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The gaze of history in 'Benito Cereno.'
Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1995 by Dennis Pahl
Perhaps no one provides a better access to Melville's complicated view of historical consciousness than does the character of Captain Amasa Delano, through whose mind most of the narrative action is filtered. Delano's difficulty in reading the scenes he encounters may, as some critics claim, betray his "marked stupidity and foolishness" (see Carlisle 350); yet on another level one might understand this "blindness" more in terms of Delano's desire not to see, that is, to repress anything that might undermine the stability of the historical world with which he is most familiar (see Justman): the world that privileges his identity as "American," "captain," "white," and "civilized." For the captain of the Bachelor's Delight, the entrance of the San Dominick into the harbor off the coast of Chile poses a substantial threat to his otherwise safe, familiar world - not because the ship may at any moment launch a brutal attack, but rather because the ship remains strange and undefined. Seen as "a shadowy tableau just emerged from the deep" (50), and carrying on its stem-piece an ambiguous symbol of physical combat ("a dark satyr in a mask, holding his foot on the prostrate neck of a writhing figure, likewise masked" [49]), the ship becomes an ever-disturbing fact in Delano's general view of the world. Insisting on a black-and-white view of reality, Delano does not wait long to arrive - via a mixture of Emersonian optimism and Yankee pragmatism - at a moral determination of what he is witnessing. His ability to rationalize away his fears and to remain continuously hopeful proves indispensable to him as a way of maintaining his authority throughout the entire San Dominick ordeal; and yet, as we discover, it is just this manner of maintaining his authority that also reveals the sort of violences of which he, as an historical consciousness, is capable. Indeed, it is only through exerting a certain will to power that Delano will be able to assimilate the mysterious signs he sees, forcing them to become an integral part of his own system of truth, of his own "natural" view of the world, his own ideology.
Aligning himself with what he believes to be the strict laws of nature, Delano will romanticize all human events as conforming to a wholly "natural" order: hence signaling a desire to turn away from material history and, instead, embrace a kind of Emersonian idealism.(4) He initially believes, for instance, that the miserable conditions aboard the San Dominick, far from having any basis in social or political reality, could only have been caused by the sea's terrible storms and "obstinate" calms (69). For Delano misery is part of the universal law; as he believes: "In armies, in cities, in families, in nature herself; nothing more relaxes good order than misery" (51-52; emphasis added). Such naturalizing of events occurs as well in his repeated attempts to repress all potentially destabilizing aspects of the ship by transforming what he sees into purely domestic images. Thus he witnesses the death-ship as a kind of "summer-house" (74); and, in the deck cabin, site of an otherwise terrifying scene of Babo holding a blade to Cereno's neck, he imagines "the hall of some bachelor squire in the country" (82).
