paradox of slave mutiny in Herman Melville, Charles Johnson, and Frederick Douglass, The

College Literature, Fall 2003 by Lock, Helen

Yet, as in "Benito Cereno," the narrative remains confined within the terms of the paradox: neither crew nor Allmuseri find a way out, a way "to win without defeating the other person." It has been said that Johnson's "text is written and read in the space of contradiction, which is not negation, but a radical form of problematizing and destabilizing fixed manners of belief and being" (Scott 1995,655). I would agree but not with the conclusion that this stance leads to "the expansion of meaning and possibility" (655). Rather, the novel offers no more solutions to these problematic issues than does Melville's tale. The Republic sinks drowning all except Calhoun, Squibb, and three Allmuseri children. Squibb and two of the children then fade from the narrative (possibly to embark for the South Seas). Calhoun has undergone the transformation of perspective that eluded Captain Delano-"the voyage had irreversibly changed my seeing, made of me a cultural mongrel, and transformed the world into a fleeting shadow play I felt no need to possess or dominate, only appreciate in the ever extended present" (Johnson 199Ob, 187)-yet he plans to take this new vision, and his newly adopted Allmuseri daughter, back to Illinois: "solid ground for once" (204). The Republic (and the republic) cannot sustain such a revolution in its premises, and the protagonist abandons the stage, the life-giving sea having brought only death, in search of new life on the formerly death-dealing land. all that remains of the ship, and the sole legacy of the insurrection, is the ship's log, consigned by Falcon to Calhoun, and written by the latter largely in retrospect. Thus for Calhoun it represents a doubling of experience, and, like the deposition at the end of "Benito Cereno," it also functions as a mirror. Here Calhoun's inside narrative is the complementary version of the "official" account that Captain Falcon's original log implies."! took his logbook from the ruins. But I promised myself that even though I'd tell the story ... it would be, first and foremost, as I saw it" (146). The story is not only of what he saw, but of his vision's reversal and redefinition: his recognition, from his liminal position between crew and cargo, of the interdependence and interchangeability of all on board. But this re-vision can only come at the expense of the destruction of Falcons dualistic world, in which "[a] s long as each sees a situation differently there will be slaughter and slavery and the subordination of one to another 'cause two notions of things never exist side by side as equals" (97). The paradox is irresolvable.

In the section of Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave that concerns the Creole mutiny the doubling of experience is that of the white mate, Tom Grant, who relates to a hostile white audience how the Creole was lost as a result of a successful slave mutiny led by the eponymous heroic slave, Madison Washington. Thus, the third-person narrator of the rest of the novella ironically cedes the authority for the slaves' and especially Washington's story to a white officer, whose chief characteristic is his conflicted response to the events of the mutiny and to the personality of Washington.Yet informing and directing this ambivalent narrative is, of course, Douglass himself, a heroic former slave. Grant's whole account, brief though it is, is shot through with contradictions and ambiguities of a kind that reveal his instinctive awareness of the paradox inherent in the uprising. After having initially denied to his audience that "the negro is, naturally, a coward," especially at sea-"For the negro to act cowardly on shore, may be to act wisely" (2000, 46)-and having declared that "this whole slave-trading business is a disgrace and scandal to Old Virginia" (47), he is goaded into telling his tale by the accusation of being an abolitionist, at which he takes great umbrage. The irony, of course, lies in his lack of conscious recognition that the story he tells, and his struggles to interpret it, actually support such a position.