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significant silence of race: La Cousine Bette and "Benito Cereno", The
Comparative Literature, Summer 1994 by Colatrella, Carol
Cultural attitudes toward race are embedded in narrative structure but can be productively reconsidered by the reader. The narrative and authorial audiences of Honor de Balzac's La Cousine Bette (1846) and Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno" (1855) understand categories of race in ways that are challenged by historical audiences.(1) Prompted by the implied author of each fiction, the authorial audience questions the narrator's moral judgments assuming the inevitability of racial difference. At a further remove, by confronting the cognitive and moral views established in the text and relating fictional experience to personal knowledge, the flesh-and-blood reader reconfigures what the narrative audience and authorial audience recognize as fictional truth. La Cousine Bette and "Benito Cereno" exploit the interactive relationship of reader and text by encouraging the narrative audience to hypothesize a narrative function of race that advances plot development. Both fictions engage the reader to criticize views expressed by characters and narrators,(2) for they rely on the reader's ability to shift perspectives and narrative levels in order to put judgments on race into a more critical context.
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La Cousine Bette relies on abundant characterization and plotting, including intertwined subplots worked out over several years to tell the story of a complicated revenge scheme and its consequences, while "Benito Cereno" records the events of a particular afternoon when an American captain, unbeknownst to him, stumbles on the results of a slave mutiny. Like many other fictions, these texts rely on the reader's adding up of various clues provided by narrators to follow the outcome of plot. In La Cousine Bette the narrator's asides indicate that he is a man of the world familiar with social customs at all levels of French society; in "Benito Cereno" the narrator first depicts Captain Delano's consciousness as he visits the foreign ship and then offers historical documents clarifying Captain Delano's account. In each text, although enslaved blacks appear powerful and dangerous to the narrative audience who accepts how these characterizations fulfill the demands of the plot and the moral view of the narrator, it is up to the authorial audience to refigure the narrative audience's cognitive and ethical judgments and to reinterpret the significance of racial difference.
The flesh-and-blood reader's analysis of La Cousine Bette and "Benito Cereno" recognizes moral corruption in the perception and representation of the cultural other. In representing the narrator's and the narrative audience's views of Africa, each text demonstrates how racial difference is manipulated by characters and interpreted by the narrative audience as a moral signifier. It is not possible to follow the plots of the fictions without making
narrative shift from the prejudices expected of the narrative audience (responding to the narrator's and characters' personal passions) to the more reasoned perspective of the authorial audience (interpreting the implied author's cues), but the particular shift made varies according to the beliefs of readers. The flesh-and-blood reader of historical fiction reworks the moral view described by the implied author of a particular text to draw connections with cultural circumstances, including social, political, economic, and religious attitudes of the period represented or of his or her contemporary period.
There is no evidence that Melville read Balzac's fiction until he had already written the bulk of his own, and his attraction to La Comedie Humaine speaks less of influence than of shared belief in vitalism, a philosophical principle underlying character and plot development (Sealts 131). While Leon Chai points out that both "Melville and Balzac adhere to the belief in a natural aristocracy separate from that of birth or wealth," the attitudes toward race and social hierarchy described in their fictions employ similar narrative strategies in conveying the different American and European perspectives on slavery.(3) By describing the inherent instability of a social hierarchy based on race, La Cousine Bette and "Benito Cereno" force readers, both historical and contemporary, to interrogate the premises of slaveholding ideology. These fictions examine how the racial "other" is marginalized and silenced by a dominant culture exploiting those who are different, a message that readers on both sides of the Atlantic could not fail to discern in a period marked by debates concerning the abolition of slavery in the European colonies.(4)
Yet their different cultural investments in slavery encouraged Europeans and Americans to countenance different resolutions regarding the problem of slavery. Alexis de Tocqueville argued in 1838 that while Europeans had brought the "evil" of slavery to the New World, a good many Americans continued to support what seemed to him to be an inherently unviable social system. In the 1830s and 1840s, European colonies began to focus on abolishing slavery, while economic considerations encouraged continued enslavement of African-Americans in the United States. In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville claims that "The two races are bound one to the other without mingling; it is equally difficult for them to separate completely or to unite" (340).(5) Pessimistically sketching the inevitable racial conflict facing the United States, de Tocqueville admits that legal inequalities are difficult to "eradicate," and acknowledges "I despair of seeing an aristocracy founded on visible and indelible signs vanish" (342). Recognizing the persistence of social hierarchies in Europe, he assumes that the formerly enslaved will always be distinguished by their different color: "Memories of slavery disgrace the race, and race perpetuates memories of slavery" (341).(6)
