Benito Cereno: Why the Historian Should Bother to Read Novels

In his critique of the way historians handle literature, Dominck LaCapra says, “Literature becomes redundant when it tells us what can be gleaned from other documentary sources. In this sense, literature is paradoxically most superfluous when it seems to provide us with the most ‘useful’ and ‘reputable’ information, for it must simply replicate or confirm what can be found in more literal documents such as police reports” (126). This view of literature is clearly contradicted in Melville’s Benito Cereno, in which the first part of the story is told as a narrative from Captain Delano’s point of view and the second part is framed as a legal deposition in a trial. Rather than the narrative and the “documentary source” mutually supporting each other, which would indeed make literature seem “redundant,” the literary narrative contradicts the (fictitious) documentary legal deposition. The narrative thus proves to be extremely important in showing how an American’s racist assumptions make him misread the situation he is in.

Prior to discovering the truth about the slave revolt, Captain Delano interprets the interactions between Don Benito Cereno and Babo as those between a master and his faithful, devoted slave: “As master and man stood before him, the black upholding the white, Captain Delano could not but bethink him of the beauty of that relationship which could present such a spectacle of fidelity on the one hand and confidence on the other” (136). Captain Delano buys into racist assumptions of Africans as willingly servile and inferior. He continuously compares the blacks to animals, and he believes they as a race have a “docility arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind and that susceptibility of blind attachment sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors” (201). Delano’s racial stereotyping is not limited to the Africans. When he starts to be suspicious that there is a secret plot to murder him, he blames the Spaniard Benito Cereno, thinking, “these Spaniards are all an odd set; the very word Spaniard has a curious, conspirator, Guy-Fawkish twang to it” (189-90). He oscillates back and forth between the belief that there is a conspiracy to murder him and the belief that he is being ridiculous. At one point, he thinks, “could then Don Benito be any way in complicity with the blacks? But they were too stupid. Besides, who ever heard of a white so far a renegade as to apostatize from his very species almost, by leaguing in against it with negroes?” (181). Because of his racial stereotyping and the belief in the superiority of all whites, even sneaky Spaniards, Delano cannot imagine Benito Cereno actually plotting against him.

 

Captain Delano ultimately does discover that the Africans were in control of Don Benito and the other Spaniards the whole time, and he helps defeat them and capture Babo. The depositions for Babo’s trial tell a completely different story about the situation on the San Dominick than what Captain Delano believed. I found one very interesting contradiction between Delano’s perceptions of the “negresses” and the description of them in the deposition. Delano watches a black woman with her child and thinks, “There’s naked nature, now; pure tenderness and love” (176).  Pleased with what he sees, “This incident prompted him to remark the other negresses more particularly than before. He was gratified with their manners: like most uncivilized women, they seemed at once tender of heart and tough of constitution” (176). The deposition, on the other hand, paints the black women as bloodthirsty and cruel: “the negresses, of age, were knowing to the revolt, and testified themselves satisfied at the death of their master, Don Alexandro; that, had the negroes not restrained them, they would have tortured to death, instead of simply killing, the Spaniards slain by the command of the negro Babo” (260-1). Delano’s racial stereotypes of the black women are too limited; he doesn’t view the black women holistically. However, the deposition, while it seems strictly factual and objective, is also overly limited. It only provides one perspective on the black women, and it doesn’t look into the motivations behind their actions or thoughts. The comparison of the clearly biased narrative with the more subtly biased deposition shows why literature is so important and why historians need to pay attention to it for more than merely content and facts. Literature can provide multiple perspectives on historical situations and shows the limitations inherent in human perceptions. Benito Cereno is a fictitious example of the ways literary narratives and documentary sources can come together. LaCapra would approve of these “variable uses of language that come to terms with—or “inscribe”—contexts in various ways” (127).

 

By the end of Melville’s text, we get to hear the story from the perspective of the American Delano and the Spaniard Benito Cereno; however, we never really get to hear the story from the perspective of one of the Africans. LaCapra argues that we should read novels differently to alert ourselves “to the contestatory voices and counter-discourses of the past” (132). While Benito Cereno gives us a “contestatory voice” from Don Benito, we do not get the true “counter-discourse” that the enslaved Africans could provide. At one point, Babo pities himself, saying, “but poor Babo here, in his own land, was only a poor slave; a black man’s slave was Babo, who now is the white’s” (150). Later on, Captain Delano even pities Babo, exclaiming, “this slavery breeds ugly passions in man.—Poor fellow!” (212). The text undercuts all this pity when we learn that Babo led a brutal revolt and was no longer a slave, but we do not get to see how Babo perceived or justified his own actions. A historian would need to find other literature to provide the missing voice of slaves who revolt, but we can still read Babo’s actions. Homi Bhabha says,

The aim of cultural difference is to re-articulate the sum of knowledge from the perspective of the signifying singularity of the ‘other’ that resists totalization – the repetition that will not return as the same, the minus-in-origin that results in political and discursive strategies where adding-to does not add-up but serves to disturb the calculation of power and knowledge, producing other spaces of subaltern signification. (312)

Although I find Benito Cereno incomplete without Babo’s perspective, Babo’s act of rebellion and the reversal of the readers’ expectations in the second part of the text show how Melville uses cultural difference to add to the story in a way that disturbs the narrative rather than “adding up”. The American Delano could not imagine the Africans as anything but docile, stupid, and inferior. Babo’s actions, whether heroic or barbaric, come from a place of cultural difference to contradict what the insulated American character believes.

 

*I used a free Amazon Kindle Edition of The Piazza Tales for all my in-text citations of Benito Cereno.