CLAGGART; OR, MICRO-FASCISM

 Howard Slater

The problem of fascism has to be seen as
a problem of the “normal” organisation
of our lived relations”[1]

 

Set in the immediate aftermath of a series of late C18^th naval mutinies at the onset of the Napoleonic Wars, Melville’s Billy Budd reveals a character at a distinct remove from that more discussed character, Bartleby. Whereas the latter seems to be will-less to the degree of offering up a suspension of ego that can be read as an existential revolt, Claggart, the master-at-arms of the Bellipotent, by contrast, incarnates not so much the obsessively driven authoritarianism of Ahab, but a parasitic accommodation to such power. If Bartleby and Ahab could be said to be at opposite poles, if they can be philosophically genealogised, then Claggart remains spookily in the backroom: “His portrait I essay, but shall never hit it.” 

Claggart seems to have come from nowhere and everywhere. His accent is indistinct. His complexion, whilst pallid, has the unusual amber hue of the “time-tinted marbles of old.” His past is a matter of surmise. He is not an old sea dog who has spent a life at sea but one of those who belatedly chose ship-bound work so as, it is conjectured, to seek sanctuary from the ramifications of some “mysterious swindle” or monarchical plot in defiance of the French Revolution. But even these half-verdicts, the narrator suggests, sway unsteadily amidst a garrulous naivety that cloaks Claggart in a harmless “vulgar rascality.” 

Melville’s narrator seems to be suggesting there is something “wicked” about Claggart that escapes his fellow sailors and that, in going either unnoticed or unremarked upon by them, is maybe indicative of some tacit sense of unquestionable masculinity. Claggart has stealthily made his way through the ranks by means of “constitutional sobriety” (rational calculation), “an ingratiating deference to superiors” (subservience) and a “ferreting genius” (intelligence gathering). In highlighting and combining descriptors such as these Melville is bringing to light characteristics that, whilst innocuous in the work-a-day world, are nonetheless all factors in power-relations that can come to resonate as elements of a ‘micro-fascism.’[2] 

Unlike the begrudged yet fear-fuelled influence that Jackson wields over the crew in Melville’s Redburn, Claggart’s schemings are more or less immune from collective criticism. His sense of well-being and social confidence is guaranteed not just by his personal position as a minor official in the ship’s political structure, but is empowered by a clique of subordinate and collusive corporals that are compliant “to a degree inconsistent with entire moral volition.” Such an abdication, or suspension of morals, enables Claggart and his, perhaps, wide-ranging cabal to work at a clandestine level to foment the “mysterious discomfort” of other crew members. 

Whilst it is to Billy Budd’s tragic discomfort that Claggart works at most assiduously, it should be borne in mind that for his racket to function he must be trusted by his superiors. This is easy for Claggart in that he sides with the ship’s officers not just because he is au fait with hierarchic gradations but because the indicators we term ‘micro-fascist’ above are inconspicuous, taken for granted, and encouraged both on ship and (as Melville analogically suggests on more than one occasion) in “business departments.” They are necessary to sniff out “incipient trouble” before it becomes recalcitrance, insubordination and mutiny. 

So, when it is suggested that Claggart is the “embodiment of radical evil,”[3] we are led towards appraising the rattan-wielding Claggart (“zealous in his function”) as being nothing more than a depraved individual who has a “spontaneous antipathy” to the handsome sailor, the beauty, Billy Budd; he of “innocent non-age.” However, there are clues that what could be at play in this antipathy is not some metaphysical conundrum but a psychological density, a malicious enjoyment, that confounds motive and emotion. That this comes into play in the ‘drumhead court’ to which, through Claggart’s machinations, Billy is eventually arraigned is no small matter. The presiding judge, Captain Vere, foregoes such considerations and tellingly rejects any need for “psychologic theologians” in arriving at his verdict. 

The narrator has already touched upon this indeterminate aspect: “Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colours, but where exactly does the one first blindingly enter in to the other?” It could be inferred from such a poetic sentence that Melville is hinting at that psychological nuance, that field of unverbalisable affects and blurred feelings, that elude easy intellectual inception but which subsist between Claggart and Billy Budd; a portentous form of communication that is far more meaningful than the insubstantial language that passes between them and which, however sensed as “strange dubieties,” remain unuttered in court. 

That Claggart has jovially flattered Billy on deck whilst simultaneously grimacing in his presence, that he is depicted as being flirtatious and light-handed towards Billy (the incident of the ‘spilled soup’) whilst also being described as harbouring an obsessive “subterranean fire” is not lost on Billy Budd, who, despite his being seen as a “man-child” blinded by innocence, is struggling to form his intuitions into the more certain shape of thoughts. To help orientate himself, to socialise his concerns and dampen his nagging discomfort, Billy consults an older seaman, the Dansker.[4] The response, as cryptic and non-committal as can be, is that Claggart is “down on” Billy. 

Hate ricocheting into its opposite? Affection shot-through with aggression? The inference here, with the trope of the ‘handsome sailor’ prominent from the outset, is that, naturally, Claggart has a crush on Billy. However unsuspected this is to Billy his reaction infers an unconscious ‘knowledge’ in that he is described as finding the Dansker’s curt words as disturbing as the mystery of Claggart’s seductive behaviour towards him. Billy’s inklings, his unwitting participation in the field of affects between them, are not neatly demarcated from the society-of-men that is the Bellipotent; a society that Melville makes resplendent with a homo-erotic gaze of which Billy is the group object and, as the embodiment of male beauty, its ideal.  

The feminisation of Billy, his ‘becoming-woman’ – or, we could say, the rendering of Billy as a cliched phantasm of the male imagination – is, on one level, an occlusion of homosexual desire. As with some theories as to the rise of Nazism, this would be one means of opening up Claggart’s “wicked” antipathy to Billy as one of repressed desire. However, the shared idealisation of Billy discounts an explanation of Claggart’s plots against him as being motivated by the dammed-up drives of homosexual panic. Rather, with this novel, we are witness to what David Green has referred to as the “soullessness of an all-male world;” one in which male-bonding is as much cemented by consenting to the frisson of cruel power games as it is by an automatic work ethic. 

If we solely relate to Fascism as a matter of molar politics at the level of nations and states, as an economic formation that salvages capitalist-democracy, as the rescinding of ‘rights’ by an oligarchic executive, if we, as often occurs, relate to its acolytes as stupid and lacking in intelligence (“fascism can never triumph as we are more clever”[5]), then, we fail to take heed of the incipient and sub-rational psychic mechanisms of a micro-fascism through which shifting allegiances, jockeying for position and gaslighted othering, yield, for some, a form of pleasure that, in seeming to be a ‘growing over’ [transcroissance] of sexuality and gender, runs through many aspects of our capitalised everyday lives. Worse, it is operative in the very areas in which we come together to struggle against such indignities.  

Theweleit is one writer who does not shy away from taking the thoughts and feelings of avowed fascists seriously. Furnishing us with a quote that is apposite to the ‘evil’ motivations of Claggart, he cites Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss recalling his term in prison: “The attractive younger prisoners were much sought after as ‘beauties’: they were the objects of the most vicious battles and intrigues.”[6] Here we are not so much in the presence of homophobia as that of a sexuality that is being ‘leaned on’ as the vehicle through which to conduct games of rivalry and prestige, a vehicle in which sexual desire becomes transposed into expressions of dominance. In prisons and in public schools, as well as aboard the Bellipotent, what we have, even in the absence of women, is a patriarchal idiom that is so replete with the frisson of power that it cannot help but re-assert itself anew in any society-of-men. 

So, intrigues, rackets, cabals… are these not the ways and means of a micro-fascism that subsist in the psychical interstices of politics and business? Are these, when taken as modes of organisation, expressive of nothing more progressive than competitive social relations? Billy Budd, however naïve and Christlike he is interpreted to be, however much his skillful dexterity in the rigging of the foremast pales before his ‘scantily developed subjecthood’, is, above all a character who does not participate in power games. As Melville writes: “to deal in double meanings and insinuations of any sort was quite foreign to his nature.” Is it such power games, and the surreptitious erotics they stimulate, that underpin the unifying codes of this society of men? Is it Billy Budd’s inchoate refusal of the pleasureable trappings of patriarchal power that so riles Claggart? 

Another ready-to-hand schemer from classic literature is Shakespeare’s Edmund: “A credulous father and a brother noble, whose nature is so far from doing harms that he suspects none; on whose foolish honesty my practices ride easy!”[7] Here Edmund displays the rational cold-heartedness (“constitutional sobriety”) of manipulative practices, that opportunist advantage-taking which prides itself on strategic intelligence but yet ‘rides easy’ along the lines of least resistance. The unsuspecting Billy Budd cannot recognise that his being singled out and ‘othered’ by Claggart (as woman, as child, as incorruptible) is maybe a result of his unspoken resistance to the sexualisation of power that marks “the [micro] fascist potentialities in the social organization of gender itself.”[8] 

One of the rites of such social organisation is witnessed by Billy soon after he has been impressed from the Rights-of-Man to the Bellipotent; and thus, it could be said, transferred from the safe haven of a ‘regicidal republic’ to that of a ‘bellicose monarchy.’ Billy is present at the flogging of a fellow sailor, one whose misdemeanour is slight (temporary absence from his post), and he is horrified into “heightened alacrity” by the sight of a back “gridironed with red welts” and the “dire expression” of shame on the victim’s face. Such mutilation, as Theweleit leads us to consider, not only breaches the body-ego for its straying adrift from the masculine social ego, but “disempowers public morality” (the possibility of collective resistance) in tautologically displaying the “uninhibited self-expansion of the flogger.”[9] There is pleasure to be gotten by means-of and under cover of the code. 

Billy’s alarmed reaction is only natural as the public flogging is intended to shock him and his fellow sailors into conscientious work and discipline on board the ship. However, as Theweleit comments, this “sting of command,” once received can be passed on to those “below.” As with Claggart’s rising through the ranks, we see a defence against pain in the prospect of being in a position to deliver the blow. A kind of libidinal banking: “the man with the whip exchanges the pain he has suffered for a pleasure.”[10] The shame need not be contained and mulled-over but ‘cashed-out’ later as a pleasurable opportunity for the drives to be ‘amorally’ expressed with the added justification that everyone should suffer: ressentiment releases tension; not least the tension, in a society-of-men, that any one among us, including oneself, may, through a reluctance to participate, reveal how the abusive code of patriarchal power is a means of ensuring pleasure. 

Billy’s intense horror, then, puts him at a remove from the Bellipotent’s social ego: one in which Claggart’s “retributive righteousness” towards Billy and other crew members can have full range in that it is sanctioned by a micro-fascist ‘rascality’ in which the passing-on of shame, the legitimacy of vengeful feelings, callous backbiting as verbal flagellation, the discharging of violent emotion etc. can all, while seeming to uphold the group law, give rise to personalised fulfilment.[11] There is some sense here of what Theweleit refers to as the “supplementary external egos” of fascism: to ensure that self-preservation affords some pleasure and does not remain as waged drudgery, then, one such as Claggart needs to deposit his desire in the bank, an additional external drive, in order to gain an interest without paying fees to the super-ego.[12] 

The interest Claggart exacts is extortionate, but, before arriving at the events of the ‘drumhead court’ it should be stressed that what Melville brings to light in this novel is not a power struggle in which Claggart seeks to overthrow Captain Vere and lead a mutiny on behalf of other crew members. Neither, as far as we know, does Claggart seek monetary gain, a material profit or even tips. No, Claggart’s “inconceivable motive” is to attain a jouissance beyond gender and sexuality but in full conformity to the ‘transcendent’ and mitigating patriarchal code. He does this via a form of psy-ops that, at several removes from bullying, uses the social ego generated by a society-of-men, its psychological undertow, its covert vacuoles of frisson, as a means to engineer the potential demise of the traitorous ‘sissy’ Billy Budd.  

Claggart is well aware of that constant fear of an uprising that dwells amongst the ship’s officers (they cannot utter the word ‘mutiny’) and uses the latter’s field of affect to manipulate them into arraigning Billy Budd. He has Billy visited by other sailors (presumably emissaries from his corporals) who whisper vague statements into Billy Budd’s ear that leave him surmising that these may well be indicators of a planned mutiny. Again, Billy is uncertain as to any sure-fire meaning and refrains from both snitching and consulting the Dansker. After a length of time, presumably to monitor Billy’s reaction, Claggart reports this ‘incriminating’ encounter in the rigging to Captain Vere where, as “an invented rumour of an imagined misdemeanour,” it takes on a legal materiality. Claggart, presumably in full knowledge of the Mutiny Act (and perhaps of the added pressures on Vere as a member of an illustrious seafaring family) must be aware that the consequences for Billy will be severe.  

So, Claggart’s intent towards Billy appears to be a murderous one and wielding power by means of institutional and psychological proxies, he leaves it to martial procedure to enact ‘his’ desire. It is almost as if Claggart’s racket is functioning as a parallel power aboard the Bellipotent; one that safeguards patriarchal freedoms. However, in terms of the eventual outcome, it is crucial to mention that Billy, maybe true to his ‘sissy’ nature, is a fretful person. He is described as unable to conceal his anxieties, he has a stutter, he is overly conscientious to the degree that he becomes “heedful in all things” right down to the tidiness of his bunk area. Billy, in tying to read the gestures and expressions of his shipmates and in his looking to Captain Vere as a father figure, is, Melville infers, vulnerable to those “vague threats” which, as ambient anxiety, have rendered him hypervigilant. 

This hypervigilance, a further refutation of Billy’s ‘scantily developed’ subjecthood, is an indicator of a sensitivity to his surroundings. His stutter can be seen as a way that he reacts to the social pressures of a ‘soulless’ male world which, for Billy, is made acute by his inkling that he has been singled out by Claggart. So, just as the stutterer can be seen as suffering from a physiological speech defect, an “organic hesitancy” as Melville describes it, there is also the far from negligible factor of the stutterer being psychologically aware of the power-dynamics at work in social relations. That his stutter comes over him in the formal setting of the ‘drumhead court’ is, then, no surprise, and, struggling to express himself, being rendered mute, being at odds to the male-code, he explodes in a bodily abreaction, an ‘acting out,’ that sees him fatally punch Claggart. 

This punch is seen as an inverse miracle, an act of unpremeditated and willess murder, that Melville couches in a kind of supernatural aura. Like Jesus on the cross, Billy is fated to be hung and just as it is noted that his body does not spasm on the point of death, there is a kind of ‘heavenly choir’ that becomes audible as his body is dispatched into the sea. Melville peppers a penultimate chapter with descriptions of environmental sound, a kind of entity music (“murmurous indistinctness […] not easily to be rendered verbal”), that adds a cosmic redemptiveness to the novel. However, as David Green offers, what comes across forcefully in this work is Melville’s intention to critique the homo social space of compulsory brotherhood, a society-of-men that in order to dominate seeks a rebirth (an ‘Eveless genesis’) by means of patriarchal structures that make power desirable. In other words, as Theweleit’s study of the fascist psyche demonstrates: “The problem originates in the relation between the world and the male ego: a power-relation in which pleasure is taken in violating whatever displays itself as living.”

 

Howard Slater

October 2025