5. Melville’s Cancelled Note-to-Self

This chapter explores the genesis of Herman Melville’s unfinished final prose work, the novella Billy Budd. To do so, it relies upon Hayford and Sealts’s Genetic Text Edition, and upon the Fluid Text Edition available on the Melville Electronic Library. Billy Budd tells the story of its titular protagonist, a sailor who is wrongfully accused of mutinous intent and, ultimately, is hanged. In the fragmented sections of its conclusion, Melville enumerates Billy’s afterlife in memory — revealing how variously and incorrectly others judge his innocence and interpret his fate. These final episodes, what Melville called the ‘ragged edge’ of the tale, dramatize the conflicting ways in which a reader might interpret the novella’s events. They focalize narrative unreliability and misreading as the author’s central themes.

Critics have written extensively on this topic, yet have seldom taken into account the text’s own base instability and, at times, incoherence. Incomplete, and corrupted by significant errors and inconsistencies in its manuscript, Melville’s story is not only about narrative disorder, it is also itself a disordered narrative. This chapter undertakes a genetic approach in order to untangle the oversights of an infirm artist from his intentionally ‘ragged’ effects, and to trace how the theme of narrative disarray gradually emerged in the messy process of composition. It argues that Billy Budd’s ‘ragged form’ and dramatization of misreading were not the initial crux of the novella. Rather, they emerged in the final stages of the revision process, as Melville increasingly cultivated textual disorder in the story and made unintentional errors in the manuscript text. I examine three crucial pieces of evidence: mid-stage revisions that replaced the simplicity of his initial coda with a triptych of competing narratives; the late addition of an explicit authorial comment about the inaccessibility of truthful resolution; and a cancelled note-to-self which reveals Melville identifying an unintended inconsistency, the result of his many additions, and choosing to preserve this textual disorder instead of correcting it. The chapter closes by calling for further genetic inquiry into Melville’s earlier, but similarly ‘ragged’ novella, Benito Cereno.