The grim novella Benito Cereno, written in 1855 during a transitional period in Melville’s career, represents a remarkable fusion of the themes and techniques that characterize his art. F. O. Mathiesson calls it “one of the most sensitively poised pieces of writing” Melville ever wrote (373). His early sea-adventure novels had been relatively well received by the critics, but his later novels explored philosophical ideas in long, Shakespearean passages. His masterpiece Moby-Dick (1851) combined these additions with the sea adventure, while Pierre (1852) was in the form of the Gothic novel. Critics and book buyers either could not or would not follow Melville into these new waters, and when Melville began publishing his short stories in Putnam’s (1853), he was trying once again to gain the ear of the reading public.
Along with “The Encantadas,” critics considered Benito Cereno a return to Melville’s gift for writing tales about the sea. Stung by the failure of Moby-Dick, Melville moved away from the autobiographical elements of his earlier novels and drew on the travel narrative published in 1817 by real-life Amaso Delano, which he freely adapted to meet the demands of his art. Touches of the Gothic abound in the gloomy tone of the descriptions, and Shakespeare echoes throughout the tale, notably in the moral ambiguities of the ending. Melville also turned to abolitionist literature for ways to treat the question of race (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, was serialized in 1851).
The narrative begins off St. Maria, an island near the southern tip of Chile, when Amaso Delano, captain of the Bachelor’s Delight, encounters an unknown ship. Delano, “a man of such native simplicity as to be incapable of satire or irony” (184), epitomizes 19th-century American attitudes: optimistic and full of goodwill and faith in human progress, he is nevertheless racist, anti-intellectual, and naive. Melville subtly but unmistakably satirizes him throughout the story, underscoring each instance where Delano misreads or oversimplifies the world, which, like the seascape itself, is “gray” and “fixed” like fate, dominated by a chiaroscuro of “shadows present, foreshadowing shadows to come” (161). Delano cannot make out the other ship through this murk, and despite the “lawlessness and loneliness of the spot” (161), refuses to take precautions against possible treachery.
Though observant, detached, and rational, Delano misperceives and misjudges nearly every detail of the other ship; the grays of the atmosphere cloud his judgment as well as his vision. The appearance of the other ship unsettles him immediately, and this vague foreboding casts shadows across his mind, causing him to imagine the ship, on the one hand, as a “whitewashed monastery” in the Pyrenees populated by “Black Friars” (163), and on the other, as a vessel whose “keel seemed laid . . . and she launched, from Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones” (164). Melville exploits these two images—of the multicultural Christianity that had once flourished on the border between Catholic France and Muslim Spain, and of the cultural upheaval and spiritual isolation found in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible—to isolate Delano in the ambiguous moral atmosphere of the story.
Delano banishes his misgivings as irrational and boards the other ship to offer assistance. Once aboard, he meets the ship’s ostensible captain, a frail Spaniard named Cereno, and his ostensible servant, the wiry and officious Babo, who relate the story of the strange “fever” that decimated the ship’s company. Babo had fabricated this tale to conceal the slave revolt, in which he, seconded by the muscular giant Atufal, had taken control of the ship. During this tale, many details of life onboard the other ship continue to unsettle Delano: the spectacle of mute Atufal in chains, the slave who strikes a sailor without punishment, the curious incident with the knot, the hidden meanings behind the glances of sailor and slave alike. Yet he continues to rationalize away each instance as signs confirming the weakness and irregularity of Cereno.
Delano likewise profits nothing from the name of the other ship, the San Dominik, which suggests both the medieval Catholic saint who founded the order of monks known as Black Friars, and the Caribbean island of San Domingo, site of a recent slave revolt. Either suggestion might have warned him of his mistakes: St. Dominic preached human frailty to heretics who thought they were morally superior to the world (as Delano does), while the slave revolt clearly indicated how untenable was the racism (like Delano’s) being used to underwrite slavery. But Delano cannot hear these warnings, and finds himself forced into a series of desperate actions as Cereno abandons his own ship to seek refuge with Delano, who is forced to overpower the slave ship and return with it to Spanish territory. The authorities who conduct the investigation at first think that Cereno exaggerates the events of the revolt but are forced to believe him after other sailors confirm even the most fantastic details (239).
Melville believes the deposition is the key that opens all the secrets of the matter, and he gives it in its original form. But he turns back to narrative for his conclusion, which admits that the nature of the events themselves have made him choose this unorthodox method of telling the story (255). This method, which anticipates certain postmodern ideas about narrative, hides something unspoken and unspeakable in the tale, something even Melville cannot find words for: Atufal remains mute about the revolt, which Cereno describes as “past all speech” (209), while the severed head of Babo plainly communicates, “since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words” (258). Too late, Delano discovers the reality behind his comment: “this slavery breeds ugly passions in man” (216).
The cannons of Delano rescue Cereno from the medieval gloom of his cabin, but his logic cannot force the fatalism from his heart; his cutlasses, likewise, might have deterred Babo from standing over Cereno like an inquisitor in that cabin and holding a straight razor to his throat, but the racism of Delano ensures that others like Babo will rise up against an unjust system. By forcing the reader to infer and piece together these conclusions, Melville dramatizes the difficulties of speaking about the manifold evils of slavery; even Melville cannot resolve these tensions into proper literary form. Melville cannot find a way to make revolt against the slave system into a triumphant discovery and revelation of the self, as it was in the 10th chapter of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative a mere decade earlier. Babo and Atufal end the story exiled and divided not just from their homeland, but from themselves, and this tragic anticlimax anticipates the responses of 20th-century literature toward problems of race and culture.
Sources
Bloom, Harold, ed. Herman Melville: Bloom’s Major Short Story Writers. New York: Chelsea House, 1999.
Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. London: Oxford University Press, 1941.
Melville, Herman. Billy Budd and Other Stories. New York: Penguin, 1986.
Pahl, Dennis. Architects of the Abyss: The Indeterminate Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989.
Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis
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