Robert Lowell’s 1964 stage adaptation of Benito Cereno, with Frank Langella as Benito, Roscoe Lee Browne as Babo, and Lester Rawlins as Amasa Delano (list of illustrations 9.1)
Captain Delano’s resources for understanding this performance are far from sufficient. A man of “singularly undistrustful … nature,” he carries in his head a parcel of platitudes that the historian George Fredrickson has called “romantic racialism”—the prevailing view among antebellum northerners that blacks are by nature “childlike, affectionate, docile, and patient.” This particular string of adjectives was strung together in 1844 by the New York Unitarian minister Orville Dewey, who may have been Melville’s model for that simpering minister Mr. Falsgrave in Pierre, and such a view was by no means eccentric. In fact, it was so prevalent and, to Delano, so obviously true that Melville chose the archaic verb form “bethink” (“Delano could not but bethink him of the beauty of that relationship”) to suggest that he does not so much think his thoughts as they think him.
Still, Delano feels uneasy, and the more questions he asks about what is going on, the fewer answers he gets. When he asks Don Benito for the “whole story,” the Spaniard can only blanch and flinch. “He is like one flayed alive, thought Captain Delano; where may one touch him without causing a shrink?” Now and then it seems that something—a silent hand signal or a hissing whisper from one of the whites—might cut through Delano’s haze and awaken him to the true situation, but he always reverts to “tranquilizing” thoughts about the black man’s natural servility and the white man’s natural strength. Something below the level of his consciousness seems to hold him back from pressing his inquiries—as when he feels “an apprehensive twitch in his calves” at the sound of blacks polishing a pile of hatchets.
The world of the San Dominick is a world turned upside down: a regal black slave stands unbowed before a white captain who trembles with fear. These anomalies drive Delano to reach deep into his store of complacencies, and each time he feels momentarily relieved (at one point he persuades himself that the so-called Benito Cereno must be some “low-born” impostor), but the cumulative effect drives him to distraction:
he leaned against the carved balustrade, again looking off toward his boat; but found his eye falling upon the ribbon grass, trailing along the ship’s water-line, straight as a border of green box; and parterres of seaweed, broad ovals and crescents, floating nigh and far, with what seemed long formal alleys between, crossing the terraces of swells, and sweeping round as if leading to the grottoes below. And overhanging all was the balustrade by his arm, which, partly stained with pitch and partly embossed with moss, seemed the charred ruin of some summerhouse in a grand garden long running to waste.
Trying to break one charm, he was but becharmed anew. Though upon the wide sea, he seemed in some far inland country; prisoner in some deserted chateau, left to stare at empty grounds, and peer out at vague roads, where never wagon or wayfarer passed.
This is the same psychological impasse at which the lawyer in “Bartleby” had arrived, and the same that Pierre had experienced on his journey to New York when he first reads the mysterious pamphlet:
If a man be told a thing wholly new, then—during the time of its first announcement to him—it is entirely impossible for him to comprehend it. For—absurd as it may seem—men are only made to comprehend things which they comprehended before (though but in the embryo, as it were). Things new it is impossible to make them comprehend; in their own hearts they really believe they do comprehend; outwardly look as though they did comprehend; wag their bushy tails comprehendingly; but for all that, they do not comprehend.
Captain Delano has lost his bearings because “it is entirely impossible for him to comprehend” the new thing with which he is confronted. That new thing is a world in which blacks are in charge and whites are in subjection.
5.
Reading Benito Cereno is something like being teased with a promise of sexual relief but having it continually deferred. About halfway along comes a scene in which the teasing reaches a point of intensity that is almost cruel. It begins with an authoritative-sounding statement of how well suited blacks are to such personal services as manicuring, hair-dressing, and barbering (these were, in fact, among the few trades open to free blacks in antebellum America):
There is something in the negro which, in a peculiar way, fits him for avocations about one’s person. Most negroes are natural valets and hair-dressers; taking to the comb and brush congenially as to the castinets, and flourishing them apparently with almost equal satisfaction. There is, too, a smooth tact about them in this employment, with a marvelous, noiseless, gliding briskness, not ungraceful in its way, singularly pleasing to behold, and still more so to be the manipulated subject of.
With these thoughts in mind, Delano follows Cereno and Babo into the captain’s cabin, where the slave prepares his master for a shave. Warming to his work, Babo fetches a piece of bright-colored bunting from the flag-locker and wraps it, with elaborate obsequiousness, around his master’s neck as a bib. He sets up a basin under Cereno’s chin, fills it with salt water, then dips in a cake of soap, lathering the Spaniard on the upper lip and “low down under the throat.” Then comes the master stroke:
Setting down his basin, the negro searched among the razors, as for the sharpest, and having found it, gave it an additional edge by expertly strapping it on the firm, smooth, oily skin of his open palm; he then made a gesture as if to begin, but midway stood suspended for an instant, one hand elevating the razor, the other professionally dabbling among the bubbling suds on the Spaniard’s lank neck.
Melville develops this scene, which has no source in the historical Delano’s memoir, into a meditation on subjectivity itself. Of course, thinks Delano, a good Negro will do anything to serve his master—even use his own skin as a razor strop. But while the American savors this “tranquilizing” thought, his Spanish counterpart is trembling with terror. There is something almost comic here—like a vaudeville act in which some clueless fool is pickpocketed or cuckolded in full view of the audience while he himself has no idea of what is going on. When Babo drags the blade across his palm, Delano hears the sound of a black man abasing himself. What Cereno hears is the black man warning him: if you make one move toward candor, I will cut your throat.§
In his agitation, Cereno has loosened the bright-colored cloth around his neck, which Delano now recognizes as the Spanish flag with a “castle in a blood-red field diagonal with a lion rampant in a white.” What, he wonders, can this indignity signify? For an instant, the “antic conceit” enters his mind that the black is a “headsman” and the white “a man at the block.” But he shakes off the thought and reminds himself that, like children, blacks love all things brightly colored, so there is nothing amiss about Cereno sitting with his nation’s flag wrapped around his neck and Babo standing over him with blade drawn. Delano’s capacity for self-deception is limitless.
Still, Babo takes no chances. He improvises a new scene: with a flick of the razor, he draws a spot of blood “which stained the creamy lather under the throat” and, pulling “back his steel, and remaining in his professional attitude,” rebukes the man in the chair: “See, master,—you shook so—here’s Babo’s first blood.” For Delano’s benefit, he concludes Cereno’s toilette “with comb, scissors and brush; going round and round, smoothing a curl here, clipping an unruly whisker-hair there, giving a graceful sweep to the temple-lock, with other impromptu touches evincing the hand of a master,” as if he were “a Nubian sculptor finishing off a white statue-head.”
But Babo is not quite finished. With Cereno in tow, and out of sight of Delano, who has preceded them out of the cabin, he cuts his own face. Once emerged onto the deck, he holds his hand to his cheek till he sees that Delano is watching, then lifts the hand away to reveal the bleeding. “Ah, ah, ah,” Babo mutters, in a little soliloquy, “cutting Babo with the razor, because, only by accident, Babo had given master one little scratch.…” S
hocked at first by this instance of hot Spanish petulance, Delano is soon relieved to see that the spat (“but a sort of love-quarrel, after all”) has passed and that Don Benito once again leans “on his servant as if nothing had happened.” This pattern of tension followed by release gives Benito Cereno its teasing rhythm of flow-and-ebb, which, since the release is never complete, has the incremental effect of building pressure toward the bursting point.
The burst finally comes as Delano prepares to return to his own ship. Loath to let him go, the Spaniard clutches his hand—“Adieu, my dear, dear Don Amasa. Go—go!… go, and God guard you better than me, my best friend”—and just as Delano shoves off in his boat, the Spaniard snaps. The masquerade is over. The masks come off. There is no more pretense of order, only chaos: “Don Benito sprang over the bulwarks, falling at the feet of Captain Delano; at the same time, calling toward his ship, but in tones so frenzied, that none in the boat could understand him.” Several whites leap after him and swim for their lives—yet Delano, in his amazing obtuseness, still fails to grasp what is happening and somehow persuades himself that they are coming to rescue their captain from what they think is an abduction by the Americans. When Babo then leaps after Cereno with dagger in hand, Delano thinks the slave, too, is defending his master out of “desperate fidelity.” After wrestling the black man down to the bottom of the boat, Delano keeps him supine by standing in triumph astride him.
Up to this point, Melville has composed Benito Cereno with the eye of a painter. But now he works as if he were sculpting, arranging his figures in poses reminiscent of objects he had seen on his travels. On his European trip in 1849, he had marveled at the “most unique collection” of medieval artifacts in the Hôtel de Cluny, a Gothic structure built on the ruins of Emperor Julian’s Roman baths, which had recently opened as a museum in Paris. In this fifteenth-century building, whose ancient foundations Melville used in Moby-Dick as a metaphor for the “larger, darker, deeper part” of Ahab’s soul (an “antique buried beneath antiquities”), he would have seen objects and images which he now used to construct an iconography that his scripturally literate readers would recognize.
Among the carvings at Cluny was a medieval Judas whispering in the ear of Christ (as Babo does to Benito) and a delicately carved ivory mirror case depicting King Solomon and his queen stepping upon the lion and adder as prophesied in Psalm 91. Especially striking were several alabaster carvings of the resurrected Christ emerging from his boatlike tomb, his left hand grasping the Cross while stepping with his right foot upon the prostrate body of a Roman soldier.
For centuries, Christian commentators had interpreted the image of the monster underfoot (Luke 10:19: “Behold, I give you power to tread on serpents”) as Christ empowering the faithful to defeat and demean the devil by stamping upon him in insult as well as exultation. Throughout Benito Cereno, Melville plays variations on this image. The carved medallion on the stern of the San Dominick presents a reversal or dark twin of the traditional Christian tableau: a “dark satyr in a mask” (Babo) holds “his foot on the prostrate neck of a writhing figure” (Benito Cereno) “likewise masked.” But in the climactic scene, the traditional Christian scene of virtue triumphant is apparently restored: Delano becomes the savior subduing the fiendish African, grinding down the “prostrate Negro” with his right foot while holding up the swooning Spaniard with his left hand.
The Resurrection of Christ, fifteenth century, Musée du Moyen Age (Cluny), Paris (list of illustrations 9.2)
Amasa Delano is a visual echo of the Savior bringing truth and light—but Melville deliberately misuses his religious materials and leaves this “savior” utterly in the dark. He is an image of Christ rendered ironically. Despite all the hints and clues that have been strewn in his path, he still misreads the dance of death between Babo and Cereno as a lovers’ duet. His moment of highest triumph is also his moment of deepest ignorance, as he continues to believe that the slave has leapt into the boat in order to rescue his master. In Amasa Delano, Melville represented the American colossus as a colossal fool.
6.
At last, with enemies subdued, the fool’s eyes snap open. The masks are shed. This moment, too, Melville delivers in scriptural language: “Captain Delano, now with the scales dropped from his eyes, saw the negroes, not in misrule, not in tumult, not as if frantically concerned for Don Benito, but with mask torn away, flourishing hatchets and knives, in ferocious piratical revolt.”‖ The revelation comes to Delano while he looks down and sees that Babo has concealed a second dagger “in his wool” and, “snakishly writhing” like the serpent of Luke 10:19, is aiming it “from the boat’s bottom” at the heart of his master, “his countenance lividly vindictive, expressing the centered purpose of his soul”:
That moment, across the long-benighted mind of Captain Delano, a flash of revelation swept, illuminating in unanticipated clearness his host’s whole mysterious demeanor, with every enigmatic event of the day, as well as the entire past voyage of the San Dominick. He smote Babo’s hand down, but his own heart smote him harder. With infinite pity he withdrew his hold from Don Benito.
Here, at last, is the release for which we have been waiting: “Not Captain Delano, but Don Benito, the black, in leaping into the boat, had intended to stab.” The doltish Delano has finally gotten the “whole story.”
Or has he? This extraordinary sentence (“Not Captain Delano, but Don Benito, the black, in leaping into the boat, had intended to stab”) is among the most contorted sentences in all of Melville’s writing: gnarled, syntactically disordered, a stretch of twisted prose in which subject, verb, and object seem to want to merge with one another, separated by a string of commas that barely keeps the sentence from collapsing into itself. So tortuous a sentence requires exertion if we are to make sense of it; and once we have managed to parse it, we feel the kind of relief that Delano has been seeking since the moment he ascended from his bunk into the morning fog.
The trouble is that he is still in the fog—and so are we. There is much more yet to tell. The blacks, taunting the whites from afar “with upthrown gestures hailing the now dusky moors of the ocean—cawing crows escaped from the hand of the fowler,” are now pursued, attacked, and subdued. The prisoners are brought to trial in Lima. En route, during “the long, mild voyage” on which Delano accompanies his Spanish friend, the American reverts to type and closes his mind to what he has seen. As for Cereno, he has seen stabbings and drownings and bleedings to death, yet Delano wonders why he seems disturbed. Cereno has seen his friend Don Alexandro Aranda, owner of both ship and slaves, tortured and dismembered, his flesh offered as carrion to the gulls and his picked bones strapped as a memento mori figurehead to the bow (the blacks had wrapped it in a sail to conceal it from their American visitor). But “ ‘you are saved,’ cried Captain Delano … ‘you are saved; what has cast such a shadow upon you?’ ” “ ‘The negro,’ ” is Cereno’s only answer. Delano’s stupidity is staggering.
In Amasa Delano, Melville created a character whom we recognize as an ancestor of those callow Americans who walk through the novels of Henry James mistaking malice for charm, botching uncomprehended situations with the unintended consequences of their good intentions. Melville placed this representative American at the center of a thrice-told tale. It is told first as a mystery (who is in charge, who is in thrall?); then from the Spaniard’s point of view in a long legal deposition as a story of black treachery and white courage—the sort of courtroom transcript, as the legal scholar Robert Ferguson has written, that reveals only “the story that a community is willing to tell itself.” Finally, in Babo’s silence, the story is told yet again—or, rather, eloquently untold. This last (un)telling is the unheard tale that begins not with a revolt aboard a slaveship but long before, in Senegal, where a black boy is stolen, branded, and shipped into slavery for the use of some white buyer in the New World. It is a tale that most Americans could not—and still cannot—bear to hear.
Today, one recognizes in
Benito Cereno a prophetic vision of what Benjamin Barber calls “American innocence so opaque in the face of evil that it seems equally insensible to slavery and the rebellion against slavery”—the kind of moral opacity that seems still to afflict America as it lumbers through the world creating enemies whose enmity it does not begin to understand. Melville was able to write with such savage irony because he had mastered in Benito Cereno the art of magazine fiction, producing a story whose moral depth is rivaled among his short works only by “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” To the casual reader, Benito Cereno is a story with the pace and intrigue of good suspense writing in the genre of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (1845), about a mystery hidden in plain sight (Lewis Mumford declined to “spoil Benito Cereno for those who have not read it by revealing its mystery”), but like “Bartleby” it has immense reach and resonance. As the distinguished Melvillean Merton Sealts has concluded (quoting Melville’s own phrases from his 1850 essay on Hawthorne), he “had managed” in Benito Cereno, “to work on more than one level, not alternately but simultaneously, so as to reach not only the ‘superficial skimmer of pages’ but also the ‘eagle-eyed reader.’ ”
Among the “eagle-eyed” readers who dove deep into Benito Cereno was Ralph Ellison, who borrowed this passage for an epigraph to his great novel Invisible Man:
Melville: His World and Work Page 33