SOURCE: “Masquerades of Language in Melville's Benito Cereno,” in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 2, Summer, 1988, pp. 5-21.

[In the following essay, Hauss probes the link between language and political oppression in “Benito Cereno.”]

… the principle relic of faded grandeur was the ample oval of the shield-like stern-piece, intricately carved with the arms of Castille 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.¹

This image, on the stern of the Spanish slave-ship in Melville's “Benito Cereno,” focuses the central subject of Melville's story—masquerade. At the same time, it embodies the story's central insights. Masquerades, constructed of various “mythological and symbolical devices,” are enacted to shield structures of social control. The stern-piece, “medallioned about” with such devices, is a large oval described as “shield-like.” The “devices” on the stern-piece revolve explicitly around an emblem of the Spanish state—the “arms of Castile and Leon.” But the masked figures on which this passage finally focuses broaden the context of masquerade to include all hierarchical struggles between oppressor and oppressed. The first figure, “in a mask,” holds “his foot on the prostrate neck” of the second figure, “likewise masked.”

Melville's story is filled with physical forms of masquerade—elaborate costumes and props, as well as theatrical gestures and fixed poses. But the central form of masquerade examined by, and ultimately dominating, the text is linguistic. Ostensibly organized as a mystery tale, so that the reader is enlisted in a search for the “true” story of the San Dominick, “Benito Cereno” ends, not by unravelling that story in some final form, but by entangling story after story, each a kind of masquerade, into a complex narrative knot. The languages that enmesh Melville's text are those of its principle characters—Babo, Delano, and Benito Cereno. Critics have attempted, in various ways, to strike through this mask of languages to some hidden truth within. But to do so is to strike past, and ignore, the story's greatest achievements. Ultimately, “Benito Cereno” communicates no truth beyond its linguistic masquerades, but a few truths about them.

Each is used to guard a social hierarchy. Babo's language takes two forms, both of which enact masquerades that guard a newly-won hierarchy of blacks over Spaniards. Delano's language enacts as masquerade that shields what he considers a cross-cultural hierarchy of whites over blacks. Cereno's language, like Babo's, enacts two masquerades, one of them impressed on him to guard black power, the other enacted for the Spanish court (which hegemonizes and sanctifies his words in the form of the “deposition”) to shield a hierarchy of Spaniards over blacks.

All these languages twist and interweave through Melville's narrative, as both its overwhelming substance, and central subject. As Carolyn Karcher has pointed out, “Benito Cereno” is not “primarily a dramatization of slave revolt.”² Melville's text dramatizes not revolt itself, but a series of linguistic masquerades subsequent to it. If the reader chooses, like the black who takes the old sailor's knot from Delano, to “[ferret] into it like a detective Customs House officer after smuggled laces” (76), he will be disappointed. With “some African word, equivalent to pshaw,” the black tosses the knot overboard. But the interwoven knot is interesting in itself.

William Charvatt's studies of Melville's relationship with the American reading public opened up a much-needed discussion of Melville's use of linguistic disguise and concealment—what I would call linguistic masquerade. Charvatt suggests that Melville followed Hawthorne's lead in using a language calculated—as Melville described Hawthorne's prose—to “egregiously deceive the superficial skimmer of pages.”³

Marvin Fisher carries Charvatt's conception of Melville's language into his discussion of “Benito Cereno.” Fisher suggests that Melville “smuggled in” certain banned truths about the black slave under “the account of the consequences of a slave rebellion at sea.”⁴ Fisher says that, in “Benito Cereno,” Melville communicates “an image of a negro leader,” Babo, who is both “a militant spokesman for what are now called … Third World views”⁵ and “the most fully developed example of manhood in the story.”⁶

Both Charvatt and Fisher have rightly emphasized Melville's awareness of language's potential for masquerade. But I argue that linguistic masquerade so completely dominates “Benito Cereno”—as well as such other late works as “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and The Confidence Man—that no final truth is ever smuggled in beneath that masquerade. The figure of Babo, for example, is so thoroughly mediated by partisan languages that we can no more call him “the most fully developed example of manhood in the story,” than we can call him, with Newton Arvin, “a monster out of Gothic fiction.”⁷

In contrast to Fisher's optimism about hidden messages beneath the linguistic masquerades of Melville's story, Edgar A. Dryden has argued that the world of “Benito Cereno” is one “composed entirely of surfaces,” the background for which is “blank.”⁸ Michael Rogin likewise sees in the story a grim preponderance of masquerade. Rogin says that “the visible and deepest subject of Melville's tale is the inability of its characters to break free.”⁹ I would like to extend Rogin's insight into the text's domination by masquerade to a discussion of the text's domination specifically by masquerades of language.

Babo first appears to the reader in the guise of a humble servant, speaking a language which Captain Delano considers, for the most part, appropriate to the slave's position. We later learn that Babo's language is a conscious masquerade, guarding the successful subversion of master-slave relations. But the deposition reveals that Babo's use of language in these scenes is preceded by another use of language, prior to Delano's appearance on the San Dominick. In these earlier scenes, Babo uses a language carefully selected and integrated with a symbolic device—the ship's skeleton figurehead—to create a complete masquerade consolidating black rule of the ship:

to keep the seamen in subjection, he wanted to prepare a warning of what road they should be made to take did they … oppose him.

(106)

That warning is the skeleton of Don Aranda, attached as a new figurehead to the ship. The ship's former figurehead was an image of Christopher Columbus, emblem of Spanish colonial dominion and part of a whole system of “devices,” including the Spanish flag, uniforms, swords and sashes, guarding the hierarchy of Spanish civilization. In place of this figurehead, Babo sets up an emblem which associates whiteness with death, and implicitly contrasts the enervation and impotence of whites with the palable vigor and virility of the new black leaders.

Babo interprets this emblem to the Spaniards with a peculiarly organized language. The first words credited to Babo during his rule of the San Dominick begin to weave this emblem into a kind of black state religion. Having brought Cereno to look on the skeleton for the first time,

the negro Babo asked him whose skeleton that was, and whether, from its whiteness, he should not think it a white's; … 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,” pointing to the prow; … the same morning the negro Babo took by succession each Spaniard forward, and asked him whose skeleton that was, and whether, from its whiteness, he should not think it a white's … each Spaniard covered his face; … then to each the negro Babo repeated the words in the first place said to the deponent.

(107)

I quote this passage at length to illustrate Babo's schematic, even ritualistic, use of language. H. Bruce Franklin notes the parallel between the San Dominick's blacks and the representatives of the Spanish Catholic Church.¹⁰ The parallel is instructive in this context. Babo is using language to create, around a new icon, a new “faith.” To inculcate this faith, Babo puts each Spaniard through what can only be called a catechism, haranguing them with a language which makes of their “whiteness” a symbol of their defeat. Babo's signification of whiteness becomes a mask which the Spaniards wear within his hierarchy. They are threatened with death, should they disturb that hierarchy by failing to “keep faith with the blacks”; and that threat is encapsulated in a metaphoric slogan. Babo scrawls the last words of his catechism, “Follow your leader,” beneath the ship's skeleton figurehead.

Babo's emerging network of language and symbol must suddenly, however, be supplanted by another. Upon encountering the Bachelor's Delight in the harbour of Santa Maria, Babo “straightaway … ordered the figure on the bow to be covered with canvas … and had the decks a little set in order” (109). The “order” Babo revives at this point is the same that had previously enslaved him, though with a new meaning. He reinstitutes the masquerade of white superiority which the blacks have just undermined. Like the masquerade of the new “faith” which he must now conceal, this masquerade is composed of both physical and linguistic emblems. Babo uses “the device of presenting Atufal … as chained” (109). Cereno becomes a lavishly costumed actor under Babo's exacting direction, and Babo keeps him in proper trim, forever stooping to polish a buckle or straighten a sleeve. At the close of the famous shaving scene, Delano notes that Babo surveys Cereno as, “in toilet at least, the creature of his own tasteful hands” (87).

Delano does not notice, of course, that Cereno is Babo's “creature” in more than this respect. Babo controls, not only Cereno's costume, but his dialogue as well. Babo is careful to unite the costumes and stage-props of his masquerade with a controlled language—the “fictitious story, dictated to [Cereno] by Babo, and through [Cereno] imposed upon Captain Delano” (110). The deposition states that Babo “understands well the Spanish” (110). The curious phrasing blurs Babo's knowledge of the Spanish people with his knowledge of their language, indirectly equating social with linguistic structures. Babo extends his mastery of Spanish to a domination of its usage. Contriving and enforcing a usage that shields a revolutionary restructuring of Spanish society, Babo turns the Spaniards' own language against them.

Cereno is instructed “what story he was to tell on every occasion” (109). He is warned that if he utters “any word … that should give the least intimation of the past events or present state, [Babo] would instantly kill him” (109). Babo, and other blacks likewise versed in Spanish, are stationed about the ship as policemen of the “invented story.” The Spaniards are imprisoned by it, since it precludes any speech which might liberate them by communicating their oppression to Delano. The Spaniards struggle persistently but hopelessly to circumvent the story. The deposition states that “attempts were made by the sailors … to convey hints to [Delano] of the true state of affairs; but … these attempts were ineffectual … owing to the devices” which Babo has arranged (112). When a Spanish ship-boy speaks “some chance word” of his hopes of release, he is struck with a knife (113). His word has ventured outside the enforced fiction to give voice to an emotion denied by the fiction.

In the scene of the intricate knot, the old sailor mutters to Delano

in broken English,—the first heard in the ship,—something to this effect—“Undo it, cut it, quick.” It was said lowly, but with such condensation of rapidity, that the long, slow words in Spanish, which had preceded and followed, almost operated as covers to the brief English between.

(76)

The scene concretely embodies the theme of language as an imprisoning masquerade. In apparent desperation, the old sailor tries to sneak a banned language, English, between the “covers” of the enforced language, Spanish. His effort fails. Babo's “devices” present too many contradictions to his strange plea for the plea to be comprehensible. The sailor is dismissed as “simple-witted.” As we later learn, he is “made away with” for his attempt to speak another language than that enforced by the blacks.

When Delano steps aboard the San Dominick, he steps directly onto the stage of Babo's masquerade. Yet he feels at ease within it precisely insofar as the masquerade is controlled and comprehensive. Perhaps the most important thing to understand about Delano is his active search for masquerades that affirm his sense of proper hierarchy, and his willful confidence in them, once discovered. The narrative stresses the sense of artificiality with which the San Dominick is pervaded on Delano's approach. It seems “unreal,” a world of “strange costumes, gestures, and faces, but a shadowy tableau just emerged from the deep” (50). But while this appearance is distinctly unsettling to Delano, his unease centers more around the fact that no familiar masquerade yet dominates the stage than that these masquerades may be deceptive.

On the ship's first appearance in harbor, Delano searches through his glass to find the “colors” denoting the ship's origin. Aboard the ship, he peers through its “indiscriminate multitude” in search of one in the distinctive dress denoting command of the ship. He looks anxiously for both “costumes” and “gestures,” for appropriate clothing, as well as a stooping servility in the blacks and a proud bearing in the Spaniards. Far from striving to pierce through surface images, suspicious about what is underneath, Delano actively searches out familiar images to put his mind at rest.

His search is soon gratified by the appearance of a “gentlemanly, reserved-looking … man … dressed with singular richness,” Benito Cereno (51). At Cereno's side is Babo, wearing “nothing but wide trowsers” (57). The two proceed to perform for Delano the roles of master and servant, with desired effect:

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, denoting their relative positions.

(57)

For Delano, of course, this is more than mere “spectacle.” Their gestures, costumes, and dialogue are the visible signs of a hierarchical truth.¹¹ Their dress does not disguise, but “denot[es] their relative positions”; their performance is the outward evidence of a hierarchy overseen finally, as is the chained figure of Atufal in a later passage, by “the ever-watchful Providence above” (97).

Delano curiously assumes that these costumes and gestures are controlled by superiors in the hierarchy. Thus, when he has noted both the lock on Atufal's chains and the key suspended from Cereno's neck, he smiles and remarks, “So, Don Benito—padlock and key—significant symbols truly” (63), imagining Cereno thereby meant to signify his power over the slave. Conversely, Delano is annoyed when Cereno seems inadequate to control the gestures of his slaves. When the Spanish ship-boy is slashed by a black, Delano remarks indignantly, “Had such a thing happened on board the Bachelor's Delight, instant punishment would have followed” (59).

Delano assumes that superiors should enjoy a similar control of language—of linguistic as well as physical symbols. Babo has done well, therefore, to put his story in the mouth of Cereno. Greeted, upon boarding the ship, by “a clamorous throng of whites and blacks,” who pour out “as with one voice,” undifferentiated by race or class, a “common tale of suffering” (49), Delano “turned in quest of whomsoever it might be that commanded the ship” (51). Beyond what critics have identified as the American captain's condescension to the Spaniard's old world ways,¹² Delano approaches Cereno as a “brother captain,” (52) from whom “the best account” of the San Dominick “would, doubtless be given” (54). Delano's activities aboard the San Dominick consist largely, amid various interruptions, of his prodding Cereno for “further details” of the ship's story. Disappointingly, of course, Delano's chosen authority has a voice “like that of one with lungs half gone—hoarsely suppressed, a husky whisper” (52). Cereno seems “an undemonstrative invalid … apathetic and mute,” (53) leaving Delano, at one point, with the disquieting suspicion that Cereno possesses “little of command but the name” (59).

Babo, to Delano's mind, has no rightful involvement in the dialogue of captains. When Delano would discuss the San Dominick's finances with Cereno, he wants Babo to withdraw. Gesturing toward the black, he tells Cereno, “there is an interference with the full expression of what I have to say to you” (90). When Cereno responds that Babo is “in all things his confidant,” Delano feels “some little tinge of irritation.” Similarly, when Babo presumes to expound upon Atufal's kingship, Delano is “annoyed with these conversational familiarities” (63). In the various episodes in which Babo and Cereno move aside to confer privately, Delano is doubly irritated. Their whispered words escape his personal control, and the confidential manner of their conference undermines the distinction, affirmed by their dress, of “their relative positions.” Babo's familiarity with Cereno should remain explicitly “menial,” not “conversational.” Tellingly, Delano's first fond impression of Babo sees him gazing up at the Spaniard “mutely” (51).

If Babo wishes to speak, he should do so in a language authorized by his superiors. Ostensibly taking command of the ship to get it back in harbor, Delano stands on the poop-deck, “issuing his orders in his best Spanish” (92). Suddenly, he notices “a voice faithfully repeating” his words, rising from beneath him. It is Babo, “acting, under the pilot, his original part of captain of the slaves” by echoing Delano's words to the throng of blacks. Ignorant that the authority rests in Babo's voice, not his own, Delano finds the arrangement “valuable.” Delano's perception of the scene is a concise image of the relation to privileged language he expects Babo to have.

On the poop-deck, Delano assumes a captain's control of speech. But it is especially in the private language of Delano's mind that we see this white captain guarding a social hierarchy with words.

Typically, he labels the blacks as dull-minded menials, or as harmless or domesticated animals. In unguarded moments, Delano “start[s] at the occasional cymballing of the hatchet-polishers,” and passes them “with an apprehensive twitch in the calves of his legs” (58-59). But Delano's language soon recontains their threat. The hatchet-polishers become, on second glance, “so many organ-grinders”; the oakum-pickers, “bed-ridden old knitting-women” (69). Babo is “like a shepherd's dog” (51). The blacks squatting under the inverted long-boat are “a social circle of bats, sheltering in some friendly cave” (81). A black baby at its mother's breast is a “fawn” with hands “like two paws”; its mother, “a doe” (73). All the blacks aboard are Cereno's “flock of black sheep” (60).

Delano's words halt the blacks in static poses. Each degrading label works exactly like the word of reproof Delano utters, with “a half-mirthful, half-menacing gesture,” while he oversees the hauling-in of the water casks: “Instantly the blacks paused … each negro and negress suspended in his or her posture, exactly as the word had found them” (79). Delano's interior language works restlessly and continually to freeze the blacks in a subordinate “posture” within a white-dominated hierarchy, and to seal out all humanized images of the black. Hence, the “revelation” that comes to Delano amid the sudden chaos aboard his Rover, is finally anything but a revelation. It is a critical and terrifying moment for Delano, not because it reveals to him a new truth about the blacks, contradicting his animalistic masking of them, but because it threatens to do so, and thereby to bring the masquerade he has helped create crashing down around him.

The photographic image of Delano, standing erect “while [with] his right foot” grinding the prostrate Babo against the bottom of the Rover, implicitly recalls the emblem on the San Dominick's stern-piece (99). Delano's act ossifies the tumultuous moment into a static emblem. But this emblem reveals, if only to the reader, a fundamental truth about Delano's act: masks figure in it, concealing the features of the participants in a brute struggle for dominance. The “mask torn away” in this episode is immediately and violently forced back by Delano. The escaped blacks are “cawing crows escaped from the hand of the fowler” (100). Babo is “snakishly writhing” (99). The sword-wielding blacks have “red tongues” that loll “wolf-like, from their black mouths” (102). Animals still, they have merely gone from tame to wild.

Cereno's language, like Babo's, partakes of two distinct masquerades. The first is the “fictitious story” he must tell Delano. On the journey back to Lima, after the San Dominick has been recaptured, Cereno laments to Delano:

… you were with me all day; stood with me, sat with me, talked with me, looked at me, ate with me, drank with me; and yet, your last act was to clutch for a monster, not only an innocent man, but the most pitiable of all men. To such degree may malign machinations and deceptions impose. So may even the best man err, in judging the conduct of one with the recesses of whose condition he is not acquainted.

(115)

The titular character of Melville's story suffers personally a political oppression guarded by masquerade. Thus, his experience goes deeper than Delano's, partaking more of the story's central insights. Cereno experiences masquerade as masquerade, knowing the fictitiousness of Babo's story even as he tells it. Furthermore, Cereno discovers the tremendous power of “machinations and deceptions” to perpetuate oppression by masking oppressor and oppressed. Despite the long close contact of their day aboard the ship, Delano mistakes Cereno, “an innocent man,” for “a monster,” just as he had initially mistaken him for true commander of the ship.

Cereno's tone in this passage is distinctly self-pitying. He characterizes his masked condition as that of “the most pitiable of all men.” But he never enlarges his self-pity to a sympathy with other oppressed groups imprisoned by masquerades. His understanding of the slave condition, despite his enforced duplication of it, is not enhanced. After his ordeal, he persists in contrasting his own “innocent” torment with the “malign” activity of the blacks. Yet, despite these limitations, Cereno's experience reveals for the reader a truth about masquerade. The mute horror of that experience—in the barbering scene, to take a single example—is perhaps the most powerful emotional undercurrent of Melville's story. It vivifies, by extension, the torment of all masked figures “with the recesses of whose condition” we are unacquainted.

But Babo's is only one of the linguistic masquerades in which Cereno speaks. “Broken in body and mind” after his ordeal, Cereno musters the strength to speak against the blacks in the Spanish Court of Lima, where his words become the substance of the deposition. In “Mars Jeem's Nightmare,” a story by the 19th century black American author, Charles Chesnutt, a white slave-owner must live the “nightmare” of the slave condition for a day. Afterward, returned to the role of master, “Mars Jeems” can swap white men's jokes about “niggers” only cynically, and with a new sense of their meaning.¹³ When Cereno redeems his position in Spanish society, however, he reaffirms, with his last publicly uttered words, the old language about blacks.

Cereno speaks for the deposition, where his words are stamped with the approval of both church and state. The deposition is ordered by “His Honor, Doctor Juan Martinez de Rozas, Councilor of the Royal Audience of this Kingdom … of whom he received the oath, which he took by God, our Lord, and a sign of the Cross” (103-104). Under these twin sanctions, the slave revolt is called “crime,” “atrocity,” and “wickedness.” The deposition sanctifies this evaluative language. Warwick Wadlington has pointed out, in addition, that the names of characters in the deposition are preceded by formulaic labels. Delano is always “the generous captain Delano,” while Babo is always “the negro Babo.”¹⁴ In Melville's story, “The ’Gees,” the narrator expresses annoyance with his readers for not knowing exactly what he means when he talks about “’Gees”—his diminutive and ultimately dehumanizing term for a branch of Portuguese South Sea Islanders. The story is a prolonged attempt by the narrator to statically fix what a “’Gee” is, an “inferior race” with which the narrator is “very familiar.”¹⁵ The deposition uses the word “negro” in the same style, fixing people thus labelled in a static hierarchical pose.

But the partiality of the deposition is evident in more than its evaluative language. The document strikingly cuts short the historical perspective which the structure of Melville's tale initiates. After the deposition has been delivered, the narrator remarks that “the nature of this narrative … has more or less required that many things, instead of being set down in the order of their occurrence, should be retrospectively or irregularly given” (114). The reader begins to comprehend the significance of the San Dominick's “shadowy tableau,” only through the history which the deposition provides. The narrative encourages a “retrospective glance” as a method of comprehending “shadowy” experience. Yet the retrospective glance of the deposition conspicuously halts at the moment of black revolt itself.

Given this limitation, the deposition can place black revolt as the first cause in the San Dominick's tragedy. It can thereby comprehend white violence strictly as backlash against initial black violence. Thus, the white's bloody recapture of the slave ship is understood as a backlash against the blacks' “ferocious piratical revolt.” Aboard the Bachelor's Delight, a Spanish sailor stabs “a shackled negro, who, the same day, with another negro, had thrown him down and jumped upon him” (114). Even Babo's horrible end—dragged through the streets of Lima, hung, decapitated, his head displayed on a pike—is, as it were, aesthetically balanced, in the deposition, against his torture and murder of Don Aranda.

The black violence of the tale is never graced with a similar retrospective understanding. The deposition tells us that the “negro Jose, … without being commanded to do so by the negro Babo, … stabbed his master, Don Alexandro, after he had been dragged half-lifeless to the deck” (111); that the black Lecbe “struck, with a hatchet, Don Francisco Masa when … he was carrying him to throw overboard” (111); that “the negresses … would have tortured to death, instead of simply killing, the Spaniards slain by command of the negro Babo” (112). The deposition presents black violence starkly, as though it were gratuitous, with no attempt at either retrospective or intrinsic understanding.¹⁶

The Spanish boatswain, Juan Robles, thrown overboard to drown, “in the last words he uttered,” begged “mass to be said for his soul to our Lady of Succor” (107). Cereno also directs his last publicly uttered words to a Spanish institution, the court sanctioned by church and state. Outside the court's linguistic masquerade, Cereno is mute. He either does not know, or will not find, words for his shattering experience. When Delano presses Cereno for an explanation of his mournfulness—“you are saved; what has cast such a shadow upon you?”—Cereno answers only, “The negro” (116). With this word, the conversation between captains ends. Cereno has seen the tremendous unspoken potential of the blacks burst through the simplifications associated with the word “negro.” Yet, with a glance of “foreboding” which hints that the word will be shattered again, Cereno will only utter the old label. After speaking in court, Cereno shuts himself up in “the monastery on Mount Agonia.” Within the confines of that institution, “three months after being dismissed by the court, Benito Cereno, borne on the bier, did indeed, follow his leader” (117). His experience of masquerade's function, still unspoken, is buried with him.

Babo's is also a “voiceless end,” but with a different meaning. Though Spanish institutions claim Babo's body, he refuses to give his words to them. His “slight frame” yields to the “superior muscular strength” of Delano. But at the moment of capture, “Seeing all was over, he uttered no sound, and could not be forced to” (116). Babo seems to recognize beforehand the use his words would be put to by the Spanish court. The involvement of the black women in the revolt is established by the court “because the negroes have said it” (112). “The negroes have … said,” also, that the old Spanish sailor was murdered by blacks in the hold. The words of the blacks are incorporated into the language of the court, where they are used to convict the blacks. Babo had to subjugate the Spaniards before their language could be used for his own ends. Now that the Spaniards again control both the blacks and the language that imprisons them, Babo refuses to speak.

By the writing of “Benito Cereno,” linguistic masquerade had become, not only the central problem of Melville's fiction, but the central subject and substance as well.¹⁷ Beyond its surface masquerades, this “fictitious story” is finally as mute as are Cereno and Babo outside their masquerades. Yet the story communicates very clearly certain truths about the political function of linguistic masquerade.

Babo's language reveals a keen contrivance for political purposes. Both his masquerades use language to weave “symbolical devices” into comprehensive ideological masquerades. His ritualistic interpretation of the skeleton figurehead weaves that emblem into a masquerade guarding black rule. His “fictitious story” unites designated costumes and gestures into a masquerade with a similar purpose. In the first instance, we see a linguistic masquerade in its incipient evolution, concocted by a new master class to consolidate its power over a new oppressed. In the second, we see the traditional masquerade of Spanish dominance over slaves consciously employed as a fiction to imprison the Spaniards as it had previously imprisoned the blacks.

Delano's language reveals an active search for, an willful faith in, masquerades that guard a hierarchy of whites over blacks. In the interior, insidiously automatic, processes of language within Delano's mind, we see this white American captain appropriating to himself the privilege of naming, and thus hierarchically fixing, the people and situations that surround him. Delano assumes this right for every superior in a hierarchy he considers Providential. Cereno, to Delano's mind, has the right to control both the physical and linguistic trappings of all his subordinates. Inferiors such as the San Dominick's blacks have no separate right to language. They are to speak, if at all, only a language dictated to them by their white superiors.

Cereno's language reveals a conscious enactment of masquerade in the services of political oppression. The “fictitious story” guards his own oppression, while the deposition reinstitutes the oppression of blacks by Spaniards. Cereno's emotional torment within the first masquerade indicates the extremes of oppression guarded by masquerade. His enfeebled contribution to the masquerade of the deposition shows a declining Spanish nobility desperately reiterating the story of white dominance. The deposition reiterates this story both by fixing evaluative labels and by reorganizing history into a scenario that opposes black evil to Spanish right.

The stern-piece of the San Dominick images forth the central insights of “Benito Cereno.” Linguistic masquerades consolidate political hierarchies. They function in Babo's consolidation of black power over the Spaniards, in Delano's imaginative consolidation of white power over blacks, and in the deposition's consolidation of Spanish power over slaves. In the technical peculiarities of all these masquerades, Melville dramatizes the functional realities of linguistic masquerade in a spectrum of forms.

Notes

1. Herman Melville, Benito Cereno, in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839-1860 (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1987), p. 49.

2. Carolyn L. Karcher, Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville's America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980), p. 128.

3. William Charvatt, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870 (Ohio State UP, 1968), p. 255.

4. Marvin Fisher, Going Under: Melville's Short Fiction and the American 1850's (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1977), p. 107.

5. Fisher, p. 106.

6. Fisher, p. 109.

7. Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1950), p. 240.

8. Edgar A. Dryden, Melville's Thematics of Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1968), p. 206.

9. Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), p. 213.

10. H. Bruce Franklin, “Benito Cereno: The Ascetic's Agony,” reprinted in Melville's Benito Cereno: A Text for Guided Research, ed. John P. Runden (Boston: Heath and Co., 1965), p. 113.

11. Dryden points out that the American's social background covertly assumes as much of a “‘follow your leader’ world” as does Cereno's. Dryden cites the fact that the leader of the American onslaught on the San Dominick shouts “Follow your leader!” (205) as he boards the ship. For all his outward avowal of “republican” principles, Delano clearly assumes a cross-cultural hierarchy of whites over blacks.

12. See, for example, Fisher, pp. 112-13.

13. Charles W. Chesnutt, “Mars Jeems's Nightmare,” in The Conjure Woman (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1969), pp. 94-99.

14. Warwick Wadlington, The Confidence Game in American Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975), p. 128.

15. Herman Melville, “The ’Gees,” in The Piazza Tales, pp. 346-47.

16. Sidney Kaplan has complained that Melville facilely assigns guilt to the blacks, without accounting for the prior guilt of white oppression. This criticism attributes to Melville himself an operation of linguistic masquerade which Melville is skillfully dramatizing: the deposition's reorganization of history to whitewash the whites. See Sidney Kaplan, “Herman Melville and the American National Sin: The Meaning of Benito Cereno,” in The Journal of Negro History, XLI (1956), pp. 311-38.

17. Two years previous to the publication of Benito Cereno, Melville published “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Michael Gilmore's discussion of this story concludes that its “tragedy” is precisely the comprehensive masking off of its central character: “The turnkey at the Tombs calls Bartleby ‘the silent man,’ and Melville's point is that the class of group he represents does not speak—they have no voice—in the histories read and written by the middle class. They are not heard in texts just as they have been systematically eliminated from sight in the economy.” See Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 142.

    In the same year he wrote Benito Cereno, Melville was completing The Confidence Man, a novel in which forms of masquerade are so dominant and impenetrable that the novel's central character—and whether a central character exists—is finally undecipherable.