Benito Cereno and the Time of Reading
When the “I” seeks to give an account of itself, it can start with itself, but it will find that this self is already implicated in a social temporality that exceeds its own capacities for narration; indeed, when the “I” seeks to give an account of itself, an account that must include the conditions of its own emergence, it must, as a matter of necessity, become a social theorist.
—Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself
If I could only be certain that in my uneasiness my senses did not deceive me, then—
—Captain Amasa Delano, in Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1855)
If you can squeeze Melville into oct. it would be great.
—George W. Curtis, editor, writing to Joshua Dix, publisher (September 7, 1855)
The Posthistoricist Present
This is an essay, in part, about the historical moment in which Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno was composed and then consumed by historical readers. It began as an experiment in which I wondered whether I could both make use of the skills I had amassed as a historicist—in particular my knowledge of the local book cultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—even as I joined that knowledge to a different set of questions about the (potentially) less historically grounded practice of reading. I wanted to consider the extent to which reading is an experience that can in fact be historicized, in order to see if reading a story like, say, Benito Cereno in 1855, at the site of production, looked and felt remotely like reading it in 2009, at the furthest-most point of its (then) (ongoing) reception. The question I wanted to pose was something like this: how is the (historical) time of reading related to (aesthetic) reading time?
This question focuses on two seemingly opposed aspects of literary texts: first, the historically fixed facts of textual production and consumption (bookmaking and book buying) and second, the somewhat less moored act of aesthetic reception—in other words, the always potentially transhistorical experience of reading. Nineteenth-century American literature turns out to be a good place to ask this question, in large part because so many of its authors seem to have responded to the precarious conditions of antebellum book production by trying to reach a historically unmoored reader, an ideal reader who very often seems to bear little or no relation to the actual, embodied readers walking around streets and bookstores and libraries in the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s. And one way these authors address this historically unmoored (or ideal) reader is, I would argue, by crafting what I want to call present-time reading experiences—authoring texts that are not so much syntactically posed in the present tense but that experimentally organize themselves around the reader’s own phenomenological “reading time” (the actual moment when the act of reading is taking place, whenever that moment might be). In this sense, aesthetic reception is cultivated as a refuge from the vagaries of more materialist forms of consumption: real editors, real readers, real publishers, and all the complicated limitations that such readers pose.
Benito Cereno is both exemplary and exceptional in this regard. Here, Melville uses a now famous twist toward the end of his narrative to knowingly craft two radically different versions of the same text in one: one (almost disposable) version of the text that is to be consumed just once (upon first reading) and another (more historically durable) version that is assigned a memory and meaning after the fact of (a first, or flawed) reading, which is intended to be understood retroactively as a misreading. This double reading has, I think, a local purpose for Melville, but it also has a clear pedagogical purpose. As he writes in Pierre: “If a man be told a thing wholly new, then—during the time of its first announcement to him—it is entirely impossible for him to comprehend it. For—absurd as it may seem,” he says (now shifting not just to the plural but reorienting his claim to include both a speaker and those spoken to), “things new it is impossible to make [men] comprehend.”1 Insisting not on one but on two (or more) readings, Melville seeks to create, as it were, his own ideal reader, someone who will be forced to bear a double relation to the story over time—first by misreading it (alongside Captain Delano) and then by disavowing that first reading every time the story is read thereafter.
Whether the story’s ideal reader has come to be embodied in the form of a real reader remains to be seen, but in this essay I will consider the long historical reception of Benito Cereno first as a theoretical problem across time (giving special attention to a remarkable number of what I call presentist or present-tense readings of the text) and then as a more local matter in Melville’s own moment. I start with the presentist reception of the novella for two reasons: first, because Benito Cereno has generated, over time, a remarkably high number of historically unhinged readings (made further remarkable given the content of the story, which is so historically specific) and, second, because critical presentism has become one of the signal gestures of our own contemporary practice in American studies (and for this reason the story seems to have something to tell us about ourselves). Thus we might say that the essay you are now holding in your hands (or reading on your screen) is not exempt from the presentist gesture it describes, but it is going to try to think about it and theorize it as something that has a distinct origin, in this case, in the story itself and, maybe more to the point, in the world in which Melville lived—and wrote. In the end, this essay is an experiment in how to think about aesthetic reception in ways that are both theoretical and materialist at once.
Reading Melville in the Present Tense
Melville has, of course, been expertly appropriated to every critical moment his corpus has endured. If you visit JSTOR or Project Muse, you will find archived there all the obligatory critical gestures, each in their calendrical carrel: Benito Cereno, in particular, has been avidly dissected by old historicists, by formalists, by poststructuralists, by multiculturalists, and by new historicists (each of whom, in their own way, was reading the story in the present tense, accommodating it to the critical preoccupations of their own moment). But Benito Cereno has also been appropriated in a far more striking way for particular moments—and indeed, in a totally inverse way that resonates quite peculiarly with the historicist turn we have just lived through in the last thirty years or so in American literary studies. As grounded as the text might seem to be in a certain set of historical practices and assumptions, Benito Cereno has routinely lent itself for over a century to numerous readings that rely on an almost total evacuation of its actual historical content, often producing highly allegorical, transhistorical, and, most of all, very presentist readings—readings in which the specific scene, setting, and content of the tale are replaced by some other scene, setting, and content.
Take, for example, the case of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt, a central figure in the work of Giorgio Agamben, was a twentieth-century German political theorist who has been called both the Crown Jurist of the Third Reich and (because of his ongoing popularity with contemporary neoconservatives) the Éminence Grise of the Bush-Cheney White House.2 Like many Germans in the 1930s, however, Schmitt was also an avid reader of Herman Melville, and by far the text he fixated on most acutely, both privately (in correspondences with friends) and professionally, in his university teaching, was Benito Cereno. Numerous letters and anecdotes indicate that Schmitt saw the story not so much as a story about the United States in the 1850s (as it has for some decades been assumed to be in American studies) or even about the hemispheric effects of the global slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (as it is increasingly understood to be) but as an allegory for life under Hitler in the twentieth century. Indeed, according to Tracy Strong, Melville’s eighty-four-year-old story was “widely read and discussed in terms of the contemporary political situation” in Germany upon its appearance in German translation in 1939.3 Schmitt himself thought the story “very current” when he first read it (apparently in English) in the 1930s. He so identified with what he called “the situation” on board the San Dominick that on several occasions he actually wrote letters to friends in which he signed off as “Benito Cereno” or (even more abjectly) “your Benito Cereno.” In one such letter, circulated after World War II (when Schmitt was under investigation for his implication in Nazi war crimes), he announced: “I am the last conscious representative of the jus publicum Europaeum (the European public order) … and I’m experiencing its end just as Benito Cereno experienced the pirate ship’s journey.” Using the story to help explain his behavior throughout the war, Schmitt concedes that “my book [Leviathan, written during the 1930s] contains shrill anti-Semitic tones” and worries that “the uninitiated reader … who does not know that I wrote this book in the role of Benito Cereno will think I am a racist and consider me complicit in the murder of Jews.”4
One of the most interesting things about Schmitt’s seizure of Benito Cereno for his own contemporary experience of German history—and indeed, for highly biographical and self-interested purposes—is the mythic and ahistorical character of his fantasy. On one hand, he believes he has come to the end of some part of history: somewhat astonishingly (having witnessed the Holocaust), he claims himself to be the only survivor of a fading formation that he nostalgically calls “the European public order.” On the other hand, his unique experience has been foreshadowed, many years before, in the figure of Benito Cereno, whom Schmitt treats as the very archetype of passive subjection—or abjection. Schmitt’s reading is thus both timely and timeless, but it’s important to realize that both these effects are generated, in some sense, by the story itself, which appears to have taught Schmitt something about how to endure a historical crisis by urging people to find multiple interpretations for what they’ve read. When Schmitt describes, for example, his book’s anti-Semitism, he takes a page from Melville by suggesting that this reading of his work should be dispatched to the dustbin of disposable readings while a new (more durable) postwar reading should be substituted in its place: only “the uninitiated reader,” he insists, “will think I am a racist.” By signing this defense with the name Benito Cereno, he hopes to show that he never really was complicit at all in Nazi ideology—that he was, like Cereno, an unwilling participant in someone else’s masquerade.
Schmitt’s appropriation of the story is remarkable, but he’s hardly alone. Schmitt saw Benito Cereno as a story about the Third Reich, but other prominent readers throughout the twentieth century made the same move, appropriating Melville for their own historical present in much the same way that Schmitt did in the 1930s and ’40s. The best-known example may be C. L. R. James, who deftly braves the contradiction of his own critical position (which I would describe as historically presentist) by opening Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1952) with a syntactically unsettling use of the present tense: “one evening over a hundred years ago,” he writes, “an American whaling-vessel is out at sea on its way to the whaling-grounds.”5 Unlike Schmitt, who opportunistically plucks the story out of time and reinserts it into his own, James wants to establish a dialectical relation with Melville’s world. More often than not, however, James simply posits Melville as a man out of time (or before his time)—someone exceptional and miraculous (rather than fated and historical). Indeed, “the miracle of Herman Melville,” James writes, “is … that a hundred years ago … he painted a picture of the world in which we live. … His characters are instantly recognizable by us who have lived through the last twenty years and particularly the last ten” (3). Benito Cereno in particular “seems as if it was written not even after World War I but after World War II” (110).
I could go on to accumulate several more examples of this kind of appropriation of Benito Cereno, but the basic structure of this kind of reading is already evident in the two interpretations just cited.6 I’ve chosen Schmitt and James not because I want to flatten them out—they are clearly very different—but because they serve to demonstrate just how flattening presentism as a practice can be. As we see here, the presentist gesture actually enables these two totally different readers to treat the story as if it were an empty container, a structure with no political or historical content of its own—even though each of them probably thought the story very political and very historical, in some sense.
The prevalence of this kind of reading in the early twentieth century would not be all that remarkable if Benito Cereno weren’t in the midst of a presentist renaissance even as I write. Since the year 2001 (at least), Benito Cereno has been repeatedly read as a story that can teach us something about our historical present. Most notably, it has been persistently linked to discussions of global terrorism by critics working in a wide variety of fields. Lindsay Waters, for example, put the case rather bluntly in the spring of 2002, just after the events of 9/11, when he referred to Babo’s slave revolt as a “hijacking,” connecting Babo and Mohammad Atta with that one powerful word. The situation Americans are facing today, Waters wrote, “is exactly like Melville’s Benito Cereno. We need energy now in the form of petroleum. We needed it then in the form of slaves.”7
Sheer as this conflation is, its most basic premise has been repeated by a number of different scholars since 2001. The popular political theorist Benjamin Barber, for example, argues that “the myth of innocence captured by Melville has persisted down into and through the twentieth century and right into this new millennium, where it colors and helps explain the Bush administration’s new preventive war doctrine.”8 Andy Doolen, a literary critic whose work focuses on the period before 1820, agrees: he sees Benito Cereno as “a prophetic tale of American obtuseness” and insists that “the same racial ideology that prohibited Delano from seeing either the slave rebel’s humanity or his true intentions would come to justify U.S. military and economic intervention in foreign places like Nicaragua, Cuba, the Philippines, Mexico, and Haiti.”9 Likewise, Andrew Delbanco, who, in his recent prize-winning cultural biography of Melville takes a break from a more conventional kind of historical biography to note that “in our time of terror and torture, Benito Cereno has emerged as the most salient of Melville’s works; a tale of desperate men in the grip of a vengeful fury that those whom they hate cannot begin to understand…. It is a tale that most Americans could not—and still cannot—bear to hear.”10 All these post-9/11 readings make a powerful presentist claim for Benito Cereno. Waters insists that the situation on the San Dominick is “exactly like” our present day situation. Barber believes that the story can “help explain” President Bush’s foreign policy in the “new millennium.” Doolen thinks “the same” racial ideology in play in 1855 is still alive and well today. And Delbanco believes we “still” have not learned the very political lesson that Melville is out to teach.
As in the earlier examples, there is something both universalizing and particularizing in each of these more recent readings, as if they are trying to be both presentist and historicist at once. But the thing that interests me the most about them is that they almost all attach and indeed invest themselves in the figure of Delano and in his very powerful and particular penchant for misreading. Unlike someone like Schmitt (who identifies almost entirely with the figure of Benito Cereno), all four of the post-9/11 readings align themselves (or contemporary Americans more generally) after the fact of reading the whole story with the perception of Melville’s spectacularly obtuse captain. Lindsay Waters, for example, calls Delano “a typical American male not just of the nineteenth century but of today” and concludes that “he is my compatriot.”11 Delbanco is less cagey. He overtly disidentifies with Delano at several points in his reading—“Delano’s stupidity is staggering,” he says—but he also sometimes aligns himself with the “not undistrustful” captain, as when he repeatedly points out that “we [as readers] feel [Delano’s] relief” with him when the slave revolt is revealed. This collapse of critic into reader (“we feel his relief”) and of reader in turn into character (not only a critical commonplace but I would argue a necessary effect of this narration the first time through) allows a number of anachronisms to slip into Delbanco’s rhetoric. In fact, in channeling Delano’s diegetic point of view, the chapter channels his historical consciousness in peculiarly unfiltered ways, using the word Negro without historicizing quotation marks and remarking on one occasion on Cereno’s “hot Spanish petulance.”12 The critic thus focalizes, as Melville once did. But to what end?
Moments like these suggest some of the pitfalls of presentism, a practice that at its best establishes a dense continuum across time and at its worst simply collapses two moments without attending to the process that animates the moments in between.13 The more contemporary ones are simply more telling because they are ours and (for a time at least) they are now. In conflating the contemporary American experience of terrorism with Delano’s perceptual experience of the slave revolt, these readings circumnavigate timelines both grand and minor (matters of both history and what we might call more local reading time). The most basic thing we can say is that they collapse two time frames. In doing so, they expose something about how readers inhabit both time and history. Here’s the rub, however. To the extent that they maintain a focus on the unenlightened Delano (in Waters’s words, “a typical American male not just of the nineteenth century but of today”), they wind up in the end doing one of two problematic things. If, as scholars, we sustain an interest in what we might call the durability of the disposable reading (insisting that the story is somehow “about” willful innocence as opposed to something else), then we are either actively identifying with Delano and hence refusing to read the story dialectically (by positing a reader who refuses to be changed by his reading) or we are actively dividing the labor of enlightenment from the fruits of innocence, disidentifying both with Delano and our own contemporaries by fusing him not with our own (now bygone) reading interest but with those of others around us whose difference from us is that they cannot or do not read (well) (other Americans, named Bush—or not). As Waters says, with a poker face: Delano “is my compatriot.” Either way, these interpretations allow the novella’s two readings (the disposable and the durable, the initial flawed reading and the second corrected reading) to sit in disintegrated relation to one another: either the former is embraced and the latter refused within one reader, or the latter is embraced and the former is simply reassigned to the next reader, another reader, a less enlightened reader nearby (a “compatriot”). Such readings not only preserve but resurrect Delano’s own peculiar version of myopia in the guise of criticizing it, reconstructing the story’s false front by reproducing new other not-slave-revolts (like airplane hijackings) that take the place of Delano’s preferred red herring: piracy. But the point of the story is not that we should imitate any one its characters or that we should lament what we know that others don’t. The point is that we should be changed by our reading. The ethics of this double reading is a problem I will return to at the end of the essay.
The Time of Reading and the Time of Writing
In a recent talk Jonathan Elmer used Benito Cereno to theorize what he called “the literary event,” and he pointed out that literary history has always tended to be more attentive to the history of production than to the history of reception, in large part because, he suggested, the point of production tends to be knowable and finite while reception is theoretically infinite—a continuously ongoing and unfolding event that, were we to theorize it in its totality, would require a massive reconceptualization of the scale of “the literary event” called (in this case) Benito Cereno.14 As Elmer notes, there are almost always many more sites of reception for any given text than sites of production. But the relationship between production and reception almost entirely disappears in presentist readings of Benito Cereno. In most of the examples cited so far, the moment of reception is actually given more primacy than the moment of production. Thus James’s wonder at “the miracle” of Melville’s ongoing relevance for his world and his insistence that Benito Cereno “seems as if it [had been] written not even after World War I but after World War II” (175, 110). The disjunction between the moment of production and the later moment of reception is swept away in such accounts, while the distance between the story’s two potential readings is likewise collapsed. Yet the history of Benito Cereno’s earliest readings suggests that reception is always tied in some sense to production, and so I want to offer an experimental attempt to link the issues I’ve been describing to an account of the story’s production and early reception in 1855 and ’56.
It’s hardly a coincidence that Benito Cereno has called forth so many presentist readings. The story itself is very much occupied narratively with the slow passage of time on board the ship where it is set. The famous first words of the story are “In the year 1799,” a gesture that seems to embed the story in History with a capital H. But, in fact, much of the story turns out to be not about epic historical time but about the quotidian painfulness of a more everyday kind of time. As students almost always report about their own (usually disposable) first reading, the story creeps like a caterpillar the first time through—so that the time that passes in the plot as we read it (before we know what is really happening) seems almost to line up with the time of reading, marked as that time is by a sense of profound disorientation as to why we are reading what we are reading and what the different details being described mean. The slowness both of Captain Delano’s perception and of the narrative unfolding of the action is marked repeatedly in Melville’s prose by the use of the words at present or presently to describe the slow unfolding of the story’s (non)action for its first two-thirds. Indeed, some variant of the word present or presently is used fifty-two times in as many pages. As I will discuss at more length in a moment, it is almost as if the story actually were being read in the present tense—even though, of course, it isn’t. But the fact that it isn’t is, of course, crucial to the overall effect Melville seems to want to generate.
The discomfort of reading this story is connected in part to the discomfort Melville was beginning to feel about writing books that readers could not appreciate or understand. Indeed, it seems safe to say that Melville’s experience of his own present tense was not really a comfortable one. The rise and decline of his authorial fortunes are well known: from popular romancer of the South Seas in Typee to literary experimenter in Moby-Dick and Pierre to increasingly frustrated and penny-pinched hack magazinist in the later 1850s to depressed poet (and state bureaucrat) in the last thirty years of his life. At the center of this declension narrative is the poor reception of Pierre. At the time Melville began writing magazine stories like Benito Cereno, he was routinely being described in newspapers and magazines as “exhausted,” “insane,” and “finished” because of the failure of Pierre. In 1853, in fact, Putnam’s printed a critical assessment of Melville that essentially amounts to an authorial obituary: describing Melville’s career as one of steady decline (from the productive “ferment” of Typee to the staggering “poison” of Pierre), Fitz-James O’Brien warned that “Mr. Melville … totters at the edge of a precipice, over which all his hard-earned fame may tumble with such another weight as Pierre attached to it.”15 But Melville could not have produced another Pierre even if he had wanted to, because after 1853 he had trouble getting freestanding novels published and turned instead to the serialized forum that more successful writers (like Hawthorne—and Stowe) were, by the mid-1850s, leaving behind: the middle-class magazine.
Benito Cereno is one of these post-1853 magazine fictions, and its reception proved to be as mixed as anything that came before it.16 George W. Curtis, who eventually assumed the editorship of Putnam’s, warned his friend Joshua Dix, the publisher, to “decline any novel from Melville that is not extremely good.” Though Curtis appeared to be warning Dix away from publishing Benito Cereno as a freestanding novel, he was nevertheless instrumental in getting the novella serialized in Putnam’s in late 1855. Having read the story himself, Curtis assured Dix that “Melville’s story is very good,” even though he pointed out two notable aesthetic problems that bothered him in his reading: first, the problem of the story’s disconnected parts and, second, the problem of pacing. Though Curtis thought the story “very good,” in other words, he also found it frustratingly fragmented and slow and would not take the risk of publishing it as a novel. “It is a great pity,” he writes, that Melville “did not work it up as a connected tale instead of putting in the dreary documents at the end.—They should have made part of the substance of the story.” He ultimately judged it to be “a little spun out” but insisted “it ought not to be lost” (Log, 2:501).
Besides Curtis, we have few other records of the earliest readers’ responses to Benito Cereno. It’s not mentioned in Melville’s correspondence or in any surviving correspondence between the magazine and its readers. The only other place to look for early readings is to the published puffs and barbs received by the collected Piazza Tales, which we might think of (using my earlier vocabulary) as the (durable) collection of all of Melville’s (disposable) Putnam’s’ tales.17 The reviews for The Piazza Tales tell us that Benito Cereno was neither Melville’s best nor his worst received piece of writing, but many remark, as Curtis did, on its oppressive difficulty. One appreciative reviewer called it “a thrilling, weird-like narrative; which, read at midnight, gives an uncomfortable feeling” (Log, 2:516). Another found the story “most painfully interesting,” noting that “in reading it we became nervously anxious for the solution of the mystery it involves.” As if stumping for two readings, this reviewer concludes: “the book will well repay a perusal.” But the reviewer for Godey’s was less willing to put up with the discomfort that every other reader describes: there, the whole book is simply described as “confused and wearisome” (Log, 2:523).
Though such responses form an inevitably partial record of the story’s first reading(s), they sound a remarkably unified note: the story is as disconnected, “spun-out,” “dreary,” “weird,” “uncomfortable,” “painful,” and “anxious[-making]” as it is “thrilling” or “interesting.” The uniformity of these early responses aside, however, few (if any) more recent readers have treated Benito Cereno as anything other than holistic monument. Its genre is often in question—it is variously described as a story, a tale, and a novella—but its aesthetic oneness with itself is rarely questioned. When it is conceived of as having parts, they are formalist projections: we sometimes speak of a “frame” for the scene on board the San Dominick or of the “appendage” (or “insertion”) of certain legal materials near the story proper’s end.
But there is another way to think about the parts of Benito Cereno, and that is to consider its original serialization. We do not really know how Melville composed the story, but we do know how it was composed in type for Putnam’s and then reset (virtually as is) for publication in The Piazza Tales.18 It appeared piecemeal in three successive issues of Putnam’s in October, November, and December of 1855, and the narrative caesurae that interrupt each section would appear to be as purposefully staged by Melville as many of the San Dominick’s spectacles are staged by Babo. For example: the break that ends the first installment feels very like a conclusion, as if Melville knew he were writing the end of the first installment when he composed it (which, indeed, he may have). Thus Putnam’s readers who read the entirety of the October 1855 section of the story were treated to the following summation on its final page: “Such were the American’s thoughts. They were tranquillizing [sic]…. Nevertheless, it was not without something of relief that the good seaman presently perceived his whaleboat in the distance. Its absence had been prolonged by unexpected detention at the sealer’s side, as well as its returning trip lengthened by the continual recession of the goal.”19 Most readers who get to this point in the narrative are tranquilized, if not numb, by the interminably slow pacing of the plot. The story’s drifting winds and tides naturalize Delano’s wait, but they also serve to extend our own reading time, which, like Delano’s unexpectedly long visit to the San Dominick, is “lengthened by the continual recession of the goal” (narrative development, even more so than resolution). Progress of any kind, in other words, is entirely arrested in part 1 as plot and text align (uncomfortably) in the real time of reading. The crippling collapse of our own aesthetic reading time with Delano’s diegetic boat time is just one of many “tautologies” identified by Eric Sundquist in his magisterial new historicist rereading of the story, creating a shared tempo that forces every (first-time) reader into uneasy alignment with Delano and continually reminds second-, third-, and fourth-time readers of that initial mistake.20
Quite remarkably (for a serial fiction meant to attract further consumption), almost nothing happens in this first installment. Benito Cereno begins with Delano being awakened to observe the mysterious San Dominick, and the whole action of this section involves Delano getting up, getting dressed, journeying over to the mystery ship in a whaleboat, listening to Cereno’s story, and then observing a small number of inexplicable actions while he waits for his crew to return with water and food. By far, the primary action of part 1 involves the painstaking unfolding of Delano’s cognitive processes as he compares Cereno’s “tale” to the “stories” he has heard elsewhere. Delano’s “singularly undistrustful good nature” comes into direct conflict throughout this section with “the sort of stories” he has heard about “impostor[s],” “low-born adventurer[s]”, “conspirators,” “burglar[s]” “assassin[s],” and (most recurrently) “Malay pirates” (Oct.: 364, 365, 366). Hence the story flip-flops repeatedly, creating a tedious narrative zigzag: Cereno is a murderous “impostor” at one moment and merely a needy “invalid” the next (Oct.: 364, 357, 360). For readers of the first installment on first (or later) reading, there are few overt markers of a slave revolt. Suspense, such as it is, is entirely generated through Delano’s fantasy that he might have stumbled into some interracial pirate plot (after the fashion of The Many-Headed Hydra).21
Indeed, if part 1 has a theme, it is the slow pall of temporality itself. Perhaps this is why the most notable “event” in part 1 involves the appearance of Atufal, who stands before us as a marker of both boat time and our own elapsed reading time. As Cereno explains: “‘I could not scourge such a form. But I told him he must ask my pardon. As yet he has not. At my command, every two hours he stands before me’” (Oct.: 362). What Cereno draws attention to as “form,” Delano dubs both a “time-piece” and a “punctual shadow” (Nov.: 472 and Dec.: 633). Atufal is thus a sort of narrative clock, and, as readers, we can, if we like, mark time either by the narrator’s many careful and seamanlike references to the placement of the sun or by keeping track of Atufal’s staged appearances, which occur twice over the course of Delano’s visit—timing that (again) neatly coincides with our own reading time of that particular stretch of story. In this way, boat time becomes “now-time” (as Dana Luciano has called it)—for characters and readers alike.22
Against the temporal crawl of part 1, the second and third installments of Benito Cereno unfold—a little less slowly—the epic signs of a less phenomenological temporality, arriving finally (if uneasily) at the version of time that Homi Bhabha identifies with modern nationalisms—a time its adherents are willing to submit to because it promises to contain both the everyday and the hereafter of history.23 The slave revolt that is so well camouflaged in pirate’s dress in the first installment of the story comes much more clearly into focus in the second, which contains the story’s most celebrated and politically charged scene—Delano’s visit to the cuddy, where he clearly intuits the revolutionary potential of what Babo calls “shaving-time,” a powerful moment in which Delano finally/for the first time sees “in the black … a headsman, and in the white, a man at the block,” an insight which is then tranquilized (as the narrator might say) by the arrival of the long-awaited whaleboat in the closing pages of part 2 (Nov.: 467, 473). The second installment of the story thus ends with the following sentences, each given its own paragraph, perhaps because they compress time so much more radically than other parts of the story: “The ship was now within less than two miles of the sealer. The whale-boat was seen darting over the interval. // To be brief, the two vessels, thanks to the pilot’s skill, ere long in neighbourly style lay anchored together” (Nov.: 473).
It is not hard to imagine how exasperating it would be to be left hanging at precisely this juncture—not because of the exquisite production of aesthetic suspense but because of the continual return of its lack. Perhaps it is not so surprising, then, that just as the endings of the first two installments seem intentionally to spoil the story’s potential for desirable suspense, so the opening pages of the third installment defy the conventional rules of narrative plotting by giving away the solution to the plot in the first pages, rather than building and then releasing narrative tension over the course of many pages. For the stalwart reader who was still following along with the serialized version, the third installment opens almost immediately with the revolt’s unraveling and the mystery’s denouement. Having spent several months reading a story in which nothing happens—for the first two installments have virtually no action, little discernible suspense, and hence almost no potential for serialized pleasure—the reader is bombarded almost immediately with a dense succession of information and events—a radical shift in tempo from either of the earlier installments. Thus, as Babo’s plot is revealed, time compresses and collapses for both Delano and the reader (as the narrator famously remarks, “past, present, and future seemed one”; Dec.: 635). Indeed, the bulk of part 3, which focuses almost entirely on the legal disposition of the people and things “rescued” from the San Dominick, might be said to negotiate the present-tenseness of part 1 and the messianic (or revolutionary) temporality of part 2. It is here that Melville’s first reader, George W. Curtis, found aesthetic fault (finding the “dreary documents at the end” distastefully disconnected from everything that came before) and it is here that many recent readers have sought to allay that formalist criticism by making sense of the law as the key to the story’s various historical, philosophical, and theoretical (if not narrative) puzzles. It is here too that the narrative point of view shifts from a focalization on Delano to a more omniscient position. And it is here that Delano insists that “the past is passed,” while Cereno continues to morosely grieve (Dec.: 643).
I will resist the temptation to make every part fit, in the interest of making the opposite point, which is that the story ends in pieces: bones scattered across different burial sites, point of view shattered, Cereno’s mind unstrung, the San Dominick’s wealth redistributed, and a large number of the surviving slaves deported to different foreign markets. More notably, perhaps, Babo’s body is violently divided from itself (as slave rebels’ bodies often were), with his head, that powerful “hive” of collective “subtlety,” left on a stick in the town plaza, an ambiguous sign of his ongoing psychic power over Benito Cereno and his physical subjection to the power of the law, the state, and the paramilitary might of liberal seafarers like the American Captain Delano. In the end, the master plotter is dismembered, just as the story itself was published in three aesthetically unsatisfactory parts, subjected to the piecemeal logic of antebellum print culture and all its various generic expectations, which Melville by turns fulfills and frustrates. Scholars have frequently noted Melville’s alignment with Babo, the plotter (and the reader’s alignment with Delano, the naive reader). Here, the body of brilliant Babo is made commensurate with the material shape of an ungainly aesthetic object, its beautiful “form” (like Atufal’s) constrained by the temporal conditions of what can and can’t be said, by whom, and how.
Thus, as Maurice Lee has perhaps most powerfully noted, the story is as much about the theoretical conditions of certain forms of historical speech as it is about a particular slave revolt or social injustice.24 But if this is true, it makes the time of writing a matter of no less importance than the time of reading. As trivial as the conditions of a text’s publication and reception may seem hundreds of years after the fact (and as unseemly as it is to compare a fictional man’s corpse to a real man’s corpus), antebellum print culture—its commitment to disposable seriality and its fetishization of the freestanding and hence more durable book—forms the conditions of Melville’s ability to speak, to give an account of himself and of his contemporary world. The status of cultural production and consumption is very much on Melville’s mind here. It is no mistake that Delano repeatedly soothes himself, throughout his many anxious cognitive meanderings, by rehearsing a number of middle-class norms, pop culture commonplaces that float freely through the story, scattering themselves through Delano’s thoughts like a “tranquillizing” [sic] narcotic. When brought below deck (to the same place where Don Aranda has recently been flayed alive), Delano prefers to imagine that he is visiting the country house of some “eccentric bachelor-squire” straight out of Jane Austen (or a rural Ik Marvel), a man of leisure “who hangs his shooting-jacket and tobacco-pouch on deer antlers, and keeps his fishing-rod, tongs, and walking-stick in the same corner” (Nov.: 466).25 In this perilous setting, he likens Babo to a domesticated family pet (a “Newfoundland dog”), dubbing him a “natural valet[] and hair-dresser[]” while at the same time rationalizing the tension he observes (when Babo actually cuts Cereno in an effort to subdue him) as “a sort of love-quarrel” (Nov.: 463, 467, 469). Likewise, at the highest pitch of his suspicion in part 1 (just before the first installment breaks off—for a month—in the October issue of Putnam’s), Melville writes:
Scarce an uneasiness entered the honest sailor’s mind but, by a subsequent spontaneous act of good sense, it was ejected. At last he began to laugh at these forebodings; and laugh at the strange ship for, in its aspect someway siding with them, as it were; and laugh, too, at the odd-looking blacks, particularly those old scissors-grinders, the Ashantees; and those bed-ridden old knitting-women, the oakum-pickers; and, in a human way, he almost began to laugh at the dark Spaniard himself, the central hobgoblin of all.
(Oct.: 366)
Bachelors, dogs, servants, lovers—as well as minstrel-like “scissor-grinders” (earlier called “organ-grinders”), Dickensian “knitting-women,” and even Irvingesque “hobgoblins”—are the stuff of middle-class culture, reductive stereotypes and caricatures that Delano must labor to paste onto and over the scene he sees unfolding before him throughout those painful hours we spend with him aboard the San Dominick. Indeed, it hardly seems unlikely to imagine that Delano himself might have enjoyed a Putnam’s—or a Harper’s—subscription. He is that kind of cultural consumer, that kind of invested and willful mis/reader.
The pained and irritated responses of Benito Cereno’s early reviewers tell us that the narrative dialectic of disposable to durable reading with which I began was being played out very meaningfully in Melville’s material life as an author who was coping not just with the transcendent issues we associate with aesthetic masterpieces but with the material details of everyday life. It is clear from Melville’s correspondence that he wanted to publish his magazine fiction as a freestanding (and more durable) object and that he anxiously awaited news about The Piazza Tales’ early reception—whether in the form of praise or royalties. He queried his publishers in writing as early as August 1856 (only a few months after the book was in print), asking them to calculate its sales for him. The clerk who responded to his correspondence noted that sales were “dull,” but urged the author not to read too much into the present accounts, which were then forwarded to him (showing that the book was still in the red), and he pointed instead to the pure potentiality of the book’s future sales, which he assured Melville would be brisker in the fall season (Log, 2: 520).26
Melville’s clerk turned out to be wrong—or merely polite. Consumers in 1856 were not ready to make Benito Cereno—nor, indeed, any of the Putnam’s tales—appear immediately and obviously durable through a spontaneous act of conspicuous and enthusiastic mass consumption (like the remarkable one granted to Uncle Tom’s Cabin a few years earlier). Indeed, if Melville saw in book (as opposed to magazine) publication a potentially more durable artifact than the ephemeral mode of serial publication in magazines, his historical readers and reviewers steadfastly refused this distinction by continually marking the collection’s origins in the pages of various serial publications (like the ones their reviews appeared in). As one reviewer wrote in the New York Times: “Herman Melville’s Piazza Tales, taken as a whole, will not augment his high reputation…. ‘Benito Cereno’ is melodramatic [and] not effective…. The author of Typee should do something higher and better than Magazine articles.”27 In 1856 the more durable form of a book could not overshadow its origin in the more disposable form of mere “Magazine articles”—even though the formalist bias of almost every review insists on taking the collection (and each story, whether serialized or not) “as a whole.”
As such details suggest, Melville was enmeshed, like every writer, in the everyday minutiae of composition, publication, and reception, but, as his best readers have always recognized, he was also thinking on a grander scale than the problem of how one survives his (or her) own present tense in stories like Benito Cereno. Here he forces his reader to experience the discomfort of being in the present tense, but he also defers the value of his writing to a later moment of reception, playing with the very idea of a deferred interpretation (and thus reevaluation) in the diachronic structure of the two reading experiences he joins under one title. I have called these two readings the “disposable” and the “durable” readings, purposefully evoking the language of the ephemeral versus the language of the permanent in an attempt to capture not just how the technique works for readers but why Melville executed the story in this way. On one level, the story is Melville’s attempt to negotiate the quotidian everyday pain of his own experience of the antebellum present through a temporal deferral of the potential reception of his text. In doing so, he actually appears to have alleviated his own present tense pain as the author of several failed texts by creating what amounts to a painful reading experience for his readers (thereby redistributing some of the discomfort associated with writing texts for readers who do not appreciate them). But, as Elmer argues, the moment of production only forms a part of the literary event, which means that the meaning of the story is still unfolding with every new reading.
Today Again: When Double Reading Is a Dated Reading
I began this essay in 2007 and I complete it today in 2009. In the months and years that have intervened between drafts, epic historical changes have changed the way the world looks and the way we write and think in universities as well in newspapers, blogs, magazines, and books. This continues to be true, even though America has, in recent decades, repeatedly been told (or told others) that it (or they or we) have come to the end of history, a claim that (ironically) has attached itself to a series of unfolding events: the end of the cold war, the painful events of September 11, the decline of the interminable (double) Bush regime, the election of Barack Obama—all distinct events that have been accompanied along the way with the so-called decline of the nation-state, the rise of globalization, and the onset of global recession. The keywords of my lifetime, once I write them down, promise to make this essay another piece of ephemera in a world of disposable ideas, events, people, and things. Those keywords (this morning) are: Twitter, Madoff, Britney, healthcare. These four, and others like them, make up (or made up) the present tense of the essay you are reading, at the increasingly distant site of its production.
Like us, Melville experienced history in his own present tense, and his absorption in his own unfolding world is marked throughout The Piazza Tales in any number of highly contemporary allusions. “Bartleby,” most especially, makes explicit reference to the material everydayness of Wall Street, to “the late John Jacob Astor,” and to recent newspaper fodder (such as the Colt-Adams murder).28 Benito Cereno seems to intentionally place itself on a more vast historical (and geographical) stage, alluding to deep historical time through a series of references to church and state and insisting on a more distant date (1799) than the historical Delano and Cereno inhabited (though notably, the fictional Delano refuses to acknowledge himself as a character in history and instead posits himself as part of some dime novel plot). But the grandness of its temporal scale aside, Benito Cereno has been no less situated, for the last thirty years or so, in local discussions of United States slave culture. To good historicists, the keywords of the 1850s have seemed for some time rather obvious: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Bleeding Kansas, Harpers Ferry. My earlier list (Twitter, Madoff, Britney, healthcare) would seem to suggest that, at the start of the twenty-first century, history is not all that historical in the present tense. But the world of Benito Cereno is only historical in a way ours is not (yet), simply because of our distance from it. We are still (always) naive readers of the present tense, which must submit itself to a second (or third) reading before we can, as Delano says, “be certain” of what matters most to the future (Oct.: 365).
The story raises a series of questions about how one should deal with the uncertainties of the present. Readers can choose between two character positions, identifying with the cornered Benito Cereno (as Carl Schmitt did) or the naive Delano (as more contemporary readers sometimes do). But they can also choose between two interpretive positions—the naive or the knowing. As Dana Luciano has noted, the story is not invested in modeling “a new kind of character but a new kind of reader.”29 Yet Melville prescribes no clear directives here (short of rereading), which are left instead to be settled over time, again and again, in every new reading. Indeed, as the examples of Schmitt, James, Waters, Barber, Doolen, and Delbanco demonstrate, the answer to these questions must always be historical ones, depending on the fatal intersection of who and where (and when) we are. That aspect of the time of reading, once again, shadows the time of writing. The story is about what we can say and what we can know (or are ready to know) at any given point in time.
In the end, Melville models in Benito Cereno a version of a historicism that tarries—for the few hours when we are reading it—in the present. In doing so, the story collapses aesthetic reading time with historical time, making itself unsettlingly available to any reader’s everyday, no matter the decade or the century in which the story is consumed. Melville thus seems to point knowingly to the philosophical problems of time, of progress (or enlightenment), and of everyday life, but then again leaves them as he found them, unsettled. And why not? To do otherwise would be to enunciate a kind of temporal or developmental fanaticism, one not unknown in the West, either in 1855 or in 2001 or today—whenever that might be.30 That fanaticism is what we call modernity, and it’s safe to say that in whatever world my printed essay about Melville’s printed text circulates, some form of it is nearby, because print is, as a rule, a tool of such fanaticism, as are the conventions, in some sense, of literary criticism, which speaks always in the present tense of fictional plots, whether insurrectionist or not. In the end, Benito Cereno is “implicated in a social temporality that exceeds its own capacities for narration”—and, while Melville seems to know it, we often do our authors and ourselves the favor of trying not to notice that fact.31 It is a necessarily partial account of the enduring conditions under which we might give an account of ourselves in our own present tense—and, as such, it is a kind of social theory of nonfanatical progress, one that takes into account the many different cultural forms and artifacts through which any one person’s historical experience is first articulated and then, forever after, archived.
Notes
I thank the friends who helped me with this essay—Lara Cohen, Elaine Freedgood, Siobhan Somerville, and Joe Valente—as well as the participants, organizers, and audience of the American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions conference and the members of my spring 2009 “Scenes of Reading” seminar at the University of Illinois.
1. Herman Melville, Pierre, or The Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University, Press, 1971), 209.
2. On Schmitt, see Jan-Werner Muller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) 3, 40; Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 2002), 182–83; and Barbara Boyd, “Dick Cheney’s Éminence Grise,” Executive Intelligence Review 33, no. 1 (2006): 35–36.
3. Tracy B. Strong, “The Sovereign and the Exception: Carl Schmitt, Politics, Theology, and Leadership,” in Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), viii.
4. All Carl Schmitt passages cited here appear in German in Thomas O. Beebeee, “Carl Schmitt’s Myth of Benito Cereno,” Seminar 42, no. 2 (2006): 114–34. German portions of this essay were translated for me by Adam Chambers.
5. C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001), 5.
6. For three more examples, see Maurice S. Lee, “Melville’s Subversive Political Philosophy: ‘Benito Cereno’ and the Fate of Speech,” American Literature 72, no. 3 (2000): 513.
7. Lindsay Waters, “Life Against Death,” boundary 2 29, no. 1 (2002): 281, 283.
8. Benjamin Barber, Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism, and Democracy (New York: Norton, 2004), 72.
9. Andy Doolen, Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 189.
10. Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York: Vintage, 2005), 231, 242.
11. Waters, “Life Against Death,” 281.
12. Delbanco, Melville, 239.
13. For a more dialectically dense version of this same maneuver, see Paul Downes, “Melville’s Benito Cereno and the Politics of Humanitarian Intervention,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, nos. 2/3 (2004): 465–88. For another example of a purely allegorical substitution of one reader’s own historical moment for Melville’s (or Delano’s), see Robert Lowell’s 1965 theatricalization of the tale in The Old Glory: Endecott and the Red Cross; My Kinsman, Major Molineux; and Benito Cereno (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), which stages Babo as a 1960s civil rights figure.
14. For conference proceedings, see Jonathan Elmer, “A Response to Jonathan Arac,” American Literary History 20, nos. 1/2 (2008): 12–21.
15. Jay Leyda, ed., The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 1:466–67. Further page references to The Melville Log will be cited parenthetically in the text.
16. There is only one extended account of the contemporary reception of Melville’s magazine fiction: James L. Machor, “The American Reception of Melville’s Short Fiction in the 1850s,” in Philip Goldstein and James L. Machor, eds., New Directions in American Reception Study (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 87–98.
17. Serial publications in the nineteenth century were literally more disposable than they had been even fifty years earlier. Before 1820 it was not uncommon for families with subscriptions to newspapers and magazines to keep the entire run of such objects as family heirlooms—often binding them in leather folios for posterity. By the 1850s, serial publications were much less likely to be preserved. Even as early as 1839, Theodore Weld was able to compose most of his American Slavery As It Is by picking through the trash at Manhattan’s mercantile libraries, bringing home discarded newspapers and recycling them into clippings that would later form the bulk of Slavery As It Is. Even invested readers threw out their magazines: Melville himself, when putting together a clean copy of his Putnam’s stories for publication in The Piazza Tales, forwarded a request to Putnam’s for clean copies of the issues his work had appeared in, because he had not saved them: “upon looking over my set of magazines,” he wrote to his publisher, “I find two Nos., that I want, gone:—Dec. No. 1853, and Ap. No. 1854. Will you be kind enough to send those two Nos. to me by mail, so that I can do my share of work without delay” [sic]. Herman Melville to Dix and Edwards, Publishers (January 7, 1856) in The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 177.
18. We know the serialized version formed the exact basis for the later version included in The Piazza Tales, because Melville used the magazine’s printed pages as his proof sheets when preparing the collection for publication. Herman Melville to Dix and Edwards, Publishers (January 19 and February 16, 1856), in Davis and Gilman, The Letters of Herman Melville, 177, 179.
19. Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art 6, no. 34 (October 1855): 367. Further citations to the story will be inserted parenthetically in the text, with the month of publication and page number.
20. Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 135–225.
21. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2000).
22. Dana Luciano, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 209.
23. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation” in Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 291–322.
24. Lee, “Melville’s Subversive Political Philosophy,” 495–520.
25. On Melville’s attention to middle-class discourse, see Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
26. The August 30 statement showed that the tales cost $1048.62 to print and distribute, while sales had accrued $628.20 to the account, leaving the book over $420 from turning a profit. The ensuing season showed no better results for either Melville or his firm. In April of 1857, Melville’s publisher failed and sold the stereotyped plates of The Piazza Tales (and The Confidence Man) to another firm, which likewise failed in August of the same year. The plates were offered to Melville for purchase, but on September 15, 1857, Melville wrote to George Curtis saying that he “could not at present conveniently make arrangements with regard to [the plates]…. Do with [them] whatever is thought best.” Accordingly, on September 19, they were offered at auction. Though some plates sold for as little as $15, no one bid on Melville’s, and their disposal is unknown. See Herman Melville to George William Curtis (September 15, 1857) in Davis and Gilman, The Letters of Herman Melville, 188–89.
27. New York Times, June 27, 1856.
28. On these and other allusions to the contemporary world in Melville’s short fiction, see Dennis Berthold, “Class Acts: The Astor Place Riots and Melville’s ‘The Two Temples,’” American Literature 71, no. 3 (1999): 429–61; Barbara Foley, “From Wall Street to Astor Place: Historicizing Melville’s ‘Bartleby,’” American Literature 72, no. 1 (2000): 87–116; and T. H. Giddings, “Melville, the Colt-Adams Murder, and ‘Bartleby,’” Studies in American Fiction 2 (1974): 123–32.
29. Luciano, Arranging Grief, 210.
30. I owe the concept of temporal fanaticism to Elaine Freedgood.
31. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 8.