Dusky comments of silence: language, race and Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno."

Yet "The 'Gees" does not condone this linguistic logic. As Carolyn Karcher has realized, the word "'Gee," in its plural form, "sounds almost exactly like 'Geez' or, to adopt [Josiah] Nott's spelling, 'Gheez,' the ancient language of Abyssinia in which the Ethiopic version of the Scriptures was written. Through this esoteric pun, the title relates the negroid people discussed in the sketch to an advanced African civilization" (164). The word "'Gee," by slipping away from its pejorative context, acts as an implicit critique of the racist views of Melville's narrator. The word's semantic alterity reverses the racial denigration of the African-Portuguese inhabitants of Fogo by suggesting a "sophisticated" cultural inheritance. As Karcher rightly says, "The 'Gees" is a "reductio ad absurdum of racist ethnology" (166); more particularly, it is a satire on the use of linguistic material to construct racial evaluations. The deep punning of Melville's sketch turns language against itself: the narrator's attempt to use language to validate a view of racial inferiority ironically suggests a rich and sophisticated intellectual heritage.

"Benito Cereno" echoes this strategy. The linguistic logic of the tale critiques the demeaning discourse of primitivism imposed by the European (or the European-American) upon the African: the tendency to view blackness as a sign of stupidity, and to create what Frederick Douglass called the voiceless condition of the enslaved (qtd. in Karcher 141). The figurative language of the talc plays a central part in this critique. The particular correlation of muteness and blackness that dominates the descriptions of Babo - for example the African's "dusky comment of silence" during the shaving scene (87), or his "voiceless end" and burnt body at the end of the tale (116) - is identical to the imagery associated with Benito Cereno. Prefiguring the "silence" and "muteness" that follow Cereno's confession that "The negro" has cast a "shadow" upon him (116), are a series of moments in which the muteness (53) and silence (94) of the Spanish captain are matched by his correspondingly "dark" (69) and "dusked" (51) appearance. For example when Cereno is confronted by the dark muteness of the chained Atufal, "a resentful shadow swept over his face; and, as with the sudden memory of bootless rage, his white lips glued together" (61-62). At the same time as "Benito Cereno" reverses the notion that Babo is a shadowy presence of silence by revealing how the African's brain - "that hive of subtlety" (116) - spearheads an active linguistic presence that engineers the overthrow of a colonial power, Melville's tale also silences Benito Cereno's dominant white discourse, and casts the whiteness of the Spaniard into shadowy darkness. The linguistic logic of the tale is equivocal: it tends to equate racial groups, thereby confusing the racist hierarchy upon which Delano's ideology depends.