Madness and mastery in Melville's "Benito Cereno." - Herman Melville

For about the first fifty pages of "Benito Cereno," one of the central interpretive dilemmas facing the reader involves deciding which, if either, of the story's two captains is insane. Referring to the Spaniard Benito Cereno of the San Dominick, a slave ship in distress off the coast of Chile, a third-person narrator hovering close to the American Amasa Delano's consciousness tells us that "the Spaniard, regarded in his reserve, seemed the involuntary victim of mental disorder." But despite his "undistrustful" good nature, Delano himself gradually becomes subject to confusion and suspicion so intense that they "mock him" like "phantoms" and poison his mind as an "ague" would his body.(3) Ultimately, Delano hangs onto his reason and wards off the ague of suspicion, maintaining his sanity by casting the terrors to which he has been subject into an undifferentiated and unthreatening past, "forgotten" by the sun and sea. This self-protective forgetting is enabled by his discovery of what he takes to be a rational explanation for the mysterious behaviors that have so threatened his equanimity, and that explanation is apparently enough to check his free-fall into unreason. Having unravelled the mystery of the San Dominick and defused the threat posed by the disguised rebel slaves aboard it, he is cheered by the "bright sun . . . the blue sea, and the blue sky." His liberal faith in the "human-like healing" of nature--an unwarranted one, Melville hints--enables him to regain his "good-nature, compassion, and charity" and put his former "suspicions" into perspective (314).

Don Benito is not so lucky. Whether or not he has been mad while Delano suspects his sanity we never definitively learn, but by the end of the story he clearly suffers at least bouts of mental disorder. The legal deposition that brings to light much of the story's murky proceedings leaves out, the narrator informs us, much of Don Benito's testimony because "the tribunal inclined to the opinion that the deponent, not undisturbed in his mind by recent events, raved of some things that could never have happened" (299-300). What those "things" are we never learn, and so the ravings of madness induced by Don Benito's experience of "recent events" are registered as a textual silence. Fittingly, the Spaniard's story concludes when he takes his monastic vows on Mount Agonia, and dies there in silence, three months after the tribunal.

The action of the story thus locates the genesis of Benito Cereno's madness--a clinical "private" madness as well as the social pathology it allegorically represents--in the conflicts slavery brings about. More specifically, madness seems to stem from a breakdown in the social and psychological mechanisms established to regulate and contain suspicion. Surely managing suspicion is a central problem for any society that is based on the principle of defending individual rights, but that problem is particularly acute when an entire caste is denied the freedoms and opportunities that would permit its members to be "trustworthy"--a word the soft-headed Delano invokes to describe the slaves who are anything but. (In fact, trusting slaves is what gets Benito Cereno in trouble to begin with: acting on the owner's word that they were "tractable," he has left them unchained.) Once an appropriate suspicion is engaged, however, it is liable to overflow its bounds and become a pattern of mind, or even an illness--the debilitating mental "ague" that Delano narrowly avoids, and that engulfs Don Benito in silence.