Robert Lowell's Benito Cereno

Robert Lowell's Benito Cereno MARK W. ESTRIN • BENITO CERENO, ROBERT LOWELL'S DRAMATIZATION of Melville's novella of 1855, has received scant critical attention since its initial production in 1964. The longest and most interesting play in a trilogy that takes the American flag for its unifying metaphor, Benito Cereno comes to terms with the social and political anguish of American life to a degree that one could barely have predicted at the time of its appearance. The play explores through the conventions of a poetic, ritualistic drama the racial conflict in the national experience and in the process achieves an impact impossible to find elsewhere in American dramatic literature of the past decade. There is some question about the extent to which Lowell takes his point of view from Melville and about whether Melville is even writing on the same subject. For critics have seen in Melville's tale a rejection of slavery, an acceptance of it, a combination of both, and, to complete the contradiction, have suggested the irrelevancy of the subject altogether, claiming that the story is finally about American innocence and the misapprehensions of Captain Delano, that it has nothing to do with slavery or the "Negro question" at all. Writing as he is in a decade when abolition is being hotly argued, Melville must be aware that a black uprising, even on a Spanish ship, will bring to the minds of his readers a subject vitally central to America at mid-nineteenth century. Still, the method of "Benito Cereno," the deliberate setting forth of Captain Delano's point of view as a reflector of events in the first half of the tale, with the "truth" clarified in the second through the trial deposition of Cereno himself, leads one to believe that Melville's focus is not so much on slavery as on his Yankee Captain's confrontation with the nature of evil. And the evil which Babo personifies is perhaps the most dangerous kind, for the slave is able to disguise the truth of what he is so that things seem opposite to what they really are. What is important here is that Babo, as 411 412 MARK W. ESTRIN Rosalie Feltenstein proposes, is not the Evil Negro, but One who is Evil and who is also a Negro. 1 For Melville is careful to remind us at the conclusion of the tale that it was the "brain, not the body [of Babo which] had schemed and led the revolt.,,2 The setting of a slave ship, then, while probably used by Melville as a lure to his readers for its overtones of topicality, actually provides not a context for a tale about slavery but a background for what Miss Feltenstein calls "evil in action in a certain situation. Melville is not investigating the causes but the operations of evil."3 Indeed, Melville casts Babo into a role that he will later reserve for Claggart in Billy Budd and which may best be compared to that of the Elizabethan villain. For like Claggart, whose villainy is somehow less submerged, Babo exemplifies innate depravity. Evil exists all around us and we invariably come to a day when, like Delano, we must act upon it. That an evil presence exists without necessarily offering adequate motive, that such existence may in fact be beyond rational explanation, is central to Melville's tale, just as it is central, and equally difficult for readers to accept, in English tragedy. Babo, like the sophisticated villains of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama - Flamineo, Iago, deFlores, Edmund - can be assigned no motive sufficient to make his behavior appear warranted.4 And that is precisely the terror: evil men, evil principles rarely announce themselves in advance, rarely garb themselvs in immediately recognizable clothing by which their exteriors warn us away. It is this that Delano, even at the story's conclusion, never understands. Unable to comprehend Benito Cereno's despair after he has been released from Babo's hold, the Yankee Captain suggests that the danger has passed and that it should be as simple for Don Benito as it is for him to resume a normal existence: 'But [said Delano] the past is...