[In the following essay, Haegert studies the complex narrative structure of “Benito Cereno” and its relation to the work as anti-imperialist fiction.]

If anything can be said to dominate our cultural and historical preoccupations of recent years, it is the need for greater reticence and restraint in portraying the “alien” life of others. This pervasive concern with reticence—with the need to listen to rather than to speak for the cultural experience of other peoples—has become a staple feature of such diverse and influential studies as Edward Said's Orientalism, Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures, Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Christopher Miller's Blank Darkness and Hayden White's The Content of the Form. In countering our inherited (and largely Eurocentric) notions of the East, for example, Said argues that our most important task just now is to overcome the latent imperialism of most Oriental studies, “to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a non-repressive and non-manipulative, perspective.” The difficulty of such a task becomes apparent when Said goes on to observe that “one would have to rethink the whole complex problem of knowledge and power” (Orientalism 24).

The unusually vexed relation of knowledge and power, and of both to the reticence required by a truly “libertarian” view of other cultures, is one that bears directly on our understanding of “Benito Cereno” (1855), Melville's fictionalized account of an historical slave-revolt on the high seas. Melville's novella is arguably one of the 19th-century's most searching explorations of America's “peculiar institution,” but it is also a work which evidences obvious disdain for any univocal conclusions. To say this is not to accept that Melville's work is “about” irony, ambiguity, indeterminacy, or any other form of fictional open-endedness. As I intend to argue, the indeterminacy that characterizes “Benito Cereno” derives less from some inherently unstable property of language than from the author's own uneasiness in portraying an oppressed and voiceless other—a reticence reflected in his story's unique configuration as (what I will call) a “mutinous” text. What I think can be urged for Melville, then, is that for his own reasons and in his own way he anticipates a number of ideological concerns which pervade our current thinking about the narrative representation of other times, other cultures and other lives. In the present essay I propose to examine “Benito Cereno,” both as an embodiment of Melville's antislavery sentiment and as a mutinous narrative structure, in an effort to see how structure and idea engage each other.

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More obviously than any other work by Melville, “Benito Cereno” is a narrative clotted with “complications”—interpretive gaps and anomalies which seem to defy any clear resolution. These extend, of course, from the atmospheric ambiguity generated by the opening description of the “gray” dawn off the coast of Chile, to the bewildering and often sinister-seeming conduct of Benito Cereno himself. To the extent that these complications derive from the limited point of view of Captain Delano, the putative protagonist, they serve to recall the reader's own experience with the story: in particular, his or her need to transform the text's original opacities into increments of meaning, units of significance that will then contribute to the story's hermeneutic clarity. As a way of focusing this readerly desire, Melville relies in “Benito Cereno” on one of the most melodramatic plot structures ever to be found in a serious work of fiction. Although the outline of the novella is generally well known, it may prove useful to summarize some of its essential moments—both to indicate the source of its vexing ambiguity and to emphasize the teleological hunger that propels its movement.

In August, 1799, while lying at anchor off St. Maria, a deserted island along the southern coast of Chile, Captain Amasa Delano, an American sealer captain from Massachusetts, glimpses in the distance the “shadowy” figure of another ship making its uncertain way toward the island harbor. Upon closer inspection, this vessel proves to be the Spanish merchantman San Dominick, a huge old slave-ship that has apparently been battered by gales and scurvy. After offering assistance to Don Benito, the ship's beleaguered captain, Delano is soon confronted by a series of disturbing “enigmas”: not only, for example, is there an unusual number of slaves who are allowed to roam the ship at will, but Don Benito himself exhibits a strange “reserve” toward Delano that is clearly at odds with naval courtesy. Although Babo, Don Benito's ubiquitous and “faithful” African servant, provides repeated assurances that his master is simply “not himself” after their arduous journey around Cape Horn, Delano cannot shake the uneasy impression that the captain means to do him harm, that he may even intend a murderous assault upon his ship. Not until Delano leaves the San Dominick that evening is the mystery surrounding his reception finally cleared up. As he is about to depart, Don Benito suddenly leaps into the whaleboat with him—pursued by Babo wielding a dagger. Realizing at last that the slaves are in full revolt and that Babo is their leader, Delano registers the shocked “illumination” which many readers feel on first confronting Melville's work.

The first half of “Benito Cereno” culminates in the violent recapture of the insurgent slaves and the freeing of most of the remaining Spaniards. There follows an excerpted version of Don Benito's legal deposition in which the bloody events preceding Delano's visit, and the beginning of the narrative, are chronologically recalled. It is revealed, for example, that the slaves had not only seized the ship but had murdered many of the crew and all of the passengers—among them Cereno's friend and patron, the slaveowner Don Alexandro Aranda, whose skeleton Babo had hideously deployed as the San Dominick's figurehead. By means of this judicial transcript, Melville's text purports to clarify the “true” sequence of events thus far hidden from both Delano and the reader, events that in retrospect seem to illuminate many of his plot's most disturbing enigmas. For his various offenses against the Spanish crown Babo receives the full measure of colonial justice. In the novella's concluding paragraph the mute and rebellious slave is finally executed, after which his head—“that hive of subtlety” (223)—is impaled on a pole overlooking the recent grave of Benito Cereno himself.

At least on first reading, the plot of “Benito Cereno” seems motivated by a fairly orthodox ambition, and one typical of the narrative logic of most 19th-century fiction: to build toward a clarifying end that will reveal in retrospect the real significance of its earlier “complications.” As if to emphasize the elemental nature of his narrative design, Melville relies heavily on what he himself deemed to be a demotic form of literary plotting. “Dollars damn me,” he wrote to Hawthorne in 1851; “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned—it will not sell. Yet altogether write the other way I cannot” (“Letter” 1700). While it might seem presumptuous to specify the “what” and “that” of his complaint, it is reasonable to assume that “the other way” of writing includes such commercially successful forms as the sentimental novel, Gothic fiction, adventure narratives, melodramatic plots of all types and descriptions, as well as that preeminent genre of the 19th century, the detective story. Nevertheless, “Benito Cereno” abounds in precisely the sort of “overplotting” that we usually associate with these popular forms, and which Melville presumably disdained—at least after Moby-Dick (1851)—for his own more serious and exalted art.

Mainly for this reason the narrative has often inspired the closely related charges of racial insensitivity and melodramatic excess. In his influential survey of the “American Renaissance,” for example, F. O. Matthiessen faulted “Benito Cereno” for its failure to address the issue of slavery that looms behind its supposed “embodiment of good in the pale Spanish captain and of evil in the mutinied African crew.” While Matthiessen did not specifically reprove the work for its Gothic excesses—indeed he even praised it for being “pictorially and theatrically effective”—he nonetheless found its tragic plot, “for all its prolonged suspense, comparatively superficial” in relation to the historical tragedy that it sought to ignore (508). That there is a clear connection between this cultural neglect and Melville's sensational mode of narration in “Benito Cereno” was the central argument voiced by Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel. Identifying the “innocent” but befuddled mind of Delano with that of his creator, Fiedler contended that Melville's insensitivity about black slavery arose in part from the highly “theatrical” nature of his narrative enterprise:

Captain Amasa Delano fails to recognize the rebellion on a Spanish slave ship which he encounters, precisely because he is a good American. He is endowed, that is to say, with an “undistrustful good nature” and will not credit “the imputation of malign evil in man.” … Though the fact of slavery out of which all the violence and deceit aboard the Spanish ship had been bred, remains a part of his own democratic world as well as Don Benito's aristocratic one, Amasa Delano is undismayed. … Indeed, Melville seems to share the bafflement of his American protagonist; a Northerner like Captain Delano, Melville finds the problem of slavery and the Negro a little exotic, a gothic horror in an almost theatrical sense of the word.

(400-01)

Gothic extravagance, exotic theatricality, melodramatic excess: these were the terms most frequently invoked by mid-20th-century critics in describing the plot of “Benito Cereno,” a work not universally admired for its social conscience but one almost invariably felt to confirm (what Donald Pease calls) the Cold War view of Melville as a staunch defender of America's traditions of Adamic innocence and instinctive goodness. Significantly, the notion long held by Richard Chase, Harry Levin, R. W. B. Lewis and others that Delano is an American innocent confronting “a terror of blackness” in the “savagely vindictive slaves” (Matthiessen 508) has to a large degree depended on precisely those elements of plotting which earlier critics like Fiedler regarded as gratuitous or excessive. So long as “evil” in the text can be seen as a puzzle or a problem—an interpretive anomaly external to the hero and subject to his “solution”—its pernicious effects may be countered and contained, perhaps even redirected toward some likely villain regarded as its source. Initially at least, this is exactly what Melville's highly melodramatic and suspenseful plot enables us to do; that is, it invites us to believe that we can, like Delano, master its “enigmatic events” and maintain our “innocent” or value-neutral stance in the process.

The self-exculpating or even self-congratulatory nature of this interpretive ideal accounts, I believe, for the curiously artificial cast of Melville's plot, some of whose elements are as contrived or as staged as Fiedler and others have suggested—though not for the reasons they suggested. Here let me cite two noteworthy examples, each illustrating a different mode of melodramatic excess typical of the narrative. When Delano first approaches the San Dominick to offer his assistance, he is immediately struck by her “battered and moldy condition.”

[T]he castellated forecastle seemed some ancient turret long ago taken by assault, and then left to decay. Toward the stern, two high-raised quarter galleries—the balustrades here and there covered with dry tindery sea moss—opening out from the unoccupied state cabin, whose deadlights, for all the mild weather, were hermetically closed and caulked—these tenantless balconies hung over the sea as if it were the grand Venetian canal. But the principal relic of faded grandeur was the ample oval of the shieldlike sternpiece, intricately carved with the arms of Castile and Leon medallioned about by groups of mythological or symbolical devices, uppermost and central of which was a dark satyr in a mask holding his foot on the prostrate neck of a writhing figure, likewise masked.

(144)

Needless to say, the “dark satyr” of the tale will ultimately prove to be not Don Benito (as Delano initially suspects) but the mutinous Babo, who all along manipulates appearances in order to “mask” his real intentions—although in another sense it is also Delano who fulfills the satyr's role, imposing his ideological hegemony on the “prostrate” slaves. Merely to mark this passage as an exemplary instance of Melvillean irony, however, is to overlook its more obvious, and more obviously theatrical, intent: to engage the reader in a melodramatic plot whose ultimate issues and concerns will be measured in terms of “tenantless balconies,” “symbolical devices,” and masked figures “writhing” in mysterious and deadly combat. What is most immediately striking about Delano's perception of the San Dominick, in other words, is not its ambiguity (or “undecidability”) but its specular specificity and suspensefulness. Fairly bristling with Gothic emblems and portents—including its own version of the proverbial haunted castle in the form of an abandoned and decaying forecastle—the San Dominick's physical appearance unfolds for Delano, and therefore for the reader, as a series of visual prolepses: promissory images suggesting an eventual understanding of her innermost secrets.

The second example occurs in Don Benito's legal deposition, a document which promises to resolve the unsettling ambiguities confronting Delano in the first half of the narrative. While on board the San Dominick, Delano has occasion to observe an enormous slave with “an iron collar about his neck, from which depended a chain thrice wound round his body, the terminating links padlocked together at a broad band of iron, his girdle” (159). This enchained giant, one Atufal by name, is a purported mutineer, brought before Don Benito to beg his pardon for some unspecified infraction. In the deposition, however, it is revealed that Atufal's mute subservience before his “master” is only another ruse contrived by Babo, an elaborate mime-show designed to intimidate Cereno and to reassure Delano that white authority still reigns supreme aboard the Spanish vessel. Thus, to Charles Martin and James Snead, the real story of Atufal's lock and chains emerges in the deposition as an explicit deconstruction of Delano's limited and highly prejudiced view of black behavior (240-41). If so, however, the deconstructive moment is hardly an efficient one. Affirming “that, among other devices, was the device of presenting Atufal, his [Babo's] right-hand man, as chained, though in a moment the chains could be dropped,” the deposition then goes on to assert, almost superfluously, “that in every particular [Babo] informed [Don Benito] what part he was expected to enact in every device, and what story he was to tell on every occasion, always threatening him with instant death if he varied in the least” (214).

The documentary passage is noteworthy not only for its “retrospective” clarity but for its expository excess. Although the deposition does indeed clarify Delano's encounter with Atufal, it does so only by making it a “problem” in the first place: that is, it transforms the symbolism of the chains into an interpretive “enigma” which the deposition then proceeds to illuminate and explain. One could easily imagine the deposition without this explicit, indeed over-explicit, account of Atufal's earlier appearance, in which case the wary reader would simply recollect it him/herself as an unstated instance of Babo's treachery and cunning. Yet in so assiduously recasting the scene as a semiotic ploy, a mutinous “device” designed to fool the “innocent” American, the deposition seeks to impress us with its undaunted rigor, its determination to repeat and dispel “every enigmatic of the day” confronting Delano aboard the San Dominick. Hence, once again, the curiously gratuitous and overplotted quality of “Benito Cereno” to which I have already alluded. Courting the reader's desire for authoritative clarity and closure—for a complete understanding of the text's earlier ambiguities—Melville's melodramatic plot offers us a surfeit of narrative details which are often in excess of any apparent need.

What each of these examples illustrates, the first proleptically and the second analeptically, is an element of critical “overstanding” which can be said to characterize our initial reaction to the story, a reaction shaped and motivated by Melville's unabashed use of melodramatic devices (masked relationships, disguised identities, menacing encounters, last-minute escapes, etc.) as a way of focusing and ordering his plot, thus creating the impression of a narrative mystery awaiting ultimate illumination. If, as Peter Brooks suggests, one of the primary motivations of melodrama is the author's desire to “say all” or to “tell all” (16), then it could be argued that the plot of “Benito Cereno” often imitates the reader's desire to “know all” in relation to the narrative's anticipated end. Throughout the tale there is a developing expectation that the darksome ambiguities confronting us in the first half of the narrative are merely provisional ones, the product of our uninformed “first reading,” and that the authoritative “second reading” provided by the deposition will serve to dispel them in the end. As a result even those readers who have felt uncomfortable with the work's extravagantly melodramatic cast have usually expressed confidence in its ultimate coherence.

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Melville's reliance on melodrama in constructing “Benito Cereno” is closely allied to his use of another popular form, that of the detective story—perhaps the 19th-century's most vivid expression of the necessary “second reading” implicit in all narrative. Speaking of this apparently demotic genre and its paradigmatic usefulness in understanding fictional plots, Tzvetan Todorov describes the temporal structure of the classic “whodunit” as a deliberate—indeed unavoidable—conflation of two stories, the “absent” story of the crime and the belated story of the inquisition: in solving the crime the detective does not merely identify the culprit or the criminal, he also postulates a sequence of events leading up to the crime which is, and can only be, a later retracing of an earlier occurrence. In this way, Todorov suggests, the “paradoxical” structure of detective fiction might serve to elucidate the representational strategy of all narrative discourse, in particular its inevitable fusion of fabula (or story) and sjužet (or plot) as a way of organizing its fictional material (44-46).

In the undeniable sense that “Benito Cereno”'s plot consists of an elaborate series of retellings or retracings—Delano's bumbling attempt to interpret (and then reinterpret) the “enigmatic” events aboard the San Dominick, Don Benito's authorized or official version of the mutiny embodied in the deposition, even the reader's “retrospective” judgment of the story based on these two accounts—one might easily infer that the fundamental form of the work is that of a detective story manqué: not only is there a crime (and so presumably a criminal), there is also a series of “investigators” at work intent on discovering “what really happened” aboard the San Dominick before Don Benito's desperate leap into Delano's boat. Reinforcing this notion of narrative belatedness or secondariness in “Benito Cereno” is the compositional history of the work itself. As Harold H. Scudder noted, Melville derived his 1855 narrative in part from an 1817 naval document written by the “real” Amasa Delano, a document historically recounting, among other things, a violent slave-revolt on the high seas. In his fictionalization of this event (as well as of the Amistad mutiny and the Creole affair described by Kaplan) Melville thus undertakes a task of detection or reconstruction even more arduous than that assigned to Todorov's detective. As author, he must construct a version of the crime that is not once but twice removed from its mortal matrix, whereby his version is constrained to be nothing more than a later retelling of an earlier text.

As a detective story, therefore, “Benito Cereno” clearly anticipates the belated structures and “absent” centers of such essentially modernist works as James's “The Figure in the Carpet,” Conrad's Heart of Darkness, or even Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, whose ostensive aim is the detailed recollection and retelling of an earlier story or event from a later point of view. Like these other narratives of deferred transmission, Melville's text reveals a persistent slippage between the earlier or absent story (in this case, Babo's original takeover of the ship) and its putative retelling in the narrative, a slippage which is formally elaborated in the relation between Delano's story and the legal deposition which follows it. Insofar as Delano's perception of events in the first half of the narrative invites comparison to the reading of a text, we are thus reminded of our initial reading of “Benito Cereno”—a reading shaped to a significant degree by Melville's “immoderate” use of stereotypical plotting (“the other way” of writing) in the creation of his story. Judging from most recent reactions, however, Delano's reading or misreading of events aboard the San Dominick is one we have come to regard with considerable antagonism and contempt.

Although earlier discussions of Melville's narrative varied widely both in quality and focus, critics today generally agree that Delano's perception of the mutiny is a severely limited one, marred not only by a natural “innocence” bordering on stupidity but, even more centrally, by the institutionalized cruelty and inhumanity of slavery itself. Consigning Africans to their accustomed 18th-century role as valets, hairdressers or body servants—as perennial minstrels of white vanity—Delano cannot even conceive the possibility that a black man, let alone a black mind, could be sufficiently daring and adroit to wrest control of the vessel without leaving unmistakable evidence of his transgression. Babo succeeds so well in his treachery because he is both the mastermind and the master-mime of the San Dominick's mutiny. As author of the slave-revolt, he is acutely aware of the racial stereotypes informing the American captain's understanding of non-Western, and especially African, behavior. In orchestrating the events of his visit, therefore, Babo is always careful to confirm Delano's “innocent” impression of white supremacy and black subservience; hence Don Benito, for example, is invariably displayed in full uniform, complete with imperial sword and scabbard, while the desultory and “undisciplined” slaves seem to hang on his every word.

Needless to say, in this extended pantomime of white authority, it is the viewer as much as the viewed who plays a vital role, and Delano exhibits every evidence of being an ideal audience for Babo's minstrelsy, if not of the “captive” kind represented by Don Benito himself. Observing an infant nursing at the breast of his slumbering mother, for example, Delano selectively ignores both the infant's fate and the mother's anguish under slavery. Instead, he derives from the scene a soothing image of “naked nature … [of] pure tenderness and love,” an image which prompts his further reduction of African womanhood: “He was gratified with [the other women's] manners: like most uncivilized women, they seemed at once tender of heart and tough of constitution, equally ready to die for their infants or fight for them. Unsophisticated as leopardesses, loving as doves. Ah! Thought Captain Delano, these perhaps are some of the very women whom Ledyard saw in Africa, and gave such a noble account of” (173).

A multitude of other examples could easily be adduced. Cumulatively, they confirm the impression articulated by any number of recent critics: that Delano's compassion for Don Benito conceals, as its corollary, an unacknowledged bigotry toward blacks (Grejda); that his naive reading or misreading of the mutiny mirrors an unspoken need for mastery (Martin & Snead); that his much-vaunted innocence is less a matter of providence, like Billy Budd's, than of privilege (Kavanagh)—especially a Eurocentric privilege which allows white males to represent enslaved black women as “leopardesses” and “doves.”

What is perhaps less obvious, and to a degree less comfortable, is the extent to which Delano's misreading of the mutiny mirrors our own first reading of the story, including many of the innocent “first readings” offered by earlier Melville critics. While it is no doubt true, as J. H. Kavanagh suggests, that any comprehensive account of “Benito Cereno” must ultimately strive to “situate” rather than “replicate” the hero's ideology, I think he overstates his case somewhat by insisting that our analysis of the work “must begin by breaking absolutely the seductive grip of identification between the reader and Amasa Delano” (360). Such extrication, while necessary, can be earned or achieved only in the unavoidably temporal course of our own reading, and rereading, of the story. In this dynamic process our initial “identification” with Delano depends as much, I think, on the formal patternings of the plot as on any supposed ideological affinity for the hero, even one based on the (now) discredited notion of his moral superiority and “singularly undistrustful good nature” (142).

As I have tried to demonstrate, the extravagantly melodramatic cast of Melville's narrative serves primarily to deflect us from the kinds of ideological questions so persuasively posed by Kavanagh and others—thereby inducing in the reader what we might call a Delano-like complacency toward the text's ultimate intentionalities. As a fictional account of an historical event, that is, “Benito Cereno” seems at first far more interested in recounting the lurid and sensational aspects of the mutiny—its elements of “theatrical” suspense and mystery—than in exploring its institutional and historical causes. Hence Melville's reiterated emphasis, in the first half of the narrative, on both the ambiguity and the incompleteness of his protagonist's perceptions; hence also the often confused and contradictory accounts offered by Delano of “his host's whole mysterious demeanor”: “The singular alternations of courtesy and ill-breeding in the Spanish captain were unaccountable, except on one of two suppositions—innocent lunacy, or wicked imposture” (162).

The unusually high incidence of such hermeneutic tension and confusion throughout the narrative, at times almost verging on paranoia, serves, I would argue, not merely to underline Delano's “innocent” imperviousness to the tragedy of slavery. On the level of plot, it also (and more immediately) serves to intensify our sense of the tale as a narrative puzzle or “enigma” requiring later exegesis. As a result, even Delano's intermittent impression of evil in the story—dim-witted and silly though it may seem in retrospect—is very much our own insofar as our confused first reading of the work is impelled by a basic desire to know “what really happened” aboard the San Dominick, if not exactly “whodunit.” However crude or unsophisticated such responses may seem, they derive naturally from our initial perception of the story as a mystery narrative—indeed as a work of detective fiction whose essential aim is to clarify the numerous contradictory “clues” confronting both Delano and ourselves in the course of our mutually imbricated readings.

Nor is it only Delano's naive and prejudiced point of view which accounts for this impression. Virtually the entire narrative is organized as an extended inquisition, in which the criminal elements involved are formally identified in the “authoritative” second reading supplied by the deposition. Like the naval account of Billy's execution at the end of Billy Budd, Don Benito's legal statement—transcribed later at the viceregal court in Lima—embodies an authorized or official version of the story, an interpretive overview that seems to transcend the distorting partialities of earlier accounts. More than that, however, the deposition also seeks to disinter the earlier or “absent” story of “Benito Cereno” that lies buried beneath Melville's hopelessly belated plotting of it. As such, the deposition offers itself to the reader as the hitherto unacknowledged fabula of the narrative's sjužet, disclosing in dry, factual detail and with due deliberation the true extent of Babo's treachery—as in this horrifying account of Don Alexandro's fate:

[W]hen, at sunrise, the deponent coming on deck, the Negro Babo showed him a skeleton, which had been substituted for the ship's proper figurehead—the image of Christopher Colon, the discoverer of the New World; that the Negro Babo asked him whose skeleton that was, and whether, from its whiteness, he should not think it a white's, that, upon discovering his face, the Negro Babo, coming close, said words to this effect: “Keep faith with the blacks from here to Senegal, or you shall in spirit, as now in body, follow your leader.”

(212)

In such ways does the deposition propose not only to clarify Don Benito's “mysterious demeanor” but also to unravel the “enigmatic” sequencing of Melville's plot. The trouble with its legal representations, of course, is that they leave unanswered so many vexing questions raised earlier in the story—questions which the deposition seems anxious to elude, if not suppress altogether. For example, after Don Benito's narrow escape, the narrator unequivocally asserts that Delano's crew were told, “the more to encourage them” in their pursuit of the fleeing slaves, “that the Spanish captain considered his ship good as lost; that she and her cargo, including some gold and silver, were worth more than a thousand doubloons” (204). The obvious duplicity of this announcement is less important, perhaps, than the clear possibility, never disposed of by the text, that the one who utters it is none other than the “innocent” Delano himself!

Other anomalies press for consideration. If, as the deposition implies, the slaves are only abject mutineers, then why do they fight with such fierce determination, against overwhelming odds, without guns or supplies (and hence any real hope of winning), yet with a noteworthy courage and devotion to their cause unequalled in any earlier depiction of “the Negro” in American literature? Or again: given the deposition's insistence that the American sailors were singularly gallant and heroic in their selfless efforts to recapture the San Dominick (a representation already undercut by their apparent need for monetary “encouragement”), how do we then account for their excessive violence and brutality after the vessel has been taken? Despite the deposition's claim to objectivity, such questions continue to linger in our imagination, leaving an ominous residue of ambiguity which modern readers like Lawrance Thompson (passim) and Warner Berthoff (153) have considered to be the work's presiding purpose.

It is not merely ambiguity or incompleteness, however, which marks the various representations offered in the text. Further problematizing the authority of the legal deposition is an exclusionary logic which critics have hastened to underscore as prima facie evidence of its ideological bias: first, the “document” Melville includes from the courtroom proceedings is a series of “extracts” rather than a complete transcript—extracts selected, that is, from “among many others, for partial translation”; second, the extracts in question are only the transcribed testimony of Benito Cereno himself, including some “disclosures” originally held “dubious” because of his “not undisturbed” state of mind; third, and perhaps most revealing, the tribunal's final decision to accept as authoritative Don Benito's version of “the true history of the San Dominick's voyage” (207) is made without once considering the Africans' point of view—indeed without once considering that the Africans even have a point of view. Thus, not unlike Delano's “innocent” first reading of the mutiny, the “authoritative” second reading furnished by the deposition collapses under its own ideological weight. As Brook Thomas suggests, “Rather than bringing us closer to the actual events, the legal point of view in one sense removes us even further from them” (29).

Evident throughout “Benito Cereno,” then, is a curious disparity usually overlooked by readers intent on discovering the latent ideological meanings of Melville's narrative. On the one hand, we have what purports to be a fictional plot motivated entirely by a need to know (and to tell) “what really happened,” a need arising from our innocent first reading of the work and stimulated by the narrator's reiterated reference to what Roland Barthes might call its “hermeneutic code”—its suspenseful sequencing as a narrative “enigma” (the word is Barthes's as well as Melville's) awaiting full disclosure and final revelation (Barthes 19). In the fulfillment of this need the story often takes on the demotic trappings of a mystery or a melodrama, infusing its enigmatic events with a purposiveness that seems not just authoritative but authoritarian. On the other hand, the fact that our subsequent readings of the story (including our rereading of the deposition) generate so many other questions lying outside its hermeneutic code suggests that our deepest engagement with the text is in some sense an “unlawful” one, that is, an engagement motivated by issues and concerns not strictly “relevant” to its purported plot. The intricate interplay of authoritarian plot and unlicensed meanings in “Benito Cereno”—and Melville's conspiratorial awareness of it throughout the narrative—not only accounts for many of the novella's most disturbing ambiguities. It also brings us closer to the transgressive truth of the work that has thus far eluded most ideological readings.

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That indeterminacy abounds in “Benito Cereno” (and of course in Melville's other major fiction as well) is no longer news to anyone. Nor is it particularly surprising that an author who was himself so often marginalized in his private and professional life should feel sympathy for the oppressed and disinherited peoples of the earth. What requires further elaboration and emphasis, however, is the remarkable confluence, in “Benito Cereno,” of ideological critique and narrative open-endedness: a confluence precisely indicated in the ironic interplay of first and second readings outlined above. For it is not only ambiguity or silence which occupies Melville's narrative, nor simply the ideological blindness of his central characters. Far more fundamental to the work's subversive movement is a deep-seated suspicion of the dynamics of narrative itself. In this sense “Benito Cereno” is a work which challenges not only the authority of sea captains and judges, but even its own authority to speak for an enslaved other who has been denied any definitive voice in the world of the text. To explain what this means we need to consider once more Melville's parodic use of detective fiction in the construction of his plot.

One of the most frequently cited truisms in contemporary studies of detective fiction is that the detective is always an accomplice of the social world he protects against its criminals. Notwithstanding Todorov's insistence that the detective/narrator is generically “immune” to the influences affecting ordinary mortals (44), Melville's narrative stunningly anticipates the work of more recent theorists like D. A. Miller, who have found in 19th-century detective novels (such as Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone) abundant evidence of an ideological “surveillance,” of a “policing” power inherent in the nature of narrative itself. Neither completely innocent nor altogether disinterested, the detective is therefore one whose brilliant interventions and discoveries mark “an explicit bringing-under-surveillance of the entire world of the narrative” (Miller 35).

Applying this idea to Melville's text, we might say that the various “clues” of criminal conduct confronting Delano aboard the San Dominick are always indicative of an economic system (slavery) and an ideological overview (white authority) which he is sworn to protect against both internal disruption and external challenge. Even though he is therefore “wrong” to suspect Don Benito of conspiring with the slaves, he is also “right” in upholding the segregationist standards of his society. Hence the clues are never value-free in the sense that Todorov implies of contributing to a “purely formal architecture” (45) of initial puzzlement followed by analytic reprise which is the presumed legacy, he suggests, of works like Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. Instead, the mystifying clues confronting Delano in “Benito Cereno” derive from their ability to generate anxiety and disequilibrium in the detective himself, both in his immediate role as “surveillance-operative” and in his ex officio capacity as spokesman for “the entire [white] world of the narrative.”

Melville's acute (and acutely self-conscious) understanding of this dynamic accounts, I believe, for three of the most perplexing features of “Benito Cereno”: first, his choice of Delano as “protagonist” in the first half of the narrative; second, his refusal to confirm any version of the mutiny suggested by the text—including any hypothetical version constructed by the reader; and third, his consignment to silence of the narrative's two principal antagonists, Don Benito and Babo, who before their deaths “agree” to say nothing of what has passed between them. The evident anomalousness of Delano's role as central character is immediately apparent, of course, in the very title Melville gives to his fiction—a title which not only directs our attention to another character, Don Benito, but even suggests that this other character is more deserving of our attention than Delano himself. To whom, then, does the narrative “belong”? Is it Delano's story or Don Benito's? Who is the “major” character, and who the “minor” one? That Babo is conspicuously excluded from any possibility of narrative “ownership” is, I would argue, one of the dominant worries of the work, if not its principal theme.

Nor is it only the title of the work which precipitates such questions. Delano's own character seems in many ways strangely unsuited to the prominence thrust upon him by the author. Though he is obviously at the center of the story, he is not at the heart of it: at least not to the extent that Don Benito and Babo are. Even assigning him the honorific standing of chief witness or detached observer in the narrative has its undeniable drawbacks; as a Jamesian consciousness, Delano is hardly one of those “on whom nothing is lost.” Indeed, as a detective-figure he is more aptly compared to the bumbling and officious Dr. Watson than to the sharp-minded Holmes. As for any claim he may have to moral ascendancy within the work, we have already had occasion to observe just how riddled with prejudice his American “innocence” really is. If he is not evil himself, then he is unquestionably implicated—both by choice and by circumstance—in the institutional evils which have shaped his ideology and that of his countrymen. In most ways, in short, Delano seems to be a thoroughly middling man and as unlikely a hero as one could hope to find in a story ostensibly devoted to the historical iniquities of slavery.

The problem with this view, however, is that the plot of “Benito Cereno” is “ostensibly” devoted to nothing of the kind. Rather than conducting a searching inquiry into the issue of slavery, Melville's narrative offers itself to the reader (at least on first reading, as we have seen) as a compendium of popular fiction, an array of formula plots designed to divert our attention—or even to repress it—from the potentially serious concerns underlying them. In terms of this plotting Delano is an ideal protagonist rather than a troublesome one. Young, vigorous, amiable and willing, he is a man of “singularly undistrustful good nature” and so an eminently qualified central character in a narrative fiction that seems part melodrama, part sea adventure, part mystery tale, part detective story—part any popular form that requires of its protagonist only a dedicated aversion to moral ambiguity and ideological complexity. Moreover, Delano is a sincere and capable spokesman for the coercive force and regulatory practices which impel much of the narrative. Whenever he is confronted with evidence that something is amiss aboard the San Dominick, for example, rather than acceding to his suspicions and acting on them, Delano chooses simply to suppress them; in the process he unfailingly asserts a cultural and racial hegemony which masks itself as a kind of natural law, even a theology of sorts: “Once again he smiled at the phantoms which had mocked him, and felt something like a tinge of remorse that, by harboring them even for a moment, he should by implication have betrayed an atheist doubt of the ever-watchful Providence” (199).

Simply to dismiss this musing as the self-centered prattling of a white imperialist, as so many critics have done, is to overlook the extent to which its “ideology of dominance” is systematically restaged in the rest of the narrative: not least by Don Benito's legal deposition, a document which dispenses its judgments with a quasi-scriptural solemnity, brooking no “atheist doubt” of its ultimate authority. Indeed, one could almost say of Delano that his role as protagonist in the story is increased rather than diminished by his numerous errors and misreadings. Because he is apparently wrong only about the identity of the criminal—and never about the nature of the crime—even his stupidity is enlisted in the cause of a “natural” and “providential” plot: the fortuitous rescue of a Spanish innocent by an American one from an unspeakably “savage” fate. It is only when we begin to question the representational authority of this plot that Delano's real limitations manifest themselves, and along with them the ideological blindnesses which his providential view inspires. Hence Melville's determinative title for his fiction not only signals a redirected emphasis upon Don Benito; it also alerts us to the arbitrariness, or even the tyranny, of a narrative plot which subordinates its fictional events to any unilateral point of view.

Such resistance to narrative's unilateral authority also underlies the notorious open-endedness of “Benito Cereno,” an open-endedness often taken to be a tacit rebuke of Delano's simplistic moralizing. It is that, of course; but in the repressed cultural context of the tale the instabilities of the ending acquire for Melville, I think, a uniquely self-reflexive character. Written against the tradition of the effusive closure in sentimental fiction, the story's concluding segment enacts another arabesque or temporal detour in the narrative sequence—this despite Melville's presumed impatience with the unavoidably “retrospective” nature of his account. Recounting the “long, mild voyage to Lima” after the San Dominick's recapture, this brief section is almost casually inserted between the courtroom deposition and the final paragraph describing Babo's execution and Don Benito's demise. In it the two captains are shown in relaxed and friendly concourse after their ordeal, “their fraternal unreserve in singular contrast with former withdrawments” (220). Yet their present interaction is not altogether different: despite Delano's repeated admonition to Don Benito to forget the past, there is evidence of a continuing rift between the two commanders—an unhealable breach caused not only by Delano's earlier apprehension of Don Benito as a “monster” (the term is Benito's), but by Don Benito's inability to forget what has happened.

The scene in question, one of the most moving and mysterious in all of Melville, centers on the one major character in the story who has had no “say” in its presentation: Babo. Noticing Benito's gloomy and choleric cast, Delano vainly attempts to lift his spirits by reminding him that he is “saved”:

“But these mild trade winds that now fan your cheek, do they not come with a human-like healing to you? Warm friends, steadfast friends are the trades.”

“With their steadfastness they but waft me to my tomb, senor,” was the foreboding response.

“You are saved,” cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; “you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?”

“The Negro.”

There was silence, while the moody man sat, slowly and unconsciously gathering his mantle about him, as it were a pall.

There was no more conversation that day.

(222)

A number of concerns command our attention here. Like Kurtz's bewildering reference to “the horror” in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (a work which Melville's story resonantly anticipates), Don Benito's ambiguous reference to “the Negro” seriously undermines the teleological integrity of the narrative preceding it. Thus, not unlike Marlow's frustrated effort to find a reason for Kurtz's defection, Melville's apparent attempt to bring his account of the mutiny to a complete and orderly close encounters an impasse: an interpretive “enigma” that refuses the call to coherence signalled by Delano's injunction to “forget.”

That this resistance emanates entirely from Don Benito is thus doubly significant. Having had to play the “role” of a captain while being the “slave” of a slave has taken its lethal toll on him; and critics such as Kavanagh (374-76) are right to suggest that Don Benito's silence at the end indicates that he at least has some awareness that the institution of slavery is less a matter of law than of power—cruelly coercive and disproportionate power. Hence his ambiguous reference to “the Negro” serves also to disrupt and subvert the cover story that Delano, and much of the narrative with him, seems determined to perpetuate: that the San Dominick mutiny is from beginning to end only the account of a criminal offense committed by lawless savages against the enlightened leadership of the Spanish crown. Whether “the Negro” alludes to Babo in particular or the Africans in general is finally less important than the fact that the reference itself reminds us that there is another point of view never even represented in the tale.

Indeed, the deliberate suppression of this point of view, and the narrative's apparent failure to suppress it at the end, directs us to what is most distinctive about “Benito Cereno” as a literary form: namely, its status as a “mutinous” text whose deepest meanings emerge as the “lawless” and transgressive consequence of its formal plotting. To the extent that the story always generates more questions than it answers—to the extent, that is, that our first reading of the work is inevitably frustrated rather than fulfilled by our subsequent readings—“Benito Cereno” exhibits (we might say) an uneasy conscience about the very nature of narrative: especially narrative's apparently ineradicable need to impart an “authoritative” meaning to its most “irrelevant” or resistant details (Price 24-36). Dramatizing this authoritarian impulse of all narrative, Melville's novella also dramatizes the subversive and illicit movement of meanings not included in its teleological grip. As a result, his refusal to validate any single version of the mutiny—far from plunging us into further ambiguity—may actually alert us to an anti-imperialist perspective in the work which counters the repressive organization of its “intended” plot.

In what sense, however, is “Benito Cereno” an anti-imperialist fiction, and how can it be said to be one when its principal spokesman, Babo, is allowed no voice in the story—a muteness further emphasized by his implacable resolve not to say another word from the moment of his capture to the time of his death? Commenting on Babo's “mysterious silence,” Brook Thomas has observed: “Readers who see the text undercutting the proslavery perspectives within it cannot propose their own antislavery perspective as an impartial and complete account of the text, because their perspective is based solely on an absence [Babo's silence]” (32). Yet it is not only Babo's point of view which is absent in “Benito Cereno.” Virtually the entire narrative rests on an extended absence left by the gradually receding “facts” of the mutiny, facts that can only be recalled and reinterpreted in a continuing effort to “master” their true significance. Melville himself thematizes this point by emphasizing that the fictional events of his story took place more than fifty years before (in 1799), and that the legal account of them survives in the form of selected “extracts” translated from another language. Hence there is an undeniable aptness in his use of demotic elements throughout the narrative. In the sense that the original events of the mutiny come to us already contaminated by human handling, as it were, they are as much the product of borrowed or belated plotting as “Benito Cereno” itself.

To the degree that Melville's story is a belated narrative, however, it also serves to emphasize what Sartre's Roquentin calls the tyranny of the end implicit in all fictional plots (57-58)—especially imperialistic plots (like the ones authored by Delano) which tend to forget that the apparent priority of fabula to sjužet is, as Barbara H. Smith suggests, only an illusory one, impelled by the interpreter's need to believe that there is an authoritative set of facts on which his own representations rest. Exposing this mimetic impulse for the policing operation that it really is, Melville's elaborately retrospective fiction reminds us—through its apparent failure to cohere—that its various perspectives on black behavior are more accurately seen, perhaps, as perspectives on white behavior: on white ways of enslaving and controlling the “savagely vindictive” other. In so doing “Benito Cereno” offers itself to its readers not as an authoritative text but as a mutinous one, a work whose illicit and uncontrollable meanings extend far beyond the discursive framework of its plot toward the kinds of cultural questions being raised today.

One such question is the “perturbing question of our relationship to others” addressed by Edward Said. “The difficulty with the question,” Said suggests, “is that there is no vantage outside the actuality of relationships between cultures, between unequal imperial and nonimperial powers, between different Others, a vantage that might allow one the epistemological privilege of somehow judging, evaluating, and interpreting free of the encumbering interests, emotions, and engagements of the ongoing relationships themselves” (“Representing the Colonized” 216-17). Rephrasing Said somewhat, we might say that Melville's narrative is only too aware of the “unequal” powers and “encumbering interests” which separate Babo from his imperialist masters: white authority-figures who seek control of his body but also of his language—a language consigned by them to the “savage” periphery of more “civilized” tongues. In refusing to speak to his inquisitors, therefore, Babo does not simply create an “absence” in the reader's search for ideological determinacy. To the extent that this search can be conducted only within “the actualities of [unequal] relationships” between opposing others, his silence signifies rather a final gesture of mutinous resistance: resistance not only against his colonial masters, but even against an imperialist author who would appropriate him further.

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