Session 13: Literary Wickedness

Session 13: Literary Wickedness
Chair: Alejandro Cervantes-Carson

Contesting Claggart: Evil in Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor
Luc Small
Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities, Faculty of Art, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

In this paper I explore how Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor has been used to defend various philosophical positions on moral evil. While my discussion focuses on the substantive views of Peter Kivy, Colin McGinn and Daniel Haybron, I also consider some wider issues about the use of literary material by philosophers.
In Melville’s classic the depraved John Claggart destroys the virtuous Billy Budd for no clear (instrumental) motive. Claggart’s perplexing psychology has engaged many philosophers concerned with moral evil. I have elected to survey three representative and contrasting philosophical works, namely: Kivy’s Melville’s Billy and the Secular Problem of Evil; McGinn’s Ethics, Evil and Fiction; and Haybron’s Evil Characters. Whilst in his paper Kivy expresses strong reservations about the possibility of explaining unmotivated malice, both McGinn and Haybron aim to demonstrate that this can be done. Intriguingly all three commentators, despite their markedly differing conclusions, find support for their respective positions in Melville’s text.
I discuss which philosopher presents the most tenable stance on human evil, and consider which philosopher supplies the best reading of Claggart’s psychology. Interestingly, in each case, the philosopher is different. Finally, I draw a number of conclusions about the general practice of using fiction to inform philosophy. On the strength of the evidence presented (in which three philosophers find support for widely differing positions on human evil in the same text) it might seem that the practice should be avoided. I argue, however, that a common emphasis on a work of fiction enables efficient comparative analysis between competing philosophical positions. That interpretations of Melville’s Claggart vary significantly demonstrates that literature can expose the true complexity of a philosophical problem. The interplay between a literary text and a philosopher’s interpretation, I conclude, can inspire new philosophical positions and expose them to debate within a common context.

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Evil has traditionally been portrayed in terms of the extraordinary. In religion, myth or folklore, symbolic embodiments of evil are situated   outside the realm of the mundane, exercising their powers above or below the fictional topography – Satan overreaching to heaven, Hades ruling the underworld and goblins residing in grottos and mines. Literary figures representing radical evil, such as Iago or Hannibal Lecter, exhibit degrees of deviousness and brutality that cannot be contained within our conception of normalcy. Kafka was perhaps the first writer to imaginatively anchor evil in the sphere of the perfectly ordinary. In The Castle (1930), the physical edifice, as well as its rulers, epitomize an unsettling combination of omnipotence and banality, projecting a world in which, to quote C.S. Lewis, “the greatest evil is done…by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”
This vision of the “banality of evil,” to borrow Hanna Arendt’s memorable phrase, equally underpins Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance (1990). In spite of the difference in the narrative line – K., Kafka’s main character, is excluded from the object of his desire, whereas Nashe and Pozzi, Auster’s protagonists, are imprisoned in the mansion of the two ruthless millionaires- both Kafka and Auster allegorize evil through the trope of the Castle. The implications of this trope, as well as the  sociological and metaphysical scope of their imaginative exploration of evil are the subject matter of the present paper.

Prior to the 1983 publication of M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, the diagnosis of evil had never entered the psychiatric lexicon. In an attempt to allow for this designation within the medical sphere (68), Dr. Peck’s treatise attempts to explicate the characteristics of both individual and group evil. As a result in the course of his landmark study, the then practicing psychiatrist offers a host of insightful observations concerning the nature of evil. Given however the parameters of this investigation, I intend to concentrate on only one of them. How might we recognize evil? Dr. Peck suggests a proven method: “If one wants to seek out evil people, the simplest way to do so is to trace them from their victims.”(107)
No one can deny that Dr. Fritz Emmenberger, the protagonist of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Der Verdacht, epitomizes evil; he had after all participated willingly in the endless killings, taking place in the Stutthof concentration camp. Yet how many of us can presently identify with such radical evil perpetrated in a different time and a different place? But all of us relate to others on a daily basis.
Consequently these pages focus only on Emmenberger’s relationships and their significance for him (and ultimately for us). How does he treat those with whom he surrounds himself? How does he select and subsequently control them? Just how does he detract from the efficacy of their lives? And does he do so repeatedly, over extended periods of time? A single misguided act rarely condemns an individual. (104) The case histories to be examined are those concerning three staff members employed in Emmenberger’s Zurich hospital: Dr. Edith Marlok, Emmenberger’s medical assistant, the dwarf and the deaf-mute.