The gaze of history in 'Benito Cereno.'

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1995 by Dennis Pahl

a calculated and relentless pleasure, the delight in the promised blood. . . . Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. (151)

Those who, by the end of the story, are in control of the rules - namely Delano and the Spanish court - are thus intent on judging others strictly in accordance with what best enables them to maintain their own power.

For Delano and the court, the moral meaning of Babo's final image (as well as of all the events that took place on the San Dominick) could not be clearer. But for Melville, whose fictional re-creation of the real Delano's history is but a meditation on history itself, the final image of Babo points to a more complicated notion of history - one that is neither black nor white, nor able to be reduced to a metaphysical statement about the ambiguous nature of evil.(10) Concerned as Melville is with both the material facts of history as well as with the material consequences of historical form, "Benito Cereno" gives ample testimony to Melville's interest in keeping a vigilant eye not only on the violences inherent in, and resulting from, the institution of slavery, but also on the epistemic violences inherent within any narrative construction of that institution's past. Precisely in his scrutiny of those forms and formulations of history, that would help maintain such barbaric cultural practices, Melville demonstrates a desire to tell a different kind of history. It is one that, in revealing history's imposing gaps, its eloquent silences, and its counter-discourses, finally makes it possible for the Other (otherwise kept silent) to speak and for the otherness of history finally to emerge from its shadowy depths.

1 For similar views, see Kaplan, Fiedler, and Widmer.

2 For an interpretation of the story's black-white imagery as it pertains to the politics of race, see Nelson 109-30.

3 For a discussion of the way Melville's romances engage history by seeking to "penetrate and symbolically rework the social order," see Rogin 22.

4 For a discussion of the role of nature in "Benito Cereno," see Martin, who astutely points out that despite Delano's dependence on nature for reassurance and support, all natural signs in the story are "hopelessly equivocal" (166).

5 See Spivak, who argues: "No perspective critical of imperialism can turn the Other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been the absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self" (253). As we shall see, it is Delano's attempted domestication of Others that allows him to consolidate, and to ground, his imperialist self. That Melville's text sets out to undermine the stability, of this self suggests one of the ways Melville tries to de-domesticate history.

6 Though Delano is cast mainly as an administrator, removed from the violent activity, occasionally his own brute self reveals itself: for example, during the scene of Babo's attack when Delano's foot begins to "ground the prostrate negro" (99). Later, the narrator refers to "the superior muscular strength" (116) of Delano, in contrast to the small stature of Babo.