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Melville's Subversive Political Philosophy: "Benito Cereno" and the Fate of Speech
- American Literature
- Duke University Press
- Volume 72, Number 3, September 2000
- pp. 495-519
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
American Literature 72.3 (2000) 495-519
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Melville’s Subversive Political Philosophy:
“Benito Cereno” and the Fate of Speech
Maurice S. Lee
Melville was stirred by the possibilities of transgression, and critics trace his career with the question: How does he speak the unspeakable? What one means by “unspeakable” makes a difference, for God, society, and language systems all potentially bowstring one’s speech; and Melville, we are told, quarreled with each as blasphemer, rebel, and protodeconstructionist. I am interested here in the radical Melville who voiced unspeakable politics. From the start, this Melville ran afoul of his culture with Typee’s (1846) explicit criticism of missionaries. He then flirted time and again with taboo, enduring chastising review upon review, until he became a clandestine writer whose work turned increasingly private and bitter before collapsing into obscure ambiguities, masquerades, and eventual silence. Ann Douglas, Carolyn Karcher, and Michael Paul Rogin tell various political versions of this fall, though I offer two caveats that bear heavily on the wicked work of “Benito Cereno” (1855).1
The first is that Melville’s magazine fiction is not the run-out of a tragic career, for Melville did not abandon America after Moby-Dick’s (1851) lukewarm reception, nor did the author who expurgated Typee descend step-by-step, rebuke-by-rebuke, to the self-destructive, labyrinthine quietism of Pierre (1852) and The Confidence-Man (1856). There remains a tendency to utterly alienate the later Melville from his culture—to forget, for instance, that Moby-Dick was not entirely misunderstood; to elide some evidence that even Pierre was at one time intended to both profit and please; to read the end of The Confidence-Man as only a parting, ironic shot; to ignore Israel Potter (1855) and Battle-Pieces (1866) as texts that pursue the meaning of America. [End Page 495] Melville’s short fiction is not optimistic, nor is it finally intended for a casual reader. But neither does it forsake democracy as a subject worthy of intelligible talk. “Benito Cereno” may seem to be a skeptical lock with no key, and yet it struggles to engage, and perhaps even “solve,” the time’s foremost political quandaries.2
Which introduces a second caveat: the work of subversive politics is inherently problematic. Here subversive implies not only opposition to prevailing ideologies but also a cunning use of narrative and tone that defies the public spirit of politics. In this sense, the more subversive a text, the less political it becomes, until at some degree of difficulty covert radicalism quietly slides into solipsistic despair. We should locate the politics of “Benito Cereno” upon this slippery slope—somewhere between the San Dominick’s allegory and the tale’s unknowable silences, between Melville’s penetrating social criticism and his desire to puncture the political. To do so with any precision, however, we must, like Melville, closely attend to the potential responses of readers; for subversive politics are semiprivate. They must fool a suppressive, dominant culture while speaking the unspeakable to someone. They must imagine a friendly and sensitive listener in a hostile political world. In what follows I argue that “Benito Cereno” is “about” the failure of political speech—as a critical issue in Melville’s America, as a challenge to his “great Art of Telling the Truth,”3 and as a theoretical inevitability founded in the political philosophies of Machiavelli and Hobbes, whose dark convictions undermine the principles of American republicanism.
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No Melville text invites political analysis more than “Benito Cereno,” if only because it explicitly addresses issues of slavery and race. Yet after reconstructing multifarious discourses and identifying manifold allusions, political readings of the last half-century arrive at different ends. Melville is a racist or a protomulticulturalist. He is radical but bedeviled by conservative fears. He ultimately advises a political tack or skeptically leaves us adrift.4 Compelling scholarship has winnowed these arguments to the point that we can say with some confidence that Melville’s satire of the slavery debate does not clearly imply his own stance, nor can we limit his social concerns solely to the subject of slavery. To devotees of Melville this is hardly surprising, for...