The idea of nature in "Benito Cereno."

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1993 by Terry J. Martin

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)