The Center and Billy Budd

While finishing the last few chapters of Billy Budd I couldn’t get this idea of the center being both within and outside of the structure. As I sat tallying up the different instances of Billy, Claggart, and Vere as center in the novel I was for some reason annoyingly repeating the first verse of Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”. At first I thought this was mostly because of that line “the center cannot hold”, but then it occurred to me that the verse in its entirety really speaks to the kind of conflict and ensuing chiasmus that Barbara Johnson talks about in the chapter we read. Here’s the verse

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Initially I thought I would be able to make the case for Vere as the center since he adjudicates Billy’s assault on Claggart, however I see now that this would’ve been flawed since, as Johnson points out, Vere is making his judgement from inside a political and historical structure which Billy and Claggart do not occupy. Likewise, Vere doesn’t understand the structures, or maybe more precisely modes of being, that Billy and Claggart exist within. I’m interested in those last few sentences of Johnson’s, “It [the deadly space where eclipses in meaning occur] is that which, within cognition, functions as an act; it is that which, within action, prevents us from ever knowing if whether what we hit coincides with what we understand” (p.109). Is she not basically saying that there is no center? Because if there were then wouldn’t action always have to coincide with understanding since the center would be a kind of fail-proof metric for both what we know and how we act? She looks at all these different approaches to interpreting the novella, psychoanalytic, moral, religious, and according to her they all fall short. I feel, though, that her relentless introduction of all these oppositions, human being and doing, literality and irony, leave me with the same lack of understanding. Is that the point? That the more we interpret the less things are what they seem? That things (knowing, action, judgment) fall apart because, as Yeats proclaims, the center cannot hold?