Homosocial Pretension No More-Lovelessness in the Cognoscenti : Melville's Billy Budd as a Camp Story

In his posthumously published Billy Budd (1924), Herman Melville (1819_91) refers to the invert, the X man, as "a nut not to be cracked by the tap of a lady's fan," as an "exceptional" man, as a man "without vulgar alloy of the brute" but "dominated by intellectuality." This X man is equivalent to the master-atarms on the man-of-war Bellipotent, Claggart, a figure who could even have loved [the Handsome Sailor, Billy Budd, or the innocent Baby Budd] but for fate and ban." What holds Claggart back from enjoying same-sex love? What drives himto his policy of harassment? Do Claggart's mentality and his perverted behavior toward Billy have something to do with Melville's failed companionship with Hawthorne? Taking into consideration the author's use of allegory to dissolve the differences in time and location, I try to clarify Claggart's [and/or Melville's] inverted love and hatred for and against innocence, beauty, Billy, and Hawthorne.When thinking of the patriarch system of "government through surveillance," we can verify the importance of Claggart's role as the-master-of-arms, the chief of the internal police on the man-of-war. At the same time, we may suspect that Claggart hides his intention to persecute Billy. The patriarchic order defended by Claggart is a society quite opposite to the benign brotherhood, i.e., the fiercely competitive society, what he ]litico-psychoanalyst Grunberger characterizes as the anal hierarchic society. This society is symbolically represented by rat - in RATcliffe, in Claggart (whose name can be slightly transposed to ClaggRAT), in his cats-paws, or his RAT pack, with their rodent-like behavioral pattern of ferreting, etc. The more unstable the patriarchic hierarchy becomes, the more harmful its effects grow. These harmful effects -enmity, jealousy, contempt, hate, and disgust - afflict Captain Graveling and the Red Homosocial Pretension No More - ovelessness in the Cognoscenti Whisker on the merchant ship Right-of-Man, and Ratcliffe, the Dansker, CaptainVere, and Claggart himself on the man-of-war Bellipotent. All of these sailors but Claggart manage to survive the anal society by reaping the joy derived from the same-sex love for Billy. Only Claggart stays loveless. Only Claggart waves a phallic rattan to show his persistency in refusing the sexual, and in him this persistencyis transformed into hatred.Then, we delve deeper into Claggart's psyche, the pre-oedipally constructed and post-oedipally strengthened inward realm. Discerning the speedy promotion of the new comer Billy and the ostensible partiality toward Billy in the paternal Captain Vere, Claggart responds with fright, fury, and the feeling that he has been supplanted by the youth and evicted from the paradise by the loved one [Vere]. In a way, Claggart has to acquiesce to exactly the same fate of a loser in the sibling competition for the attention and love of the parent. Claggart symbolicallystands in exactly the same footing as an unloved elder brother, resolute in vainly demanding of his father figure [Vere] the observance of primogeniture. After this demand is proven to be impossible to realize, Claggart turns to the tactics of threatening the captain/father by converting himself into a satanic Jacksonian Democracy practitioner or a claimer of equal treatment, a radical democrat in the <highly hierarchic warship

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