Benito Cereno

by Herman Melville

edited by Wyn Kelley

(Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008)

Trade Paperback, 153 Pages, Fiction

ISBN: 9780312452421, US$5.75

ABCD Rating: BACKLIST

From the Cover: Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature’s greatest writers. In The Art of the Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time. With its intense mix of mystery, adventure, and a surprise ending, Benito Cereno at first seems merely a provocative example from the genre Herman Melville created with his early best-selling novels of the sea. However, most Melville scholars consider it his most sophisticated work, and many, such as novelist Ralph Ellison, have hailed it as the most piercing look at slavery in all of American literature. Based on a real life incident--the character names remain unchanged—Benito Cereno tells what happens when an American merchant ship comes upon a mysterious Spanish ship where the nearly all-black crew and their white captain are starving and yet hostile to offers of help. Melville’s most focused political work, it is rife with allusions (a ship named after Santo Domingo, site of the slave revolt led by Toussaint L’Ouverture), analogies (does the good-hearted yet obtuse American captain refer to the American character itself?), and mirroring images that deepen our reflections on human oppression and its resultant depravities. It is, in short, a multi-layered masterpiece that rewards repeated readings, and deepens our appreciation of Melville’s genius.

My Review: This is not the first time that I have read Melville’s novella, but it is the first time that I have really understood what it is all about. What Melville has done in Benito is nothing short of amazing. He has taken everything we accept about race and the evidence of our own eyes and completely turns it on its head.

And even more than that, Melville plays with the fact that race is performative and absolutely confirms that idea, showing how one person can completely subvert another’s perceptions and, in this case in a very intricate and elaborate performance, shows how much about race we completely take for granted.

A lot of this subversion comes from the fact that the main character—Captain Amasa Delano—is our main lens through which we view what is happening on the San Dominick and while we are, for the most part, given Delano’s perspective (which the Reader sympathizes and identifies with), as the novellas moves forward, the Reader finds him or herself more and more uncomfortable with what they see Delano seeing (and more importantly, not seeing). The fact that Melville weaves so many levels of a single theme (repression: by Delano, by the Reader, by the Africans in the story) into this novella is amazing, and makes for very complex storytelling. This feeds into an underlying tension of slaves as captors (and vice versa) and how easily this reversal can happen.

Melville trades heavily in repression in Benito Cereno and shows the consequences of repression what you know to be true and what you know to be there. It is a story that, as it progresses, moves further and further away from a black and white world view and into one that is full of grayness. Add to this that Benito contains one of the most frightening and tense shaving scenes you will ever read, and that makes for an incredible tale, by one of the great masters of American letters. I am a huge Melville fan, and Moby-Dick is one of my most favorite novels of his (and of all time) but I have to say that Benito Cereno is quickly gaining on Ahab and the Pequod.