Madness and mastery in Melville's "Benito Cereno." - Herman Melville

Criticism, Wntr, 1996 by Benjamin D. Reiss

The menacing silences that conclude the story constitute Melville's refusal to replace the "stupid" positivist readings of difference that were available to him with more positivism. Inside Delano's head swarm the alternately paternalistic and fearful rhetorics of race and insanity that in Melville's day produced a hopelessly confused network of sliding and proliferating difference. Melville does not deliver a final answer on the meanings of race or madness; rather, he reveals the processes of domination and disavowal by which such silences are produced and by which they come to be linked. In doing so, he exposes the confused state of knowledge about African Americans and the insane, hybridized figures who were silent in and often silenced by the very debates on reform that were supposedly conducted for their benefit. For in Melville's story, the silences of Babo and Don Benito are both relegated to the margins of the legal deposition. However, Melville stresses that they are not identical. Rather, Babo's defiant silence (he "could not be forced to" speak) seems to fall on top of Benito Cereno, a kind of shadowy oblivion that smothers the Spaniard's voice. As he has missed the meaning of so much of the story, Delano fails to understand Don Benito's continuing gloom after his rescue from the clutches of Babo:

"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 if it were a pall.

There was no more conversation that day. (314)

In "Benito Cereno," suspicion is both constituted by legitimate social threat (the threat to Delano emanating from the San Dominick, which has its real origin in Babo's revolt) and itself constitutes a source of threat, in that, run wild, it can lead to outbreaks of irrational violence, a sort of madness-in-action. In reference to his suspicions of the manifestly bizarre behavior of captain and crew, Delano thinks, "This is like the ague; because it went off, it follows not that it won't come back" (272). The lunacy that stems from unchecked suspicion, he worries, may be contagious. Accordingly, Delano labors throughout the story to contain his suspicions, calling on his diminishing reserves of "trust and good will" whenever his mental apparatus is threatened by the scene unfolding before him. Strangely, though, the possibility of Don Benito's insanity is sometimes comforting to the American captain; at one point he reaches the altogether false conclusion that if the Spanish captain is mad, no intentional threat exists: Don Benito's is an "innocent lunacy." The possibility he misses is that Benito Cereno is mad and that an intentional threat exists. His difficulty in distinguishing between his legitimate suspicions, his own madness, and the madness of another suggest Melville's understanding of the fluid relations between psychopathology and social trauma. If insanity is produced by an experience of social trauma (as is undeniably the case with Benito Cereno), then Delano's hypothesis of an "innocent lunacy" is an oxymoron. But for the moment, at least, it puts a halt to interpretation and suspicion, and thus has a palliative effect on the American.