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ABSTRACT
Herman Melville’s novella “Benito Cereno” (1855/56) is one of the best-studied texts both within Melville’s oeuvre and nineteenth-century American literature in general. In recent decades, its puzzling structure and fragmented narrative perspective as well as its symbolism and themes have been subject to critical scrutiny mostly in the context of inquiries into the text’s racial politics regarding the institution of slavery. More specifically, the canonical tale about a slave uprising on the ship San Dominick, its detection by a Massachusetts-born captain and its consequences, has been discussed in the context of Paul Gilroy’s black Atlantic paradigm. Few readings of the tale consider the significance of the Pacific setting of a story grounded in the transatlantic slave trade but happening far away from the center of American slavery. Taking a fresh look at Melville’s tale, this essay focuses on its translation of (black) Atlantic subject matters and epistemologies onto the Pacific. Not only do I read the tale as both an Atlantic and a Pacific text, demonstrating that the institution of slavery and its specters know no geographical borders in Melville’s imagination; I also argue that piracy is an important trope in this context. Anticipating the shift of piracy cases and slavery to the Pacific towards the end of the nineteenth century, it both recalls a black Atlantic and predicts a bleak Pacific of violent imperial scenarios that would come to characterize US–Pacific relations.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on the contributor
Alexandra Ganser is professor of American literary and cultural studies at the University of Vienna and key researcher of the interdisciplinary research platform Mobile Cultures and Societies. She holds a PhD from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany; her dissertation was published as Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women’s Road Narratives, 1970–2000 (2009). She was Christoph-Daniel-Ebeling Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society (2010). Her current book project, sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), examines transatlantic representations of piracy and is titled Crisis and Discourses of (Il)Legitimacy in Transatlantic Narratives of Piracy, 1678–1865 (forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan in 2018).
Notes
1 For example, Sundquist, Mackenthun.
2 One notable exception is Gniadek’s autobiographically inspired essay “Americans Abroad: Melville and Pacific Perspectives,” which critically reflects the imperialist dangers of the transatlantic and transnational turn in American studies.
3 I am referring to recent work by historians Matt Matsuda and David Igler in the context of Pacific studies and by Huang, Hoskins and Nguyen, Cruz, Duerr and Schorch, and Suzuki for transpacific studies.
4 Perry, Facing West, 59; Eperjesi, Imperialist Imaginary, 22.
5 Eperjesi, Imperialist Imaginary, 4.
6 Ibid., 14.
7 Huang, Transpacific Imaginations, 6, 73.
8 Eperjesi, Imperialist Imaginary, 47.
9 Grandin, Empire of Necessity, ch. 13, 14.
10 DeLoughrey, Roots and Routes, 4. She uses the term in the context of island literatures.
11 Eperjesi, Imperialist Imaginary, 16.
12 Grandin summarizes this relation between existential slavery and slavery as a Western institution: “[I]t is exactly Melville's existential digressions that speak directly to the problem of slavery in Western society, that go straight to the heart of what the massive and systemic subordination of millions and millions of human beings over the course of hundreds and hundreds of years meant to the societies that prospered from slavery and to the slaves who suffered creating that prosperity” (Empire of Necessity, 125; see also 54, 89).
13 See Roberts and Stephens, “Archipelagic American Studies”; DeLoughrey, Roots and Routes.
14 Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 4.
15 Ibid., 4.
16 For an overview, see Evans, “Black Atlantic.”
17 Goebel and Schabio, “Introduction”; Feldman, “Black Pacific,” 206.
18 Evans, “Black Atlantic,” 255.
19 Reid-Pharr, “Engendering the Black Atlantic.”
20 Evans, “Black Atlantic,” 266; Dayan, “Middle Passage as Metaphor.”
21 Neary, “Mining the African American Literary Tradition,” 367, n. 22.
22 De Souza and Murdoch, “Oceanic Dialogues,” 223.
23 Shilliam, Black Pacific, 9.
24 See Neary’s study on black miners in California, Smyth on Caribbean poetics, Feldman’s musicological essay on the Afro-Peruvian revival, Hudson on black artists from Vancouver, Taketani on James Weldon Johnson.
25 Smyth, “Black Atlantic,” 390.
26 Ibid., 391. Likewise, George Lipsitz points out the contradictions that he sees inherent in a black Pacific model as similarly awkward when looking at African American-Japanese alliances that embraced Japanese fascism and imperialism (“‘Frantic to Join’,” 350).
27 Feldman, “Black Pacific,” 206.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 207.
30 Grandin, Empire of Necessity, 239. This is arguably the most detailed and well-balanced historical study of Delano and the slaves aboard the Tryal.
31 Melville, “Benito Cereno,” 34. Subsequent references to the novel are cited parenthetically.
32 Slocombe, “Santa Maria,” 31.
33 Ibid., 32.
34 Grandin, Empire of Necessity, 7.
35 Levine, Conspiracy and Romance, 213.
36 Sundquist, “New World Slavery,” 95–96; Levine, Conspiracy and Romance, 168–170; Fortin “‘Excited Almost to Madness’.” Mackenthun reads Babo as “a composite figure of the historical characters Singue, leader of the Amistad revolt, and Toussaint L’Ouverture […] mixed with traces of African trickster figures,” Fictions, 125.
37 Goldberg, “Mute Testimony,” 7.
38 Sundquist, “New World Slavery,” 94.
39 Rogin, Subversive Genealogy, 211. Carolyn Karcher explains how the trope of piracy connects “Benito Cereno” and the Amistad case: “Charges of piracy were central to the trial. The press had repeatedly described the Amistad as a pirate ship when it was sighted […], but the Africans’ defense team […] successfully argued that it was not piracy for persons to rise up against those who illegally held them captive” (“Notes,” 2465). See also Thomas, Cross-Examinations, 108.
40 Qtd. in Rogin, Subversive Genealogy, 212.
41 Karcher, Shadow Over the Promised Land, 136.
42 On the parallel construction of the American South and the Catholic Spanish Empire in “Benito Cereno,” see Levine, Conspiracy and Romance, 202.
43 Sundquist, “New World Slavery,” 106.
44 Levine, Conspiracy and Romance, 191.
45 Reichardt, Alterität und Geschichte, 128, following Gilroy.
46 Kaplan, “Transnational Melville,” 45.
47 Parker, Herman Melville, 281. In the 1840s, Melville visited many of the same places Delano had been to 40 years earlier; Grandin, Empire of Necessity, 166.
48 Kelley, “Style of Lima,” 62–63.
49 Melville, Moby-Dick, 1061.
50 Ibid., 68.
51 Ibid., 69.
52 Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific, 58.
53 See Tardieu, “Origins of the Slaves.”
54 Maude, Slavers in Paradise; Huang, Transpacific Imaginations, 68.
55 Horne, White Pacific, 2, 37.
56 Ibid., 5.
57 Ibid., 10 and ch. 8; on the British slave trade in the Pacific between 1864 and 1908, see Phillips, “Mapping Imagination.”
58 Horne, White Pacific, 11 and ch. 1; Huang, Transpacific Imaginations, 68.
59 Delano, Narrative of Voyages and Travels, 48.
60 This description is one of Melville's deliberate alterations: Grandin notes that Delano’s historical encounter with the Tryal took place on a sunny day; Empire, 213.
61 Mackenthun, Fictions of the Black Atlantic, 117; Nnolim, Study in Meaning of Name Symbolism, 57.
62 Levine, Conspiracy and Romance, 222.
63 Richardson, Interpretation With Annotated Text, 211 n. 31.
64 Franklin reveals that the historical Delano was, in fact, a privateer and likewise emphasizes that he was regarded as a pirate by his enemies; “Past, Present, and Future Seemed,” 237.
65 Stuckey and Leslie, “Aftermath.”
66 Ibid., 271; also Grandin, Empire of Necessity, 231.
67 Stuckey and Leslie, “Aftermath,” 271.
68 Ibid., 273.
69 Mackenthun, Fictions of the Black Atlantic, 123.
70 Ibid., 115; Nnolim, Study in Meaning of Name Symbolism, 17.
71 Emery, “Manifest Destiny,” 102. Melville adds the explicit reference to piracy to the first edition of The Piazza Tales. In the original serial publication in Putnam's, he is just “a privateer's-man – to head the party” (see Richardson's concordance, Interpretation With Annotated Text, 132); a second correction is Melville's reference to John Ledyard, an American adventurer who explored Africa and the Pacific with Captain Cook, which is replaced by the Scottish traveler in Africa Mungo Park; 128, 210 n. 30.
72 Thomas, Cross-Examinations, 108.
73 Lane, “Life and Times”; Franklin, “Past, Present, and Future Seemed,” 273; a fact Dampier conceals in his Narrative.
74 Farrier, Unsettled Narratives, 2. Melville was also familiar with earlier Spanish accounts of Pacific exploration such as Alvaro de Mendana's, which he references in White-Jacket (Brins 21).
75 Melville, “Encantadas or Enchanted Isles,” 257–258.
76 Jonik, “Melville's ‘Permanent Riotocracy’,” 248; Deleuze, “Bartleby.”
77 Jonik, “Melville's ‘Permanent Riotocracy’,” 230.
78 See “The Advocate,” ch. 24 of Moby-Dick; Jonik, “Melville’s ‘Permanent Riotocracy’,” 236; Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific, 35; Eperjesi, Imperialist Imaginary, 29.
79 Melville, “Encantadas or Enchanted Isles,” 255.
80 Ibid., 261.
81 Kaplan, “Transnational Melville,” 52.
82 Nnolim, Study in Meaning of Name Symbolism, 18.
83 Emery, “Manifest Destiny,” 103.
84 On filibustering and US expansion in the period’s literature, see. Breinig, “Invasive Methods.”
85 Franklin, “Past, Present, and Future Seemed,” 238; see also Zagarell, “Reenvisioning America,” 141.
86 Mackenthun, Fictions of the Black Atlantic, 113, quoting Jones; also Franklin, “Past, Present, and Future Seemed,” 237; Beebee, “Carl Schmitt's Myth,” 128.
87 Sundquist, “New World Slavery,” 136.
88 Sale, Slumbering Volcano, 161. The tale includes a stereotype of African behavior as barbaric and brutal not to be found in Delano's source text. Goddard notes that Babo's name, too, alludes to historical pirates, namely the Barbary “pirates” and the conflict between North African states and western powers; “Of Mimicry and Masks,” 229.
89 Gillman and Gruesz, “Worlding America,” 238. Though he can only speak through the body, as Zagarell notes (“Reenvisioning America,” 136), Babo's final image is that of “an almost disembodied brain” (Karcher, Shadow Over the Promised Land, 130), perhaps the tale's most significant critique of racist assumptions about people of African descent.
90 Spanos, American Calling, 110.
91 Franklin, “Past, Present, and Future Seemed,” 237.
92 Stuckey, African Culture, 55.
93 Melville, Moby-Dick, 1199; Birns, “‘Oriental Archipelagoes’,” 13.
94 Sale, Slumbering Volcano, 158.
95 Haegert, “Voicing Slavery Through Silence,” 34.
96 Ibid., 177.
97 Levine, Conspiracy and Romance, 220.
98 Blum, “Atlantic Trade,” 120.
99 Ibid., 122; see also Mackenthun, Fictions of the Black Atlantic, ch. 5.
100 Buell, “American Decolonization,” 116.
101 Heide, “Inter-American Relations,” 37.
102 Ibid., 43.
103 Gillman and Gruesz, “Worlding America,” 231. Piracy is associated with early modern Europe earlier in “The Bell-Tower,” which examines the debauchery of the slave society of sixteenth-century Venice (Richardson, Interpretation With Annotated Text, 88) and connects the topic of slavery to its origins in European maritime states. Linked by Shakespeare’s Othello and its rebellious African protagonist in Venice, the diptych formed by the two tales presents a comment on the globalization of slavery (and piracy, for that matter, as the history of Venice is itself deeply entangled with piratical practices). Karcher views “The Bell-Tower” as more radical than “Benito Cereno,” confronting the reader “directly with a slave society's naked contempt for human values” (Shadow, 147). Venice is also invoked as another center of corruption in “The Town-Ho's Story,” ch. 54 of Moby-Dick.
104 Mackenthun, Fictions of the Black Atlantic, 122.
105 Levine, Conspiracy and Romance, 224.
106 Sundquist, “New World Slavery,” 107.
107 Strong, “‘Follow Your Leader’,” 284 (emphasis in the original).
108 Huang, Transpacific Imaginations, 8.
109 Ibid., 9.
110 James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, 133–134.
111 See also Franklin, “Past, Present, and Future Seemed.”
112 Sundquist, “New World Slavery,” 94.
113 Strong, “Follow Your Leader,” 288–289.
114 Balfour, “What Babo Saw,” 262 (emphasis in the original).
115 Schnackertz, “Wahrnehmungsperspektiven,” 179.
116 Strong, “Follow Your Leader,” 289.
117 Olson, Call Me Ishmael, 113.
118 Phillips, “Mapping Imagination,” 131.
119 Ibid., 133. Against this interpretation, John Carlos Rowe has read Typee as an anticipation of Melville's social criticism in his later work in that it refuses to represent the colonial experience as a “simple or singular narrative”; Literary Culture, 95.
120 Horne, White Pacific.
121 Huang, Transpacific Imaginations, 2.
122 Ibid., 3.
123 Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific, 37.
124 Gniadek, “Americans Abroad,” 323.
125 Ibid., 326.