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Madness and mastery in Melville's "Benito Cereno." - Herman Melville
Criticism, Wntr, 1996 by Benjamin D. Reiss
In Melville's story, "intention" is a category reserved mainly for those who react to the slave uprising. Don Benito's deposition, which is the main basis for the "capital sentences" handed down on the blacks, is not designed to show the motives upon which Babo and his followers acted, but that "from the beginning to the end of the revolt, it was impossible for the deponent and his men to act otherwise than they did" (311). The paradox is that the slave possesses just enough intentionality to break a law, but not enough to have motives to do so. The psychological pronuncement made by the Chilean tribunal in "Benito Cereno"--that Don Benito, "not undisturbed in his mind by recent events, raved of some things which could never have happened" (299-300)--accordingly refers to the jailor and not the prisoner. Because the intentions and mental state of those accused of a crime are not under review, madness is examined not so much as a cause of violent behavior, but as a result of it. Babo's intentions could never become a legal issue, because to suppose that a slave could intend would be to admit that his natural state was a rational one, which would destroy the very grounds for justifying slavery. Only an artificial exposure to freedom, as the Census Report cited earlier suggests, could introduce the sane/insane distinction into the discussion of slaves. As long as they were "protected" from society, the editor of the American Journal of Insanity wrote in 1845, the lower races shared "an exemption ... from insanity."(57) But if slavery is the natural position for blacks, then the motivation for rebellion is an unspeakable subject for a court; Babo's transgression stands in the deposition as an act with no causes, only effects. In the Rogers case, insanity had been the rational legal explanation for a seemingly gratuitous act of violence; in the deposition of "Benito Cereno," Babo's rationality is impossible to imagine, and introduces an element of "raving" into the proceedings. Don Benito's insanity comes back to haunt the legal process as law's nemesis--law can no more divine the inside of the Spaniard's head than it can penetrate Babo's "hive of subtlety."
In Jacques Lacan's account, paranoid psychosis is brought on when paternal law (or the "name-of-the-Father") fails to cover over the hole in meaning brought on for the subject by a traumatic encounter with the "real." This hole therefore "sets off the cascade of reshapings of the signifier from which the increasing disaster of the imaginary proceeds, to the point at which ... the signifier and signified are stabilized in the delusional metaphor."(58) Law in Melville's story resembles what Lacan calls the symbolic realm, which is brought on by the "name-of-the-Father"; the "truth" of Babo's alterity might be the threat against which the symbolic defends. Lacan is writing of a generalized process by which modernity interpellates its subjects; "Benito Cereno" poins to a moment in which that interpellation was particularly fragile-the legal edifice of the symbolic fails notably to defend against Babo's threat. Melville does not provide us access to what Don Benito "raved about" or the "cascade of reshapings of the signifier" that would allow us to follow out the analogy with Lacan. But the structure of slavery in "Benito Cereno" does read like a paranoid psychosis, in which law fails to constrain the suspicion and aggressivity that occur when one enters the social realm. As Philip Fisher has written, the conditions aboard the ship suggest that "like a seriously damaged neurotic, the society's every expenditure is self-obsessed and directed to self-maintenance."(59) Rather than acting under the dictates of the father, the whites aboard the San Dominick and later the law itself must constantly produce the illusion of the rule of the father, who is already dead: Don Aranda's head is fixed on the prow of the ship, and Don Benito's sword is in reality no more than "a scabbard, artificially stiffened" (315).
