Politics and Ideology in Melville’s Benito Cereno

In Melville’s Benito Cereno there are different levels of narrative structure and perspective. The story starts with an encounter between two different ships—an American and a Spanish one—near the coast of Chile; continues with the later revelation of a mutiny on the Spanish ship of black slaves; and then finds its epilogue in a court of law in Lima. The main narrator of the sequence of events, Captain Amasa Delano, turns out to be deluded during the most part of the narration and unable to properly recognize reality. Only at the end are the facts revealed by the other character, the Spaniard, Don Benito Cereno, who delivers a reversed version of the story. The last level is represented by the third main character’s perspective, the enslaved Babo, who despite being the directing mastermind of the events, does not disclose his narrative account at the end. All these levels of telling (or not telling) a story, whether by means of a narrative voice, a character’s voice, or by means of action, are present in Melville’s Benito Cereno—a political implication which is rather intricate and tangled. Commonly in narratives dealing with political issues of subordination, whether race, gender, or class, the fact of having or gaining a voice, being therefore able to tell the story from within the subordinated perspective, is held to be related with the process of attaining agency. To be an agent means being a subject who has the freedom to say “I” and take action. Scholars have already written extensively about how in Melville’s Bartleby there is a reversal of the symbolical meaning of silence which is not to be read as the outcome of a silencing process but as a political symbol of resistance, of passive action and, indeed, as an expression of one’s own statement. We also see in Benito Cereno the plain linear symbolism of the empowerment of a subjugated subject through action and speech. Nevertheless, the reversal of symbols’ meanings that takes place in the novella is combined with their shift in meaning (Cardwell 67) as well. In the novella, even though the themes of having a voice (speech) and silence are related to the constellation of power and empowerment concerning the subject and his/her agency, it is displayed by the entanglement through which this relationship is compelled. This intricate knot (Burkholder 6), not by accident one of the main symbols of the story, seems to recount how the dynamics of being or becoming a subject also depend on circumstances and social conventions. Aim of this paper is to show how in Melville’s Benito Cereno speech and silence reveal an unexpected dialectic dynamic: depending on different circumstances and settings, each works through the narrative as an expression of the subject’s agency and also of his/her own subjection.