The gaze of history in 'Benito Cereno.'

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1995 by Dennis Pahl

All this naturalization, or domestication, of the world around him serves Delano well as a way to construct a self that would have complete dominion over all those he considers Other.(5) Consistent with Delano's egocentric view of the world is his belief that, as John Samson puts it, ever since Columbus's voyage to the New World, "America signals the End Times of human history" (6). Indeed, as "the American" with a providential view of history, Delano feels that he represents the most enlightened form of humanity, far surpassing those cultures - African and European - that come to signify for him the unenlightened past. (Africans he equates with "Newfoundland dogs" (84) and "the very word Spaniard," to his mind, "has a curious, conspirator, Guy-Fawkish twang to it" [79]). It is perhaps not surprising that Delano's most frequently mentioned characteristic is his "good nature." For more than simply pointing to his cheerfully optimistic personality, this designation also suggests Delano's desire to view himself as being good by nature, hence as being morally superior. In Delano's mind there is little room for the belief that "goodness" is, as Nietzsche would argue, mainly a convenient term used to justify the present political order and thus to obscure the many violences upon which so-called "natural" or "divine" authority is always based.

Yet while Delano may try to reassure himself about the stability of what he discerns as his historically and morally advanced position, Melville's ironic text is constantly putting into question the very basis of Delano's authority, of his sense of historical self-identity. For evident throughout is a certain otherness within himself that he refuses to accept, let alone acknowledge. If Delano tries to separate himself as much as possible from the increasingly bizarre world he encounters, Melville's narrative nevertheless suggests ways in which Delano takes on the very aspects of that which considers Other. Just as, for instance, the San Dominick is designated in Delano's mind as "the stranger," so too is Delano himself, not long after his arrival aboard the ship, referred to as a "stranger" (67, 94). Similarly, while Delano earlier locates Cereno's otherness in the Spaniard's primitive belief in superstitions, the American captain is himself shown to be likewise subject to so-called primitive thinking: he is reported to feel a "ghostly dread of Don Benito," believing that amid the many "phantoms" (68) he witnesses, Cereno is "the central hobgoblin of all" (69). And finally, if Cereno is, from Delano's point of view, often characterized as mentally unstable, we notice a similar kind of instability manifesting itself in the otherwise stable American: Delano is often depicted as bewildered, haunted, and "Lost in . . . mazes" of thought (75) - to the extent that at one moment he hallucinates that he is a "prisoner in some deserted chateau" (74).

No doubt an important cause of Delano's instability is the sudden sense that he can no longer trust in the usual signs that render his world both meaningful and orderly. As a literalist "incapable of satire or irony" (63), Delano reads the world as a perfectly stable system of signs that refer naturally, that confer upon the things of the world a purely natural identity. Thus the image of Cereno leaning on his slave - of a captain demonstrating his loss of mastery, his dependency on an Other - serves only to shatter the world of "significant symbols" (63) to which Delano is accustomed. It suggests instead a world of appearances, where all signs, while they are capable of being manipulated by a will to power, are nevertheless empty in themselves - as empty as the "artificially stiffened" scabbard that is supposed to hold Cereno's silver-mounted sword, the "apparent symbol of despotic command" (116). Without a world of naturally grounded signs to rely upon, Delano is in jeopardy of losing his bearings, that is, of losing his sense of himself as a "center," as a "master" of his world.