CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Of Mimicry and Masques

Benito Cereno and the National Allegory

Kevin Goddard

NATIONALISM AND ALLEGORY

IT is perhaps not very surprising that at the present juncture in world history reading Melville’s Benito Cereno may prove salutary. When a single nation has the dominance over the globe that America currently has, and when that dominance is interpreted as a power to award freedom to those who ask it, then a reading of Melville’s novella may be particularly apt. Melville’s story seems relevant to a post-cold war America that now more than ever sees itself as having traversed a linear journey toward enlightenment, and in which a paternalistic role in world politics is deemed necessary. As a self-avowed purveyor of “light,” and humanitarianism, the United States’ collective mind is a copy of Amasa Delano’s onboard the San Dominick, one that sees itself as having “republican impartiality” (Benito 80), as “honest” (86) and bearing an “undistrustful good nature” (47). Such sentiments are reinforced by the American Fathers’ “city on a hill” rhetoric, echoed by Ronald Reagan in his Farewell Address, as it is by George W. Bush’s remark that America “has a spiritual energy in her which no other nation can contribute to the liberation of mankind,” a linking of nationalism and religion endorsed by mayor Rudy Giuliani, speaking at St. Paul’s Chapel in New York: “Abraham Lincoln used to say that the test of your Americanism was … how much you believed in America. Because we’re a kind of religion really. A secular religion” (qtd. in Monbiot).

In this reading, Melville’s novella is, to some degree at least, an allegory about conquest and the relative “blindness” of the conquistador. This invites a further reading of the text as an exploration of the nationalist allegory of the Founding Fathers and their descendants, the supporters of Manifest Destiny, and expansionism. Like a secular messianism, such nationalist allegory blends supra-historical teleology with a rhetoric supportive of physical force, which is used to ensure the continued authority of the conqueror. The quasi-religious end “outside history” justifies the aggression used within history’s confines.

Melville’s novella explores the function of such conquering rhetoric by bringing to light some of the ambiguities the rhetoric masks. In the process, Melville foregrounds masking as one of the primary tropes of the national allegory. For it is in masking that allegorical roles, like those of master and slave, can be fixed. And one of the text’s important endeavors is to ponder the degree to which masking can be used to undo the allegorical fixity it sustains. Together with the motif of masking goes that of mimicry. It is, as Homi Bhabha has shown, an important device in the drama of colonialism, not only in the way the slave is forced to mimic the expectations of the master, but also in the way he or she chooses to use that game of mimicry to attempt to undo the master’s power. As Bhabha puts it, “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference” (Of Mimicry and Man 86). By underscoring the ambivalence within the colonialist game or masque, Melville disavows the singularity of meanings on which depend the allegorical mode and its nationalist manifestation, “Manifest Destiny.”

Melville himself invites parallels between individual actions like those onboard the Tryal and national/colonial ones when he alters the name of the ship to the San Dominick and sets the story in 1799, the year of the slave revolt on Santo Domingo. We are invited to view the action as allegorical of wider events like this one, like Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, like the Mexican War of 1848, or as an allusion to America’s acquisitive eye on Cuba. And, of course, we must inevitably see the battles on the San Dominick as foreshadowing the Civil War.

But it is the very multi-referentiality of the allegorical meaning here that calls allegory into question. Melville gives us what appear to be fixed meanings but tells us that these meanings are not to be taken too literally, that they are “Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come” (46), that they “challenge [the] eye” (54). If the national allegory is meant to depict the community as both homogeneous and an instrument of liberation (of itself and the “Other”), then who, Melville asks, is being liberated, and what is the price of the nation’s apparent homogeneity?

We are invited by the text’s numerous ambivalences to read the elaborate drama on the ship of state, the San Dominick, as enacting the stasis that dominates colonial relations rather than as an image of progression or teleological fulfillment. As Partha Chatterjee puts it, “Nationalism … seeks to represent itself in the image of the Enlightenment and fails to do so. For Enlightenment itself, to assert its sovereignty as the universal ideal, needs its Other; if it could ever actualise itself in the real world as the truly universal, it would in fact destroy itself” (qtd. in Bhabha, “DissemiNation” 293). Nationalism, fixing identities by monologic signs, demands static relations between selves and others even as it pretends to seek progress. Hegel had shown this stasis to be at the heart of the master-slave relationship, one caught in a mutual mimicry, where slave mimics the master’s image of what he ought to be, and the master is imprisoned by the role he must himself play. Hobbes, in Leviathan, had shown political power and national identity to reside in acting, for “a Person is the same as an Actor is,” and if not, the kingdom would be “divided in it selfe [and] cannot stand” (M. S. Lee 508). Neither of these thinkers explores the space of slippage between mask and reality, however, as Melville sets out to do.

What Hobbes takes as essential for national survival, Melville peels away. In peeling away the assumptions of the nationalist mask, Melville presents six allegorical scenes, each one appearing to be a form of progress but in fact retaining the stasis engendered by a fruitless mimicry. The six scenes are Atufal’s chains, the shaving scene, the lunch scene, the stern piece, the skeleton scene, and, finally, the gibbet itself. They may be divided into two parts, the first of which I will call “The Sign of the Barber,” and the second “The Sign of the Scaffold.” Together they form a kind of balance, pointing simultaneously at the horrors of colonialism, with its fixing allegories upholding Manifest Destiny, and at the horrors of revolt.

THE SIGN OF THE BARBER

When Delano attempts to persuade Cereno at the end of the story that he should not be so mournful but consider the bright future in store, he is imposing a teleological reading on the events they have shared. Cereno cannot share his optimism. “But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it,” says Delano. “See yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.” Cereno, on the other hand, knowing his empire is coming to an end, cannot gloss over the past so easily, nor can he pretend moral questions are not paramount. “Because they [sea and sky] have no memory, because they are not human,” he replies (115–116). Cereno knows what Delano is too blind to see, that only someone inhuman can forget the past, with its chains of memory. Memory is the “shadow” that casts such a pall over Cereno’s face because it evokes a knowledge of what might be in the future—an end of empire.

Cereno has learned this lesson partly, one suspects, from the “masque” played by Atufal, the enchained, apparently regal, African, who appears every two hours, like clockwork, before him (62–63), refusing to ask pardon for some unnamed offence. His appearance particularly affects Cereno’s “memory,” and his pantomimic reappearance disallows the very forgetting that Delano encourages. Time is the shadow here, for to Cereno, even as it passes, it promises merely to return yet again, reminding him of his own powerlessness and of the game both are playing, from which they cannot escape. Cereno knows he is as chained as Atufal. The chain of time encourages a teleological hope—where pardon and renewal occur—but the Negro’s silence cuts short the promise of change and keeps both actors in the “play” of power-powerlessness. In this play neither memory nor Destiny can expect a manifest future, only an eternal return. Empire, whether Spanish or American, or any other, is not renewal, but replay. And if replay, then the end of empire is present in its beginning. This is the tacit message of Atufal’s muteness, itself an ambiguity of the kind Bhabha describes, for it can be read as a refusal to participate in the discourse that defines him in terms other than those he himself might choose, or it can be read as the muteness of the slave, who has no words to speak his experience.

The latter reading would be echoed in Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom: “But how is it with the American slave? … He is said to be happy; happy men can speak. But ask the slave what is his condition—what his state of mind—what he thinks of enslavement? And you had as well addressed your inquiries to the silent dead. There comes no voice from the enslaved. We are left to gather his feelings by imagining what ours would be, were our souls in his soul’s stead” (276). Cereno has had a glimpse of this soul, is chained by it, and, unlike Delano, knows that he is. It overshadows him, as it does his empire’s end. Delano remains too blind to see any such shadow. Perhaps the more important lesson Atufal offers is that mimicry, and the enforced silence it engenders, is really just a version of voicelessness. The key that hangs around Cereno’s neck, meant to unlock Atufal’s chains, is made futile by the stasis of the event, turning it into an intolerable weight. And if the deposition that Melville reproduces at the end of the narrative is described as “the key to fit into the lock of the complications which precede it” (114), then narrative as a key to meaning becomes questioned. Melville’s text overwrites Delano’s deposition precisely to show that the deposition is not a key to unlock the complications on which slavery and racism are based. Moreover, Melville’s own textual masque refuses to compromise ambiguities that deny closure. This refusal questions textuality as a key to unlock any complications. What has preceded in time is not to be solved by what comes after. There is no teleological closure, any more than Atufal’s “time” of enchainment is “closed.” The narrator cannot enter the soul of the Negro fully or break the inertia of mimicry any more than Cereno can. Both are shadowed by bondage.

This bondage is played out in the shaving scene, the purpose of which is not so much to show the horrors of Inquisitorial torture and retribution as to explore Delano’s inability to assess the meaning of the events before him. He cannot see the meaning of the mimicry because he has no eyes with which to see it. He is caught in the masque by not being able to see outside its stereotypes. Like the “vapors partly mantling the hull” of the San Dominick, which “streamed equivocally enough” (47), the barber scene is an equivocal vapor to the American, more so because he detects no equivocation. While the national allegory requires fixed meanings as a tool to establish its ideological assertiveness, Melville uses the “mantling vapors” of equivocation to undo the national allegory. The tools in the cuddy have equivocal meanings, both of religion and of empire, of rest and of torture, undoing allegorical fixity at the same time they invite allegorical readings.

One of Melville’s particularly acute linguistic “dismantlings” is his way of encouraging profoundly anticolonial, anti-allegorical meaning. I refer to the trope of the “barber” in the text, whose various meanings can be seen as ways in which Melville undercuts Delano’s monovision. But even as we explore the multiple layers of the meaning of “barber,” we must ask whether their multi-referentiality ultimately has any effect on Delano, and therefore whether the mimicry of assertive agency that both Babo and Melville’s text enact has any final bearing on real colonial events.

Melville makes Babo the main protagonist, changing the original Mure, who, in Delano’s text, is the leader of the rebels, though Babo is one of the historical characters, killed in the taking of the Tryal.¹ Melville’s choice is deliberate, I believe, because the name carries multiple connotations. By using the allegorical meanings commonly applied to the Negro, Melville attempts to undermine those fixed meanings. However, the very use of allegorical racial stereotypes prevents the narrator or author from fully overcoming them. For while the name does carry multiple connotations, each of them remains fixed in its colonial construction.

The idea of the baboon is one connotation. Not only does the idea hark back to when Melville was himself referred to in his youth as a “Ciceronian Baboon,”² but it may also have reminded Putnam’s Monthly readers of a recent article declaring that the Negro ought not to be described as a baboon (see McCall 60 n. 9). Closely allied to the baboon image is the traditional one of the Negro as a trickster figure and/or a minstrel. Both Eric Sundquist and Henry Louis Gates have pointed to Melville’s adoption of this standard trope of the Negro. Sundquist’s reference to Babo’s “stylized enactment of a rebellion contained within the illusion of mastery, as though in ritual pantomime” (138), suggests a reading of Babo’s masquerade as Melville’s way of showing the artifice within the American dream of democracy. Both slave and slave owner are tricksters of a kind, ultimately the victims of their own game. Both depend on allegorical readings of the Other to mask their real being. Both live in the game Hobbes describes.

This game is akin to what Sundquist argues is a kind of “tautology” or a “virtual equivalence of potentially different authorities,” which develop into a “rhetorical mimicry” (155), as he terms it, similar to Bhabha’s notion of mimicry, and its central symbol on the ship is the “knot in hand and knot in head” (Benito 76) presented to Delano, an intellectual “trick” devised by the “hive of subtlety” (116), Babo, and ironically presented to Delano by one of the white sailors. The taut(ological) knot is an allegory of the impossibility of the tie that binds master and slave. When Babo uses his allegorical nature as slave to mask his real intentions, he creates a tautology that, like Atufal, both frees and imprisons him. He has no rhetorical power but the tools of the master by which to define himself. Similarly, the reader is locked into the same tautology, forced by Melville to play the same colonial game.

Most intriguingly for the present argument, however, is that “Babo” suggests “barber.” Without wasting space on complex etymological origins, suffice it to say here that “barb” was a “beard” in 1618 (Oxford English Dictionary), that “barb” and “cut” are linked in “barber,” and that a “barbarian” is traditionally one who carries a beard, who originally is associated with the Barbary Coast, and who may be a non-Hellene or non-Roman or non-Christian. But while these meanings appear to shed light on Babo and declare him a barbarian, we are forced by the shaving scene to note that Cereno is the one with the beard, not Babo.

Yet another connotation of barbarism is elicited by the “Barbadoes planter” who warns Delano against mulattoes who have “European faces.… Look out for him; he is a devil.” Dismissing the planter, Delano points to Babo as the epitome of gentlemanliness, “with features more regular than King George’s of England” (89). But his dismissal suggests a further irony. Not only are Europeans the devil in disguise, but “Barbadoes,” named after the “bearded” Indian fig tree growing there, is yet another derivative of “barb.” The “planter” has “supplanted” the original Arawaks, taken their name, and grown their beard as well as their fruit. One of Melville’s aims in the text is clearly to suggest that real barbarism remains in the eye of the beholder and might not even know itself to be barbaric.

Another historical allusion is worth unpacking. Berber, or Barbary, pirates played an important role in the conflict between western and north African powers from the late 1700s to the time of Melville’s writing. They captured American schooners like the Maria off Algiers in 1785. Jefferson sought ransom for the two thousand-odd captives in Algiers, many of them American, not for humanitarian reasons (many died anyway), but because “the liberation of our citizens has an intimate connexion [sic] with the liberation of our commerce in the Mediterranean, now under consideration of Congress.” Hiding behind the mask of democracy, Jefferson, like Delano in his boat Rover (with its piratical connotations), is hardly less of a pirate than the Berbers, or Babo himself. And it is this barbarism that Frederick Douglass castigates in his famous 4 July speech in 1852: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; … To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy licence; your national greatness, swelling vanity; … your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence, … your sermons, … mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.… For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without rival” (qtd. in Hollinger and Capper 405).

Douglass’s words turn a traditionally racist language aimed at blacks on its head and perform the “masque” that Melville’s novella enacts. But, like Babo, Douglass’s words are ultimately still caught in the colonial framework and so are a version of slavery. This bind suggests that even in attempting to dismantle the meanings of barbarism, Melville, unlike Douglass, is showing the futility of language itself as a tool of “truth.” He knows, as well as Babo does, that even reversing the rhetoric of the master is a version of enslavement and that the only “true” speech can be silence.

Such shadowiness of language and the hypocrisy it may engender suggest the third scene or “play” among Cereno, Delano, and Babo, that of the lunch. Like the Last Supper, it prefigures the battle, arrest, and final execution to come. The sacramental questions raised in the scene notwithstanding, the primary question is who is Judas? And this may be a question as much aimed at the reader as at any character, for it is in reading the nature of the protagonist Christ that one may or may not become a Judas. Cereno is “like one flayed alive” (93), a version of St. Benedict. Babo appears to be Judas, suggested by the reference to his hand “pushing the Canary towards” Cereno (90). “Behold the hand that betrayeth me is on the table,” says Christ in Luke 22.21. In the betrayal the servant is trying to overthrow the master.

But if we read to the end of Luke 22, we discover Christ turning hierarchies on their head, doing something of what Frederick Douglass attempts: “Rather let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. For which is the greater, one who sits at table or one who serves? Is it not the one who sits at table? But I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22.24–27). Christ’s words place Babo in the position of the betrayed suffering servant, administering the wine (his blood), soon to be spilled, and the “host” whose body is soon to be broken on the scaffold. It is also no accident that the wine is “Canary,” for it is on the Spanish Canary Islands that the last remnants of the Berbers were being made extinct as Melville wrote. (It was also on the Canary Islands that Columbus stopped on his way to the New World.)

Like Douglass, and like Babo, Christ’s words are locked into a tautology, demanding adherence to a particular way of seeing and having no alternative but to use the language available to the speaker. Melville puts a new slant on the dilemma by introducing a Delano who is blind to even the reversal of hierarchies. Amidst “the noisy confusion of the San Dominick’s suffering host [that] repeatedly challenged his eye” (54), Delano remains unable to see himself as a cause of the suffering. The Christ/host remains victim of the blind do-gooder, who, like Judas, believes his violent action to be in the interest of all. All the rhetorical shifts in the world do not matter in the face of blind force, just as all the Christlike roles will not matter as the story progresses. Douglass’s words had no more effect on the slave-owning South, or even on the North, than Babo’s masque would have substantial effect against Delano, or Christ’s words would prevent his ultimate betrayal by Judas.

THE SIGN OF THE SCAFFOLD

The scaffold scenes, stern piece, skeleton at the prow, and the gibbet, present further forms of allegorical tautology. In the process they close down any possible agency that may be derived from mimicking the powers of empire. Brute force overcomes rhetoric and dismisses any play that attempts to find a meeting ground between opposing forces.

Allegory, as Angus Fletcher has shown, often has a dualistic structure of battle and progress. After the battle and the victory of good over evil, the pilgrim may progress further. It thus implies a linear journey toward teleological fulfillment. While the three scenes previously presented each offer a promise of some progress to come—an unchaining, a sacramental meal hinting at eternal brotherly communion, a shave hinting at the restitution of order—the last three do the opposite. They show stasis, not progression, in which Melville is concerned not with who is “good” and who “evil” but rather with the relativity of both these terms of the dyad. The stern piece, a little like the picture Ishmael encounters at the door of the Spouter Inn, which shows an “unnatural combat of the four primal elements” and the “breaking up of the icebound stream of Time” (Moby-Dick 13), represents a battle between forces whose identities are masked. It is a timeless and elemental battle. The “dark satyr in a mask hold[s] his foot on the prostrate neck of a writhing figure, likewise masked” (49).

The allegorical meanings would be clear but for the masks Melville inserts. Delano will reenact the scene when he confines Babo with his foot, suggesting that we should read Babo as the writhing, snakelike evil one conquered by the “good,” as Adam’s foot tramples the snake after the Fall. This allusion allows the reader pause, however, to question the assumption of Delano’s innocence, for Adam in the New World garden has fallen, so that the trampler here is a satyr, masked, and masking his own Fall, as Adam masked his shame. The figure writhing could be doing so unjustly. The stern piece, a “relic” of the “faded grandeur” (49) of the Spanish Empire, suggests the rise of the new American Empire and also hints at its decline in a “faded” future. It turns linear progress into a form of circular repetition. The new empire is as mysterious as the old, refusing to reveal its true nature by keeping on the mask. Executed and executioner both wear masks, so that empire reenacts tautological entrapment, refusing progress.

This circularity defines the “follow your leader” scene, where Aranda’s bones are displayed at the prow. As Foucault points out, “battle” and “progress” were central to the public execution during the Inquisition and even later. The auto-da-fé ensures that the “patient” in the amende honorable, a common form of execution for slaves, will undergo battle with the executioner before the progress into the afterlife. Bodies will be broken, drawn and quartered, dismembered, and so on, before the final hanging. Death is an allegory of the power of empire over the sinful but repentant body, and over the devious criminal mind (Foucault, Discipline and Punish 32–69).

Ensuring that the criminal’s mind, the “hive of subtlety” (Benito 116), is finally vanquished, the state would, according to Foucault, often display the decapitated head and have the body burned. Power lay in dividing the head from the arm that would carry out its devious purposes. Contrary to the imperial power’s obsession with the monolithic, Melville dismisses imperial rhetoric by offering alternative scaffolds. They become a kind of balance of alternatives that, nevertheless, do not, it might be quickly added, finally undo the wilfully blind force of the American conqueror/savior.

On one hand there is the stern piece balancing the prow piece with its ambiguous inscription, “Follow your leader” (49). These two scaffolds, as it were, point at each other. On the other hand, there is the final scaffold on which Babo’s head will be placed. To look to the prow is to look for “progress,” like the patient in the auto-da-fé. But the masking of the skeleton at the prow seems aimed at pointing back to the masked figures at the stern, nullifying progress. Babo places Aranda’s bones at the place where the head is meant to be, replacing head with body, a gesture in contrast to what will happen to Babo himself. Body cannot be separated from idea, Babo suggests. The slaves do not think like Descartes, not least because it is on the bodies of slaves that Western empires were built. What was meant to be the image of “Christopher Colon, the discoverer of the New World” (107; italics in original) is now white, fleshless bones. They have no color and therefore no racial fixity. No mere killing of the flesh can, it seems, take away the force of the person. Making the body anyone’s is Babo’s way of framing the absent body (often the slave’s) as the one most present. It is also, one might suggest, Melville’s way of undoing the fixed meanings of allegory.

Long before he turns to the final gibbet scene, Melville makes one all-important eschatological point about the white bones, one that questions the idea of linear progression that lies behind Manifest Destiny, or the notion that Columbus ought to be in any way “followed.” He equates the bones with the Valley of Dry Bones in Ezekiel. Here God says of the bones: “Behold, I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone, and will gather them from all sides and bring them to their own land; and I will make them one nation in the land, upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king over them all; and they shall be no longer two nations, and no longer divided into two kingdoms.… But I will save them … and will cleanse them; and they shall be my people and I will be their God” (Ezekiel 37.21–23). The passage seems a pointed comment to America in the wake of the Compromise of 1850 and in the face of the impending Civil War. The question is whether America can come alive with a new breath and be one nation. But Melville offers no image of such life, only the last gibbet scene where the gaze of black and the white meet across the plaza. The future is stasis, not progress, and the allegory lies stuck in the phase of battle. For, if in the biblical typology the Valley of Dry Bones prefigures Christ’s resurrection, it also prefigures the great eschatological conflagration between Gog and Israel where, in the very next chapter, Ezekiel prophesies: “every man’s sword will be against his brother. With pestilence and bloodshed I will enter into judgment with him” (Ezekiel 38.21).

Instead of resurrection, Melville offers us the final execution scene. It bears the marks of Christian allegory, with Babo dragged to the gibbet at the tail of a mule—Christlike, but also significant as the symbol of the hybrid beast, silent and “mute,” emasculated and powerless. Like Christ, Babo does not speak when he is executed, in opposition to the demands of the auto-da-fé, where the “patient” is meant to request forgiveness. We are invited to assume the suffering slave to be a symbol of the suffering Christ. But here Melville inserts ambiguity. The slave cannot appropriate the national allegory for himself and become the grand victim. For both Aranda’s bones (white and “cleaned” as they are) and Cereno gone to his monastery on Mount Agonia also suggest Christ. Three Christs, in fact, stare at each other across the plaza. Africa, Spain, and the New World gaze at each other. The allegory of progress becomes stuck in the tautology of mutual mimicry, so that the rhetoric of “Christ” as “good” is overturned and demythologized. Nothing, however, is put in its place, leaving the reader, as it does both Babo and Cereno, stranded, balanced, as it were, on opposite ends of the ship.

Such “balancing” of opposites takes us back to a central passage in Moby-Dick. Babo’s silent head, balanced with the head and bones of Aranda and Cereno, suggests the two whale heads mounted on either side of the Pequod. The sperm whale suggests the phrenologically “broad brow” of the white man, a Platonian, forerunner of Descartes, one who emphasizes mental acuity over physical force. The other, a right whale, with its tongue glued, as it were, to the floor of its mouth, is a Stoic, suggesting the black man (Moby-Dick 335). However, if we read Babo the black as having a mind that is a “hive of subtlety” and Delano as one who cannot perceive the meaning of things before him, using instead only brute force, then the stereotypes are reversed. Either head could represent either type, nullifying the ideologically charged differences. Like the human head and bodies, these two death’s-heads are similarly balanced, as if a head and a body together. In Moby-Dick the body is not entirely free of its head or vice versa, even though the body is mostly “silent” and “black.” “Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads,” says Ishmael, “while they yet lie together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will not be long in following” (335). Ultimately, there is no distinction between heads, black and white, or master and slave, just as there is none between old and new, Spanish or American, or empires. They mimic the tautology that traps both slave and master in their different roles and that traps expansionist America in its quest, one that can but lead, as Babo/Melville suggests, to the fleshless body at the prow.

Aranda’s bones, a fleshless but whole body, remind us, too, of the whale skeleton in “A Bower of the Arsacides,” where the vines that overgrow and “mask” the skeleton become an image of the skeleton themselves. The vines, a kind of flesh, are themselves another version of a skeleton. This image implies that, for Melville, skeleton (suggesting white America) begets skeleton, though it appears to be, as it would to the supporters of Manifest Destiny, “greener and fresher verdure.” The future “life” it promises in the form of vines (evoking a Promised Land) is but another form of death. “Life folded Death; Death trellised Life,” says Ishmael (Moby-Dick 450).

That death will come, Melville suggests, because the skeleton, despite being worshipped, “lay lounging, a gigantic idler!” (Moby-Dick 450). The image anticipates the “sort of Castilian Rothschild” (64), the Southern landowner and Spanish gentleman, that is later used to describe Cereno. While in its idleness the skeleton is a “cunning weaver,” it is nevertheless deluded, for the “verdant warp and woof hum[s] around him,” as Ishmael says, just as a similar warp and woof will hum around Pip when he “sees God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom,” and the ringed horizon will begin to expand around his forgotten and outcast head (Moby-Dick 414). The horizon of Manifest Destiny is misery to the slave, implies Melville, a verdure woven by a God who secretly hides the white skeleton beneath, and who offers a future that is not one of linear progress but is “ringed,” turning back in on itself.

Balancing Pip’s lonely head will be Ahab’s, just as Aranda’s bones balance Babo’s head. The white captain’s head bobs alone in the sea “like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might burst” (Moby-Dick 551). In each case the horizon is ringed and endless. No progress is possible, only the balance of endless battle. The white whale’s “pleated head” (Moby-Dick 550), which will “spin” its victims with coiled ropes to their own deaths, offers but “appalling battle on every side” (Moby-Dick 558). The “loomings” at the beginning of Moby-Dick have become the “hive of subtlety” at the end of Benito Cereno, a weaving that ties itself in its own knots, and that, like the Gordian one the old Spanish sailor holds up to the dumb Delano, can be undone finally only by brute Alexandrian force.

In the language of Manifest Destiny, the brute force becomes a “trade,” both of capitalism and of its more nefarious product, the slave trade. Delano sees the trade as “mild” and cannot understand Cereno’s dejection after his rescue. To Cereno the only progress is to death. The winds driving the ship of state, carrying the slaves of capitalism, steer toward death. This stasis in battle is the same one Ahab encounters at the equator and at the meridian—the same “meridian” that inspires Delano’s “good nature” (65)—so it is fitting to leave the last word on the national allegory to Moby-Dick. Ahab, about to encounter the dead, blind wall of the white whale’s forehead at the meridian and on the equator, speaks of the warm trade winds. Like Delano, who sees the slaves as “naked nature,” he appropriates even Nature to his own ends: “These warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the clear heavens blow straight on, in strong and steadfast, vigorous mildness; and veer not from their mark, however the baser currents of the sea may turn and tack, and mightiest Mississippies of the land swift and swerve about, uncertain where to go at last. And by the eternal Poles! these same Trades that so directly blow my good ship on; these Trades, or something like them—something so unchangeable, and full as strong, blow my keeled soul along! To it! Aloft there! What d’ye see?” But the answer from aloft is the most telling final word of all on the destiny of the national allegory. “Nothing, sir” (Moby-Dick 564).

Benito Cereno foreshadows what Melville saw as the likely end to America’s national allegory, the expansionist effort at Manifest Destiny, not by looking to the future, but by looking to the past. In this backward glance, and in its deliberate overwriting of the very words used by his predecessor, Melville reenacts the drama of being caught in the allegorical rhetoric of slavery. For, by using Delano’s deposition as the foundation of his story, changing it only in important instances to suit a deeper purpose, Melville allows himself to be embedded in the language and confined by the eyes of a Delano. He recognizes at once the need to escape those eyes by presenting an alternative reality, in the form of Babo, at the same time that he knows himself to be but a mimic, a trickster trying to outplay the master, who is really pulling the strings. Mimicking Delano, he participates in the language of those white Northerners who remain trapped in racist preconceptions and in the circular tautologies of the national allegory. His only escape is, as it were, to use that circularity against itself, allowing the narrative to undo the assumptions of a “secular religion” or a godly state in which the one holding the power is assumed, as Nietzsche was to argue about power, to be the bearer of innocence.

NOTES

For my father.

1. See Delano’s deposition, reprinted in McCall 217.

2. See H. Parker 1:111. Parker cites a letter by R in the Microscope of 15 April 1837.