonobjective act, what if we refused to judge? This question is similar to Nietzsche’s in On Truth and Lying, in which he questions language and its limitations. In language, we seek to classify and rigidly define aspects of our world so we can control and better understand them. Vere does something similar in attempting to reduce the ambiguity of Budd’s crime by placing it against societal rules and standards. In both cases, we attempt to reduce the meaning of a concept so that we can push it aside and move on. However, if objectivity is what we want, then why decide at all?

On the other hand, is it possible to even live in this much ambiguity? Taking again the example of the plot of Billy Budd, how would Vere do this? Yes, the captain could throw his hands up in the air and say “I don’t know, I have no verdict”, but in doing this, in refusing to make a decision, he ends up making one anyway by keeping Budd from punishment. Interestingly, I think the main problem between binaries and ambiguity is that we can never have just one. If we try to live in black and white, we are only pointed towards the grey, and vice-versa. Life is about both ambiguity and binaries, I guess.