"Benito Cereno": No Charity On Earth, Not Even At Sea

“BenitoCereno”: No Charity On Eurth, Not Even At Sea DAVID ANDREWS Chicago State University And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity,it profiteth me nothing. Charitysufferethlong,and is kind; charityenvieth not; charityvaunteth not itself,is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil . . . Bearethall things,believeth all things,hopeth all things,endureth all things. -I Corinthians, 13:3-5, 7 n his early novels, Herman Melville regularly presents castaways and shipwrecks as exemplary charity cases. This practice reaches its peak in I Moby-Dick (1851) through characters like Pip, the waif driven to idiocy when left by Stubb to float alone at the center of the sea’s “heartless immensity ,”and Ishmael, who, as the lone survivor of the Pequod, is rescued by the Rachel, a ship trolling for orphans.’ Ocean and shipwreck are crucial elements in that the sea’s unearthly pitilessness makes human assistance a nautical obligation of the first order. Conversely, the ultimate show of uncharitable behavior involves a failure to extend such assistance. Only a pirate or a Prometheus would dare break Melville’s code, as Ahab does in refusing to help the Rachel search for her orphans (NNMD 532). Ordinary mariners follow this rule of the sea. After the publication of Moby-Dick, Melville made of charity an obsessive theme, one he would treat in increasingly desolate terms until he stopped publishing fiction in 1857. This bleak treatment begins with Piewe (1852), a novel whose naive protagonist is tormented by Plotinus Plinlimmon’s pamphlet “Chronometricalsand Horologicals,”which argues that Christian chari1 HermanMelville,Moby-Dick, or The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford,Hershel Parker,and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago:Northwestern University Press and The NewberryLibrary, 1988), 414. Subsequent references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text as NN MD. That Melville perceives an analogy between the plights of Pip and Ishmael is suggested when the latter carefullyinstructs the reader not to judge “Stubbtoo hardly The thing is common in that fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what like abandonment befell myself.” L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 83 D A V I D A N D R E W S ty is a pleasing abstraction incompatible with earthly experience.2As a practical guide, ideal charity leads to death. But Pierre takes place on land, where charitable behavior is not the clear imperative it is at sea. If Christian values hold little sway on land, the possibility remains that average men will still act charitably at sea. As a consequence, Pierre does not chart Melville’sfaltering idealism so clearly as those fictions in which he gradually complicates his notion of charity at sea. Oddly enough, this process of complication begins, strictly speaking, not in a sea narrative but in “Bartleby”(1853), which Like Pierre is set in New York City. To resolve this paradox, it helps to explain why Stubbs failure to rescue Pip does not initiate this process. The episode fits the criteria in key respects. It is set at sea; it involves the uncharitable action of a character who, untouched by the demonic, Platonic yearnings that define Ahab, is every inch the “ordinarymariner.”What sets this episode apart, however, is that Stubb,in refusing to rescue Pip so as to chase a whale, expects the young black sailor will be plucked from the sea by boats following in his wake. This, Ishmael suggests , is a reasonable expectation nullified by happenstance: “those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase” (NN MD 414). Stubb is provided with an excuse; if he has not acted with charity, neither has he acted with malice or undue egotism. Still, it is clear he would not have risked Pip’s life had his Christian values not been in naked conflict with his desire for gain. As...