In Washington Irving’s “The Art of Book-Making,” one summer afternoon Geoffrey Crayon wanders into the British Museum. Briefly distracted by minerals, mummies, and hieroglyphics, Crayon sneaks through a door and finds himself in the museum’s reading room watching “studious personages, poring intently over dusty volumes, rummaging among mouldy manuscripts, and taking copious notes of their contents.” Call slips deliver to the desks the books from whose “sequestered pools” writers draw “to swell their own scanty rills of thought.” Books, Crayon concludes, are made from other books. Drifting off to sleep in the soporific atmosphere, he dreams of authors donning books like clothes and fitting themselves out by mixing and matching periods and styles. In his review of The Red Rover, Melville suggested a book should be “appropriately apparelled” and that in their bindings books “should indicate and distinguish their various characters” (PT 238). For Crayon, the contents of books are clothes an author wears. Eventually evicted as a poacher on this literary estate, he asks himself, “May not this pilfering disposition be implanted in authors for wise purposes; may it not be the way in which Providence has taken care that the seeds of knowledge and wisdom shall be preserved from age to age, in spite of the inevitable decay of the works in which they were first produced?”1 If the art of making books required such a “pilfering disposition,” then Melville was the Michelangelo of his age; a long-standing user and borrower of literary sources, he perfected the art in his magazine writing.
This chapter focuses on Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno,” where Melville’s literary pilfering took a new turn. We have long known that canonized mid-nineteenth-century writers dipped their buckets in the wells of popular literature and culture to hydrate their stories and characters. Like his contemporaries, Melville assimilated and transformed “key images and devices” from his social and literary milieu in a process David Reynolds describes as “the arrival at literariness after an immersion in the popular.”2 Melville’s pilfering of James Maitland’s A Lawyer’s Story for “Bartleby” is a case in point. And in his early novels he supplemented semi-autobiographical or original stories with other sources he consulted. But in his magazine writing, Melville did not just adapt “images and devices”; he rewrote already published narratives of real-life experiences: Henry Trumbull’s Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter (1824) and chapter 18 of Amasa Delano’s Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817). A writer’s job is always an epistemological labor that builds knowledge of the world in which he or she lives; Melville now added a metafictional copestone. Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno” are writing about the process of writing and publishing.
In this chapter I make several original claims: that with Israel Potter Melville showed himself the consummate editor of second-rate raw material; that in “Benito Cereno” he edited Delano’s original account into a prototype for the American psychological thriller; and that both texts are better understood as examples not of Melville’s immersion in the prosaic terrain of popular literary culture but of an embeddedness in which he was an editor and surrogate reprinter. Melville did not just rework generic characters or ideas; in Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno” his rewriting of existing narratives extends our understanding of what magazine writing involved to include the processes of editing and reprinting. Working and shaping material rather than inventing from nothing lies at the core of Melville’s art in this late magazine period. Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno” turn two-dimensional originals into three-dimensional copies. If, in the rush to interpret what their writings mean, we sometimes forget what writers do when writing and rewriting, one can say of “Benito Cereno,” for example, that only from Melville passing Delano’s account through his imagination do the meanings of that story follow. The important issue this chapter addresses, then, is not the distinction between high and low culture, but between writing and editing, plagiarism and innovation, and the unique and the generic text.
Identifying the sources Melville used in his writing and how he used them is an industry whose development began as soon as Melville published Typee in 1846 and matured with his recovery in the twentieth century. Melville’s first reviewers noted not just the obvious thematic resemblance of Typee to Robinson Crusoe but more specific affinities with nonfiction sea narratives such as David Porter’s Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean (1815) and Philip Carteret’s Account of a Voyage Round the World (1773). Mary Bercaw Edwards’s ledger of the first 140 years of this activity for all of Melville’s work is a model of broad and deep reading. She shows where Melville acquired his material: books he bought purposely to help him with his writing; books he chanced upon, such as Trumbull’s tale of Israel Potter; books friends and family lent him; and books read aloud in his family circle. Melville then used these sources in two ways: by incorporating old facts in new narratives, and by editing and adapting already published narratives.3 The only instances of this second approach are Israel Potter, “Benito Cereno,” and the Indian-hater chapters of The Confidence-Man, which adapted part of James Hall’s Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the West (1835). All, that is, come from the end of Melville’s fiction-publishing career.
The difference between Melville’s working method for his earlier work and for Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno” is evident when one compares these later narratives with Typee. John Bryant’s forensic analysis of that novel’s composition puts to rest the idea that Melville sat with sources open before him as he started writing. Bryant shows that Melville wrote an initial, much shorter, version of Typee and then expanded it with additional material he foraged from David Porter and another key source, Charles Stewart’s Visit to the South Seas, in the U.S. Ship Vincennes, during the Years 1829 and 1830 (1831). So the use of his sources “most certainly occurred late in the compositional process” once Melville ran out of his own anecdotes.4 Moby-Dick followed the pattern of Typee: a core narrative supplemented by the sources Melville had read or was still reading until quite late in the writing cycle.5 Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno” reversed this method. Rather than supplementing his own work with sources, Melville supplemented sources with his own work.6 Here he returned to a method that occupied him immediately before he started writing for magazines. The Isle of the Cross reworked a story Melville heard from his father-in-law’s colleague John Clifford, and which Clifford then wrote down in a letter to Melville on July 14, 1852 (C 621–25). That novel does not survive to show how Melville imagined and fictionalized the story of Agatha Hatch and James Robertson. Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno” suggest that Melville understood how he could edit and rewrite narratives to enhance, enliven, and deepen the original kernel of stories contained in these sources.
In either of the modes in which Melville used sources, the specter of plagiarism is never far away. But copyright legislation was in its infancy in the 1840s and 1850s, and the idea of ex nihilo creativity was not universal. Writers and thinkers, Robert Macfarlane argues, “began to speak out against the overvaluation of originality as difference”; other models “envisaged creativity as a function of the selection and recombination of pre-existing words and concepts.”7 With Melville, the relativist position on plagiarism holds sway.8 John Bryant makes a convincing case for Typee that plagiarism and appropriation are forms of textual version or revision. Manifesting itself as “a kind of problematic quotation,” such plagiarism becomes “one writer’s synecdochal version of another writer’s writing.” Melville used this method strategically to make the “canny observation that the media through which readers learn of distant places distort rather than illuminate the reality of colonial Pacific life” and “to awaken his readers to their unacknowledged complicity in that process.”9 Revising one’s literary borrowings, then, becomes part of Melville’s creative process; recasting pilfered material is a form of intertextual monkey-wrenching that realigns the cogs and rods that make up the machinery of meaning.10
With Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno” Melville faced a new challenge. “Bartleby” soon abandoned Maitland’s The Lawyer’s Story, and there is no evidence Melville owned or read Maitland’s book beyond the initial chapter published in the New York City press. Never before had Melville taken a self-contained, published work and made it the basis for one of his own narratives. We can only speculate why he decided to try this literary formula. Perhaps the experience of hearing Clifford’s tale of Agatha Hatch and his writing of The Isle of the Cross alerted him to the compelling nature of everyday stories circulating in the shadows of American culture. We know the story of Israel Potter’s life had been exercising Melville since at least 1849, when he travelled to Britain and France. In his journal, he notes buying a London map of 1766: “I want to use it,” Melville wrote, “in case I serve up the Revolutionary narrative of the beggar” (J 43). That both Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno” are historical stories based on real events also gave Melville the opportunity to reflect on the way those events filter into the world in which they occur and into the narratives by which the past is understood in the present.
Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno” may also mark the waning of Melville’s faith in his capacity to generate original fiction. Only The Confidence-Man would appear after the end of his career at Putnam’s and Harper’s, one last hurrah in the face of declining health, sales, and public recognition. Nina Baym makes the bold but compelling claim that even from the beginning of his writing career Melville “had no great respect for fiction” and moved from “impatience with its demands to a clear sense that fiction and truth telling are opposed activities.” The provisional and constricted short form of magazine writing suited Melville better because the guiding principle of the short form was “limitation rather than freedom.”11 The caveat here is that Israel Potter is a long form in the guise of a short form: a novel written in serial. Neither by magazine standards was “Benito Cereno” short. Magazines serialized some stories that were not full-length novels, but by far the majority appeared in a single installment. The limitation Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno” work within is not length but their conspicuous reliance on a source story.
For this reason, I treat Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno” as angular inhabitants of what Meredith McGill calls the “culture of reprinting.” The 1790 U.S. Copyright Act granted copyright for a term of fourteen years, with a right of renewal for another fourteen years if the author survived to the end of the first term. The case of Wheaton v. Peters (1834) muddied the waters, however, by ruling that an author controlled the first but not subsequent publications of a work. This legal case helped maintain the ready and cheap supply of imported literature and hindered for a time the publication of American-authored books. Reprinting was not plagiarism, since works were usually published under the name of the original author. Neither was reprinting a form of piracy; without copyright laws, the republication of works was legal and commonplace, particularly in the 1830s and 1840s. And with reprinting came editing. Melville carried out root-and-branch editing work in Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno” rather than subtle variation. Authors are not usually thought of as reprinters, partly because, as McGill writes, “the subject of reprinting is significantly larger than the question of how authors are situated or how literary texts circulate and signify within this system.”12 As should be clear by now, however, in this book I am more interested in what authors do within systems than with what systems do with authors, and in what specific ways the culture of reprinting leeched into authorial activity still remains unclear.
Seeing Melville as a reprinter is certainly to broaden and rework McGill’s concept, but like all great enabling ideas the “culture of reprinting” works best when seen as a continuum rather than a specific condition. With Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno” Melville took an original text, edited it, and republished it for profit in a different format. This was not the same as a New York City printer taking a British book recently arrived by ship from London, setting it in new type, and selling the resulting book to an American public without recompense to the original author. But the two acts share a family resemblance. Nor was Melville’s example simply an editorial reworking. Editors help change and shape the work of others. All writers edit themselves, but Melville was editing other texts and then publishing them, at least when they appeared in book form, under his own name. Neither plagiarism nor invention, what Melville does to Trumbull’s or Delano’s narrative seems closer to McGill’s idea of reprinting than to Reynolds’s understanding of a work’s “arrival at literariness after an immersion in the popular.” Although not themselves responsible for the physical reprinting of other texts, authors can be surrogate reprinters when, as in Melville’s case, they pass on these texts in reworked form to physical publishers. Surrogate reprinting is one more example of Melville’s embeddedness in the material creation of magazines.
Magazines themselves were apt vehicles for editing and reprinting because of their composite nature. Magazines recycled and reprinted at will and with varying commitment to attribution. Even a magazine like Putnam’s, which prided itself on origination, relied on a conceit: that the magazine had a continuous identity beyond the monthly production schedule and the collective of writers who provided content. But the Putnam’s name, as I noted in chapter 3, continued through various changes in editorship and ownership. The job of these editors and owners was to condense into a serene title the hidden activity of production. Magazines were ultimately wrappers that sold themselves by absorbing writers’ labor into the owner’s brand. Faith in anonymity meant that Putnam’s more than other magazines worked hard to maintain this conceit. Melville inhabited the conceit and embedded himself within it. He made himself into a magazine editor when he took on the job of altering Trumbull’s and Delano’s work in his rewriting of Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno” for the pages of Putnam’s. Stretching the parameters of the conceit to edit dead writers and forgotten writing rather than new and contemporary work, Melville upcycled his sources with a flair Briggs and Curtis might have envied.
During his British Museum reveries about how books are made from other books, Geoffrey Crayon extends the metaphor of reuse: “Thus it is in the clearing of our American woodlands; where we burn down a forest of stately pines, a progeny of dwarf oaks start up in their place: and we never see the prostrate trunk of a tree mouldering into soil, but it gives birth to a whole tribe of fungi.”13 The kind of replenishment envisaged here—turning pine into oak, rotting into living matter—occurs in literature not organically but in the minds and hands of embedded authors when they work with the materials at their disposal. As I noted in the introduction, the centralization of publishing from the 1850s on meant that Melville was writing in a magazine world in which origination and iteration were unevenly changing positions. Editing and reprinting old narratives, he had one eye on each of the waxing and waning worlds of print. Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno” were both iteration and origination.
What attracted Melville to the serial form is not clear, although the terms of his initial letter to Putnam on June 7, 1854, suggest money was a key motivation. Melville had already offered Israel Potter to Harper’s but was met with silence because the magazine did not serialize American fiction at this time. In the United States and Britain, weekly and monthly magazine novels became increasingly popular beginning in the mid-1840s, after the initial success of pirated novels in story papers like Brother Jonathan and The New World. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, serialized in The National Era in forty weekly parts, indicated the potential of this mode of publication; Robert Bonner at the New York Ledger was soon adding tens of thousands of subscribers with popular serializations by Fanny Fern and E. D. E. N. Southworth.14 With his letter Melville enclosed the first sixty pages of Israel Potter. He asked for an advance of $100 and agreement that “not less than the amount of ten printed pages (but as much more as may be usually convenient) [are] to be published in one number” (C 265). One can best judge Melville’s negotiating skills, and his value to the magazine, by observing that Putnam offered neither the advance nor the guarantee of a ten-page minimum. Melville received five dollars a page as for all his work for the magazine; five of the nine installments were less than ten pages.
Only an incomplete transcription of Melville’s letter to Putnam survives. The transcription breaks off just as Melville seems on the point of providing the “more particular understanding” of the manuscript he is enclosing (C 265). This is as close as he gets to explaining his reasons for basing his serial so closely, at least in the first part of the manuscript, on Trumbull’s story. What he wrote we can only surmise. Walter Bezanson suggests that Melville felt obligated to explain his adaptation to Putnam, though quite why is not immediately clear given that Putnam had just rejected “The Two Temples.” Melville’s reassurances that the new serial contained “nothing of any sort to shock the fastidious” (C 265) more likely suggest a publishing relationship where power resides with the publisher. Putnam’s refusal of Melville’s terms suggests likewise. As for the reliance of Israel Potter on Trumbull’s narrative, the time for Melville to tell Putnam that the serial “was to be basically a rewrite job,” Bezanson argues, “was now rather than after the critical vultures could move in, and it is probable that in the passage omitted from the letter Melville explained his intentions” (IP 183). While this seems a reasonable assumption, Melville was rarely forthcoming with magazine editors and owners about the content of his writing. What is remarkable about much of Melville’s professional magazine correspondence is precisely the lack of discussion. This one missing letter may, of course, be simply a departure from his usual practice. But there is no evidence that when submitting “Benito Cereno”—a piece just as reliant on Delano as Israel Potter is on Trumbull—that Melville felt it necessary to offer a similar explanation.
While the “particular understanding” Melville provided for Putnam remains a mystery, that Melville sent only the first sixty pages of Israel Potter offers some clue to the story’s composition and Melville’s conception of what he wanted to achieve with the work. A sensible assumption is that the sixty pages were all Melville had written to date. “It is quite possible,” Bezanson notes, “that Melville did not know yet that he would abandon sustained use of the Life in the next batch of writing” (IP 183). The “next batch” were the chapters on Potter’s meeting with Franklin in Paris, from which point Melville’s narrative—before rehabilitating one or two incidents toward the end—dramatically diverges from Trumbull’s. Sheila Post-Lauria argues that once Putnam’s accepted the serial Melville changed his original intention to write a derivative, paraphrased biography of the sort favored by Harper’s and instead wrote a challenging, evaluative biography better suited to Putnam’s more demanding and intellectually discerning tastes.15 Post-Lauria conveniently ignores the first chapter of Melville’s Israel Potter, which adds entirely new material to the Trumbull version and would have been part of the first sixty pages sent to Putnam. Even leaving this aside, her argument seems to contradict Melville himself: what he pointed out to Putnam was that the new serial, as well as containing “nothing of any sort to shock the fastidious” also has “very little reflective writing in it; nothing weighty. It is adventure” (C 265). Either Melville was selling Putnam short or, more likely, he knew exactly how his narrative would develop and the adventures he would add as Potter moved from Franklin’s company into the company of John Paul Jones.
What neither Bezanson nor Post-Lauria credits is what we know for sure: that Melville read Trumbull’s book at some point in the 1840s and had been thinking of writing a narrative based on it for at least five years. It’s certainly possible that Melville did not plan his own work chapter by chapter; much less likely is that he would embark on a long piece of writing after such a gestation period, and commit to the monthly cycle of writing, without a clear idea about how he would supplement and improve Trumbull’s version. The best proof of Melville’s preparedness comes from Trumbull’s narrative itself. From the point at which Trumbull’s Israel finds he can longer travel between London and Paris because “all intercourse between the two countries was prohibited”—on page 51 of the book’s 108 pages—all thereafter becomes a sentimental tale of Israel’s wretched life in London: bouts of poverty, imprisonment, the death of his wife and nine of his ten children, and his continual hard labor, either in a brick factory or as a chair mender. These are hardly the “Remarkable Adventures” promised in Trumbull’s title. Melville even offers his own commentary on Trumbull’s version of Potter’s woes: “Best not enlarge upon them. . . . The gloomiest and truthfulest dramatist seldom chooses for his theme the calamities, however extraordinary, of inferior and private persons; least of all, the pauper’s” (IP 161). Melville does follow Israel to the brick factory and back to the United States, but the more likely reason he gave up on Trumbull’s narrative after the Franklin encounter is that there was very little good material left to work with.
The declining adventurousness of Trumbull’s narrative may itself have been intentional. Trumbull had few literary credentials; he was a hack writer of cheap popular books. He became a newspaperman when he took over the running of the Connecticut Centinal from his father and worked with Nathaniel Coverly in Boston on The Idiot, a weekly gossip sheet. Truth little bothered Trumbull. He was, according to David Chacko and Alexander Kulcsar, “one of our early and most prolific literary liars.”16 The purpose of Trumbull’s narrative, which he freely admits in the preface, is to advertise Potter’s plight in the hope that the Revolutionary War veteran might secure before dying the pension recently refused him by the American government. In light of this context, the aim of the sentimental second half of Trumbull’s book seems best suited to generate a sympathetic response from the pension administrators. Melville may not have known the true events of Potter’s life; he was a skilled enough reader to know when a story was treading water for sentimental effect. What Melville did, as he wrote to Putnam, was to provide the “adventure” that improves the second half of a narrative heading nowhere. The continuity of this adventure was also vital to the serial form in which Melville wrote Israel Potter.
Newspapers recognized Melville’s authorship and his efforts as the serial began to appear, though none questioned, probably because they did not know, that they were reading a new version of an old story. The New York Commercial Advertiser of July 3, 1854, called “Israel Potter” the “greatest literary attraction” in the July issue of Putnam’s, and praised Melville’s “original American romance” as “much more interesting, and likely to be much more popular than even his admired narratives of South Sea adventures.” In September, the New York Citizen claimed that “Melville is reaping fresh honors in his ‘Israel Potter.’” In January the same paper described it as “a stirring narrative, and admirably written; so that if you begin you must finish it” (IP 209–10). Almost as soon as the serial ended in the March 1855 issue of Putnam’s the book version appeared. Reviews were mainly positive, though often short; major magazines like Harper’s, Graham’s, and the Southern Literary Messenger did not register their opinions. The reviewer in Putnam’s, however, thought he had caught Melville out.
Melville’s new preface to the book edition takes the form of a dedication. The figure of “The Editor,” who poses as its author, admits that the following narrative is drawn from an earlier account—“forlornly published on sleazy gray paper”—a tattered copy of which he has “rescued by the merest chance from the rag-pickers” (IP vii). To the reader unfamiliar with Trumbull’s version, this morsel of information works as a standard literary device, much like Irving’s ruse of finding “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in the papers of Diedrich Knickerbocker, or Hawthorne’s narrator finding in the custom-house Jonathan Pue’s original that he rewrites in The Scarlet Letter. The Putnam’s reviewer, however, notes that the original of Israel Potter “is not so rare as Mr. Melville seems to think. At any rate, we have a copy before us, as we write.” While he points out that Melville “departs considerably from his original,” the review finishes with a barb: “How far he is justified in the historical liberties he has taken, would be a curious case of literary casuistry.”17 Being thrown under the carriage by one’s own publisher was certainly a novelty for Melville. Had he after all, Bezanson asks, “not forewarned Putnam? Or had Putnam not passed the word along? . . . Or did someone on the staff, feeling that the magazine, or the public, had been duped, take this means to even the score?” (IP 218).
The answer is that Putnam was no longer Putnam’s. The founder from whom the magazine took and kept its name had relinquished his management and ownership of the magazine. The May 1855 issue in which the review of Israel Potter appeared was the first under the new ownership of Dix & Edwards and the editorial control of Curtis, Dana, and Olmsted. Melville may still have been a Putnam’s author, but the magazine had nothing to gain from a positive review of a book published by G. P. Putnam & Co. Neither did Curtis have anything to do with the commissioning of the magazine version of “Israel Potter”; his furlough from the magazine began in July 1854, just as Melville proposed his serial to Putnam. Curtis’s misgivings about “The Bell-Tower” and “Benito Cereno” would follow later in 1855. The review of Israel Potter in Putnam’s is anonymous, but the likeliest reviewers are Curtis or Dana. Trumbull’s book was originally published in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1824. Curtis was born in Providence that same year; although schooled for a short time in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, he returned to Providence during the 1830s and was there through late March and April 1855, the time when someone wrote the Israel Potter review. It is very possible that Curtis wrote the review and that its spirit was to signal a new beginning for the magazine. He had already written to George William O’Connor in March indicating that he hoped the “new regime . . . is to be better than the old.”18 There was no better way to achieve this new regime than by separating the magazine from the work and the literary judgments of the old regime, especially in a review of a book too reliant for the reviewer on the old than the new.
Melville’s interpretation of Trumbull’s narrative, the transformation from book to serial, and the additions he makes are lost on Curtis (or whoever was the Putnam’s reviewer), but these editing techniques transform the original story. The editor in Melville saw that the balance between narrative time and historical time, while workable at the beginning of Trumbull’s book, are out of kilter thereafter; he rectified this limitation by working in the spirit of the first part of the narrative—placing an ordinary man into historic events and connecting him to heroic historical figures—and imagining the serial dramatic action that might ensue if an author was given license to invent. The resulting shift in the story’s center of gravity means that while Potter spends as much time in penury in Melville’s version as he does in Trumbull’s, Melville condenses these forty-five years into a single short chapter. Melville did not need to appeal to the sympathy of Washington’s pension bureaucrats; he was engaged in literary pursuits and his editing and rewriting of Trumbull’s narrative produced several literary adjustments faithful to both the spirit of experimentation and the limitation of the magazine form. One key element was the addition of the preface to the published book. I deal with this last in part because it was the last change Melville instituted in his version but also because it suggests how he retrospectively imagined the narrative he had written for the pages of Putnam’s. The preface is an addition to, and a revision of, Melville’s own version of Potter’s narrative as well as an addition to Trumbull’s narrative.
The one editorial choice Melville made right from the very beginning was to prefer a third-person to a first-person narrator, a change he repeated when he rewrote Delano’s narrative in “Benito Cereno.” Freed from the necessity of personal appeal or pretensions to authenticity, Melville did not need Potter to make his own case. Neither did Melville require Potter, or Delano for that matter, to be a cerebral narrator like Ishmael. The events Potter experiences in Melville’s narrative certainly affect him, but they are too reliant on fortune to bring about the kind of character development one finds in a bildungsroman. Potter is tossed about not so much on the currents but on the waves of history, where there is little opportunity for his character to develop to a point where it might determine his fate. By changing from a first-person to a third-person narration, Melville turns Potter’s story from autobiography into fictionalized historical biography and creates the latitude to explore how a life intersects with history. In magazines like Putnam’s or Harper’s, which published nonfiction and fiction side by side, people were only a turn of the page away from national and international events, and Melville’s narrative neatly embeds this principle into its dynamics.
The third-person narrator in Israel Potter starts to develop in the first chapter the theme that history is geographical as well as temporal in order to create Potter’s historical presence. Where Trumbull’s Life begins with facts, dates, and events in mundane sequential order, Melville’s first chapter defamiliarizes the world out of which Potter appears in a manner well-suited to Putnam’s cosmopolitanism, a trait I discussed in chapter 3. The narrative does not start with the individual—the “I was born” character of Trumbull’s narrative—but with an anonymous traveler moving through space “in the good old Asiatic style” who finds a Berkshire, Massachusetts, that “remains almost as unknown to the general tourist as the interior of Bohemia”; a place where “you have the continual sensation of being upon some terrace in the moon. The feeling of the plain or the valley is never yours; scarcely the feeling of the earth” (IP 3). Spaces also change places with one another: what in summer are “wild, unfrequented roads . . . overgrown with high grass,” in the winter are covered “with the white fleece from the sky. As if an ocean rolled between man and man” (IP 6).
Growing up in this strange world where the sky becomes the ground, the ocean the land, Potter is a boy of the New England hills who little thinks when “hunting after his father’s stray cattle” that he will in turn “be hunted through half of Old England, as a runaway rebel” or that “worse bewilderments awaited him three thousand miles across the sea” (IP 6). Rooted and then uprooted, as time passes and history occurs, Potter will experience that history through his movement across space. The proleptic and catalyzing phrases of this first chapter add a scope and perspective in which the reader finds a character, “our hero” (IP 6), for whom history—the natural history of his environment, the cosmic history of the celestial landscape, the national history of New England settlement—is already set in motion. Having these passages told from the first-person perspective would equip Israel with too much knowledge of the world that awaits him; from the third-person perspective he is a character with a place in the scheme of larger things beyond his comprehension.
Melville uses the third person to similar effect in the battle between the Bon Homme Richard and the British warship Serapis. This was one of the major battles of the Revolutionary War, and the narrator registers the difficulty in following the events—“the intricacy of those incidents which defy the narrator’s extrication”—as they play out in the waters off the east coast of Britain (IP 120). For a fuller version of the battle, the narrator points the reader elsewhere, “because he must needs follow, in all events, the fortunes of the humble adventurer whose life he records” (IP 120–21). And while omniscience should be able to focus on more than one place at the same time, the narrator also notes that following Potter “necessarily involves some general view of each conspicuous incident in which he shares” (IP 121). The “general view” is geological, of the “incessant decay” as the coast “succumbs to the Attila assaults of the deep” (IP 121); positional, as the ships maneuver into view of another; and celestial, as the harvest moon rises like a “great foot-light” to “cast a dubious half demoniac glare across the waters” (IP 123). As the narrator watches the scene developing, so now in the moonlight do spectators from cliffs on shore. What they see is obscured by mist and cloud; into this opacity only the narrator can venture, “to go and possess it, as a ghost may rush into a body” (IP 124). Here the general view gives way to a more specific view, not of Israel, who is entirely absent for the time being, but of John Paul Jones as he “flew hither and thither like the meteoric corposant-ball, which shiftingly dances on the tips and verges of ships’ rigging in storms” (IP 126). Only as the battle commences in earnest does Israel reappear, at which point he responds to Jones’s order to throw a grenade aboard the Serapis.
The narrator’s awareness of perspective is one notable feature of the aesthetic tenor of this chapter, in which Melville’s writing in Israel Potter reaches its apogee, as Robert Levine rightly notes. Levine also points out Melville’s use of a wide range of allusions in the scene—to Milton, the Scottish poet James Macpherson, Mephistopheles, and the Guelphs and Ghibellines—that turn the battle into an aesthetic spectacle, one observed by the onlooking crowds. By transforming the revolutionary energies giving rise to the battle into the stuff of aesthetic contemplation, Levine argues, “the implication of this amazing scene, with its emphasis on crowds over nations, is that something further may follow from the battle between warships that would do justice to the battle’s incipient democratic energies—but not in Israel Potter.”19
But why not in Israel Potter? Why should a scene have an “implication” more important than what it achieves as a piece of writing? For Levine, Melville’s writing is a lesson: “we are encouraged to imagine new stories from the ‘mouldy rags’ we have been bequeathed.”20 As Melville transforms Trumbull’s “mouldy rags” into a new story, so democratic energies will follow if we learn this lesson. I prefer to see Melville’s writing as an action embedded in the process of turning a past into a present narrative; it was Melville who in Israel Potter imagined a new story out of the “mouldy rags” of Trumbull’s Life. What Melville does in the battle scene is to have his protagonist “share” the “conspicuous incidents” of which he is a part; the attention to narrative perspective, and the use of third-person narration, help achieve this end better than could a first-person narration. Rather than in an abstract aesthetic future, it is in this formal change, partly driven by the demands of appearing as a long-running serial in a miscellaneous magazine like Putnam’s, that the democratic energy of Israel Potter resides. Melville acts now, not at some point in the future, by lifting Israel from the “mouldy rags” of Trumbull’s narrative and having history share its events with him. Any democratic potential comes from not just observing aesthetic spectacle; Melville and Israel Potter make aesthetic spectacle out of the forms they use to create magazine writing.
Across the geographic spaces of his adventures, Potter develops an aesthetic presence befitting the status to which Melville raises him. Facts and details in Trumbull’s narrative rarely resonate beyond their moment of expression; in Melville’s hands they become the occasion of poignant connection or proleptic intent. In Trumbull’s Life, Potter takes to hunting after working as a chain-bearer for His Majesty’s Surveyors. Although skilled with his fowling-piece, Trumbull has him bluntly observe that General Putnam instructs Israel and his fellow soldiers at Bunker Hill to reserve fire “until the enemy approached so near as to enable us to see the white of their eyes.”21 Melville draws the line that links hunting animal and human prey: “It never entered his mind, that he was thus qualifying himself for a marksman of men. But thus were tutored those wonderful shots who did such execution at Bunker’s Hill; these, the hunter-soldiers, whom Putnam bade wait till the white of the enemy’s eye was seen” (IP 9). Melville also enhances Potter’s preparedness for Bunker Hill by inventing for him a whaling career absent in Trumbull’s narrative. Promoted to harpooner, Israel, “whose eye and arm had been so improved by practice with his gun in the wilderness, now further intensified his aim, by darting the whale-lance; still, unwittingly, preparing himself for the Bunker Hill rifle” (IP 10).
Melville sees in Trumbull’s narrative a life unfolding in front of itself that, with some judicious editing, becomes a life with meaning rather than a ghostwritten list of facts and events. That a “little boy of the hills, born in sight of the sparkling Housatonic, was to linger out the best part of his life a prisoner or a pauper upon the grimy banks of the Thames” (IP 6) is a fabrication of Melville’s making but nevertheless truer to the spirit if not the reality of the life of the Rhode Islander Israel Potter. Melville introduces the habitat of the Berkshires he knew so well to create a ligature between a life’s opening and its unfurling. When Potter sets off to sell the skins that are the bounty from his hunting, Melville imagines him as “a peddler in the wilderness,” much like the porters who “roll their barrows over the flagging of streets” (IP 9). Foreshadowing Israel’s experience of wandering the flagged streets of London looking for chairs to mend, Melville adds and connects in the way an editor might suggest; he has the narrative refer backward and forward in a way Trumbull either could not imagine or could not execute. Melville’s narrative has a shape, a sense of place, and a sense of character and personality. In Trumbull’s account Potter’s life simply happens; there are incidents but no character, actions but no thought. By embedding his writing in the writing of another author Melville edits Trumbull’s Potter into a serial narrative suitable for the magazine form.
He also finds more ways to ornament his raw material. He ventriloquizes characters Trumbull leaves silent: the incompetent soldiers from whom Israel escapes before heading for London (IP 17); Sir John Millet, who guesses Israel’s nationality and status as escaped prisoner of war but gives him work and wine nonetheless (IP 26–27); and, more memorably, George III when Israel gets a job at Kew Gardens. In Trumbull, Israel has “frequent opportunities to see his Royal Majesty in person” and is one day “unexpectedly accosted by his Majesty.” Melville has Israel observe the king slyly before their first meeting: “Israel through intervening foliage would catch peeps in some private but parallel walk, of that lonely figure, not more shadowy with overhanging leaves than with the shade of royal meditations” (IP 29–30). Melville adds the thoughts these glimpses inspire in Israel—“unauthorized and abhorrent thoughts,” “dim impulses” of regicide that “shoot balefully across the soul of the exile” (IP 30)—that then disperse following his conversation with the king. The voices Melville adds to Trumbull’s narrative turn the two-dimensional into the three-dimensional and effect a similar transformation of Israel himself, who shows a capacity for thinking when he drops from Melville’s pen. One of the things he lights upon is the paradox that “the very den of the British lion, the private grounds of the British King, should be commended to a refugee as his securest asylum” (IP 29). This is not the first time, and far from the last, that being hidden in plain sight features as a narrative conceit in Melville’s rewriting of Potter’s story.
Several of these incidents occur as Israel tries to find a way of being “appropriately apparelled.” He discards old clothes that give away his identity for new ones that will deceive his pursuers and enemies even as they foretell his future. Changing his “prince-like” clothes for the “wretched rags” of a ditcher, he finds himself wearing an outfit “suitable to that long career of destitution before him.” In the patchwork coat and stringless breeches, Israel “looked suddenly metamorphosed from youth to old age” in dress that “befitted the fate” (IP 19). When he is inadvertently separated from John Paul Jones during an encounter with a British frigate, Israel—having shuttlecocked between British, American, and again British vessels—understands that “some audacious parade of himself offers the only hope” of preserving his freedom (IP 133). Dropping his jacket overboard, he has to rely on his wits after finding himself “black-balled out of every club” aboard ship (IP 136). When an officer asks “who the deuce are you?” (IP 137)—a question he twice repeats during the ensuing conversation—Israel blusters, invents, and plays the fool in order to outlast his interrogators. Under the pseudonym of Peter Perkins he manages to see out the voyage, swims ashore one night from the ship, and finds “some mouldy old rags on the banks of a stagnant pond” to replace his seaman’s clothes (IP 152). Israel makes his way once more to London, where he lives the rest of his days before eventually finding a way back home.
The geographic adventures during which Israel meets history rely, then, on a succession of costume disguises. The same is true for other characters engaged in their own adventures. The narrator struggles to portray Franklin’s multifariousness in the language of clothing. Franklin “dressed his person as his periods” and with the biblical Jacob and the philosopher Hobbes forms a triumvirate of “practical magians in linsey woolsey” (IP 46–47). Given the variety of Franklin’s pursuits, the narrator feels “more as if he were playing with one of the sage’s worsted hose, than reverently handling the honored hat which once oracularly sat upon his brow” (IP 48). Clothes are the ornaments of character; as they do on Israel, clothes gesture toward, without defining, the individuals who wear them; and they hold identity at bay more than they are its incarnation. Who the deuce is Israel Potter, or Benjamin Franklin, or John Paul Jones? The history to which Melville returns Israel Potter and these other figures is one where not being what one seems is the lifeblood of narrative time. When Israel Potter is what he seems—a poverty-stricken chair mender scratching a living in a London—historical time and narrative time break apart and decades can pass in a single chapter. The London crowds may provide security for the persecuted man, but there is no place in history for the anonymous man those crowds create.
Finally, then, to the preface. It was not published in Putnam’s, and it is likely Melville wrote the dedication “To His Highness the Bunker-Hill Monument” near the time Israel Potter appeared in book form in March 1855. Melville’s brother Allan wrote to Augusta on March 1, 1855: “Herman’s book will not be out for a week yet. I was in at Putnam yesterday to get a copy but none were ready. He has sent a dedication to Bunker Hill Monument.” Because the dedication was news to Allan, who also assumed Augusta—Melville’s transcriber—did not know about it either, for Hershel Parker the “implication is that Melville had provided it for the book recently.”22 Walter Bezanson makes the point that if Melville wrote the dedication at this later date, and backdated the signature lines at the end of the piece “for historical and ironic effect” to Bunker Hill Day the previous year—“June 17th, 1854”—then “he was being literary rather than literal” (IP 191). This is a shrewd assessment of a dedication that appears, when one reads it at the beginning of the novel, to be the frame in which Melville composed Israel Potter. But the contrary is true: Israel Potter was the frame in which Melville composed the dedication. This is not to suggest that Melville was not conscious of the art he was creating while publishing serially in Putnam’s, but the post hoc dedication casts the person who pens it as an editor rather than a literary composer.
Melville wrote other prefaces to his novels, but never in the guise of an editor. Unlike Henry James’s prefaces, the spirit of Melville’s commentary on his own work is playful rather than analytical. Casting himself as editor rather than author, Melville did more than simply cover his tracks in case reviewers made the connection—as did Putnam’s—between Trumbull’s Life and Melville’s version. Anyone familiar with Trumbull’s narrative would know the editor is lying when he claims that what follows “preserves, almost as in a reprint, Israel Potter’s autobiographical story.” What the editor has done to Trumbull’s version amounts to much more than the “expansions, and additions of historic and personal details, and one or two shiftings of scene” he passes off as “a dilapidated tombstone retouched” (IP vii). By using the dedication to pull his own narrative into the orbit of an earlier version, Robert Levine argues, “Melville seems intent on writing a novel about the American Revolution that refuses to rise above the level of a ‘minor’ work.”23 But the dedication is more afterthought than signal of intent, especially as the novel was virtually unchanged from the magazine version. The preface is not of a piece with the rest of the narrative; Melville is constructing that narrative retrospectively and reading his own work as a reader might read “Benito Cereno” the second time around: with hindsight.
The judgment Melville exercises at this moment shows how he understood the composition of Israel Potter. Rewriting a narrative from a specific source for the first time, rather than supplementing his own work with sources, Melville poses as an editor rather than an author. Melville is acting like the reprinters who added prefatory matter to their editions of reprinted stories and books. He recognizes the connection between editing and reprinting and his role as a reteller rather than an originator of stories. The close attention he pays to the material status of the object he is working with also indicates the value of these roles. The editor takes something first “forlornly published on sleazy gray paper” and picked up “by the merest chance from the rag-pickers” (IP vii). He then turns this cheap and worthless artifact into an object he considers fine enough to present to the Bunker Hill Monument. Melville’s editor turns rags into fine writing “appropriately apparelled” in the pages of Putnam’s and the cloth binding of G. P. Putnam & Co., whose edition of Cooper’s The Red Rover, with horseshoe embossing, Melville so admired.
Melville’s preface to Israel Potter nods to an earlier version of the protagonist’s life to show that copying is never plagiarism in the hands of a writer or an editor. As in some of his other magazine works, Melville turns to the material in both senses of that word when he wishes to affirm his authorship: in his contemplation of the paper on which writing takes place he generates the content that amply fills new sheets, magazines, and books. In “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” he focused on the process that produced the fine paper on which he set down his own words; in Israel Potter he trained his sights on how stories are made from other stories, books from other books. Somewhere amid these two processes is an idea that clothes and paper are never far apart and that neither, too, are clothes and books. Writers wear books like clothes in the way Geoffrey Crayon describes when he enters the British Library reading room.
What Melville would not have known when he edited and reprinted Trumbull’s narrative was that Israel Potter already existed in the world of books. In 1819 John Thomas Smith, who trained at the Royal Academy and went on to be Keeper of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, sketched a series of itinerant London traders for a work published posthumously in 1839 as The Cries of London. Alongside the rat-catcher and corpse-bearer, the bladder-man and the water-carrier, is the chair mender Israel Potter. Smith’s engraving of “one of the oldest menders of chairs now living” shows a mournful-looking Israel in cropped, ragged trousers, with rushes across his back should his cries elicit any trade. Smith is skeptical that much work comes Israel’s way. The matted mass of rushes go unused for months at a time; Israel is about the streets by 8 a.m. primarily to find “broken meat and subsistence . . . for his daily wants.”24
And Potter lived on after Melville: in Routledge’s unauthorized edition of Melville’s book, number 113 in their Cheap Series; and as The Refugee, an edition printed by T. B. Peterson, who bought the printing plates from Putnam and attributed two false works, The Two Captains and The Man of the World, to Melville on the title page. More bizarrely, Melville’s fiction about Potter became fact in Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1888). This book repeats Melville’s invention that Potter served under Colonel John Paterson, commander of a Berkshire regiment; the real Israel, of course, served in a Rhode Island regiment. Charles Edward Potter’s Genealogies of the Potter Families and Their Descendants in America (1888) repeated these mistakes (IP 280–81). All of which goes to show that there is a world of difference between copying and editing, between duplication and reprinting. It may not have been hard for Melville to improve on Trumbull’s Life, but none of the pilferers of Melville’s work managed to improve the editing job he did for Putnam’s when he created “a silk purse . . . out of a beggar’s pocket!” (IP 80).
Melville was likely filtering for some time the events Amasa Delano relates in chapter 18 of his Narrative to produce “Benito Cereno.” Where Israel Potter roamed across continents and oceans in breathless adventure and pulled in sources to enliven and extend the breadth of invention, “Benito Cereno” details a single event against whose narrating the deep waters of the Pacific seem to lap only gently until Melville unleashes their full force. During the winter of 1854–55, Melville finished a serialized adventure novel and moved on to write a groundbreaking short story that, although itself serialized, arrived in one piece in the offices of Putnam’s in April 1855, its inspiration undeclared.
“Benito Cereno” equally demonstrates Melville’s skill as an editor. Amasa Delano’s achievement was to take thrilling experience and turn it into the dust of a sea captain’s reflection; it could have been the evidence on which Tzvetan Todorov based his observation that “no thriller is presented in the form of memoirs.”25 Melville’s achievement was to edit Delano’s dust into the prototype of the American psychological thriller. Poe had explored the psychological recesses of the human mind more vividly than most writers in his magazine tales of the 1830s and ’40s. He adapted the traditional gothic tale of mystery and terror for an urbanizing sensibility whose sedimented fears Poe crystallized. But these tales do not match the narrative ingenuity evident in the stories of ratiocination featuring Dupin, where the treatment of temporality patented a formula for later writers in the detective genre. The psychological thriller actually requires much less terror, torment, and sensation than Poe provided. Above all it requires a narrative mode in which patience and elongation are as important as disruption and revelation. This is what Melville provided in “Benito Cereno” when his authorship fused with a preexisting narrative.
In this fusion, the story’s unfolding defiantly burst the banks of the magazine form. Even a magazine like Putnam’s, which prided itself on publishing new and original work, could not help but manage the printing of “Benito Cereno” awkwardly. Quantitatively and qualitatively, there was only so much newness the magazine could cope with. Too long for the editors to consider publishing it in a single issue, “Benito Cereno” was also a story too unified in its effect to withstand serialization. Moreover, it has a complex array of iterative and original attributes. Literally iterating another text by reprinting Delano’s original—although stripping out all the iterations that mark Delano’s text—it also originates a new text by editing Delano to produce new effects, new insights, and a new form. Even if unintentionally, “Benito Cereno” pulls us back to that transition between a culture of iteration and a culture of origination that McGill suggests is occurring in the 1850s. The story does so by embedding iteration and origination in its own narrative formation.
What Melville first saw and valued in Delano’s narrative must remain conjecture given the silence in which he composed his story. The only break in his silence occurred when he prepared his Putnam’s work for publication as The Piazza Tales. Initially, when the provisional title of the collection was Benito Cereno & Other Sketches, he appended “a M.S. Note” to “Benito Cereno.” He wrote to Dix & Edwards in February 1856 withdrawing the note, explaining that “as the book is now to be published as a collection of ‘Tales,’ that note is unsuitable & had better be omitted” (C 286). The contents of the “note” are unknown, but the difference between the more factual sketch and the more fictional tale suggests Melville saw no need to offer a qualification if “Benito Cereno” was to count as fiction. Even when that fiction—presumably unbeknown to the publishers—was so closely based on a factual, published account.
Yet why was it Delano’s narrative that Melville chose to edit and rewrite? The sea narrative is crucial. It returned Melville to an environment he understood better than most writers, and the Pacific location suited the cosmopolitan magazine environment of Putnam’s, whose articles regularly roamed the globe. But the slave revolt was an uncommon feature of magazine writing, even if revolts at sea were not themselves unusual. With the exception of Frederick Douglass’s fictionalization of Madison Washington’s Creole rebellion in The Heroic Slave (1853), such stories exercised nowhere near the same hold on the American imagination as the dozens of slave narratives circulating before the Civil War. Delano does not even make a particularly apt candidate for attack: at various points in his book he criticizes slavery and imperialism. Delano’s attraction to Melville, Robert Levine argues, “lay less in his villainy than in his geniality and liberality.”26 As he showed in White-Jacket on the subject of flogging, Melville was not interested in merely exposing evil: “It is next to idle, at the present day,” the narrator announces, “merely to denounce an iniquity. Be ours, then, a different task” (WJ 143). The “different task” he undertook in “Benito Cereno” involved accommodating a social position in which Melville was pulled in different directions.
He was not as compromised as his father-in-law, the antislavery judge Lemuel Shaw, whose support for the letter of the law twice saw him rule in favor of slave owners in Fugitive Slave Act trials. But Melville married into—and was himself a less august member of—a social class that had much to lose should political disorder affect the ship of state. The Astor Place riot of 1849, which erupted close to Melville’s home in New York City, was another mutinous event that critics argue forced Melville to confront his class anxiety and complicity in “Bartleby” and “The Two Temples.”27 In “Benito Cereno” and in the orbit of race, Melville once more tested, according to Levine, the “conflict between his political sympathies and his social anxieties”; between his contempt for “enslaving sea captains” and his fear that mutinies disrupted the social order he himself, and sea captains, were eager to preserve. Levine suggests that “to plumb this complicity” with the established order, Melville assumed for the first time in his writing the perspective of a sea captain during just such a mutinous episode.28
From within rather than without, then, does “Benito Cereno” put flesh on the bones of the story it edits and rewrites. This also required a counterintuitive formal gambit from Melville that rejects the inside accounts from Delano’s original narrative, which appear in three parts. The first is “an extract from the journal of the ship Perseverance, taken on board that ship at the time, by the officer who had care of the log book.” Two pages later, the second part begins. This is Delano’s own account: “some remarks of my own,” he calls them, whose purpose is to give the reader “a correct understanding of the peculiar situation under which we were placed at the time this affair happened.”29 The final part consists of court documents and depositions from the principle characters—Delano, Benito Cereno, and the midshipman Nathaniel Luther, who served on Delano’s ship—and letters between Delano and the King of Spain’s envoy following Delano’s return to Boston. These are all testimonies from within: reports and comments of the men who experienced and combated the slave revolt and those whose task it was to judge the rights and wrongs of “this affair.” But Melville chose to shun the form, if not the content, of the log and Delano’s personal account. And the only deposition he includes in his rewriting is Don Benito’s. So why abandon these narrative positions?
The “complicity” Melville addressed was too important to be left in the hands of such calculatingly official forms and characters. If the log is matter-of-fact in stripping out, simplifying, and summarizing the events on which Delano elaborates, the captain’s own account also displays from the beginning an air of defensive self-interest. Delano laments that he is “in a worse situation to effect any important enterprize than I had been in during the voyage,” mainly as a result of losing “extraordinarily good men” at New Holland who were “inveigled away from me” by Botany Bay convicts. Men of this ilk now also compose a good number of his new crew, having come aboard without Delano’s knowledge. Through “strict discipline” and “wholesome floggings” he maintains order across the South Pacific. At St. Maria, three of the Botany Bay men run from the boat once put ashore; the captain puts another five men ashore when they give reason to suggest they too might abscond. The captain keeps his whaleboat on deck to deter other would-be escapees. From this climate of suspicion Delano then commends his crew for their conduct in the events that follow: “In every part of the business of the Tryal, not one disaffected word was spoken by the men, but all flew to obey the commands they received; and to their credit it should be recorded, that no men ever behaved better than they, under such circumstances.”30 Delano combines the role of enforcer and benevolent defender.
No doubt Melville understood that these roles were part of the captain’s job description; that in just such combination did power seek to maintain order aboard ship in the weeks and months away from land. But in moving from one position to another in his narrative, Delano also demonstrates that he knows how to manipulate his role: to flog and succor as he deems fit. Or to line up the three narrative strands so they each repeat the same story. But all are tacitly blind to the subjectivity on which their apparent objectivity relies. Rather than accounts from within, they are retrospective accounts whose perspective is always external to the events themselves. Although written at varying distances from the events—the log is nearest; the trial next; Delano’s account on his return to America the last—like planets aligned the accounts manage to stand in harmony. But even an amateur astronomer knows that the planets never align; a writer like Melville forcedly attuned by his early reception to distinctions between fact and fiction, authenticity and romance, knew the perjury of alignment.
To write “Benito Cereno” from within, Melville cast the log and Delano’s preamble overboard. Melville also found no space for the defensiveness Delano continues at the end of his account, before the official documents, where he bemoans Don Benito’s attempt to injure his character. Melville also dispenses with an explanation of how the Bachelor’s Delight comes to be in St. Maria and whence it came. To rewrite the story from within, Melville actually dispenses with Delano’s voice and opinions, his justifications and defenses—all of which Delano offers after the fact—and instead takes up a narrative position that shows the events appearing and unfolding not as iteration but for the first time to Delano as they appear and unfold for the reader. The opening retrospection locating the reader in the year 1799 quickly gives way to a narrator who hovers impersonally alongside Delano rather than looking back at him. What lies ahead for the reader—on first reading at least—the narrative withholds. There are, then, no signs of the iteration that marked the original publication in Delano’s narrative. As he reworks an already published narrative that was itself written retrospectively, Melville strips out all signs of iteration.
By withholding knowledge of the mutinous crime from his narrative in this way, Melville undertakes that formal maneuver whereby the story of detection and investigation metamorphoses into the thriller. Rather than the story of a crime already known, whose investigation the reader follows, the thriller “suppresses the first and vitalizes the second” of these stories. In the thriller, Todorov explains, “we are no longer told about a crime anterior to the moment of the narrative; the narrative coincides with the action.”31 Here is the formal conceit that Melville uses to edit and rewrite Delano’s narrative from dry, self-defensive reflection into psychological thriller. Until the point when Don Benito leaps from the San Dominick into Delano’s boat, retrospection more generally gives way to the interplay of two other temporal modes with formal consequences for “Benito Cereno” as a piece of magazine writing: prospection and stasis. The tenor of Melville’s narrative suggests that while nothing is happening, something is on the verge of happening.
In the previous chapter I suggested the opening installment of “Benito Cereno” demonstrates that seeing is not knowing. The lack of clarity in Delano’s perspective as he moves closer toward and then onto the San Dominick also works to enhance the prospective nature of the narrative. Delano’s continued attempts to decipher what he sees introduce a narrative rhythm in which curiosity is paramount. On Delano’s behalf the narrator does not stop observing and speculating, and the second installment immediately revisits this theme. The speck Delano sees advancing toward the San Dominick carries the supplies for which he has sent; the captain’s eye, however, is taken by events on deck as “two blacks, to all appearances accidentally incommoded by one of the sailors, flew out against him with horrible curses” and “dashed him to the deck and jumped upon him.” When Delano asks Don Benito, “Do you see what is going on there? Look!” the Spanish captain staggers onto Babo’s supporting hand (PT 70). Don Benito sees exactly what is going on; in his own looking Delano does not.
Yet the question opens an interpretive gap that requires an answer not forthcoming. Babo’s actions instead “wiped away, in the visitor’s eyes, any blemish of impropriety,” and Delano’s glance is “thus called away from the spectacle of disorder to the more pleasing one before him” (PT 70). When Babo soon conducts Don Benito below deck, Delano is left rubbing his eyes when he thinks the Spanish sailors return his glance “with a sort of meaning.” Delano looks once more, “but again seemed to see the same thing” and “the old suspicions recurred” (PT 71). He asks questions of the sailors but concludes that “these currents spin one’s head round almost as much as they do the ship” (PT 73). Distracted by the “ribbon grass, trailing along the ship’s water-line” Delano finds himself “becharmed anew”; looking at the main-chains he once more “rubbed his eyes, and looked hard” but what he thinks he sees “vanished into the recesses of hempen forest, like a poacher” (PT 74). About these and other questions Delano finds himself “lost in their mazes” (PT 75). During the electrifying shaving scene, Delano finds his imagination “not wholly at rest” and imagines Don Benito and Babo “acting out . . . some juggling play before him.” In response, he can only ask himself another question: “What could be the object of enacting this play of the barber before him?” (PT 87). This and all the other unanswered questions, like the crescendo of interpretation that comes over Delano at the end of the first installment, are false summits. But rather than stopping one’s ascent they spur one on to reach the real summit where the narrative will provide answers.
The prospective rhythm of “Benito Cereno” is part of a larger narrative polyrhythm in which stasis also plays an important role. If the repetition of charged looks and glances—emblems of detection worthy of Poe’s ratiocinative hero Dupin—and asked and unanswered questions imply the prospect of future resolution, they also create a circular pattern where nothing seems to be happening except the same thing over and over again. The accumulation of repetition heightens a tension that ultimately needs resolving; each moment of irresolution leaves one no closer to that resolution.
The descriptive writing Melville adds to Delano’s account reiterates stasis. Immediately marooned on “a small, desert, uninhabited island toward the southern extremity of the long coast of Chili,” Delano finds that the measurements of geographic distance and time evaporate as grayness takes over: the “gray surtout of the cloud,” the “gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors” (PT 46). Distinctions of time and space are less easy to discern in such colorlessness and in “the shreds of fog here and there raggedly furring” the San Dominick (PT 48). Unlike in Israel Potter, where the movement of ships about the ocean provides a dramatic backdrop for Israel’s own movements, in “Benito Cereno”—at least until the slave revolt becomes known—neither the San Dominick nor the Bachelor’s Delight undertake any dramatic maneuvers. The reader spends little narrative time on the whaleboat “darting over the interval” between the two larger vessels (PT 95). And Delano’s piloting of the San Dominick to anchor beside the Bachelor’s Delight introduces movement to presage the resolution that follows shortly thereafter. As they lie becalmed through most of the story, so does the narrative action as Delano slowly—exceedingly slowly—accumulates moments of prospection whose resolution Melville withholds and withholds.
The rhythms of prospection and stasis certainly create a narrative tension in “Benito Cereno,” though whether this amounts to narrative suspense, if by suspense is meant excited expectation, is moot. The magazine context and the rewriting context offer some help in deciding the case. Trish Loughran notes of the story’s first installment as it appeared in Putnam’s that “quite remarkably (for a serial fiction meant to attract further consumption), almost nothing happens.” Her fascinating discussion of disposable and durable reading that follows—where the form of “Benito Cereno” consoles Melville’s dissatisfaction with present-tense readings by deferring its meaning for later readings—seems to rest on the assumption that Melville wrote the story with serialization in mind. But there is a difference between material written for serial publication—like the adventuring Israel Potter—and material only serialized at the point of publication. There is no evidence that Melville wrote “Benito Cereno” (nor “Bartleby” or “The Encantadas”) in serial form; he likely wrote and sent “Benito Cereno” to Putnam’s as a single manuscript. When Loughran suggests that “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,” she misses the point that the separation of the story into three parts in Putnam’s was the responsibility of the magazine’s editors, not Melville.32
There are practical oddities about the serialization of “Benito Cereno” that suggest likewise. Putnam’s serialized “Bartleby, the Scrivener” in two parts of eleven and six full pages; “The Encantadas” in three parts of nine, ten, and six full pages. These were much shorter installments than “Benito Cereno,” whose three parts took up fourteen, fifteen, and eleven pages. If Melville was writing with serialization in mind, then his experience of writing for Putnam’s would surely have led him to put possible installment breaks, even potentially disruptive ones, elsewhere. Putnam’s rarely published anything the length of the first two installments of “Benito Cereno.” Whoever sectioned “Benito Cereno” at Putnam’s made the breaks fit with the comings and goings of the whaleboat between the two larger vessels and the anchoring of the two ships beside each other. Loughran is right that serialization might make “Benito Cereno” a painful and frustrating read for a magazine consumer who must wait for the next issue. The third part does seem rushed when it reveals the slave revolt after only a couple pages, leaving the rest of the narrative to drift into what Curtis called the “dreary documents.” But does this make it more likely that Melville, not Putnam’s, sectioned the narrative? Another way to put this question is to ask whether the deferral of interpretation is Melville’s monkey-wrenching against the magazine form or whether the magazine form simply exposes its own constraints—miscellaneity, seriality—that in turn constrain the literary forms it can accommodate. Seriality, as Melville knew from writing Israel Potter, suits episodic narratives; the psychological thriller, however, is not an episodic form because tension must build continuously and iteratively.
This is the “almost nothing” that happens in the first part of “Benito Cereno.” But it is not that nothing happens; rather, what happens does so only very slowly and, because of the narrative perspective, does so mainly in the mind of Delano. To judge whether almost nothing happens in a narrative one must first have a sense of what needs to happen. Suspense can take several forms and is not necessarily apparent as the hooks, cues, and cliffhangers traversing each published installment and the next. What is more important about “Benito Cereno,” as Charles Swann points out, is that in “the original” on which Melville builds “there is no suspense, no narrative secret” because the story is told three times, and the first time within a few paragraphs.33 “Benito Cereno” does not conform to our contemporary understandings of suspense honed by decades of masterful generic accretion, but suspense was the most dramatic formal change Melville added to Delano’s narrative by stripping out its iterations. While we can speculate about whether Melville had serialization in mind when he wrote “Benito Cereno,” there is no doubt that in editing and rewriting Delano’s narrative he made formal decisions whose evidence is his version of the story.
The delay or anticipation of resolution is still suspense. The unfolding of Delano’s cognitive processes may well be a “painful” experience, as Loughran notes, for book as well as magazine readers, but painfulness is another side of the same coin as suspense. The reviewer of The Piazza Tales she quotes who finds the story “most painfully interesting” and who “became nervously anxious for the solution” registers just such an effect. Suspense, by definition, induces anxiousness; pain is not necessarily physical but a discomfort of the mind experienced as annoyance, vexation, or impatience. The pain comes from wanting a resolution the story withholds. Suspense in Todorov’s terms moves from cause to effect: the reader is shown the causes—Delano’s observation and investigation of the San Dominick—and interest is sustained (however painfully) by the expectation that certain effects (however long they take) will occur. Judged against this standard, what happens in the first part of “Benito Cereno” is everything that needs to happen.
If Melville’s intention, as the narrative perspective in the rewritten version suggests, was to inhabit the perspective of a sea captain during a mutinous episode he cannot see, then would anything other than a painstaking exploration of Delano’s cognition reiterate his ideological shortsightedness? That the resolution occurs only when Delano is about to give up his investigation and leave the San Dominick suggests that Melville understood the principles of suspense: the resolution is delayed until the very last possible moment. “Benito Cereno” even anticipates Chekhov’s dictum that if you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall then later in the story it absolutely must go off. Instead of guns in “Benito Cereno” there are the hatchets Delano sees the former slaves polishing when he first boards the San Dominick; when the scales drop from Delano’s eyes and he sees “the negroes, not in misrule, not in tumult, not as if frantically concerned for Don Benito, but with mask torn away,” the blades return as he sees the blacks “flourishing hatchets and knives, in ferocious piratical revolt” (PT 99). The hatchets and the revolt for which they are the metonym have been there from the beginning waiting for the narrative to unite them.
Then there are the exquisite miniatures of suspense where the flesh Melville puts on the bones of Delano’s “actual reality” is itself inked with elaborate figures like the ornate tattoos that repel and fascinate in Typee and Moby-Dick. Melville has Babo shave Don Benito with such meticulous precision that the suspense resides in the economy of the language as much as in Delano’s reaction that “the scene was somewhat peculiar” (PT 85). At the beginning of the process, Melville patiently depicts the simple process of finding a blade and then even halts the action momentarily for added effect. Having found the sharpest razor, Babo “then made a gesture as if to begin, but midway stood suspended for an instant, one hand elevating the razor, the other professionally dabbling among the bubbling suds on the Spaniard’s lank neck.” Babo’s reassurance that “I have never yet drawn blood” is quickly modified by a prospective warning: “though it’s true, if master will shake so, I may some of these times” (PT 85). The intimation contained here makes better sense on rereading, but Don Benito does not shake from feeling the cold; when he shudders nervously it is not because he fears shaving itself.
Hermeneutic interpretations of “Benito Cereno” emphasize the importance of such rereading. The first-time reader likely occupies Delano’s perspective and does not know what is happening; on rereading, he or she is more alert to the point of view of the African revolutionaries. The full implications of racial structures of power are clearer; the Africans’ desire for freedom and how they try to effect that freedom come into focus. There is nothing unique about the temporal conceit in “Benito Cereno” that makes the story one reads different the second time around. One knows Dupin’s method the second time one reads “The Purloined Letter,” or on a second viewing that the murderer in Psycho is really Norman Bates and that the shark will end up exploding in Jaws. But rereading is also a form of iterative retrospection that acts on narratives themselves working with retrospective and prospective forms.
The hermeneutic power of the classic detective narrative to provide a solution to a crime follows this pattern: the investigation is the reconstruction of the time leading up to the crime about which the reader already knows. But when the time of the action becomes the time of the narrative, as it does in “Benito Cereno” and the thriller, retrospection gives way to prospection, whose effects are felt so forcefully—and even painfully—in Melville’s story. In this instance, rereading and the narrative’s prospection are like the two north or south poles of a pair of magnets that will not stick together. Because even rereading does not provide a hermeneutic solution to the questions “Benito Cereno” asks. No matter how many times one rereads the story, discovering the revolt is not the answer to the questions the prospective narrative asks of the rereader: Why does Delano not see in the effects of the revolt the cause that produces them? And how can the mastery of one race over another aboard the San Dominick appear as the mastery of the mastered over the masters?
As these questions affect how we understand the story’s treatment of race, power, and hierarchy, critics have offered interpretations that more than do justice to Melville’s story. But “Benito Cereno” is still unusual in that it so early deploys the thriller’s prospective form in such a confined set-piece drama all the more charged by the geographical isolation in which Melville stages the scene. “Sappy Amasa” (PT 86) misses his cues in rhythm with the performance around him and even fails at first to understand why Don Benito jumps aboard the whaler. But Melville’s attention to narrative time, and specifically the shift away from prospection, continues once Don Benito breaks ranks: “All this, with what preceded, and what followed, occurred with such involutions of rapidity, that past, present, and future seemed one” (PT 98). Action and elision follow; time speeds up and the time of the narrative no longer coincides with the time of the action. And with Don Benito’s deposition, for the first time Melville embarks on a sustained piece of retrospection.
Melville rewrites the original deposition to fit the narrative he has created, but the importance of the “dreary document,” lost on Curtis, is that it does not fulfill the retrospective function. The narrator hopes the deposition will “shed light on the preceding narrative” and explains that Don Benito’s fantastic account passes muster when corroborated by surviving sailors. But even in retrospection there is prospection: “If the Deposition have served as the key to fit into the lock of the complications which precede it, then, as a vault whose door has been flung back, the San Dominick’s hull lies open to-day” (PT 114). Whether the hull is open for all to see or whether it lies open today, still, because what lies within defies seeing, is not entirely clear. Yet another false summit.
The mountaineer moves on to the next peak, which is the final conversation between Delano and Don Benito, but not before the narrator intervenes once more: “Hitherto the nature of this narrative, besides rendering the intricacies in the beginning unavoidable, has more or less required that many things, instead of being set down in the order of occurrence, should be retrospectively, or irregularly given” (PT 114). By far the largest section of the narrative is actually given to events in “the order of occurrence.” This is Delano’s experience of seeing, boarding, and sailing the San Dominick until Don Benito leaps into the whaling boat; they account for over thirty of the forty-two magazine pages as the story appeared in Putnam’s. Only the deposition is “retrospectively, or irregularly given.” The “many things” provided in this form are clearly significant and amount to everything known of events before Delano sees the “strange sail coming into the bay” at St. Maria (PT 46). They may even be more significant to the overall story than the events that occur during Delano’s time aboard the San Dominick. Nevertheless, the narrator’s plot spends most time dealing with Delano’s experience.
The narrator’s commentary on his own selection and ordering of events is itself a retrospective intervention that attempts to resolve what the content of the narrative cannot—as though truth is in the order in which one speaks rather than what one speaks. The denouement of the one final “irregular” account that follows pits Delano’s assurance that “the past is passed” against Don Benito’s understanding of human memory that makes his past also his present. Babo’s gaze, which for several days after his death meets the “gaze of the whites,” continues to cast a shadow over Don Benito (PT 116). At the very beginning of the story the narrator of “Benito Cereno” warns of the “shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come” (PT 46). And so in the final attempt at retrospective resolution the narrator returns the reader to the start of the narrative. Somehow in this Escherian landscape the final summit is not just false but takes the reader back to the foot of the mountain. The polyrhythm of prospection and stasis absorbs and negates the retrospective impulse for resolution.
In these terms, “Benito Cereno” is a piece of defiant origination in the face of perpetual iteration. And it is all the more powerful because its own origination lies in the editing and reprinting of Delano’s original. Delano’s account of the time between first seeing the sail of the Tryal and watching Don Benito jump into his whaling boat takes three pages. By striking out other parts of Delano’s narrative and extending this section fifteen-fold, Melville rebalances the time of plot and story with seemingly little regard for what the magazine form does with longer work when it hacks stories into parts. If the effects of serialization are felt less harshly in the reading of “Bartleby” or “The Encantadas,” this is because neither are thrillers; both are retrospective, not prospective, narratives, “Bartleby” obsessively so, while “The Encantadas” is also a series of episodic sketches that withstand partition.
Judging from a letter to Putnam of October 31, Melville sent the final pages of Israel Potter to the magazine in November 1854 (C 270) and probably began “Benito Cereno” immediately after this and completed it during the winter of 1854–55, a remarkably empty period in the biographical record when his correspondence almost entirely dries up. When he sat down to write “Benito Cereno,” with the aim of rewriting Delano’s experience for reprinting in Putnam’s, Melville was possibly more concerned with literary than with magazine forms. From the serial and episodic nature of Israel Potter’s adventuring he turns, perhaps in relief, to what Curtis described as the “spun out.”34 At the point of first publication in October through December 1855, Putnam’s mangles the literary experiment of a story for whose formal defiance—its pedal tone of prospection and stasis—it has no place. For all the deserved renown Putnam’s accumulated over its short life, it never did publish much literature that proved as durable as Melville’s. And of all Melville’s magazine writing, “Benito Cereno” is the least magazinish.
Melville’s editing and rewriting reached its highest creative point in “Benito Cereno.” But this generative act is not always how critics understand the story. Catherine Toal suggests that Aranda’s skeleton symbolizes Melville’s rejection of his advice that Hawthorne “build about with fulness & veins & beauty” the story of Agatha Hatch (C 237). “Benito Cereno,” she argues, is “a self-demolishing fiction that overturns the teleology of plot and the protocols of allegory, simultaneously with the ideal of sympathetic, collaborative alliance undergirding the ‘Agatha’ project.”35 Writers can struggle with the writing process; they can find it painful, as Melville did increasingly during 1855 and 1856 when suffering bouts of rheumatism and sciatica; they can remain dissatisfied with the “botches” they create. But to see in Melville’s “Benito Cereno” a “self-demolishing fiction” one has to look past a great deal of writerly and editorial construction. The results of the creative process one finds in “Benito Cereno” may fit uncomfortably in the bounds of Putnam’s, but the work does not deny its own existence. The story breaks the conventions of the serial form with purpose. Melville combines the roles of writer, editor, and even literary critic, to create out of the DNA of an earlier narrative form a new genotype. “Benito Cereno” is not self-demolishing, then, but a piece of editing and surrogate reprinting that creates a work of art out of Melville’s “pilfering disposition.” It is also a narrative on whose helical structures other art builds.
Melville proved himself yet another kind of embedded author when writing Israel Potter and “Benito Cereno.” In chapter 1 I showed how intimately Melville understood paper and the role it played in mediating his writing life, and how after writing novels he continued to affirm himself as a writer by further embedding himself in the economy of paper. In chapter 2 we saw that contingent circumstances brought Melville and the magazines together but that Melville responded in pragmatic style by embedding himself in magazine genres and then innovating his way beyond them. I explored the collective and personal judgments magazine editors exercised in chapter 3 to argue that Melville’s writing was a material object embedded in the contingencies of publication and in the aesthetic distinctions magazines practiced. Looking at the paratextual magazine material among which it was embedded when first published, in chapter 4 I showed that Melville’s writing reached for ideas that in the magazine world of the 1850s other writers did not engage so artfully. Finally, this chapter has demonstrated how Melville embedded himself in the magazine form by taking up the role of editor in a culture on the cusp of transitioning from iteration to origination; his editing and reprinting of old narratives resulted in magazine writing that originated as it iterated. At every point where it was possible for Melville to invest his embeddedness, he returned it with compound interest.