SOURCE: “The Idea of Nature in Benito Cereno,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 30, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 161-68.

[In the following essay, Martin discusses the allegorical qualities of nature depicted in “Benito Cereno.”]

Although many critics have analyzed specific natural images in Melville's “Benito Cereno,” no one has yet focused exclusively on the role of nature in the novella, nor looked fully at its problematic relation to Delano. Such an examination can both reveal much about Melville's artistry and enhance our understanding of the protagonist's special kind of self-delusion. Midway through the novella, Delano performs an act that is at once typical and revelatory of his ideology: overwhelmed by fears for his life and doubts about providence, he turns to nature for reassurance:

As [Delano] saw the benign aspect of nature, taking her innocent repose in the evening, the screened sun in the quiet camp of the west shining out like the mild light from Abraham's tent—as charmed eye and ear took in all these, with the chained figure of the black, clenched jaw and hand relaxed.

(96-97)

The personal qualities that Delano attributes to nature (i.e., its “benign[ity]” and “innocen[ce]”), together with the religious associations that the sight evokes, reveal a kind of Emersonian belief in the transcendent goodness and moral providence of nature. It is, in other words, God's benignity that Delano sees suffused throughout the scene. Delano is not a thoroughgoing pantheist; he retains the idea of a personal God, noticeable especially when he later declares, “There is someone above” (77). Nevertheless, for Delano, just as for Emerson, this transcendent spirit is shadowed forth in phenomenal nature, and Delano would no doubt agree with Emerson that “particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts” (13). This belief in effect turns nature into a vast allegory of the divine spirit. For Delano, the mere appearance of benignity in nature warrants belief in the transcendent reality of benignity.

Delano turns to nature not only for reassurance but also for guidance and support. Nature seems for Delano to exhibit a direct interest in human affairs, in which it actively intervenes. Thus, even the most trivial occurrence, such as a pleasant tropical breeze, may convey a moral message to Delano. As Delano affirms to a despairing Cereno, “These mild Trades that now fan your cheek, do they not come with a human-like healing to you? Warm friends, steadfast friends are the Trades” (116). Delano assumes that if nature is constant in its beneficence, then Cereno's desperation must be essentially wrong and misguided. Nature seems to concur, and in Delano's estimation it openly rebukes Cereno for his moodiness:

Meantime the sound of the parted waters came more and more gurglingly and merrily in at the windows; as reproaching him for his dark spleen; as telling him that, sulk as he might, and go mad with it, nature cared not a jot; since, whose fault was it, pray?

(95)

Delano even holds up nature as a model of human behavior. In his effort to persuade Cereno to forget the past, Delano points conclusively to the conduct of natural objects: “See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves” (116). If nature forgets the past, then no doubt man ought to do so too.

Delano's belief that nature possesses a transcendent moral order legitimates for him the interpretation of natural signs. To be sure, Delano's behavior is no different from that of most of his contemporaries when he interprets, for example, the color of skin according to this ideal order. If all things signify, then surely white, being the opposite of black, must entail different spiritual characteristics as well. Indeed, Delano has only to look to “nature” to find objective corroboration for his belief that whites are “by nature … the shrewder race” (75) and therefore naturally superior to blacks: the (apparent) dominance of the whites and servitude of the blacks on the San Dominick offers sufficient proof of Delano's premise. But Delano has also observed what he takes to be the evident inferiority even of free blacks at home. Blacks have presented themselves as “good-humor[ed],” “easy,” “cheerful,” and “harmonious in every glance and gesture; as though God had set the whole negro to some pleasant tune” (83). They are, he thinks, fit “for avocations about one's person,” like “natural valets and hair-dressers; taking to the comb and brush congenially as to the castanets, and flourishing them apparently with almost equal satisfaction” (83). Furthermore, blacks are, in Delano's view, exempt “from the inflicted sourness of the morbid or cynical mind” (84). However, he also deems them essentially “stupid” (75), displaying the “docility arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind, and that susceptibility of blind attachment sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors” (84). For Delano, skin color is simply the seal that providence uses to stamp inferior goods.

Of course, who knows what happens when the races are “unnaturally” mixed? Delano conjectures about the effect: “It were strange, indeed, and not very creditable to us white-skins, if a little of our blood mixed with the African's, should, far from improving the latter's quality, have the sad effect of pouring vitriolic acid into black broth; improving the hue, perhaps, but not the wholesomeness” (89). It will be seen from this that the racially crossed offspring are at a distinct disadvantage in Delano's world, in which natural signs correlate with spiritual identity, because their identities are as uncertain as the effect of mingled magic potions. In fact, the mulatto represents a special semiotic problem for Delano precisely because the mulatto is neither black nor white and is hence unable to be interpreted with any degree of certainty. Delano is therefore even willing to consider the possibility that a mulatto with a regular European face is a devil (89). After all, a belief in the inherent allegorical qualities of matter requires that the mulatto be something less than white but greater than black, and devilishness at least presupposes intelligence gone astray.

For Delano, the meaning of human experience must likewise be understood in light of this allegory of divine providence, for no act can be seen apart from the divine justice that, in his eyes, actively dispenses reward and punishment in this world. Thus, his suspicion that there is a plot to kill him oddly brings about an examination of his own internal merit, as if murder could not have its root in external aggression, but rather must signify a priori some form of karmic retribution for the victim's own past transgression(s). He asks, “Who would murder Amasa Delano? His conscience is clean. There is someone above” (77). The statement presupposes a direct empirical causality between human behavior and divine justice; with astonishing naïveté Delano assumes that God would never let anything happen to the innocent (i.e., to himself), unless he had done something to deserve it. It also reveals how Delano is able to see his continued survival and good fortune as objective verification of his own innocence rather than of his cleverly disguised but nonetheless aggressive will-to-power.¹

Delano runs into problems, however, when the events that he witnesses often point with an almost irresistible logic to meanings that are incompatible with the existence of a benevolent providence. The whispered conversations between Babo and Benito, the nasty look of the Ashantee hatchet-polishers, the numerous signs communicated to him by the Spanish sailors, and the apparently ubiquitous presence of the imposing Atufal, along with many other equally disconcerting impressions, all suggest the existence of some sinister plot that the allegory of transcendental benignity forces him to deny. Ironically, even those spectacles that most deserve Delano's unqualified trust and sympathy, such as Benito's reduced and pathetic state, also serve to inspire the American with suspicion. In a momentary vision worthy of the completely duplicitous world of The Confidence Man, Delano reflects, “For even to the degree of simulating mortal disease, the craft of some tricksters had been known to attain. To think that, under the aspect of infantile weakness, the most savage energies might be couched—those velvets of the Spaniard but the silky paw to his fangs” (64-65). Thus, no sign, no matter how apparently innocent, carries any absolute guarantee of its legitimacy. Later, Delano recollects similar accounts that he has heard of the mortally deceptive tactics of Malay pirates and that “now, as stories … recurred” (68)—stories that have, nonetheless, a certain power and plausibility to them that cannot easily be dismissed, and that in effect challenge his own “story.”

As these examples suggest, Delano's allegorical system of understanding is not entirely self-sufficient. Although it structures and gives meaning to Delano's experience, it is also sustained by that experience—that is, it requires verification from and through his experience. It is in this way vulnerable to confutation. It is, at best, a precariously poised allegory that is in continual danger of being toppled by the logic of its tenor. And the need to read the clues around him serves to quicken the crisis of interpretation: how can he be sure that the world is not ordered according to some other allegory instead? As Delano affirms, there is in at least one sense “a difference between the idea of Don Benito's darkly pre-ordaining Captain Delano's fate, and Captain Delano's lightly arranging Don Benito's” (70); on that slender distinction rests the very nature of the world Delano inhabits.

Delano is not in fact able completely to dismiss the many indications of human evil throughout the story, but to admit them exacts a heavy price: as the evidence of earthly evil accumulates, so too grow his doubts about the supremacy of celestial goodness. Delano inadvertently reveals the extent of his apostasy when he repents of having too strongly doubted the good intentions of those on board the San Dominick, for to have given free rein to his fear, he discovers, is at once to have doubted the God that watches over him: “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 almost atheist doubt of the ever-watchful Providence above” (97; my emphasis). Thus, Delano can only bolster his faith by denying his experience. This strategy may make both the world and himself seem better, but only at the risk of blurring the way both actually are.

Delano's very need for denial makes it evident that nature is not at all what he supposes it to be. Indeed, what Delano thinks is most “natural” or objectively self-evident is precisely what is least so. When, for example, he sees the black woman kissing the baby and speaks glowingly of “naked nature” (73) as if it were “the thing itself”—a natural essence unshaped by either human artifice or perception—he is most fully deceived. There is nothing either “pleasant” or “sociable” (75) about the scene, as Delano construes it. The woman is, for instance, fully a party to the plot against his life.² Moreover, the scene is not even natural in the sense in which Delano takes it to be. It is only after the woman discovers him staring at her that she takes up the child and kisses it, a sequence that rhetorically suggests that the act is not at all spontaneously motivated by the “maternal transports” (73) that Delano supposes, but is rather an entirely self-conscious artifice performed with the specific intent of placing him off his guard.

Moreover, in the world of “Benito Cereno,” nature is not the transcendent source of clarity that Delano imagines, but rather the source of confusion and equivocation. Significantly, our first view of nature is as a fog in which there is a continual blurring and merging of boundaries, and in which nothing can be positively identified:

Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. … The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapours 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.

(46)

The passage serves as an analogue for the difficulty of interpretation by its evocation of grayness, of shadows, and of the inability to distinguish anything clearly. Fowl and vapors become inextricably mixed and confused. The description is indeed intended to blur the difference between them; the words “kith and kin”—with their hint of familial resemblance—and the exact syntactic repetition of the phrase “flights of troubled gray” both suggest a doubling that challenges cognitive differentiation. That Melville was employing this passage to question a certain set of epistemological assumptions is clear from its juxtaposition, for within such a background of complicated movements that become lost or fail to register, a hueless, uniform gray, and a reality that merges with, and finally becomes inseparable from, appearance, appears Captain Delano's surprise that the stranger “showed no colors” (46).³

Likewise, the morning light, which might be expected to bring clarity and illumination, merely streams “equivocally” (47) through the vapors. Other natural signs are equally equivocal. In one of the few departures from Delano's point of view, the narrative voice states, apropos of a haggard sailor, that “whether this haggardness had ought to do with criminality, could not be determined; since, as intense heat and cold, though unlike, produce like sensations, so innocence and guilt, when, through casual association with mental pain, stamping any visible impress, use one seal—a hacked one” (71-72). Thus, nature hides even what it has applied its seal to, and Don Benito warns that truth cannot be ascertained on the basis of phenomenal evidence alone: “Even the best man [may] err, in judging the conduct of one with the recesses of whose condition he is not acquainted” (115). In the world of “Benito Cereno,” one looks in vain for the natural sign that is not hopelessly equivocal.

Nature is, furthermore, not the source of order, but rather of entropy—of the inexorable decay and disintegration of order. The San Dominick, which has been peculiarly ravaged by natural forces that have all but transformed it to a hearse, functions as a vivid symbol of the destructive power of nature. Everything on the San Dominick is, indeed, in the process of becoming something other than itself and thus presents to view a strange, almost monstrous hybrid of its original form and altered state. Nothing retains its original identity, and nowhere is this more richly suggestive than in the description of the ship's name, which points both to the ultimate fate not only of the ship but of human discourse itself: “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” (49). It is clearly only a matter of time until the letters dissolve completely into rust, and the sign itself is obliterated. Thus, far from being in any way the foundation of language, nature instead threatens it with utter dissolution. It is the death that constantly promises to undo the most significant assertions of human identity and language, much as it will abruptly rob of his most prized social rank the “invalid courtier tottering about London streets in the time of the plague” (58).

Finally, although Delano assumes that his words and ideas derive their ultimate authority from nature itself, that “nature” turns out to be itself a fabrication of the language that presumes to reproduce it. In a typical scene, Melville has Delano peering into the ocean and envisioning the scene in terms of something that it is not:

He leaned against the carved balustrade, again looking off toward his boat; but found his eye falling upon the ribbon grass, trailing along the ship's water-line, straight as a border of green box, and parterres of seaweed, broad ovals and crescents, floating nigh and far, with what seemed long formal alleys between, crossing the terraces of swells, and sweeping round as if leading to the grottoes below. And overhanging all was the balustrade by his arm, which, partly stained with pitch and partly embossed with moss, seemed the charred ruin of some summer-house in a grand garden long running to waste.

(74)

The image of a garden is especially apt here since it was a classical symbol of order. What Delano sees is, however, merely an imaginary order significantly superimposed onto a chaos of water. The scene partakes of the enchantment that Delano temporarily falls prey to, and that in turn suggests the greater “enchantment” of Delano's entire life. Delano has, it will be recalled, a “charmed eye and ear” (96; my emphasis). He is, however, in this case quickly disenchanted when, forgetting that the rotting balustrade is, after all, only a rotting balustrade, he leans his weight on it and nearly topples into the sea. The scene dramatizes Delano's nearly fatal dependence on a “nature” without objective basis, and thereby reveals the radically transformative power of Delano's vision.

As we have seen, “Benito Cereno” dramatizes the vast distance between Delano's idealism and reality. Barry Philips has argued that “Emerson exhibited the same defects in his vision of the world and of providence as Delano displayed in his. In Amasa Delano, more than in any other of his major characters, Melville concentrated his contempt for the optimism of the American idealist” (191-92). This is true especially of Delano's view of nature. If Melville's Delano could have read Moby-Dick, he would have realized that nature is complex and multifaceted, and that one might just as easily (and legitimately!) allegorize the triumph of diabolism as of benignity in nature. The most eloquent spokesman for this view is Queequeg, who states, “… de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin” (Moby-Dick 257). Moreover, Melville makes clear that Delano's attribution of transcendental benignity to nature works in the same way as does his refusal to accept “the imputation of malign evil in man” (47): both, though apparent testimonials to an ennobling faith, are ultimately a means of ignoring evil—his own as well as others'. And to ignore evil is a dangerous thing to do, for whether it is in the wilderness without or the even murkier one within, the beast in the jungle eventually leaps.

Notes

1. Delano's “innocence” is belied by his assumption of the archetypal position of dominance modeled by the satyr in the medallioned sternpiece of the San Dominick—a position mirrored by Babo, whom Delano hypocritically regards as a “ferocious pirat[e]” (99). Delano is similarly implicated in evil by his association with images of piracy, such as in the name of his boat (which was the name of the ship of buccaneer William Ambrose Cowley) and the fact that the chief mate whom he sends to retake the San Dominick was himself formerly “a privateer's man” (101). Finally, although Delano, like Babo, kills no one with his own hands, he is nevertheless responsible for the deaths caused in retaking the ship, as well as for the atrocity of re-enslaving all of the blacks aboard the San Dominick. For especially lucid and well documented discussions of these and other dimensions of Delano's evil, see Kavanagh, Emery, and Zagarell.

2. Melville gives the black women the status of active participants in the rebellion by noting in the deposition that “all the negroes, though not in the first place knowing to the design of the revolt, when it was accomplished, approved it” (111). More importantly, he heightens the inflammatory role of the black women by noting that

   the negresses used their utmost influence to have the deponent made away with; that, in the various acts of murder, they sang songs and danced—not gaily, but solemnly; and before the engagement with the boats, as well as during the action, they sang melancholy songs to the negroes, and that this melancholy tone was more inflaming than a different one would have been, and was so intended; that all this is believed, because the negroes have said it.

   (112)

   Both passages are absent from Melville's source.

3. Melville significantly attributes to Captain Delano what was observed by the crew in the original account. See Delano 75.

Works Cited

Delano, Amasa. A Narrative of Voyages. Boston, 1817. Rpt. A “Benito Cereno” Handbook. Ed. Seymour L. Gross. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1965. 71-98.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Richard Poirier. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. 2-36.

Emery, Alan Moore. “‘Benito Cereno’ and Manifest Destiny.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 39 (1984): 48-68.

Hayford, Harrison, et al., eds. The Writings of Herman Melville. Northwestern-Newberry Ed. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP and Newberry Library. 12 vols. to date. 1968-.

Kavanagh, James H. “‘That Hive of Subtlety’: ‘Benito Cereno’ as Critique of Ideology.” Bucknell Review 29 (1984): 127-57.

Melville, Herman. Benito Cereno. The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860. Hayford et al. 9: 46-117.

———. Moby-Dick: An Authoritative Text. Norton Critical Ed. Ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. New York: Norton, 1967.

Phillips, Barry. “‘The Good Captain’: A Reading of ‘Benito Cereno.’” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 4 (1962): 188-97.

Zagarell, Sandra A. “Reenvisioning America: Melville's ‘Benito Cereno.’” ESQ 30 (1984): 245-59.