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Madness and mastery in Melville's "Benito Cereno." - Herman Melville
Criticism, Wntr, 1996 by Benjamin D. Reiss
Through madness, a work that seems to drown in the world, to reveal there its non-sense, and to transfigure itself with the features of pathology alone, actually engages within itself the world's time, masters it, and leads it; by the madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself. What is necessarily a profanation in the work of art returns to that point, and, in the time of that work swamped in madness, the world is made aware of its guilt.
--Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization
There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.
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--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
At the end of the Civil War, a conflict brought about "through the arts of the conspirators" by whom the "people of the South were cajoled into revolution," Herman Melville wrote of one of the dangers facing Reconstruction:
In imagination let us place ourselves in the unprecedented position of the Southerners--their position as regards the millions of ignorant manumitted slaves in their midst, for whom some of us now claim the suffrage. Let us be Christians toward our fellow-whites, as well as philanthropists toward the blacks, our fellow-men. In all things, and toward all, we are enjoined to do as we would be done by. Nor should we forget that benevolent desires, after passing a certain point, can not undertake their own fulfillment without incurring the risk of evils beyond those sought to be remedied.(1)
The essay in which this passage is contained--the "Supplement" to Melville's collection of poems Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War--is a challenging one, and not wholly attractive to a contemporary viewpoint. Melville seems less concerned here with achieving equality for the former slave population than with easing the burden of defeat for the resentful Southern whites, who are, after all, "nearer to us in nature" (167) than are the blacks. But, as the scene above in which we are to "place ourselves" reveals, within that near relation there is still a crucial difference--the difference of victory and defeat that shows itself in Southern resentment. Resolving that difference is a necessary step toward fulfilling Northern "benevolent desires" to integrate blacks into political and economic life, but it is also a threat to those desires. For in attempting to impose a sweeping resolution to the conflicts that brought on the war, the North may inadvertently cause resentment to spread and the difference to proliferate violently--creating "evils beyond those sought to be remedied." Melville does not spell out the nature of these evils, but apparently his idea is that if the North were to press the South too hard on questions such as the "test-oath," which was meant to exclude all those who had supported Secession from Congress, Southern resentment would build and the "furnace . . . in regions like Tennessee and Texas" would explode once again. "With certain evils," Melville warns, "men must be more or less patient" (272).
A passionate reformer in his early career, Melville seems now, in middle age and at the end of four years' witness to fratricidal warfare, a man walking through a minefield, almost as fearful of the results of reformist action as of the causes that impel it. But the last sentence in the quotation above has the ring of a general principle, rather than a situational warning: ". . . benevolent desires, after passing a certain point, cannot undertake their own fulfillment without incurring the risk of evils beyond those sought to be remedied." So where exactly did Melville learn this lesson? The aftermath of the War may have deepened his skepticism about the possibilities of reform, but it certainly did not initiate it; on the eve of that conflagration, he wrote in the poem "Misgivings" (1860) that "Nature's dark side is heeded now-/(Ah! optimist-cheer disheartened flown)."(2) The "optimist-cheer" that had flown from Melville not only extinguished his hope that North and South could be reconciled, but points to a more general crisis of faith in the very principles of natural rights, progress, and the capacity of human institutions to improve the human condition. It is in an 1856 story, "Benito Cereno," that this crisis is most clearly manifested: the seemingly intractable--and strangely interwoven--problems of race and insanity are made far worse by misguided liberal attempts to understand, contain, and rectify them. In that story, the benevolent desires of a liberal captain from Massachusetts to help a ship (of state) in distress eventually win him a fragile peace of mind, but threaten to bring on an apocalypse.
In this essay, I will show that Captain Delano's troubles result in large part from his reliance on widely held and highly charged categories of "difference" that liberal reformers and prominent legal theorists of Melville's day applied both to insanity and race. How is it that Delano reads a slave uprising as an epidemic of mental illness? Discussions of both racial unrest and insanity shuttled anxiously between schemes for confinement, assimilation and, in the last resort, exile. Crucial to these discussions were questions of obedience and rebelliousness, and the desire to set forth an "expert" language--mixing law and science--that would assure that these "different" subjects would not threaten the security of the community, and specifically the rights of its members to hold property. Moreover, the dominant technologies of curing insanity that arose in the 1830s and 1840s and that contributed to the rapid expansion of the asylum system blithely drew on certain underexamined notions of racial difference to provide paradigms for the treatment of psychological difference. Ironically, as I will show, the resulting psychiatric findings were often fed back into racialist discourse in a curiously looping reinforcement. The confusion of realms made "benevolent desires" all the more vexed and, in Melville's story, proves an explosive mixture. Looking at slavery and insanity, Delano sees only a knot; the knot is, in fact, produced by his own mind, but is no less real for being so.
