But it is in relation to the prospect of mutiny that Melville poses a different set of questions, which agitate the whole of the tale and are responsible for its most resonantly strange and provoking moments. From its first paragraph onward, the story wonders: Are impassioned relations between men the very thing that will bind the British navy, and Empire itself, into vital coherence? Or are they precisely the passions that most threaten to overturn established orders, to release an anarchic violence into the spaces of rule?

Melville’s story intimates the newly fraught state of male relation at the end of the nineteenth century, where, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick noted in a pioneering essay about the tale, intimate relations between men had become at once compulsory for subjects of patriarchy and also, with the advent of that new identity category the homosexual, subject to a series of complex, contradictory prohibitions. Billy is the sinecure of all the story’s desire, but the effects of that desire are not uniform. The Handsome Sailor inspires his shipmates and moves the cogitative Captain Vere to extremities of feeling. But what of the story’s villain, the master-at-arms whom Billy, unable to speak in answer to his accusation of treachery, kills with one unpremeditated blow? Is Claggart’s villainy a function of his “depravity,” expressed nowhere as directly as in his illicit desire for the young man so much beneath him in station? Or is it the inadmissibility of that desire, the prohibition on an attachment that hews so closely to the normative and yet is unacknowledgeable as love, that deranges Claggart and transforms his desire into resentment, his love into malice? Claggart, we are told, “could even have loved Billy but for fate and ban.” The shadow of these questions falls, too, across the central turns of the tale. Something eerily similar, some like entanglement of fate and ban, might be said to motivate Captain Vere himself. In his cajoling insistence that the ship’s officers follow him in his abrupt conviction that “the angel must hang” we might detect something of Vere’s own reflexive violence, his own inner shrinking from the ardor young Billy provokes in him. His insistence on the necessity of law is, on this reading, a cover story: an ennobling rationalization of the violence of his repudiation of a love he cannot quite countenance in himself. Readers often think of Vere and Claggart as opponents. They might also be refracted versions of each other.

If the tale is a tragedy, a meditation on the unviability of otherworldly innocence in the fallen world of human striving and law, it is routed throughout along the axes of desire, male beauty, and loves both vibrant and unavowable. It’s tempting to read “Billy Budd” as Melville’s coming to terms with the sad facts of the broken mortal world: his mature reckoning with the necessity even of flawed laws, constraining order, ballasting traditions. Students do well to treat the neatness of such readings with some wariness. “Billy Budd” is perhaps not the wholesale endorsement of the tragic necessity of law it is sometimes imagined to be. Vere, the very voice of law in the tale, may be too much a shadowy double of Claggart for that to be quite so tidily the case. Nevertheless, it is true that the tale is not invested with the heedlessness, neither the joyous abandon nor the coruscating rage, of Melville’s earlier work. The long lead-up to Billy’s death is especially excruciating, marked by passages that find Melville, with the light around him fading, discovering a new register for sorrow.

All of which might well contribute to the commonplace sense of Melville as both tragedian and tragic, a prophet of human fallenness and fallibility consigned to obscurity by an uncompromising devotion to a vision never likely to charm a mass public. Like all mythologies, this one distorts as it illuminates. And at least part of what it obscures is the exquisite force of Melville’s anger—and it obscures, too, the spectacular labors of craft he brought to the turning of this worldly outrage into articulate form, monuments of great raging beauty. Melville may well have come to a sense of the mortal world as estranged, permanently, from the orders of nature and of nature’s god, which were not to be penetrated by merely human acts of comprehension. But that tragic sense focused, rather than foreclosed, his vision of power, its alibis and duplicities, and the accumulated violence of New World history. Think again of “Benito Cereno” and its slow-burn demolition of Amasa Delano’s benighted assurance. In the story’s conclusion, where the rescued Cereno and Delano converse at last with “fraternal unreserve,” Cereno speaks less in the voice of the redeemed than of a man who knows, finally, existentially, what it is to be enslaved. It is unendurable knowledge: the traumatic memory of it, or perhaps the shattering guilt of having held others in a like subjection, will drive him very shortly to his death. But for a brief moment Cereno tries to impart something of this to the blithe-hearted American. “[Y]ou were with me all day,” he says,

stood with me, sat with me, talked with me, looked at me, ate with me, drank with me; and yet, your last act was to clutch for a monster, not only an innocent man, but the most pitiable of all men.

To the readers of the North, in fact to any American reading public, you might imagine—living for generations in intimate proximity to the enslaved and the subjugated, watching them across tables, talking with them, looking at them, gazing directly into the scene of injustice, cruelty, and terror—this is more than indicting. Cereno speaks “sadly,” but the sentences seethe. In its cadence, its damning repetitions, you can feel Melville reaching out through the text as perhaps nowhere else in his corpus and seizing the reader by the throat. It is among the most vengeful depictions of the racial dispensation of the New World, its specific moral horror, to be found in fiction.

New readers of Melville may find themselves exhilarated by the evocation of distant, antiquated worlds. Isolated islands; law offices where young men copy pages by hand; ships at sea at the end of the eighteenth century, carrying soldiers and laborers, captains and slaves: all of these come to bright life on the pages of Melville’s fiction. But I suspect readers here in the second decade of the new millennium may be startled as well by Melville’s nearness.