Fated Boy": Karpman's Drama Triangle and Melville's Billy Budd

"Fated Boy": Karpman's Drama Triangle and Melville's Billy Budd John F. Birk Literature and Medicine, Volume 13, Number 2, Fall 1994, pp. 274-283 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2010.0025 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/375732/summary Access provided at 5 Nov 2019 07:08 GMT from UMass Amherst Libraries ^ "Fated Boy": Karpman's Drama Triangle and Melville's Billy Budd John F. Birk While few great literary artists of the past or present have boasted formal credentials in psychology, their most enduring creations often elucidate what the science's practitioners maintain are the very principles underlying human behavior. Several scholars have recognized the influence of William Shakespeare's Hamlet on Sigmund Freud's theories of psychoanalysis. Others have envisioned Carl Jung and his "collective unconscious" to be a vital part of the dynamics of the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fëdor Dostoevski, and William Faulkner. Herman Melville's works are no exception. Critics praise his genius for plumbing the psychological depths. In 1975, for example, Edward F. Edinger published Melville's "Moby-Dick": A Jungian Commen- tary.1 Edwin S. Shneidman lauded Melville's "superb understanding of the presence and the power of unconscious motivation" to the point of asking, "May it not be more accurate to say that Freud was a postMelvillean than to say that Melville was a pre-Freudian?" Melville's "special appeal," Shneidman held, includes his being "psyche and shoulders the most actively psychodynamic of all American writers."2 In 1987 Willam H. Sack, M.D., diagnosed Melville's Pierre, in the novel of the same name, and pointed to Melville's intimation of the link between heredity and mental illness. "What Melville intuitively knew and prophesied more than 130 years ago, psychiatric evidence verifies today," Sack wrote.3 In "The Twisted Mind": Madness in Herman Melville's Fiction, Paul McCarthy emphasized that "a general correspondence exists between Melville's assessments of experience, himself, and insanity, on the one hand, and the stability or instability of each fictional world, on the other."4 The critical record well attests to the close relationship between Melville's fictional enterprises, his own life, and what we today know as psychology. In Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind, William Ellery Literature and Mediane 13, no. 2 (Fall 1994) 274-283 © 1994 by The Johns Hopkins University Press John F. Birk 275 Sedgwick chronicled how after Melville penned his classic Moby-Dick his family feared for his mental health.5 Melville described himself as "too full of hypos to sleep" (p. 173). Sedgwick drew a parallel between Shakespeare's Lear—"O! that way madness lies" (p. 232)—and Melville. Similarly, Neal L. Tolchin traced what he called the "emergence of unresolved grief" in the fiction of Melville and pointed to earlier critical focus on Melville's "search for the father."6 Tolchin argued that Melville's mother's bereavement after the death of his father when Melville was an adolescent effectively fed a "lifelong inability to finish mourning for his father," such that the fiction he wrote "did not achieve anything more than momentary resolutions of his chronic grief" (pp. xii, xiii). In the 1970s, Transactional Analysis and its attendant "game theory" of human interaction experienced a burgeoning popularity among lay people. Only a few years earlier, Stephen Karpman had formulated his now well-known "Drama Triangle," which held that most human interaction confines itself to prescriptive "scripts" configured by three apexes of Victim, Persecutor, and Rescuer.7 Eric Berne, one of the day's more popular proponents of the Drama Triangle, worked with the theory in his book What Do You Say After You Say Hello?8 "Each hero in a drama or in life (the protagonist) starts off in one of the three main roles... with the other principal player (the antagonist) in one of the other roles," explained Berne (p. 186). During such interaction, "the two players move around the triangle, thus switching roles" (p. 186). He elaborated on how "all struggles in life are struggles to move around the triangle in accordance with the demands of the script" (p. 187). A typical human "transaction" involves participants each occupying one site of the Triangle, only to maneuver (or be maneuvered) to another site, and perhaps even the third, in response to both immediate circumstances and one's personal script. "Each person decides in early childhood how he will live and how he will die, and that plan, which he carries in his head wherever he goes, is called his script," Berne put it (p. 31). While the deterministic element in such a view is patently apparent, it is not etched in stone. Treatment for deleterious scripts is indeed possible, and involves a "check list" first formulated by Karpman, Claude Steiner, and Martin Groder as, in Berne's words, a tool "designed to be used as a shortcut in treatment, giving a quick way of finding the active elements in a patient's script so that its tragic progress could be headed off as quickly and effectively as possible" (p. 426). The revival of American letters that followed World War I in- cluded the publication of Melville's last major work, Billy Budd, Sailor, 276 KARPMAN'S DRAMA TRIANGLE AND MELVILLE'S BILLY BUDD written in the late 1880s but not published until 1924.9 The tale of the young foretopman unjustly accused of mutiny and summarily hanged has spawned a number of theatrical adaptations and a major motion picture. No doubt the lasting appeal of this North American classic rests to a large extent on its graphically dramatic circumstances. This very drama, however, with its shifting relationships among the trio of major characters, reflects to a truly remarkable degree the phenomenon of Karpman's Triangle, some eight decades later. Not only does each of three chief dramatis personae have his own clearly identifiable script (unlike the more customary literary two), but also as each assumes a new site in the Triangle the other two shift as well. Thus, the fates of all three—Billy, his captain, and his accuser—are interwoven in a determinism visibly Karpmanesque. This taut interlink and its implication that no one might move beyond the confines of "fate" by his or her own accord lends the tale its dramatic and tragic power. I shall, first, synopsize how the characters traverse the three positions, beginning with each one's recognizable script, and then illustrate how each shift is inaugurated by one or both of the other characters. Next, I shall focus on a trio of fulcrums in the story where such sites and shifts are most dramatically in evidence. Last, I shall remark on several additional similarities and differences involving Karpman's Drama Triangle and Melville's Billy Budd. I Let us begin with Billy, a figure whose ostensible script is one of Victim. "Baby Budd," as he is called, boasts a "lingering adolescent expression" (p. 328) and is "much of a child-man" lacking all "intuitive knowledge of the bad" (p. 363). Of his birth and parentage he can offer only "God knows, sir" (p. 329) and the curious notion that he was found in a "pretty, silk-lined basket" (p. 330). Though exceptionally handsome and congenial, Billy suffers a flawed physiology: "under sudden provocation of strong heart-feeUng his voice, otherwise singularly musical... was apt to develop an organic hesitancy," an impediment akin to "a stutter or even worse" (p. 331). With his early abandonment, overly naive and trusting mien—"To deal in double meanings and insinuations of any sort was quite foreign to his nature" (p. 327)—and communicative defect, Billy's script is patently one of a child-Victim. Indeed, it resembles what Berne called the "Foundling Script," which "arises from the fantasies of adopted or even natural John F. Birk 277 children about their 'real' parents, and comes out as some version of the Myth of the Birth of the Hero" (pp. 76-77). Billy's parentless state and comparisons to great mythic heroes such as Apollo, Hercules, and Adam support this parallel. In "Billy Budd: A Psychological Autopsy," Nathaniel M. Floyd found the young foretopman to be one whose "awareness of his past [is] strangely truncated, foreshortened, suggest- ing the existence of conflicts requiring massive repression."10 In all, Billy's limited acumen, his raw naivete and "measure of immaturity and passivity," render him "woefully inadequate to certain subtle situations" (pp. 36, 34). More broadly, Floyd concluded, Billy suffers from a "hysterical neurosis" (p. 48). Impressed from the merchant vessel Rights of Man, the youthful Billy serves on the British warship Bellipotent, defending the homeland against Napoleonic France. In so doing, he assumes the role of Rescuer: he and thousands like him will preserve England from the Continental menace. In Billy's case, however, the role of Rescuer runs deeper. As one so forthright, hardworking, and uncomplaining, Billy is a paragon of unquestioning loyalty in an atmosphere highly charged with incipient mutiny. Among his shipmates he is a natural cynosure, in many ways that same "Handsome Sailor" incarnate whom the narrator so lavishly lauds (pp. 321-22). "Lieutenant, you are going to take my best man from me, the jewel of 'em," protests the Rights' skipper, lamenting that Billy was "my peacemaker" (pp. 324-25). On the Bellipotent Billy is "soon at home" and greatly admired for his "unpretentious good looks and a sort of genial happy-go-lucky air" (pp. 327-29). Even the ship's officers take due notice. The shift from Victim to Rescuer is patently visible when, in a moment of crisis, Billy assumes the remaining role. He abruptly strikes dead another sailor—the ship's master-at-arms, no less—and prompts Captain Vere to declare Billy a "[fjated boy." As Vere puts it, "Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!" (pp. 377-78). Within hours the lad is convicted and executed. In short order, then, Billy traverses the spectrum from impressed man (Victim) to "Handsome Sailor" (Rescuer) to murderer (Persecutor) to hanged man (Vic- tim). To posterity, though, he is described respectively as Persecutor and Rescuer: an official naval account entitled "News from the Mediterra- nean" maligns him as a knife-wielding villain (p. 407), while a comrade's poem, "Billy in the Darbies," touts him as an inspiration (pp. 408-9). Neither account bears truth. Billy's intrinsic nature, that of Victim, slips with him beneath the waves. Captain Vere acts out an equally compelling script. As one "allied 278 KARPMAN'S DRAMA TRIANGLE AND MELVILLE'S BILLY BUDD to the higher nobility," the Honorable Edward Fairfax Vere is by both lineage and career deeply committed to the preservation of England. Starry Vere, as he is popularly called has "seen much service... in various engagements," Starry Vere is the proverbial knight in shining armor, whose "exceptional character" and love of books (pp. 338-40) shows him to be the consummate Rescuer. His is the duty of saving English tradition—indeed, civilization itself, as he views it—from the flames of anarchy blowing across the Channel. His "settled convictions" constitute "a dike against those invading waters of novel opinion social, political, and otherwise" (p. 340). Witnessing the popular young sailor at work, Vere soon adopts a protective paternalism towards Billy, which reaches its acme with Claggart's accusation. "Defend yourself!" Vere advises the lad and then, when he observes Billy's convulsive efforts to speak, counsels him to remain calm (p. 376). Billy's spasmodic reaction of striking a blow, however, sparks a dramatic shift in Vere: "The father in him... [is] replaced by the military disciplinarian" (p. 377). He works to maintain a stern Persecutor's face throughout Billy's trial and execution. Not long after Billy's death, when Vere closes in on the foe and is shot in battle, he officially becomes a Victim. In "BUIy in the Darbies" he is cast as the unnamed arm of the system that persecuted— even martyred—Billy. Again, neither public view is correct. Likewise, the master-at-arms, John Claggart, exhibits one defined position on Karpman's Triangle. Nature more than nurture is at work here, the narrator insists: Claggart's role more than those of the other two seems determined. Enduring "an evil nature ... born with him and innate," Claggart possesses no less than "'a depravity according to nature'" (p. 354). On the vessel he serves as a "sort of chief of police charged among other matters with the duty of preserving order on the populous lower gun decks" (p. 342). With an eye casting "a tutoring glance" and a "peculiar ferreting genius" (pp. 342, 345), he is indeed the consummate Persecutor. At the same time, the deterministic element is an all-absorbing one: his role can lead only to ruin, must "recoil upon itself and... act out to the end the part allotted it" (p. 356). As with Billy and his captain, events press the master-at-arms to occupy the remaining two sites of the Triangle. It is in the guise of a Rescuer that he accosts Vere: he has caught wind of a mutinous plot and is duty bound to inform his superior. The acme of his Persecutor role, his formal accusation of Billy, prompts the blow that instantaneously transforms him into a Victim. His corpse is sent into the sea "with every funeral honor properly belonging to his naval grade" (p. 394). "News from the Mediterranean" subsequently celebrates Claggart as a "victim John F. Birk 279 ... respectable and discreet," as a defender of "strong patriotic impulse" who, while "arraigning the man before the captain," was "vindictively stabbed to the heart" (p. 407). Thus Claggart, at bottom an inveterate Persecutor, is saluted by comrades and by the naval powers-that-be as a Victim/Rescuer. II Obviously, though, it is not these three isolated turns of fate and separate crises of character that render Billy Budd an enduring literary creation. As classic drama prescribes the unities of time, place, and action, so Melville's tale offers its own private set of restrictions leading toward conflict. In a most perilous moment in history Billy, Vere, and Claggart stride the same confining decks and are forced to interact. It is not their relationships but their interrelationships that accord their story such poignancy. Three scenes in particular establish and exhibit this fateful interdependence. Moreover, all three scenes involve role "switches": Billy's arrival, Claggart's accusation, and Vere's order to execute Billy. When Billy steps onto the Bellipotent, he entices not only his own but also Vere's and Claggart's intrinsic natures to the surface. So naive and trusting a Victim, this "sort of upright barbarian" as a "signal figure among the crew" draws Vere's eye early on and induces him to proclaim Billy a "King's bargain" (pp. 330-31, 372). Simultaneously, Billy nurtures in Claggart a Persecutor's deep envy of the youth's rare personal beauty and popularity. Such envy, "eating its way deeper and deeper in him," the master-at-arms cannot ignore. "Something decisive must come of it," we read (p. 367). Billy's arrival, then, serves to limn more sharply the scripts of the three principals involved as Victim, Rescuer, and Persecutor. The second fulcrum in the story, Claggart's accusation of Billy, illustrates these roles in full flower as they commingle and generate the abrupt shifts of the men around the Triangle. Claggart's words, the accumulation of his zeal to destroy Billy, rouse Vere's paternal feeling and induce Vere to defend the lad. The switch occurs instantaneously. Billy's "right arm [shoots] out, and Claggart drop[s] to the deck" (p. 376). The master-at-arms lies a prone Victim, and Vere, himself momentarily a Victim, is taken aback, but then swiftly becomes a Persecutor to thwart Billy's aggression. The aftermath echoes Karpman's blueprint: considering what has transpired through the lens of naval law, the 280 KARPMAN'S DRAMA TRIANGLE AND MELVILLE'S BILLY BUDD narrator explains that "innocence and guilt personified in Claggart and Budd in effect changed places" (p. 380). Officially, Claggart is now a Victim, Billy a Persecutor. The ensuing mock trial illustrates another dynamic in Karpman's configuration. The Drama Triangle often includes minor characters in transactions, one of whom Beme called the "Patsy," a figure or group "there to be conned into preventing the switch or speeding it up," an often "passive" party easily manipulated by the Persecutor (p. 188). "The classical Patsies are juries..." Berne added (p. 188). Accordingly, Vere's strategy comes to involve the selection of a jury of officers who sit by near-passively at the court-martial while he railroads Billy's conviction: "In brief, Billy Budd was formally convicted and sentenced to be hung..." (p. 391). The third fulcrum ushers in a series of ironic, wholly unanticipated "switches." After confiding the sentence to Billy, Vere departs with a face "expressive of the agony of the strong," implying that "the condemned one sufferfs] less than he who [has] mainly effected the condemnation" (p. 392). Melville suggests that Vere's ramrod posture during the hanging might be "a sort of momentary paralysis induced by emotional shock" (p. 400). By contrast, the condemned man suffers little. Awaiting his demise, Billy "freely refer[s] to his death as a thing close at hand" and remains "wholly without irrational fear of it" (p. 397). When he takes the rope his final words, "God bless Captain Vere!" issue forth "in the clear melody of a singing bird" and "wholly unobstructed in the utterance"—a stark contrast to Billy's violent stammer before he strikes Claggart (p. 400). These words illustrate any and all lack of "strong heart-feeling" that any pause or stutter might divulge. Moreover, as Billy is run up the mast no less than a physiological miracle takes place: "In the pinioned figure arriv[ing] at the yardend, to the wonder of all no motion [is] apparent..." (pp. 400-401). Presumably, Billy suffers no emotional or physical pain. Meanwhile, his composed mien and lack of death spasms evoke a momentary calm among his witnessing shipmates. Again he is the Rescuer/peacemaker. Only hours before the hanging, John Claggart has been buried in a ceremony commemorating him as an official protector. In this pivotal section (chapters 23-25), then, the characters switch roles: Billy to Rescuer, Vere to Victim, Claggart to Rescuer. In all, these same three points in the drama—Billy's arrival, accusation, and hanging—pirouette the key figures around the Drama Triangle in a manner that clearly delineates their shifting roles. Interim chapters, meanwhile, serve to build up to the crises precipitating these John F. Birk 281 shifts. Notably, Billy's presence, though he is by far the least intelligent and resourceful of the trio, starts the fateful wheel in motion. His appearance on the Bellipotent derives from no one's doing but rather from all-powerful forces of history beyond anyone's ability to influence. Melville's story instructs us that no strength of character or personal quality—Billy's good and trusting heart, Vere's nobly bred intelligence cultivated by wide reading, or Claggart's evil nature fueled by passion—can allow them to sidestep destiny. Some forty years earlier, Melville's masterpiece Moby-Dick bore the same message: Ahab, likewise a ship's captain of "great natural intellect" and cunning, successfully conjoined the fates of his crewmen with his own, to the degree that, as he himself boasted, "my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve."11 Yet even wily and prideful Ahab was aware of the limits to his powers. "This whole act's immutably decreed," he confessed to his first mate as they prepared to combat the monster that would destroy them. "'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders" (p. 459). Billy Budd seems in no way to depart from this view. Billy's meager intellect renders him "practically a fatalist" (p. 327), Claggart's evil is "innate" (p. 354), and Vere, too, follows the script. While some have pointed to Melville's strict Dutch Calvinist upbringing as according him such a dark view of the human condition, the determinism in Billy Budd, like that in his other works, seems notably devoid of any deity. Simply, the world comes and goes; humanity remains too impotent or indifferent to effect lasting changes. Does not this angle of vision articulate all too well with the present-day one, which bears witness to the unhealthy, perpetual shifting of so many who, lacking intervention, remain within the prison of the Drama Triangle? ΙΠWe see, then, how Melville's Billy Budd serves as an elaborate instance of "scripted" characters "transacting" their ways around Karpman's Drama Triangle. There are three major figures, each evincing a clearly defined predisposition for playing the role of Victim, Rescuer, or Persecutor. When these same figures interact, each promptly moves to another site in the Triangle. The destructive nature of this dynamic is evident in the final disposition: each is eventually rendered a Victim by both his script and historical circumstance. The unbreakable bond of 282 KARPMAN'S DRAMA TRIANGLE AND MELVILLE'S BILLY BUDD humankind, for better or for worse, is shown when Claggart's death precipitates Billy's own, when Billy's parting words evoke thought of Vere, when the dying Vere speaks of Billy (p. 406). That Melville produced Billy Budd as a thoughtful inquiry into human behavior rather than a tragedy is further evidenced by his detailed character sketches as well as his narrator's open declaration that Billy "is not presented as a conventional hero" and that the narrative that is "no romance" (p. 332). Key passages intimate the Karpmanesque understructure of guises and switches and the desire to cling to old patterns of behavior. Berne wrote how Karpman's theory "brings fascinating insights into numerous aspects of Ufe, psychotherapy, and the theatre" (p. 188). Billy Budd does likewise. That the official version of each player's script departs so markedly from the truth of things is a poignant comment on history as a guise in its own right and justifies the tale's subtitle of "An Inside Narrative." Perhaps the most pronounced difference between Melville's tale and Karpman's Drama Triangle involves not model but remedy. In Moby-Dick Ishmael is salvaged both in mind and body by his close friendship with Queequeg. But in Billy's case no such comrade effectively intercedes. The lesser figures on the Bellipotent lack any sufficient notion of human bonding. The wizened old sea veteran Dansker, for instance, all too readily foresees Billy's fate but, governed by a "pithy guarded cynicism" (p. 349), does nothing to intervene. Indeed he, as William Bysshe Stein put it, "recognize[s] Billy's vulnerable innocence" but "refuses to guide him around the pitfalls of evil."12 Gloria L. Young saw this same figure as a Jungian archetype who beholds and is bothered by the world and yet "accepts with stoic resignation" all its injustices.13 Similarly, the ship's chaplain counsels Billy according to his Christian doctrine; beyond these parameters he can offer little else. Finally, the warship's sole physician, the surgeon, remains empirically minded to the end, refusing to acknowledge any possible meaning in the stillness of Billy's dying body (p. 402). This posture is not confined to the doctor alone, as at one point Claggart approaches Billy with "the measured step and calm collected air of an asylum physician" accosting a troubled patient (p. 375). This trope is all too appropriate in the asylum-like warship described by McCarthy as having "compartments and halls, men who can be regarded as patients, and officers or attendants for them" and its strict "rules and regulations."14 Thus, characters representing experience, religion, science—none of them can help Billy elude his fate. Time, dire straits, and scant awareness of "scripting" denied the John F. Birk 283 men aboard the Bellipotent the opportunity to escape their fates. But lurking behind all these variables was Melville's more general belief concerning the disposition of the species. Sedgwick said it quite well: Billy Budd illustrates the "impersonal acceptance of the universal tragedy implied in human nature," a tragedy "inseparable from human consciousness," for it is "a man-of-war's world and we all fight at command" (pp. 233, 237). This glimmer of light in an otherwise somber world finds a parallel in the hope offered by today's professionals, as they try to help people move beyond earlier "scripts" that prevent their living happy and productive lives. NOTES 1. Edwin F. Edinger, Melville's "Moby-Dick": A Jungian Commentary: An Ameri- can Nekyia (New York: New Directions, 1978). 2. Edwin S. Shneidman, "Some Psychological Reflections on Herman Melville," Melville Society Extracts 64 (1985): 7-9. 3. William H. Sack, "Was Pierre Manic-Depressive?" Melville Society Extracts 70 (1987): 5-8. 4. Paul McCarthy, "The Twisted Mind": Madness in Herman Melville's Fiction (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990). 5. William Ellery Sedgwick, Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945). Quotations will be cited parenthetically in the text. 6. Neal A. Tolchin, Mourning, Gender, and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), xi. 7. Stephen Karpman, "Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis," Transactional Analysis Bulletin 7 (April 1968): 39^3. 8. Eric Berne, What Do You Say After You Say Hello? The Psychology of Human Destiny (New York: Bantam Books, 1973). 9. Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories, ed. Harold Beaver (London: Penguin Books, 1980). AU quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 10. Nathaniel M. Floyd, "Billy Budd: A Psychological Autopsy," American Imago 34 (Spring 1977): 32. Quotations will be cited parenthetically in text. 11. Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967). 12. William Bysshe Stein, "The Motif of the Wise Old Man in Billy Budd," Western Humanities Review 14 (University of Utah, 1960; New York: Johnson Reprint Company, 1971): 99. 13. Gloria L. Young, "Melville's Archetypal 'Wise Old Man,'" Melville Society Extracts 38 (1979): 3, 6. 14. McCarthy, 129.