"Follow Your Leader": Knowing One's Place in Benito Cereno

"Follow Your Leader": Knowing One's Place in Benito Cereño Darryl Hattenhauer Arizona State University West In Herman Melville's Pierre, Plinlimmon's pamphlet uses the term "chronometricals" to denote the transcendent, heavenly, sacred, and timeless, and the term "horologicals" to denote the fallen, earthly, profane, and historical. In The American Jeremiad, Sacvan Bercovitch argues that the conflict between chronometricals and horologicals lies at the center not only of Melville's canon in particular, but also of American literature and culture in general. According to Bercovitch, American history has been a mission to establish a heaven on earth—a chronometrical society in a horological place. Bercovitch finds that the recurrence of the jeremiad in American politics, literature, and theology is the recurrence ofthis attempt to construct God's redeemer nation. Since such a saintly, transcendent society is impossible, the contradictions arising from pursuing the sacred amidst the inevitably profane are forced into correspondence; America's dominant culture imposes consistency on the evidence that disconfirms the belief in the city upon a hill, the new order ofthe ages, the new promised land—all ofthe variations on the myth ofAmerican exceptionalism. This conflict of chronometricals and horologicals thereby uses a spatial metaphor to represent temporal concepts: just as Godly, eternal innocence contrasts with fallen, historical struggles, so the chronometrical city of God contrasts with the horological city of man. A new approach to the problem of spatiality in literature will elucidate this spatial metaphor in Benito Cereño. This study employs the method of spatial analysis developed by cultural geographer YiFu Tuan. To that end, it is important to explain Tuan's four most central concepts: "space," "place," "horizontal," and "vertical." Tuan's Topophilia and Space and Place restrict the concept of space to only one aspect of what we normally think of as space: by "space," he means what we usually call "spaciousness," as opposed to a particular "location." For Tuan, "space" denotes great stretches of land, sky, or sea, and feels open, unbounded, even infinite. For Americans ofthe dominant culture and for Europeans in the vanguard of New World expansion (such as the European characters in Benito Cereño), space usually suggests freedom—such as the freedom associated with the wide-open spaces of the American West. By contrast, "place" refers to a location or a kind ofobject. Whereas space 8 Rocky Mountain Review connotes freedom, place connotes restrictions, limits, security, a niche in a hierarchy, a sense of belonging, a sense of home. As many have suggested, the emphasis in post-Renaissance Western Civilization in general (and in America especially) on increasing expansion and mobility has been accompanied by an ambivalence about home. Americans of the dominant culture are often not at home with domesticity, and neither is Delano, the story's WASP Yankee (see, for example, Gilbert and Gubar; Welter). For Tuan, "place" suggests verticality. Generally in traditional societies (and particularly in medieval Europe), those things social and biological which reach up above us—spires, statues, towers—are given a high value; likewise, those things which reach down to us from above are usually considered good—rain, sun, Providence. Accordingly, those things social and biological that are low or reach down below us—caves, hell, feces—are considered dirty or beneath us and given a low value. Traditionally, the vertical suggests place because home, church, and community joined people to the heavenly. By contrast, the horizontal generally suggests space because as one ranges into open territories (as the characters in Benito Cereño do) one moves horizontally away from home and the civilizing tendencies of domesticity and religion. Tuan speaks ofthe modern, expanding societies of Europe and America as horizontal because they pursue growth, expansion, and mobility in most things. He suggests that horizontal societies are less socially stratified and more given to change. For Tuan, medieval Europe was vertical, but the West has become increasingly horizontal after the Renaissance (Topophilia 42). In Babo, Melville creates a character most like himself: a secretly rebellious creator of multi-leveled plots. Both Melville's plot for Benito Cereño and Babo's plot for Delano are two-tiered. Melville conjures a plot for Benito Cereño that reads one...