Herman Melville

Herman Melville

1819-1891

After the death of his father his family was left in dire straits. In 1841 he took to sea aboard the whaler "Acushnet" and reached the Marquesas Islands. This trip will become the inspiration for his first novel, Typee (1846), which in turn launched Melville's career as a writer of sea adventures. Omoo (1847), Mardi (1848), Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850) will follow.With the publication of Moby-Dick (1851) Melville's writing turned more and more allegorical, symbolic, somber and metaphysical, a developement that soon alienated him both critics and readers.

Dubious of Transcendentalism's doctrines, Melville sought to investigate the depths of the human soul. "Melville wrote about certain districts of the mind: faith and doubt; beauty, sex, and art. And about certain problems: politics and poverty, war and race. He also wrote about consciousness itself, and then, too, nothingness; hence he wrote of the sea." "So much of Melville's creative genius lies in his careful building of character and landscape into something so daringly symbolic that dialog seems to exist only to tease us: "I would prefer not to", repeats Bartleby; "The negro", whispers Benito Cereno. And then silence" (Bryant 2002, xvii).

For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne's soul, the other side--like the dark half of the physical sphere--is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black. [...] Certain it is, however, that this grat power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. [...] Now it is that blackness in Hawthorne, of which I have spoken, that so fixes and fascinates me.

"Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1850)

And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within

Moby-Dick (1851)

Thug Notes on Moby-Dick

Delano is a genial man, smart enough to sense that something is amiss, but not smart enough to untie the knot that one knowing sailor symbolically tosses him. The problem, however, is not his lack of intelligence, but the shape of his mind, which can process reality only thorugh the sieve of a culturally conditioned benevolent racism. He condescendingly admires the black race not for its humanity (or ability to revolt) but for its servility. He distrusts the Spanish slavers because of their cruel reputation. In the end, Delano is conned by its most cherished stereotypes

(Bryant 2002, xxxii)

[Melville] adopts the voice of an omniscient and supposedly objective speaker, but limits his reporting almost exclusively to Delano's skewed point of view. [...] This speaker makes no judgments and relates Delano's fatally racist presumptions as facts. In this way, Melville effectively deceives the white readers [...] into adopting Delano's erroneous thinking. The reader, too, is conned. [...] The story's final effect is to force readers to retrace their own racism to discover how, as a condition of mind, it distorts our vision. Like Benito Cereno at the end, we are prepared to be haunted by "the negro"

(Bryant 2002, xxxiii)

Blackness captures the totalizing capacity of “the negro” to destabilize everything from how masters treat their slaves and think about them to the utter collapse of any coherent relations with social reality and knowledge. The overwhelming sense of dislocation that blackness signifies thwarts the subject’s connections to beliefs established by law, social custom, and mercantile knowledge. “Benito Cereno” reveals how racialized social conflict forces the subject to experience a place where different forms of truth – epistemological, sociological, or political – can neither be recovered nor avoided. White characters are forced to confront a crude ontological reality of psychic violence that establishes a complete sense of un-freedom. Hence, intimations of freedom, triumphant political and social equality, or political speech are not the business of “Benito Cereno" [...] . Blackness, through the symbolic power of “the negro” [...] asks us to imagine the formidable dissonance of not having – relinquishing or taking away the very thing we most desire – to solve the enigma and remove its power over us, to strategize and contem- plate through the violence and instability that inherently threaten social reality and its fundamental concepts.

(Freeburg 96)

Haitian Revolution (1791-1804)