Other Ghosts: Gothicism and the Bonds of Reason in Melville, Chesnutt, and Morrison - ed

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The three narratives place their gothic features in the service of the enslaved to varying degrees and in different ways, as they reflect the subject position of their authors with respect to "race," gender, and historical moment. In "Benito Cereno," which Melville wrote in 1855, the author is powerfully aware of his own stance within the dominant discourse that produces slavery. Melville ironizes his position as a Euro-American, New England man in the benighted Yankee Captain, Amasa Delano, who comes to the aid of the Spanish slave ship, the San Dominick.

The San Dominick is a ghastly ship of state that bears as its figure-head the shrouded skeleton of a murdered man: the owner of the slaves on board. Yet, it is not the murdered man's ghost that haunts the ship. Instead, the slave ship is haunted by the inverted shadow of its own hierarchical order. Every act of master or slaves on the San Dominick is haunted with the fleeting traces of a counter-order in which slave is master and master is slave. The hints of a counter-order are signs, undecipherable to the Yankee Captain, of the perspective, the will, and the rage of the slaves made Other by a discourse that strives to define them as nothing but subjugated bodies.(1)

From the start, Melville's story points to the limits of his own Western discourse that make it vulnerable to haunting. Melville constructs the terms of the scientific discourse as paradox. On the one hand the Western rationalism that seeks to exert control over the ship and its cargo of slaves is a perspective so widespread that it yokes in brotherhood the aristocratic captain of the slaver, Don Benito, and the "innocent" Yankee, Amasa Delano. (Melville's setting--ships at sea--calls to mind the rationalized methods of cartography and navigation that first made the enslavement of Africans possible and profitable, as Renaissance maps linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas.) On the other hand, the would-be bearers of rationalism, epitomized by Captain Delano, are not objective. As widespread and scientific as the Western discourse is, its very nature as a discourse prevents objectivity: it constructs its terms against an Other--"The African"--and it must suppress its recognition of those features of the Other that do not fit its categories.

In Captain Delano, Melville parodies the "objective" viewer. The American captain is the stranger who comes to events on the San Dominick from a distance, and his chief aim once on board the ship is to account for the strange conditions he finds there, including the group of Africans who silently polish hatchets, and the Captain who wavers between attentive civility and abstracted rudeness. Delano's overarching aim is to establish a linear relation between cause and effect that would give him intellectual mastery over conditions on the San Dominick. Because Delano is continually thwarted in his attempt to reach intellectual mastery while he is on shipboard, he cannot re-establish Western political mastery of the ship. The American Captain's rational and political control fails because he cannot draw a predictable--i.e. a fairly linear--relation between cause and effect. On the one hand, the Western discourse that makes Others of the Africans blinds Delano to the qualities of the slaves that are not aligned with their assigned role as manageable bodies. Hence, Amasa Delano cannot imagine Babo's rage and intelligence--the causes of a chain of events on board that include a slave revolt. On the other hand, even as Delano fails to see the suppressed features of the Other, they appear within the discourse under the guise of the return of the repressed. They appear as ghostly traces of the Other, unreadable as the cause of events, but powerful enough to disrupt every alternative line of cause and effect Delano attempts to draw.