SOURCE: “At the Crossroads of the Nineteenth Century: ‘Benito Cereno’ and the Sublime,” in America's Modernisms: Revaluing the Canon, edited by Kathryne V. Lindberg and Joseph G. Kronick, Louisiana State University Press, 1996, pp. 77-100.

[In the following essay, Sussman interprets the sublime and ironic qualities of “Benito Cereno.”]

Still swept up in the whirlwind that emanates in the nineteenth century, twentieth-century readers share the predicament of Benjamin's Angelus Novus,¹ even on the threshold of a millennial hyperspace in which the spatial barriers once separating social and cultural anomalies have been obliterated. The wind blowing in from the nineteenth century is a powerful one, not only in the land- and seascapes that Wordsworth, the Shelleys, and Melville described and that Friedrich, Blake, Courbet, and Turner painted, but in the pull, the constructive and destructive force, that its intellectual systems continue to exert. We turn to the void of a new millenium as a projective scene for our discourse, yet nineteenth-century systems stay on our minds; they yet furnish a template for our productive thinking.

No text illustrates the logical, social, and textual concerns occupying nineteenth-century thinkers more powerfully than Herman Melville's Piazza Tale, “Benito Cereno.” The tale of an American sea captain's visits aboard a Spanish merchant ship that has already surrendered to a slave insurrection resides on the interstice, the very hinge, between Kantian sublimity and Hegelian dialectics. In the same story we are treated to a seemingly explicit illustration of the Hegelian dialectic between mastery and slavery and to a meditation on the awe experienced by an exemplary (ruling-class) subject contemplating naval logistics and a human quandary of sublime proportions. The dialectic of mastery and subjection or the sublime could themselves alone exhaust any single reading of this text. It is no doubt an act of extreme cheek on my part that I could, in a few pages, combine both analyses; yet I do so, even at the price of some loose ends, in order to suggest the power with which Melville intuited and inscribed within the framework of his fiction the epistemological investigations of his epoch.

It is perfectly fitting that a tale exploring slavery and incorporating the structuralist intellectual frameworks of a uniquely systematic age should be strikingly economical. “Benito Cereno” offers us in fact two stories for the price of one. It is a twice-told story; or rather, a story and the appearance of a story. It chronicles the initiation of one Captain Amasa Delano into the duplicates and duplication of irony and deception. With detachment the Hegelian omniscient narrator carries on while Delano falls into and rescues himself from naïveté, credulity, good faith, and the debilitating effects of rationality. Delano, whose Hispanic name echoes the French de loin and carries as well the nuance of wool (Sp. lana), the innocence of Christ-figures and martyrs is, always already and from the outset, a straw-man and a sop. (We will return to the possible significances of his name.) The play between Delano's antics, even when they include discoveries, and the narrator's detached vision and commentary describes already the parameters of a heavily ironized situation.

The narrative structure of “Benito Cereno” is ironic, while its situation and revelations are sublime. The history of irony runs concurrent to the play of dialectics and the disclosure of the sublime.² Without the presupposition of an inherently and unalterably divided subjectivity, there would be no place for the stories of irony and sublimity. These two seemingly diametrical reactions, the former a belittling and the latter a secularized awe, are rooted in the same epistemological settings and impasses.³ Melville's tale confronts us powerfully with the ironies of Delano's utterly rational naïveté and of Babo's tendentious victory over his master and mastery in general; its setting and tone owe much to the expansiveness of sublime conditions, in nature and thought. Melville honors dialectical thinking in the stunning reversals between mastery and subjection, truth and fiction, and objectivity and subjectivity that the tale stages. Yet these acts of logical and structural subversion would come to naught if the setting did not communicate oceanic awe and global economy and conflict. Without the setting of sublimity, I am arguing, whether projected outward in vast seascapes or inward as stunning revelations, psychological coups de foudre, the drama of irony would come to small potatoes.

The setting of “Benito Cereno” thus combines the magnificence (sublimity) and devaluation (irony) that intertwine and supplant each other at the locus of the psychological and intellectual borderline. The sea in Melville is the locus of the borderline,⁴ the place where exemplary subjects lose their rational bearings, experience the dissolution of measure, and enter the economies of artistic production or philosophical speculation. Contempt and awe are the terminal points of Melville's sea voyages. In between, characters experience their emptiness as fullness; they enter a systolic alternation between filling and emptying. The fiction of voyagistic movement segments the emptying of apparent findings into distinct episodes. In Pierre, the apex of Melville's domestic fiction, there is the possibility for only one move, from the constrained rural life to an even more claustrophobic Manhattan. The arrest of movement in this text leaves the protagonist in a situation of inescapable, arrested duplicity. The imprisoning landscape of oedipal triangles that Melville paints for this novel is more horrific, in a psychological sense, than the standard Melvillian sea-dangers. It could be argued that seascapes are so compelling throughout Melville's fictive career in part because their wider scope allows for a repetitive rhythm of interpretations and debunkings, of sublime expansions of uncertainty that break out from within the constraints of dialectical precision.

There are, then, in this tale, epistemological plots that coincide with the narrated events; rhetorical moves that both buttress and undermine the sequence of thoughts and happenings; social allegories that expand into commentaries on the possibilities of knowing. Captain Amasa Delano grows as an interpreter at the same time that he revises his “take” on an anomalous naval situation; yet it is not clear that he definitively augments his “self-consciousness” or his detachment from the social compromises (e.g., slavery) of his age. The status of the “truth” seems to fortify itself as the events' narration progresses from an initial “take” to an informed explanation to a legal disposition. The sublime murkiness of first conditions in the tale has, however, ab origine undermined the possibility of dialectical increments in certainty. The slave trade is among the story's social “givens.” The augmenting epistemological crisis that the text describes in spite of its progressive acts of clarification is indicative of the status of ethical certitude in a slavery-based economy.

Let's run through the tale as it was meant to be read in terms of the conventions of shorter fiction in the period when it was composed. That is to say, in our own first “take” on the story, let us (as Conrad would say) submit ourselves to its narrative sequence and to the train of developments in consciousness that is supposed to coincide with the narrative events.⁵ But even here certain aspects of its hermeneutic and epistemological commentary make themselves materially known. Fully the first two-thirds of the novella concerns itself with the multifaceted (social, epistemological, moral) murkiness besetting a sea captain when he “steps aboard a boat.”⁶ The conditions defining the captain's “consciousness,” knowledge, or existential state during this prepossessing prologue are characterized by the ambiguity of philosophical aporias in general and by Kantian antinomies in particular.⁷ What gives this crucial initial segment any coherence it claims is Delano's attempts to interpret the status of Don Benito Cereno, captain of the renegade merchant ship. The anxiety that the disabled vessel causes Delano presents itself initially and superficially as an uncertainty regarding the power relations on board. Don Benito, the commanding officer, operates from a position of (possibly hypochondriacal) sickliness instead of from strength. His officers are largely out of the picture (or they are decorative corpses when we see them). As Delano's knowledge and consciousness emerge over the first two-thirds of the novella, he experiences a gnawing suspicion that Don Benito's underlings, slaves, particularly Babo, his personal servant, are more in control of the situation than he is.

The status of a ship under the control of its slaves defines for Melville the state of anxiety and horror in the mercantile world of Western Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century (this is the tale's temporal setting). “Normality” in this world consists of a set of (empirically located) paradoxes or antinomies gaining legitimacy from a control asserted by European powers whose societies are themselves structured by idealism. As it slowly and with considerable resistance dawns upon Delano that he has happened upon an utter dystopia, a setting in which all domestic European pretensions and hypocrisies have been declared null and void, the particularity of his (naval) situation expands itself into a general meditation, the intellectual conditions making the European civil order possible. It is no accident, then, at the end of this extended précis that Delano's departure from the phantom vessel, the San Dominick, triggers the crisis that unmasks the actual power relations prevailing on board. The conclusion of the story embraces, in quick succession, the revelation of the heretical power relations that have prevailed since the outset of the story, and the setting aright of this deviance by the authority of European judicial authority. Melville frames all but a few of the novella's “final words” within the seemingly objective format of a trial transcript. The authoritative status of a legal document promises to resolve the story's disquieting ambiguities. Yet the tale's ironies and half-awarenesses persist beyond this documentary ending, suggesting that mercantilism and slavery have shaken Western truth and knowledge to their innermost parts. The two-thirds of the narrative that Melville devotes to Delano's uncertainties, anxieties, and crises de conscience renders any restoration of the old order, any retreat into idealized eighteenth-century notions of authority, utterly hopeless.

“Benito Cereno” stages the Kantian allegory available to literary characters in post-Cartesian works of fiction; that is, the novella dramatizes the opening up of a dimension of sublimity (either in the “internal” or “external” represented worlds) to a character hitherto under the constraints and assurances of rationality. Economically, the opening up of the sublime, whether depicted as revelation, madness, rapture, or political insurrection in the present case, corresponds to a compensation, a Derridean supplement, to an aspect of poverty elsewhere in “existence.” The sublime, as I explain elsewhere,⁸ may be defined as the vestige of awe carried over into a secular religion in an age that has witnessed the severe qualification, if not the death of God. As figments of original genius, post-Cartesian literary characters lead us to a certain wonder and awe that they are privileged to unearth in compensation for the constraints that they are fated to endure.⁹ These constraints include physical deformity (Hoffmann's René Cardillac and Poe's Hopfrog); unrequited, and then requited desire (Goethe's Werther and Faust); banal domesticity (Flaubert's Madame Bovary); personal isolation (Joseph K. in Kafka's The Trial); and “the subjective experience of emptiness” (Camus' Meursault). The expanded dimensionality of the sublime is a reward even where fatal. In a post-Cartesian episteme, this compensation, which is, in Heideggerian terms onto-theological even if not explicitly religious, is in turn passed on to the reader and cultivated society as a compensation for the constraints upon their hopes, desires, rages, and passions. The opening up of the sublime may kill, but then no one is going to escape the world alive anyway. These conditions for knowledge and existence were always already inscribed in the Cartesian dualism and division between soul and body. We associate Kant with the compensatory rapture of aesthetics because of the rigor and deliberation with which he elaborated the interplay between transcendent and empirical realms and because of his meticulous analyses of the beautiful and the sublime.

I can tell you already that Captain Amasa Delano, even though “Benito Cereno” ends with the ostensible clarification furnished by a legal document, is a close confrère and semblable to the characters mentioned immediately above and in many other literary sites in the confusion, derangement, and intensity that he experiences in trade for the closures surrounding his taking-off position. His “overall” experience corresponds to the Kantian allegory: empirical man desperately seeking revelation (secular, of course).

The tale is already primed for this allegory as it begins.¹⁰ Delano enters a dimension of sublime expansion just after “He rose, dressed, and went on deck.”

The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.

(PT, 46)

There are many respects in which the seascape Captain Amasa Delano enters immediately upon the domestic task of dressing himself is uncanny, but none is more compelling than the stillness and monochromatic indifference that have befallen the fluid element of the sea, an imprisonment by rigidity if not by incarceration. Delano's starting position is an expanding sublimity of non-articulation. The perceptual and cognitive markers that would furnish orientation through differences (in color, tone, position) are absent. Delano has entered a slough of indifference and incertitude. Elements persist, but deprived of their elementary dynamic qualities. The most uncanny image (and we may begin to conceptualize the psychoanalytical uncanny as a sublimity projected “inward”) is that of leaden waves or sea swells, of an aquatic medium frozen still. These waves are also men of pleasure, swells, whose amoral pleasure violates the sea's cruciform rigidity (roods). A distinctly gray sky dons a “gray surtout,” foreshadowing an important comparison that will be made between the costumes of the sickly nobleman, the title character, and Babo, his poorly attired manservant.

The first scene of the story is already prepared for revelations, for disturbances of the encompassing torpor that will really matter. The narrator remarks upon a general aura of oddity prevailing upon ships at sea. They harbor a speculative element; seem an unreal setting for “costumes, gestures, and faces” every bit as unreal (50). The ship is a privileged locus for the bolts of lightning and enchantment that shake sea captains from their complacency and that inspire writers figured as curious, speculative subjects:

Both house and ship, the one by its walls and blinds, the other by its high bulwarks like ramparts—hoard from view their interiors till the last moment: but in the case of the ship there is this addition; that the living spectacle it contains, upon its sudden and complete disclosure, has, in contrast with the blank ocean which zones it, something of the effect of enchantment. The ship seems unreal; these strange costumes, gestures, and faces, but a shadowy tableau just emerged from the deep, which must directly receive back what it gave.

(50)

A ship is both a house and a naval vessel, satisfying both of Freud's major requirements for the uncanny. It is a temporary home or haven nonetheless pervaded by sublimity. The mood prevailing on board is unsettling, even if characterized as “enchantment.” Captain Delano hovers between confidence, Melville's general term for remaining under the auspices of a functioning idealism, and premonitions of unchecked malevolence and death.¹¹ In the passage below, the narrator contrasts Delano's assurance with the imprisoning death of sarcophagi and with threats that pursue him with the silent intrusiveness of moss (a favored metaphor in Hawthorne).

These natural sights somehow insensibly deepened his confidence and ease. At last he looked to see how his boat was getting on; but it was still pretty remote. …

To change the scene, as well as to please himself with a leisurely observation of the coming boat, stepping over into the mizzen-chains, he clambered his way into the starboard quarter-gallery—one of those abandoned Venetian-looking water-balconies previously mentioned—retreats cut off from the deck. As his foot pressed the half-damp, half-dry sea-mosses matting the place, and a chance phantom cat's-paw—an islet of breeze, unheralded, unfollowed—as this ghostly cat's-paw came fanning his cheek; as his glance fell upon the row of small, round dead-lights—all closed like coppered eyes of the coffined—and the state-cabin door … now calked fast like a sarcophagus lid … and he bethought himself of the time, when that state-cabin and this state-balcony had heard the voices of the Spanish king's officers. …

Trying to break one charm, he was but becharmed anew. Though upon the wide sea, he seemed in some far inland country; prisoner in some deserted château, left to stare at empty grounds, and peer out at vague roads, where never wagon or wayfarer passed.

But these enchantments were a little disenchanted as his eye fell on the corroded main-chains.

(PT, 73-74)

The San Dominick is a former ship of state fallen into disrepair. Once a showcase (or show vessel) of national power and grandiosity, in its reduced condition it awakens in the American sea captain an aimless undulation between ongoing ideals and hypochondria, the latter in Melville's widest sense as the loss of confidence, the inability of (Western) idealism to repair breeches in positivity and positivism. Amasa Delano, an exemplary Kantian subject, enters a rhythm of falling in and out of charms and enchantments. The strangeness of the San Dominick fundamentally undermines his confidence, but then, lost in his thoughts, his equilibrium is, as if by magic, restored. His entry into a renegade vessel offers the compensations of sublime experience; but it poses the threat undergone by all Romantic heroes that sublimity cannot be cast aside when its rigors prove too demanding.

In light of this scene setting, it cannot come as too much of a surprise that Delano's chief interlocutor and object of interest, title-character Benito Cereno, is a veritable personification of sublime attributes. Don Benito Cereno is beset by the multifaceted but vague malaise that forms, for contemporary object-relations theorists, the presenting complaint for the narcissistic disturbances. His twitchiness also corresponds to late-nineteenth-century characterizations of neurasthenia.¹² The apparent absences in his consciousness, insofar as they can be inferred from behaviors, are of vast and sublime proportions. An aura of “cloudy languor” (PT, 52) hovers about the title character, a description not without significance in terms of the novella's initial atmospheric conditions:

Still, Captain Delano was not without the idea, that had Benito Cereno been a man of greater energy, misrule would hardly have come to the present pass. But the debility, constitutional or induced by hardships, was too obvious to be overlooked. … His mind appeared unstrung, if not still more seriously affected. Shut up in these oaken walls, chained to one dull round of command, whose unconditionality cloyed him, like some hypochondriac abbot he moved slowly about, at times suddenly pausing, starting, or staring, biting his lip, biting his finger-nail, flushing, paling, twitching his beard, with other symptoms of an absent or moody mind. This distempered spirit was lodged, as before hinted, in as distempered a frame. … His voice was that of one with lungs half gone—hoarsely suppressed, a husky whisper. No wonder that … his private servant apprehensively followed him. Sometimes the negro gave his master his arm, or took his handkerchief out of his pocket for him … less a servant than a devoted companion.

(52)

As in a painting by Caspar David Friedrich (e.g., Morning in the Riesengebirge, 1810-1811), the Romantic subject, the subject of Kantian sublimity, hovers at the precipice of an immense abyss that is, in many senses, too much for him.¹³ The vacuity of the void without is mirrored in absences within—of composure, awareness, self-possession. Don Benito's voice is an emanation from the other world, not the expression of a particular subject rooted in a specific context, Heidegger's Welt.¹⁴ His variegated hypochondriacal debility bespeaks terror at some aspect of the Transcendental, the Lacanian Real,¹⁵ that has manifested itself to him. Within the framework of Melville's extended tale, Captain Amasa Delano serves as a medium of transmission by means of which this encounter with the inconceivable reaches us, the reading and thinking public.

So much for the Kantian framework to Melville's novella (Derrida would call it Kant's “frame”).¹⁶ Among Melville's splendid achievements in “Benito Cereno” is its encompassing, through literary dramatization, the major achievements of nineteenth-century systematic thought. Our bearings place us in a Hegelian world particularly when we confront the tendentious dimensions of “Benito Cereno.” The story situates us on the fronts of multiple wars, whether between races, social classes, spheres of national influence (the Spanish, American, and Senegalese), modes of subjectivity (free individuality or slavery) or metaphysical attitudes (“confidence” as opposed to hypochondria). The compulsion with which antagonistic statuses supplant each other in “Benito Cereno” affirms the necessity of something like Hegelian dialectics during the epoch whose thinking it described and qualified.

The allegory of domination or control in the novella is a complicated one. The story's unsettling quality is not exhausted by the thought that, on one occasion or another, resistant and even imaginative and manipulative slaves were able to usurp control of a ship. More than control of one sea-vessel has been shaken when Don Benito, on the verge of Delano's departure, quakingly informs him, late in the story, that he is not free to disembark from his own ship and enter a free American vessel. At this moment, a quintessential social mask, the basis for public “false self,” is cast aside.¹⁷ A whole social system has been shaken to the roots, a system in which hypochondria is not merely the foible of certain neurotics, but in which it comprises the enabling legislation for a society founded on repression and exploitation. In “Benito Cereno” slavery is the most compelling instance of the repression keeping the ruling class in place, at the cost of a few displaced symptoms here and there for its members; but it is not the only architectural support to this system. While the novella is replete with illustrations of the “master/slave dialectic,” no more graphic than in Babo's shaving his master, the full extent of its Hegelian infrastructure accounts for the repression keeping all hierarchical social orders “afloat,” for the dissimulation that structures civil interactions, for the price that under classes pay, most often willingly, for preserving the peace in civil societies.

Melville brings to bear the dissimulation at the basis of the civil order upon the narrative performance of “Benito Cereno.” At pivotal moments he effects a marvelous coordination between the thematic exploration of social violence and a performative acting out of narrative duplicity. With Conradian tact he infuses descriptive passages with rhetorical complexity and polemical import. The initial sketch of the San Dominick serves in this regard as a fine example.

Whether the ship had a figure-head, or only a plain beak, was not quite certain, owing to canvas wrapped around that part, either to protect it while undergoing a refurbishing, or else decently to hide its decay. Rudely painted or chalked, as in a sailor freak, along the forward side of a sort of pedestal below the canvas, was the sentence, “Seguid vuestro jefe,” (follow your leader); while upon the tarnished headboards, near by, appeared, in stately capitals, once gilt, the ship's name, “San Dominick,” each letter streakingly corroded with tricklings of copper-spike rust; while, like mourning weeds, dark festoons of sea-grass slimily swept to and fro over the name, with every hearse-like roll of the hull.

(PT, 49)

With a disingenuousness at the full reach of irony, the narrative introjects “Benito Cereno”'s vertiginous meditation on power and authority into the innocuous description of the ship's prow: at the outset, the narrative asks whether there is a figurehead on board or not. The ship's disrepair is a pretext for posing the tale's ultimate questions while the reader, with Delano as an intermediary, hovers between blindness and insight into its hidden laws and as yet inarticulate story. The tale makes Lacanian subjects of its protagonist and readers.¹⁸ In the beginning, they are too unschooled in the semiology of subjection and resistance to make sense of the telltale signs. As in The Confidence-Man, this text begins with a motto, in whose evolving meaning the fate of the characters and the trajectory of reading is contained: “follow your leader,” a simple command made exasperatingly difficult in a post-Cartesian world in which an identifiable Judeo-Christian deity is in retreat, monarchical authority is under siege, and in a colonial setting where the chain of command—whether emanating in Spain or the United States—has been hopelessly attenuated and weakened. A sequence of plant images runs through the story—vegetables that insinuate themselves in loci of physical stress and strategic importance; for example, in the above passage, the sea-grass obscuring the ship's identity. The entire text may be read as a commentary on how exasperatingly difficult it has become, in such a world, to follow the simple command, “Seguid vuestro jefe.” Compliance is arbitrary and intolerable (in a situation of competing multiple jurisdictions, who can take credit, exactly, for being “your leader”?); yet non-compliance brings about the horror that Captain Amasa Delano (and in a later tale, the Marlowe of “Heart of Darkness”) transmits to the reading public and civil polity.

It is in such a situation of dialectical fluidity that Melville gives us a glance at the basic master-slave diad as it can be pictorially represented at the historical moment of his awareness. The icon of an erect white man accompanied by a lesser black man at his side, a black man of the stature of a domesticated dog, has a certain integrity of its own in Melville's writing. (It is invoked, for example, to describe the operator known as “Black Guinea” in The Confidence-Man.)

The Spanish captain, a gentlemanly, reserved-looking, and rather young man to a stranger's eye, dressed with singular richness, but bearing plain traces of recent sleepless cares and disquietudes, stood passively by, leaning against the main-mast, at one moment casting a dreary, spiritless look upon his excited people, at the next an unhappy glance toward his visitor. By his side stood a black of small stature, in whose rude face, as occasionally, like a shepherd's dog, he mutely turned it up into the Spaniard's, sorrow and affection were equally blended.

(PT, 51)

Here is a vignette of the relation in which the dominant white man and his black servant stand. This is again the sickly white man, whose dyspepsia is an essential element in the system of dissimulations making the slavery-based civil order possible. The white man's vulnerability and need are fundamental pretexts in the perpetuation of this order; otherwise, why would slaves be necessary? By his side stands, or rather kneels, the black bondsman. The black owes his place in this system to the white man's need; yet his placement in it has been forced; his fidelity to the system is, by all premises of reason, divided.

The arbitrariness of the system bringing master together with slave lends the interaction between these classes a certain aura of unreality. There is a pronounced theatrical quality to Don Benito's staged interactions with Babo. The immediate context for this is, of course, the “horror” of usurped authority that both parties have an interest in hiding. Yet since the slave-system has implications for reaches of the civil order from which it is hidden (as German concentration camps affected civilian life in the cities from which they were separated), Don Benito and Babo's staged affirmations of brotherly love comment as well on civility in general during the epoch of mercantile slavery.

In the passage immediately below, Delano joins Don Benito in a professed admiration for the camaraderie and bonhomie of slavery. At the same time that Delano serves as a detached American observer to the situation, in certain respects he also functions as Benito Cereno's double in the story (both, for example, have linguistically Hispanic names). While Benito Cereno undergoes a trajectory of mental absences and recoveries, the American sea captain enters his own rhythm of anxieties and relaxations. Delano is the privileged internal audience in the story to the civil theater of slavery, the domestic drama of mutual compliance upon which its institutional continuity depends:

Once more the faintness returned—his mind roved—but, recovering, he resumed:

“But it is Babo here to whom, under God, I owe not only my own preservation, but likewise to him, chiefly, the merit is due, of pacifying his more ignorant brethren, when at intervals tempted to murmurings.”

“Ah, master,” sighed the black, bowing his face, “don't speak of me; Babo is nothing; what Babo has done was but duty.”

“Faithful fellow!” cried Captain Delano. “Don Benito, I envy you such a friend; slave I cannot call him.”

As master and man stood before him, the black upholding the white, Captain Delano could not but bethink him of the beauty of that relationship which could present such a spectacle of fidelity on the one hand and confidence on the other. The scene was heightened by the contrast in dress. … Excepting when his occasional nervous contortions brought about disarray, there was a certain precision in his attire, curiously at variance with the unsightly disorder around; especially in the belittered Ghetto, forward of the main-mast, wholly occupied by the blacks.

(57)

This brief interlude, which invokes specifically the Hegelian dialectic of the master and the slave, transpires between the extremities of “fidelity on the one hand and confidence on the other,” that is, between feigned compliance and complicity at one extreme and the idealism that powers the progress made by (Western) societies and communities. Yet the public profession of need and appreciation by the master and fidelity by the slave is, precisely, a theater piece: it is described as a “scene.” The feigned collaboration between master and bondsman in this scene is reminiscent of the forced amiability between Frank Goodman and Charley Noble late in The Confidence-Man. Deep in the bowels of this stage setting reside the blacks, in their “Ghetto.”

The masquerade of slavery-based civility and urbanity draws upon a preexisting ideology for its legitimation and engenders a revised ideology of its own. While it is not ideology that rounds up slaves and shackles them in ships (historians estimate that fifteen percent of the individuals captured for slavery died in transit alone), ideology played a decisive role in making commercial practices palatable to the domestic population. In The Confidence-Man Melville demonstrates some attentiveness to rationalizations for Indian hunting disseminated on the home front. In this sense, the attitudes that Hegel betrays toward Africa and Africans in The Philosophy of History serve as an ideological backdrop to the events and conditions that Delano (and we) are left to interpret. Hegel's role in furnishing an ideological pretext in the endeavor of slavery is as duplicitous as Delano's in the story. Hegel both elaborates a schema for world history and progress in which Africa plays at most a supporting role and elaborates the formal and structural mechanisms in which power relations (whether between masters and slaves or syntheses and antitheses) are tenuous at best. On the one hand, Hegel consummates the tradition of Western thinking that rewards fidelity to idealism in its theological, scientific, and ontological dimensions.¹⁹ Within this historical framework, the cultures of Egypt, Persia, and India are appropriable because they anticipate the ideological fidelity that powers both monotheistic religion and rigorous scientific method. On the other hand, this designation of an interior to the homeland faithful to Western idealism relegates the societies not meeting its specifications to the conceptual equivalent of a netherworld. Within the scenario of history as the History of the progressive unfolding of the Idea, the place of Africa is not a very esteemed one. “Africa proper, as far as History goes back, has remained—for all purposes of connection with the rest of the World—shut up; it is the Gold-land compressed within itself—the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night” (PH, 91), writes Hegel in The Philosophy of History (1830-1831).²⁰

Hegel consigns Africa to a history of eternal childhood, in which its single positive value is as a treasury of natural resources. Its imprisonment, and by implication, the enslavement of its peoples, is always already predetermined, by virtue of its irreversible withdrawal from the progressive realization of the Idea through the dynamics of self-reflexivity. In effect, argues Hegel, excision from the map of World Culture is just desserts for cultures rejecting the multifaceted gift constituted by progressive, self-originated idealism. Hegel not only places Africa at the margins of the map of World Culture: he accounts for the fate of its peoples:

The peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend, for the very reason that in reference to it, we must quite give up the principle which necessarily accompanies our ideas, the category of Universality. In Negro life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence. … The Negro, as already observed, exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality—all what we call feeling—if we would rightly comprehend him. There is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character.

(PH, 93)

Even allowing for the fact of the increasing schematic bent of Hegel's later writing, there is a remarkable dissonance between the categorical dismissal of Africa and Africans in the above passage and the dialectical complexity that challenges such generalizations, upon which Melville draws in his fictive meditation upon slavery. So horrified is Hegel by a presumed total absence of idealism in African culture that he would place African peoples beyond the pale of humanity. “Benito Cereno” stands astride the same extremities as the Hegelian discourse: on the one hand placing blanket dismissals in the narrative discourse; on the other entertaining the dialectical subtlety constituting the downfall of authority aboard the San Dominick and the puncturing of the American sea captain's confidence.

So too for the narrator of “Benito Cereno” is the African a child of nature, so ignorant as to bear the caste of the untouchable with relentless and natural good humor; a natural handmaiden or manservant.

There is something in the negro which, in a most particular way, fits him for avocations about one's person. Most negroes are natural valets and hair-dressers; taking to the comb and brush congenially as to the castinets, and flourishing them apparently with almost equal satisfaction. There is, too, a smooth tact about them in this employment, with a marvelous, noiseless, gliding briskness, not ungraceful in its way, singularly pleasing to behold, and still more so to be the manipulated subject of. And above all is the great gift of good-humor. Not the mere grin or laugh is here meant. Those were unsuitable. But a certain easy cheerfulness, harmonious in every glance and gesture; as though God had set the whole negro to some pleasant tune.

When to this is added the docility arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind, and that susceptibility of bland attachment sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors, one readily perceives why those hypochondriacs, Johnson and Byron—it may be something like the hypochondriac, Benito Cereno—took to their hearts, almost to the exclusion of the entire white race, their serving men, the negroes, Barber and Fletcher. …

Among other things, he was amused with an odd instance of the African love of bright colors and fine shows, in the black's informally taking from the flag-locker a great piece of bunting of all hues, and lavishly tucking it under his master's chin for an apron.

(PT, 83-84)

In preparation for a shaving scene in which the full dynamics of the Hegelian master-slave interaction emerge, a bevy of clichés concerning Africans emerges: natural docility and humor, love of music and bright colors; endless generosity in the face of abuse and exploitation.

Melville's fictive exegesis of the institution and dynamics of slavery is divided between its domestic and mercantile/military theaters. Slavery engenders, on the home front, the hypocritical civility enabling (so-constituted) business to go on and confidence, public idealism, to maintain itself. Out in the “field” (the field of the emerging social sciences as well as that of the slave trade), explicit relations of dominance and power still prevail. In the rendition of the story that Hegelian thinking makes possible, the cosmopolitan hypocrisy of slavery reaches a climax in the scene where Babo shaves Benito Cereno, a moment when the narrative does not omit to register the title character's extreme anxiety. When the mask protecting this mutual hypocrisy is penetrated, that is, when Babo and cohorts restrict Don Benito disembarking from his own ship, the time has arrived for the (Western) power underlying the masquerade of slavery to assert itself. Let us remain cognizant of how little (Western) power it takes, even for an outnumbered Delano and a depleted Spanish crew, to subdue the resistant slaves:

Setting down his basin, the negro searched among the razors, as for the sharpest, and having found it, gave it an additional edge by expertly strapping it on the firm, smooth, oily skin of his open palm; he then made a gesture as if to begin, but midway stood suspended for an instant, one hand elevating the razor, the other professionally dabbing among the bubbling suds on the Spaniard's lank neck. Not unaffected by the close sight of the gleaming steel, Don Benito nervously shuddered; his usual ghastliness was heightened by the lather, which lather, again, was intensified in hue by the contrasting sootiness of the negro's body. Altogether the scene was somewhat peculiar, at least to Captain Delano, nor, as he saw the two thus postured, could he resist the vagary, that in the black he saw a headsman, and in the white a man at the block. …

Again Don Benito faintly shuddered.

“You must not shake so, master. See, Don Amasa, master always shakes when I shave him. And yet master knows I never yet have drawn blood, though it's true, if master will shake so, I may some of these times. Now master,” he continued. “And now, Don Amasa, please go on with your talk about the gale, and all that; master can hear, and, between times, master can answer.”

(84-85)

In this passage, the subtleties of a masterful literary meditation upon a situation and the institutions making it possible become evident. There is a wonderful counterpoint between the razor suspended in midair, suspended between its servile and aggressive potentials, and Don Benito's congenital (and well-founded) Angst. The gravity of the situation punctures the soft playfulness of the soap bubbles. Babo's soothing words have the same effect as the bubbles: they mark at the same time that they soften a severe, even deadly conflict. Babo has never drawn blood, he attests, but that could change at any moment. Henceforth, Delano has to consider quite seriously the possibility that “master and man, for some unknown purpose, were acting out, both in word and deed … some juggling play before him” (87).

The dramatic climax of the novella may be described as an unmasking of the uneasy social contract prevailing on board (a microcosm of slavery-based economies) coinciding with a sudden semiological clarification. The cat is let out of the bag as far as power relations are concerned when Benito Cereno blurts out, “This plotting pirate means murder!” (98), precipitating the scuffle that leads to Babo's demise. Yet a number of other meanings receive clarification at this revelatory moment as well. Indeed, one of Captain Delano's major roles as an exemplary speculative and Kantian subject has been his encounter with gestures and other signs of dubious and possibly malevolent signification. Among these I would have to catalogue the inscription “Seguid vuestro jefe” (49, 99, 117); the “imperfect gesture” made by a Spanish sailor as he advanced toward the balcony (74, 79, 110); and above all, the uncanny percussive chorus of the oakum pickers, presumably in the act of cleaning their hatchets (50, 59, 79-80, 96).

It is precisely where the exemplary speculative subjects of Romanticism become exegetes of sign-systems that the seeds of Modernism, with its Saussurian insistence on the priority of signs over any significations they may “contain,” are planted. It is the achievement of Romantic theory to place the subject on two parallel but divergent paths: toward speculation, carrying the classical accoutrements of subjective metaphysics; and in the midst of a play of signs, a rigorous aesthetics, from which this baggage has been jettisoned. The modernist works that we remember for their distinctive style took their cue from this second pathway that Romanticism cleared.

The dramatic climax of the story coincides with a renunciation of “all but the last appearance of courtesy” on the imprisoned Spanish sea captain's part (94). The dropping of pretenses constitutes a consummation for the novella's Hegelian allegory:

Glancing down at his feet, Captain Delano saw the freed hand of the servant aiming with a second dagger—a small one, before concealed in his wool—with this he was snakishly writhing up from the boat's bottom, at the heart of his master, his countenance lividly vindictive, expressing the centred purpose of his soul; while the Spaniard, half-choked, was vainly shrinking away, with husky words, incoherent to all but the Portuguese.

That moment, across the long-benighted mind of Captain Delano, a flash of revelation swept, illuminating, in unanticipated clearness, his host's whole mysterious demeanor, with every enigmatic event of the day, as well as the entire past voyage of the San Dominick. He smote Babo's hand down, but his own heart smote him harder. With infinite pity he withdrew his hold from Don Benito. Not Captain Delano, but Don Benito, the black, had intended to stab.

(99)

The final sentence in this graphic description leaves the direct objects of its actions as well as its intended victim unclear. It may be that the black had really intended to stab Don Benito; but a singular syntax demonstrates that the black as well as the American could well have succumbed to a hateful wound. It takes no more than a slap from a white man's hand to quell a slave uprising. At the moment when relations of power become clear, an entire aesthetic configuration of signs and symbols falls into place. Indeed mystification, within the framework of this novella, is a function of a deliberate obscurantism regarding conditions of authority and power. This is Melville very much in synch with a certain polemic in Marx.²¹

Yet for the story to achieve its dramatic force, its horror (whether one of usurped power or impenetrable signs) must be depicted in terms intelligible to the hegemonic class.

Both the black's hands were held, as, glancing up towards the San Dominick, Captain Delano, now with the scales dropped from his eyes, saw the negroes, not in misrule, not in tumult, not as if frantically concerned for Don Benito, but with mask torn away, flourishing hatchets and knives, in ferocious piratical revolt. Like delirious black dervishes, the six Ashantees danced on the poop. Prevented by their foes from springing into the water, the Spanish boys were hurrying up to the topmost spars, while such of the few Spanish sailors, not already in the sea, less alert, were descried, helplessly mixed in, on deck, with the blacks.

(PT, 99)

For us, reading in 1995, in the wake of Saussure and Kafka and Joyce and Stein and Barthes and Derrida and Riddel, a crisis in signification may be an adequate and ultimate horror for this novella. But Melville, writing at a certain time and for a specific readership, chose to paint the story's threat as a dance of crazed dervishes, with the winsome colonial boys in retreat. Yet the orientalist stage props do not obscure the fact that Melville has set his chief surrogate, Captain Amasa Delano, out on the treacherous double path on which the post-Cartesian subject negotiates the delirium of aesthetics while s/he bears the baggage of existence and metaphysics. The novella's Hegelian framework could both generate categories and generalizations so crude as to be laughable and account for the subtle dynamics of shifts in power, logic, and intellectual discrimination applying to the oppressed as well as the oppressors.

There is no more telling indication of the novella's semiological crisis, the manner in which it anticipates modernist aesthetics, than the play within its system of naming. I have already noted how the Hispanic surnames of Cereno and Delano mirror each other. Melville demonstrates in this text that irony does not rely upon a theatrics of subterfuge and debunking; the act of naming is complicated enough to open powerful registers of irony.

Like Hawthorne, Melville draws upon plays of naming as a significant fictive resource. He draws our attention to this fact, just as, in a wider sense, through Delano he makes us aware of suspicious conditions aboard the San Dominick. Naming can participate in a certain complicity just as individual agents do. Melville does not allow us to pass over the ironic potential in Don Benito's name in total ignorance:

That strange ceremoniousness, too, at other times evinced, seemed not uncharacteristic of one playing a part above his real level. Benito Cereno—Don Benito Cereno—a sounding name. One, too, at that period, not unknown, in the surname, to supercargoes and sea captains trading along the Spanish Main, as belonging to one of the most enterprising and extensive mercantile families in all those provinces; several members of it having titles; a sort of Castilian Rothschild, with a noble brother, or cousin, in every great trading town of South America.

(64)

Not unlike the Joycean notion of “soundsense,”²² Benito Cereno is possessed of “a sounding name.” The narrative here gives us leave to read sense into sound, specifically, to register the “serenity” infused into Don Benito's name even if it is not orthographically evident. Within the sphere of romance languages, then, the name Benito Cereno translates into something like “the good, serene one.” Given that the title character is too beleaguered to be serene and too debilitated to be good, this appellation is nothing if not an ironic one.

Yet it is into the American counterpart's name that Melville compresses, in the sense of the Freudian Mischwort or condensation, the greatest complexity and irony.²³

“What I, Amasa Delano—Jack of the Beach, as they called me when a lad—I, Amasa; the same that, duck-satchel in hand, used to paddle along the waterside to the school-house made from the old hulk—I, little Jack of the Beach, that used to go berrying with cousin Nat and the rest; I to be murdered here at the ends of the earth, on board a haunted pirate-ship by a horrible Spaniard? Too nonsensical to think of! Who would murder Amasa Delano?”

(PT, 77)

Ironically, the brief swatch of text giving us the greatest insight into Delano's name is the only moment in the novella even approaching autobiographical reminiscence. At this single point in the narrative we are afforded a glimpse of the sailor as a young man. There was a “touch of the artist” about Amasa who, as a child, already encompassed a fictive double. Underlying the adult speculative navigator resides the artist as a young man. This point is brought home irrefutably by the brief exclamation, “I—Amasa.” A bit of play with this strange name—disjointing it—produces the phrase, “I am as a,” the very basis for the hypothetical individual, the person who lives in the possibilities of art rather than through the empirical facts. Amasa is also “a massa,” a Master. To be hypothetical about slavery, to see it but not to see it at the same time; not to be engaged in it as either the Master or the Slave, and therefore to be free to be indecisive about it—this is precisely the position of mastery on the home front. It is in this sense, as well as in others, that Amasa is also “a massa.”

The name Amasa Delano links, then, the play of the possible to the detachment of seeing de loin, from far away. Captain Delano is disquieted by the conditions and events he observes not only because of the double messages in the empirical data, but also because he, quintessentially, in name, is a hypothetical subject, a creature whose possibility defines his margin or range. This is the position, in modern-day psychoanalytical theory, of the “as if” personality, the subject whose narcissism predicates an endless deferral of self-definition.²⁴ Politically as well as fictively, Delano functions at most as a hypothesis.

The novella fatefully links two sea captains, one Spanish, the other North American. One cannot fulfill the good serenity in his name; the other realizes only too fully a hypothetical approach to some concrete problems: slavery, the exploitation implicit in mercantile economics. The story transpires between an impossible goodness and a detached hypothesis, two counterversions of idealism severed from the tangible conditions it otherwise might have amplified and reformed.

In at least two powerful senses, then, Melville's novella issues from the very crossroads of the nineteenth century. It serves as a fictive interface between predominant Kantian and Hegelian scenarios for intellection, interpretation, and subjectivity. And in its tendentious dimension, the minute attention it devotes to conditions of power and authority, it combines the speculative awareness of romantic literature and theory with the realistic depiction of social conditions that will become one characteristic feature of nineteenth-century European and U.S. fiction. “Benito Cereno” manages to place the Kantian scenario of the penetration of everyday, empirical constraints by the sublime, the aesthetic facet of the Transcendental, in contact with an exquisite Hegelian sensitivity to the reversals implicit in every situation of power, whether physical, logical, or political. The fictive investigation of slavery and its domestic ramifications that Melville undertakes in this novella is rigorous and far reaching. Fidelity is a charged term in the Melvillian lexicon. Melville's fidelity to his investigation enables “Benito Cereno” to chart a course between the metaphysics of romantic fiction and the social realism of, among others, Balzac, Crane, and Zola. (Needless to say, for the sake of its own comprehensibility, there is a powerful metaphysical element to nineteenth-century social realism.)

“Benito Cereno” may be described as the between that illuminates what falls on both sides of its wake. It arises between nineteenth-century speculative models, races, spheres of colonial influence, modes of economy (slavery and abolition), epochs of literary production, and theoretical bearings (metaphysics and language-oriented aesthetics). This between is an impasse at the same time that it is a fulcrum with access to enormous power. There is no way out of it. At most, any way out of it is a ruse, a dissimulation again harkening back to the epoch of irony, which persists from Plato to the postmodern indifference that disqualifies it by dissolving its constitutive differences between levels of knowledge.

Melville himself must resort to ruse in feigning a way out of “Benito Cereno”'s imprisoning (if not enslaving) system of intermediary locations. And his stratagem, in keeping with his epistemological moment, corresponds to a “flight into art,” giving aesthetics the final word, ascribing the ultimate indeterminacy to the freedoms and rights pertaining to the aesthetic enterprise. Do note that this way out is itself conditioned by features of education, social class, and the intended audience.

Into the network of his novella, Melville has incorporated representations of slavery, colonialism, oppression, and duplicity, images still remarkably powerful today. But his recourse, in closing off his fictive system, is to remind his readership that the text is a narrative, comprised of narratives by its characters. Explicit fictionality is both the pretext and the horizon for this literary work.

Early enough in the novella when he can still entertain doubts about the bizarre collation of facts confronting him, Delano can muse on the status of Benito Cereno's narrative.

He recalled the Spaniard's manner while telling his story. There was a gloomy hesitancy and subterfuge about it. It was just the manner of one making up his tale for evil purposes, as he goes. But if that story was not true, what was the truth? That the ship had unlawfully come into the Spaniard's possession? But in many of its details … Don Benito's story had been corroborated not only by the wailing ejaculations of the indiscriminate multitude, white and black, but likewise—what seemed impossible to be counterfeit—by the very expression and play of every human feature, which Captain Delano saw. If Don Benito's story was, throughout, an invention, then every soul on board, down to the youngest negress, was his carefully drilled recruit in the plot; an incredible inference. And yet, if there was a ground for mistrusting his veracity, that inference was a legitimate one.

(PT, 68-69)

In this passage, Captain Delano weighs the advantages and costs of believing a story. To accept Don Benito's account of the unusual conditions on board is to swallow, on the side, some implausible attestations; but the alternative to this possibility amounts to not only a dismissal of certain explanations but a renunciation of civility itself. It would be uncivil, beyond the norms of domesticity, to reject, in the absence of incontrovertible evidence, the representations of a fellow officer and gentleman. Credulity is a civic virtue; this is the hinge linking the making and reading of fiction to the dynamics of public life. Not to accept Don Benito's account is to posit that “every soul on board, down to the youngest negress [the pecking order of statuses is telling here] was his carefully drilled recruit in the plot: an incredible inference” (69). Civic duty and fiction, then, demand diametrically opposed ideals. Critical awareness demands the skepticism constituting, in terms of interpersonal equanimity, bad faith.

“Benito Cereno” ends in the form of a transcript of a legal proceeding. Both the deliberation itself and its certified record should resolve the crises in knowledge and social conscience that the related events have initiated. It is possible for written documents to arrive at a more authentic draft of events and conditions than has previously been available; yet the form of the document, the choice of genre alone, does not silence the questions to which the web of social conditions and responses has given rise. In The Confidence-Man and elsewhere, Melville attests to the centrality of credulity as a civic value. At the end of “Benito Cereno” he offers his readership a legal transcript as a means of definitively establishing the facts, as a pretext for shelving any persistent doubts. Yet at the same time that he holds out to his readers this formal device for achieving resolution, he couches the tale's ending in a rhetoric of endless reversal.

Melville concludes “Benito Cereno” in the form of legalistic determination but in the language of interminable fictionality. He thus pits his literary medium against the forms or genres of certifiable knowledge. Rhetoric and form are at each other's throats as this extended tale brings itself to an end, perhaps explaining the indeterminacy that must serve as the text's excuse for an ending. Neither fiction nor “objective reportage” are exempt from censure and suspicion in this terminal battle of discursive modes. A legal transcript may bear witness to a slave uprising otherwise hidden from public view, but its exaggerated pretense to authority may impose closure on questions whose urgency derives precisely from a fictive presentation. Fictionality, on the other hand, may bring questions of sustained moral indeterminacy to public attention; yet the aestheticization of violence and repression may, as Melville indicates, domesticate and legitimize these phenomena. Melville would appeal to overt fictionality and objective reportage in attempting to bring his tale to some satisfying conclusion, yet the compromises at play both in fictional allegory and in purportedly objective report aggravate the hermeneutic and moral indeterminacies.

It is in this context that the narrative, in reaching for its ending, adapts a rhetoric of deliberate fictionality at the same time that it would presume to limit the play of fiction through the assumption of non-fictive (e.g., legalistic) discursive forms. “Hitherto the nature of this narrative, besides rendering the intricacies in the beginning unavoidable, has more or less required that many things, instead of being set down in the order of occurrence, should be retrospectively, or irregularly given; this last is the case with the following passages, which will conclude the account” (114).

Indeed, it is only with a sense of utter dissatisfaction that one can approach, or even speak of any resolution to “Benito Cereno.” The resolution of the plot consists in a hopeless standoff; this standoff may constitute the consummation, the final Aufhebung, of any comment the novella can render upon its age. It is possible to formulate the impasse that emerges from our final glimpses of Don Benito Cereno and Babo, the intractable slave, in several ways. We can think of Don Benito, the personification of European idealism, relegated to silence by the subversive agent who seduces and overturns him. Yet we are never afforded the possibility of viewing the insurrection from the perspective of those who initiated it. Babo is in effect elided from the legal transcript, disenfranchised from uttering an account of the events as they impacted upon the slave cargo. If silence reigns at the end of the novella, the silence of an endlessly repeated and hopeless argument, this is in part the silence reigning in a Western metaphysics long-primed for ghosts and marginal, threatening blackness, in part the silence of the disenfranchised.

There was no more conversation that day.

But if the Spaniard's melancholy sometimes ended in muteness upon topics like the above, there were others upon which he never spoke at all; on which, indeed, all his old reserves were piled. Pass over the worst, and, only to elucidate, let an item or two of these be cited. The dress, so precise and costly, worn by him on the day whose events have been narrated, had not willingly been put on. And that silver-mounted sword, apparent symbol of despotic command, was not, indeed, a sword, but the ghost of one. The scabbard, artificially stiffened, was empty.

(116)

It is best if we depart from this interpretation of Melville's story—as a critical commentary on its age deploying both the major speculative systems and aesthetic liberties available to it—with the final substantial image that the author offers us. Don Benito and Babo—relegated to counterversions of definitive silence, exile from the discourse of social negotiation—complete their trajectories locked in a petrified gaze. Melville has afforded us access to this very gaze, upon a set of intractable human conditions. Even in death, Babo's decapitated head gazes upon a society that has accorded him a purgatorial status. Given the skew of the powerful social forces and counter-forces perpetuating an untenable status quo, his mute and vacuous stare, with its attentiveness beyond death, may constitute the most radical response available to him as a figment of the literary artifact.

As for the black—whose brain, not body, had schemed and led the revolt, with the plot—his slight frame, inadequate to that which it held, had at once yielded to the superior muscular strength of his captor, in the boat. Seeing all was over, he uttered no sound, and could not be forced to. His aspect seemed to say, since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words. …

Some months after, dragged to the gibbet at the tail of a mule, the black met his voiceless end. The body was burned to ashes; but for many days, the head, that hive of sublety, fixed on a pole in the Plaza, met, unabashed, the gazes of the whites; and across the Plaza looked toward St. Bartholomew's church, in whose vaults slept then, as now, the recovered bones of Aranda: and across the Rimac bridge looked towards the monastery, on Mount Agonia without; where, three months after being dismissed by the court, Benito Cereno, borne on the bier, did, indeed, follow his leader.

(116-17)

Notes

1. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1969), 257-58.

2. Irony is at once an ongoing (i.e., ahistorical) and a historically specific aesthetic achieving prominence at moments of demonstrated sensitivity to differentiated levels of knowledge (configured spatially) in artifacts. Some of the current cutting-edge theoretical work on irony has been done by Paul de Man. See his Blindness and Insight (2nd ed.; Minneapolis, 1983), 208-28. The American Romantic epoch, whose major artifacts “Benito Cereno” joins, was conditioned by meditations on irony undertaken by the likes of Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, and Soren Kierkegaard. Romantic deliberations on irony revolved around such issues as fragmentation and its aesthetic and metaphysical implications and the parallelism between linguistic play and sexual understandings. Kierkegaard, for example, finds close affinities between Socrates' disputational devices and the sexual and aesthetic issues of his own epistemological moment. For important source materials on irony, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany, 1988), and Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis, 1971). Also see Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, trans. Lee M. Capel (Bloomington, 1968), 85, 120-25, 155-56.

3. I wish to note here additionally only the parallelism between sublime (quantitative) expansion and ironic debunking and the aspect of borderline psychopathology designated “omnipotence and devaluation” by Otto Kernberg. There will be more on the derivation of the current rhetoric of borderlinity in note 4. The aesthetics of Romanticism serves as an instance of a cultural phenomenon dramatizing the sudden shifts between idealization and contempt observed by contemporary psychologists in patients diagnosed with narcissistic or borderline personality disorders. Clearly, there needs to be a contemporary literary translation of phenomena that clinicians can only situate in subject-based, personal, and, implicitly, moralistic spheres. For a powerful contemporary articulation of “omnipotence and devaluation” as a clinical phenomenon, see Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (New York, 1975), 33-39. For a preliminary attempt to translate into literary discourse the observations of contemporary subject-conditions made by Kernberg and other object-relations theorists, see Henry Sussman, Psyche and Text: The Sublime and the Grandiose in Literature, Psychopathology, and Culture (Albany, 1993), 45-92, 157-205.

4. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, 1988), 3-7, 188-95, 411-14. In its widest parameters, the psychoanalytical discourse of the borderline continues a general reorientation by object-relations theory away from the vicissitudes of drives and their fulfillment or repression so pivotal to the Freudian universe and toward the interpersonal domain of human relations. This redirection received its first substantial articulation by Harry Stack Sullivan. Subsequent theorists in the field of object relations proper placed borderline phenomena within a context of human interactions characterized by, among other things: the persistence of fundamental narcissistic wounds (Heinz Kohut), sharply polarized values (Melanie Klein and Otto Kernberg), damaged attachments (John Bowlby), “false self” (D. W. Winnicott), and a notable dearth of psychological integration (Kohut) at the crux of a battery of defensive reactions and life-strategies including projective fantasies, persistent acting out, and “the subjective experience of emptiness” (Otto Kernberg). Also see Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism, 3-44, 69-151, 213-23.

5. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel (Boston, 1958), 153: “The way is to the destructive element submit yourself.”

6. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man, ed. H. Bruce Franklin (Indianapolis, 1967), 3-9.

7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York, 1929), 257-75, 384-409, 436-58.

8. Sussman, Psyche and Text, 22-44.

9. For the concept of original genius, see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York, 1951), 150-64, 189.

10. All citations of “Benito Cereno” refer to Herman Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, 1987), Vol. IX of Hayford, Parker, and Tanselle, eds., The Writings of Herman Melville, 9 vols. to date. Hereinafter cited in the text as PT.

11. For Melville's elaboration of the ideology of confidence, see The Confidence-Man, 8, 12, 40, 42-48, 67-72, 88-93, 164-79, 291-307. I have commented extensively on the literary and metaphysical dimensions of this ideology in High Resolution: Critical Theory and the Problem of Literacy (New York, 1989), 88-114.

12. See Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (19 vols.; London, 1953-74), II, 85, 136-37; VI, 157.

13. See such paintings as Morning in the Riesengebirge (1810-11), The Traveller over the Sea of Mist (1818), and The Frozen Ocean (1823-24), all reproduced in Caspar David Friedrich, ed. Jorg Traeger (New York, 1976), 17, 22-23, 38-39.

14. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1975), 43-49, 60-64.

15. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1978), 42-79, 203-15, 279-80.

16. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago, 1987), 17-24, 29-34, 61-82, 134-47.

17. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York, 1989), 14, 68, 87, 102. Also “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship,” in Essential Papers on Object Relations, ed. Peter Buckley (New York, 1986), 233-53.

18. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 24-25, 45, 165, 169, 193.

19. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London, 1991), 13-31.

20. Citations derive from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York, 1956), cited in the text as PH.

21. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowlces (Vol. I), David Fernbach (Vols. II, III) (3 vols.; New York, 1977-81), I, 125-244, 709-72; II, 436-67; III, 170-99, 998-1016.

22. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York, 1986), 117, 121.

23. Freud, The Standard Edition, VIII, 18-21, 41-42, 163-71.

24. Helene Deutsch is responsible for coining this term. Annie Reich elaborates it and applies it to attachment in women in “Narcissistic Object Choice in Women,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, I (1953), 22-44, reprinted in Buckley, ed., Essential Papers on Object Relations, 297-317.