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  • Benito Cereno’s Mute Testimony: On the Politics of Reading Melville’s Silences
  • Shari Goldberg (bio)

When Melville’s first biographer, Raymond Weaver, determined in 1921 that Benito Cereno shows “the last glow of Melville’s literary glamour, the final momentary brightening of the embers before they sank into blackness and ash” (348), it was as an extension of his thesis that Melville’s career gradually approached a final silence following the publication of Moby-Dick. If, in the wake of abundant recent criticism on what are still referred to as Melville’s late works (those collected in The Piazza Tales as well as Pierre, The Confidence-Man, and Billy Budd), Weaver’s assessment seems almost a dismissible anachronism, contending with the steep decline in extant writing and publications from the last half of Melville’s life is far from currently irrelevant.1 In 2005, Andrew Delbanco’s biography invoked Weaver’s closing chapter, “The Long Quietus,” in naming Melville’s last decades “The Quiet End,” effectively reprising, rather than surpassing, the question that insists as one nears the conclusion of his predecessor’s work: what is there to say about one who, after 1859, seems to have said little?

Determining how to read what remains silent is a task that has haunted critics of Benito Cereno as well, for the short novel ends with its principal characters mute and conveys, more generally, a “dominant impression of uncertainty” (Hattenhauer 8). As the only Melville text to deal explicitly with the morality of the slave trade, its inconclusiveness seems to politicize and historicize silence as at once part of narrative and exceptionally difficult to narrate. The experiences of those devastated by slavery were silenced, and so subsist in the silences of [End Page 1] American history; to address these gaps without collapsing them as “quiet ends” is to approach apparent absence as essential context.2

It is my contention that Benito Cereno figures the complexity of writing about the silences of an obscured past, insisting on a revision of the terms of authorship that have been predominantly used to approach the suffering that neither fictional nor official archives capture on record.3 Attending further to the reading such revision requires, Benito Cereno ultimately suggests a theory of responding to evasive testimonies. It thereby allows for a reassessment of why Melville’s biographers and Benito Cereno’s critics are drawn to revisit the absence as much as the presence of text, while exposing the ethical terrain upon which such visits are made.

Revising Whispers

Although the biographies produced by the “astonishing revival of interest in Herman Melville in the 1920’s which rescued him from oblivion” (Zimmerman iii) contain little analysis of Benito Cereno, their treatment of Melville’s post–Moby-Dick career bears heavily on the critical tradition through which silences in the late works have long been understood. While Weaver does not quite formulate what soon became commonplace, he set the stage for assessments that equated the texts’ treatment of silence with Melville’s diminishing public regard: “in his old age he was again to turn to prose: but before Melville was half through his mortal life his signal literary achievement was done. The rest, if not silence, was whisper” (348).

For Weaver, 1500 prose pages are “whispered” because they are generally unworthy of being read aloud, but he also begins to read them as representing this bleak end: Pierre, for instance, is summarized as “an apologia of Melville’s own defeat” (343). The gesture is repeated when John Freeman’s characterization of Bartleby—“something unbearable peers out of the story to wring the heart of the reader, as the simpler episodes of the life of a mute forlorn innocent are unfolded—type of all the ineffectual, the wounded, and unwanted” (48)—is resuscitated to describe Melville a few pages later: “sunk to the depth of the obscure, mute, unpublished throng” (68). Again analogously, in the third key revival biography, Lewis Mumford focuses his final chapter, “The Flowering Aloe” (the plant is said to bloom only every hundred years), on [End Page 2] Billy Budd, the meaning of which is “so obvious that one shrinks from underlining it” (356): “At...

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