The idea of nature in "Benito Cereno."

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

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 copperspike 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