significant silence of race: La Cousine Bette and "Benito Cereno", The

Comparative Literature, Summer 1994 by Colatrella, Carol

Responding to the dilemma outlined by de Tocqueville, La Cousine Bette and "Benito Cereno " pinpoint the failings of an ideology that persists in equating amoral behavior with racial difference. Representing the belief that color is a stigma associated with evil, these texts invite criticism of racial oppression. Both texts rely on cross-cultural comparisons as a means of inviting criticism of slavery and social hierarchies based on racial difference, but the European and American fictional resolutions concerning the instability of slavery and the inevitability of racial discord differ. For Balzac, race is one factor among many others, including financial status, that influence social standing in the fictional world. As a European he is able to represent insurmountable racial difference as a problem abandoned to the New World. The Brazilian baron identified with Africa in La Cousine Bette can be sent back to his native land after he serves his purpose in French society, but the French aristocrats do not agree that criminal violence enacted by the racial other is the answer to social corruption. "Benito Cereno" depicts how the U.S. captain distrusts first his Spanish counterpart and then the African slave, Babo, who only appears to serve his master; Delano's initial impressions are not verified, and his eventual satisfaction in capturing Babo and seeing him punished is undercut by the suggestion that the violent repression of a bloody revolt is an uneasy answer to the racial problem outlined by de Tocqueville. In questioning an individual's processing of racial difference, Melville's short story resists assigning a particular value to race or ethnicity and instead explicitly demonstrates that such simplistic concepts will not reveal truth, just as documents from only one side cannot adequately represent opposing parties in a lawsuit.

Both texts suggest that Europe and America must provide other solutions to the problem of racial conflict by encouraging the authorial audience to overturn the simplistic judgments of the narrative audience and offering flesh-and-blood readers the opportunity to imagine the experience of the marginal subject. La Cousine Bette and "Benito Cereno' press us first to assume the social principles voiced by particular characters and narrators and then to recognize these principles as wanting. In Balzac's novel all characters who stereotype others according to race or gender are associated with criminal behavior; in Melville's story Captain Delano's stereotyping of slaves prevents him from recognizing the sufferings withstood by Don Benito Cereno. Although the fictions are historically worlds apart, both require the authorial audience to ultimately reject cultural values accepted by the narrative audience in order to make sense of the plot's ending.

Balzac applies cultural assumptions of racial difference to characterization as a means of encouraging the reader to sympathize with the dramatic resolution of La Cousine Bette, in which "good" vanquishes "evil," albeit by illegal means. The racial stereotypes assumed by the narrative audience of Balzac's fiction encourage the authorial audience to accept racial difference as a biological fact that can be usefully manipulated in the world, although the ending of the novel calls into question whether a social philosophy outlining a racial hierarchy deserves respect. The authorial audience of Melville's story finds that similar "facts" focalized through one character and accepted provisionally by the narrative audience are questionable and ultimately not understood by the characters or audience of the fiction.(7) In "Benito Cereno" Melville uses point of view to complicate the reader's understanding of how racial stereotypes affect the violent outcome of historical events depicted in the narrative, which resists concluding in a comprehensive explanation. The code of race described by the narrator of Balzac's novel demonstrates the historical claim that the social world has been corrupted by capital, while the narrative structure of Melville's story revels in contradictory notions of race as a way of calling into question whether any subject can claim to be sure of what race is, how racial stereotyping might affect one's understanding of historical events, and whether any definitive interpretation of historical event can be achieved.