Casey Harison

Redemptive violence and stuttering across the Atlantic: The Who's “My Generation” and Herman Melville's Billy Budd in historical perspective

Abstract Heard on the radio or played live, the song “My Generation” (1965) by the British rock band The Who could startle or enthrall. It is possible to make sense of the songs curiously stuttering lyrics, loudness and distortion, along with the smashing of instruments that ended the bands live act, as the product of long- and short-term historical developments. This article offers a historical interpretation of the stutter and violence of “My Generation” by pairing it with a literary counterpart: Herman Melvilles Billy Budd (1924). A fumbling for words and a reflex for violence mark Melvilles famous story of a young sailor who strikes and kills his nemesis, Claggart. The song and the novella describe young men unable to put emotions into words, a frustration that fuels a violent outburst. Melville inscribed the stutter as a function of deep consternation from a character for whom a physical blow is the only way for “right” to prevail. The stutter of “My Generation” comes from the modern young punk, brazen in attitude and yet deeply unsure of himself. Billy Budd and “My Generation” were products of historical settings that have obvious differences. Yet, the surprising blend of stuttering and violence in the two illustrates parallel historical developments across the North Atlantic during the last two centuries which cast certain acts of violence as “redemptive.” These developments combined with political, technological and commercial developments to create transatlantic fans receptive to surprising juxtapositions like Billy Budd and “My Generation.” The similarities in the novella and the song are signs of a distinctly modern receptiveness to youthful, stuttering, redemptive violence that has roots in the legacies of the French Revolution, the Burke–Paine dialogue and the idea of the “angry young man.”

'La Question du Marchandage': The Political and Legal Struggle Against Exploitative Subcontracting in Paris, 1881-1911

In the early 1880s, politicians, lawyers and workers in Paris resumed a fight, delayed since 1848, against a much despised form of subcontracting called marchandage. In simple terms, marchandage was a type of trafficking in labor, particularly prevalent in the building trades, that began with a contract between entrepreneur and subcontractor (tâcheron), the latter hiring and supervizing workers at a wage and under conditions determined by the ‘market’. This was a situation that could lead to exploitation, and indeed marchandage was especially disliked because it fostered intense competition among workers and kept wages low in certain trades. Not surprisingly, the practice contributed directly to the social tensions that erupted time and again in Parisian rebellions after 1830. Politicians had acted in 1848 by passing laws against marchandage, as they would do again in 1911. Much of the resentment bred by marchandage focused on the tâcheron, who came to be viewed almost universally as a selfish and divisive figure. Speaking to his colleagues on the Paris city council in 1887, the militant socialist Jules Joffrin, who was familiar with marchandage from his days as a mechanic, settled upon the ‘egoistic’ tâcheron as representative of all that was wrong with subcontracting. Unlike the ordinary honest worker, the tâcheron, said Joffrin, was almost always ‘less conscientious and less skilled, if indeed he worked at all, placing no stock in questions of morality’.1 Martin Nadaud, also a member of the city council, knew about marchandage from his former days as a stonemason. Nadaud had even briefly been a tâcheron himself — Casey Harison