麦尔维尔中篇小说《贝尼托·塞雷诺》中的奴隶贸易和人道主义

Original Joongul Paek 外国文学研究 2022-12-15

点击上方“外国文学研究”可以订阅哦

内容摘要

本文追踪麦尔维尔中篇小说《贝尼托·塞雷诺》中很少被人研究过的奴隶贸易的含义。通过对人性和人道主义的历史和理论追踪溯源，本文指出德拉诺不仅认同南方不连贯的、类似人道主义的奴隶监护逻辑，而且拥护奴隶贸易的非人性化条款，以便克服因奴隶复活其人性施为而造成的精神危机。结果，尽管巴波精心致力于恢复人的个性，但奴隶叛乱者最终还是悲惨地困入由德拉诺和种族奴隶制度为自身之便而动用的人性与非人性这两个相悖的模式之中。

关键词

麦尔维尔；奴隶贸易；人性；人道主义；人的个性

作者简介

白埈杰，韩国梨花女子大学英语副教授，已发表多篇有关斯蒂芬·克莱恩、弗兰克·诺里斯、西奥多·德莱塞、马克·土温、赫尔曼·麦尔维尔等美国小说家的论文，主要从事情绪与情感理论及资本主义文化变异的研究。

Abstract

This essay keeps track of the slave trade’s little examined implications in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno. By unpacking the historical and theoretical archives of humanness and humanitarianism, the essay scrutinizes Delano’s racial unconscious. I point out that Delano not only subscribes to the South’s incoherent, quasi-humanitarian logic of slave caring, but also espouses the dehumanizing terms of the slave trade, in order to overcome psychic crisis caused by the reanimated human agency of slaves. Ultimately, despite Babo’s astute performance to reclaim the human personhood, slave mutineers end up tragically caught in the differing modalities of humanity and inhumanity deployed by Delano and racial slavery to their convenience.

Key words

Melville; slave trade; humanity, humanitarianism; human personality

Author

Joongul Paek is Associate Professor of English at Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He published essays on American novelists, such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Mark Twain, Herman Melville and others, specializing in the theories of emotion and affect and the cultural transformations of capitalism.

Email: jgpaek@ewha.ac.kr

Although Thomas Jefferson predicted that the Abolition Act of 1808 would finally end “all further participation in those violations of human rights” perpetrated on “the unoffending inhabitants of Africa (qtd. in Du Bois 68), the illegal slave trade across the Atlantic had been active until the Civil War. ① Especially scandalizing was that the American North had been imbricated in the human trafficking all the while since the Abolition Act. In 1854, less than a year before Herman Melville published Benito Cereno (1855) in Putnam’s Magazine, Captain James Smith jolted the nation by revealing that “New York is the chief port in the world for the slave trade” (“The Slave-Trade” 194). “Ships,” continued Smith, “that convey slaves to the West Indies and South America, are fitted out” (“The Slave-Trade” 194) from the port of New York. The city’s extensive complicity brought to the fore the strategies of deception, evasion, and denial mobilized to cloak the signs of the trafficking. Government authorities failed to build a criminal case, as it was practically impossible to gather sufficient evidences or to track and determine the extent of ownership, collusion, or responsibility (Howard 1-27). The problem was further complicated by the fact that the illicit traffic was carried out through denationalized, hybridized, and even decentered grid of commerce that entailed coalitions and affiliations of divergent nationalities (Howard 14). Thus, although Northern seaports, shipbuilders, captains, and seamen were more or less embroiled in the trade, the location of criminality was difficult to identify.

In my view, the slave trade is a central, though repressed, hermeneutic code in Melville’s Benito Cereno. For some years, slave rebellion has been a major concern among critics. ② Slave trade, however, has remained so long in critical amnesia, just as the actual slave trade itself went subterranean. ③ The neglect is rather surprising, given that the San Dominick, the main setting of the novella, is primarily a slave ship, not merely a ship in revolt. Historically as well, it is worth noting that the 1850s were marked by the seething controversy over the official reopening of the slave trade as well as by the increasing U.S. involvement in the illegal trafficking (Fehrenbacher 173-204). The specter of the slave trade, I claim, hovers around Amasa Delano, the seemingly benevolent American captain who renders much needed assistances to those wretched on the San Dominick. Despite his professed humanitarianism, however, Delano not only connives at, but also desires, espouses, and perpetuates the slave trade. The signs of complicity seep through his silences, anxieties, and soliloquies, although his complicity in the slave trade is oblique and indeterminate. Benito Cereno demonstrates that the slave trade is a crucial, yet hidden component that would throw the non-slaveholding North and the slaveholding South on a common capitalist ground, thereby enabling the two seemingly opposite worlds to align under the single rubric of what Fehrenbacher calls a “slaveholding republic” (173-204). As a crucial barometer to calibrate Delano’s complicit regression, I take a close look at both hollow and reifying modalities of humanity Delano reverts to with regard to free and enslaved blacks, and examine how the Yankee captain unwittingly discloses commodification and thingification deeply etched in the human enslavement, even as the slaveholding South deploys incoherent discourses of humanity and humanitarianism to justify racial slavery.

In Sociology for the South (1854), published a year before Benito Cereno, George Fitzhugh, one of the most controversial pro-slavery intellectuals in the South, condemned the North for its “extreme inhumanity” (211) while addressing the recent efforts to reopen the slave trade. The long history of the international slave trade that the American North had been practicing before and after the Abolition Act was enough to buttress Fitzhugh’s odd claim that the North alone was culpable. Fitzhugh’s ultimate aim was to construct an image of slavery as humane, non-exploitative institution by capitalizing on the rhetorical tradition of distinguishing between “slave trading and slaveholding,” which might trace all the way back to Thomas Jefferson and Mathew Carey (Rothman 20; Deyle 59-61). Albeit with the qualification of “internal,” however, the slave trade constitutes the vital core of the Southern economy, accounting for the single greatest source of wealth for the region. Many Southerners, exactly like financial investors in the modern-day commodity markets, were given to trading slaves for the purpose of speculative profit-making. Hence Fitzhugh’s naïve and hypocritical attempt to sever slave holding from slave trading received much criticism. A critic pointed out that one “could not eulogize slavery and denounce the slave trade in the same breath, without stultifying themselves with the grossest and most suicidal inconsistency” (qtd. in Barton 17-18). Nevertheless, furor over the international slave trade provided Fitzhugh with a welcome occasion for condemning the Northern capitalism and fantasizing the South as an intimate affective community, which, though hierarchical, willingly embraces slaves as those who share “the common humanity” (Cannibals All! 205) with slaveholders. Fitzhugh’s sly conflation of anti-capitalism and pro-slavery is encapsulated by James H. Hammond, another influential advocate of slavery, who, after depicting capital as “a monster without a heart,” concluded that the enslaved black labor was taken care of by “a fellow being endowed with the sentiments and sympathies of humanity” (679).

The pro-slavery anti-capitalism exemplified by Fitzhugh and Hammond instantiates a particularly baleful case of how the very existence of slavery perverts the terms of reformism, radically undermining alternative imaginings of anti-capitalist community (Guarneri 376-83). It was potent enough to lure some scathing Northern critics of capitalism such as Orestes Brownson into endorsing the Southern slavery as a viable alternative to the exploitative relation of labor and capital. As many critics at least since Jane Tompkins have pointed out, sentimentalism is a popular rhetorical weapon for the abolitionist movement, but this also has the unexpected effect of eclipsing a pro-slavery sentimentalism, which claims to have humanized slaves. Kyla Schuller has recently offered a corrective by pointing out that sentimentalism plays a distinctive political role as “a fundamental mechanism of biopower” (2). Similarly, Fitzhugh and Hammond’s discourse on humane feelings in racial slavery is a tool for ideological control in order to prop up the regime of racial enslavement. They fantasize the vibrant currency of caring sentiments between master and slave, while disavowing as much between labor and capital. For them, slavery is the protective bastion of sentimental domesticity against inhuman economic practices.

In Benito Cereno, Babo, the hidden mastermind of slave mutiny on the San Dominick, forces Cereno to deceive Delano into believing in the illusion of a slave community which echoes Fitzhugh’s humanizing fiction of slavery, a rare shipboard community in which slaves are unshackled, dereified, and humanized. In Cereno’s account, whereas the usual “Guineamen” “thrust” slaves “below” the deck, the San Dominick permits the slaves to “remain upon deck,” and “to range within given bounds at their pleasure” (45). ④ Slaves’ subjection to white command even in freedom is portrayed natural and voluntary. According to Cereno, no coercive measure or policing is imposed upon them, yet they “conduct themselves with less of restlessness than even their owner could have thought possible under such circumstances” (45). This is of course a false account that Cereno is forced to fabricate under Babo’s threat. Yet what Cereno unravels to Delano is similar to Fitzhugh’s rosy portrayal of slavery. The uncommonly intimate relation of Babo and Cereno, as it is seen through Delano’s gaze, is the most salient case of pro-slavery sentimentalism: “Don Benito,” Captain Delano says, “I envy you such a friend; slave I cannot call him” (45). On another occasion, Delano considers Babo “less a servant than a devoted companion” (40). Although at first annoyed by the kind of agency granted to the captive slaves on board, Delano is soon allayed by Babo’s “steady good conduct”(41).

“Tell me, Don Benito,” he added, with a smile – “I should like to have your man here myself — what will you take for him? Would fifty doubloons be any object?”

“Master wouldn’t part with Babo for a thousand doubloons,” murmured the black, overhearing the offer, and taking it in earnest, and, with the strange vanity of a faithful slave appreciated by his master, scorning to hear so paltry a valuation put upon him by a stranger.” (58)

This is a revealing moment at which Babo deceives Delano into believing that there surely exists a sentimental master-slave relation above the sordid world of money exchange. According to Babo’s disguised response, it is exactly the slavery system itself that plucks slaves out of the impersonal cycle of fungible properties and humanizes them. Like Fitzhugh, Babo appears to subscribe to the notion that slavery is an improved form of human governmentality diametrically opposed to the slave trade. Pro-slavery sentimentalism is a strategic apparatus to deflect attention from the slave trade inscribed at the heart of slavery. The light-hearted bantering between Delano and Babo allows us to see how slavery necessitates, for its survival, the concealment of the slave trade, its inerasable kernel. Babo carefully manipulates discursive practices to steer clear of this issue. On the one hand, Cereno is making up an idealized master-slave relation, ensuring Delano that everything is going well, even when slaves are given agency. The reassuring remark, however, is made possible precisely by eliding the memory of the Middle Passage and relegating the slave ship to the lost wreck of the past. Babo, on the other hand, tries to hide from Delano’s view the truth of slave mutiny. Yet the act of concealing is made possible only by regarding the monetary quantification of the affective bond between Cereno and himself as a practical impossibility.

Ironically enough, however, it is precisely Delano, the inhabitant of the free North, who inadvertently conjures up the specter of the slave trade. Even as he is briefly co-opted by the fictive Utopia of camaraderie engineered by Babo, Delano is unable to get over the trader’s deep-seated habit and instinct, which prompts him to revert to the principle of exchange. For Delano, the intimate homosocial fraternity which Babo refuses to quantify is nonetheless quantifiable into “fifty doubleloons” (58). As befits a deep-sea merchant captain, Delano can fathom the degree of intimacy only within the discursive boundary circumscribed by the economy of exchange. By asking “what will you take for him?” (58) Delano exposes to view the concealed truth that slaves are nothing but articles of commodity. For the American captain, Babo is primarily a fungible property ineluctably subordinate to commercial trade, even though the slave servant, boldly intercepting the authority of his master, asserts the inalienability of his own person. Commerce is indeed the limit of Delano’s cognitive, affective, and moral horizon. Insofar as it generates profits, the conscientious distinction between the civilized and the inhuman commerce is pointless for Delano, even if he must have heard of the contemporary abolitionists who attacked the slave trade by variously calling it as “barbarous,” “iniquitous,” and “inhuman” (Gould 4). Delano is ultimately a captain of a merchant ship who just came from Canton, and his main job is to be engaged in trades, exchanging, for instance, “seal-skins for teas and silks” (53). At its heyday, the triangular trade underpinned the economy of New England (Williams 51-52), the very region from which Delano comes. Characteristically, in the triangular trade, the distinction between human slaves and inanimate goods is blurred in the bartering system of equivalence. Likewise, for Delano all trades are the same.

Considering this, Delano’s self-styled humanitarianism—which I will discuss more in detail shortly—is highly questionable. In Benito Cereno, Delano presents himself to be a man of “good nature, compassion, charity” (101) in sight of both whites and blacks who seem to suffer. But it is not entirely clear how far his humanitarian support acknowledges the humanness of the black slaves. It is, above all, significant to note that Delano’s relation with African Americans, enslaved or not, assumes peculiar sort of distance and remoteness, even as he prides himself on casual intimacy with them. When Delano says he takes “rare satisfaction” in “watching some free man of color at his work or play” (71), the American captain is actually treating the black man as an interesting spectacle, thereby drawing attention to the implied gap between the spectator and the visual object. Right after this, Melville also writes, “In fact, like most men of a good, blithe heart, Captain Delano took to negroes, not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs” (71; emphasis added). Here, Delano’s professed affection for free blacks, it is worth noting, is primarily that of geniality, not of philanthropy. The invocation of dogs elicits from many critics the charge of offensive racist stereotyping (Sundquist 153; Tawil 198-99). From a different perspective, Xine Yao recently calls attention to how Delano’s fond memories of his own affection for “negroes” resonates with the seemingly moving spectacle of Babo’s canine devotion to Cereno (45). Although such readings are fully warranted on their own, I suggest that Delano’s remarks involve more than a simple expression of racism or condescending sentimentalism.

Shifting the focus to the rejection of philanthropy, I want to emphasize that the love of humans is foreclosed from the outset. In this regard, geniality is more like an ersatz emotion, an affective displacement of philanthropy. In other words, geniality is primarily a preemptive way of contriving a distance and disrupting any possibility of human intimacy between blacks and whites, or a strategy of forestalling the emotional bonding that the love of humanity might entail. Moreover, Delano’s “negroes” (71) lack individuation, which points to James Weldon Johnson’s remarks on white Northerners’ abstract, non-emotional way of loving blacks (Melish xii). ⑤ Unlike Samuel Johnson and Lord Byron who loved their black servants, Barber and Fletcher respectively (71), the American captain recalls no black man or woman by name. Thus, as a generic, unspecified collectivity, blacks figure as amorphous and anonymous mass for whom Delano might have vague affection, but with whom he would rather not form any concrete inter-human bond.

Given Delano’s cheerfully abstract relations with free blacks, then, Babo’s humanness, which seemingly springs from his unusual friendship with Cereno, is especially menacing to the American captain. For him, the contradictory amalgam of a “friend” and a “slave” (45) in a black person is what he admires at a distance, yet he cannot easily swallow. As Susan Ryan has noted, there emerged discourses in the 1850s that tended to racialize benevolence, invoking the injunction of intra-racial solidarity. Taking as an example Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who argued in 1855, “[O]ur sympathies will go with our own color first” by invoking “the great family instinct,” Ryan portrays how terms of benevolence were inflected by the rhetoric of racial bond that “overrode abstract benevolence” (146). When Cereno and Babo form interracial intimacy, it all seems to Delano that they’re violating the tacit terms of racial divide in bonding, thereby undermining the very foundation of racial solidarity between the whites. Several times, Cereno receives Delano’s friendly offers coldly or reservedly, while seemingly fraternizing with Babo in an openly intimate way that elicits Delano’s jealousy. When Delano proposes to have a private discussion for business, Cereno refuses to dismiss Babo, on the ground that Babo is “not only his constant attendant and companion, but in all things his confidant” (77). The excess of human agency in slaves, as in Babo, is a cause for concern for Delano. And that it should appear as a mode of interracial intimacy, which exceeds what is normally expected of the hierarchical relation of master and slave, is even more unsettling. Those “whispered conferences” (74) Cereno openly has with Babo in the very presence of Delano most intensely provoke Delano’s displeasure. Previously, Babo has already irritated Delano by his far-fetched familiarity, a revealing sign of Babo’s indocile impudence to feature himself as a social equal to whites. This is possible only through the extended authority Babo has usurped on the basis of his friendly relation with his master. Now, as Cereno whispers to Babo in order to mortify Delano deliberately (or so it seems to the American captain), it is unbearable for Delano. “The beauty of [their relationship]” (45) undergoes a drastic transformation: Cereno from a man with “a sort of valetudinarian stateliness” to a degraded ruffian “anything but dignified,” Babo from a faithful companion who has the “original charm of simple-hearted attachment” to an ordinary slave-servant with “the menial familiarity” (51). Delano reaches the conclusion that by unwholesome association of two incommensurable races, both Cereno and Babo become traitors from their respective races.

The crisis posed by such reanimated human agency is solved only by returning slaves to their ontological modality that precedes dereification, which is nothing else than a status of cargo, immured in their thinglike inanimateness and immobility with their agency suspended and muted. The peaceful scene of a black female slave taking a nap with her baby, I would argue, is the most striking exemplification of Delano’s unconscious desire to return slaves to cargo-like thingness.

His attention had been drawn to a slumbering negress, partly disclosed through the lacework of some rigging, lying, with youthful limbs carelessly disposed, under the lee of the bulwarks, like a doe in the shade of a woodland rock. Sprawling at her lapped breasts was her wide-awake fawn, stark naked, its black little body half lifted from the deck, crosswise on its dam’s; its hands, like two paws, clambering upon her; its mouth and nose ineffectually rooting to get at the mark; and meantime giving a vexatious half-grunt, blending with the composed snore of the negress. . . .There’s naked nature, now; pure tenderness and love, thought Captain Delano, well pleased. (60-1)

Critics have read in this passage the reduction of blackness to sexuality, animality, or primitiveness (Karcher 134; Emery 327) as well as the sentimentalization of maternal love from a sentimental onlooker (Coviello 164; Yao 42-44). Dana Nelson, among these critics, has most persuasively shown how Delano capitalizes on these modes of reductionism and sentimentality so as to construct an imagined white brotherhood with African explorers like Mungo Park and John Ledyard and psychologically palliate the anxiety triggered by the failure to strike racial fraternity with Cereno (1-4). Yet Nelson fails to address the deeper cause of such anxiety. As I have argued, the weakening of racial solidarity originates from Cereno’s uncivil bonding with Babo as well as from slaves’ invested humanness, assertiveness, and indocility.

Thus, the deeper strategic value of the peaceful scene is that it reflects Delano’s racial unconscious to enact the imaginary return of slaves from their white-threatening humanness to mere humanness, or, more precisely, as “naked nature” (61) implies, to the status of a naked human being, stripped of anything but humanness, a mere life that shares naked nature with other living beings. To put it in Giorgio Agamben’s terms, Delano’s intent is to reduce African slaves to “bare life” (1-12), the humanness thrown into its most precarious state. The ideal ontology Delano allots for African slaves is the humanity vulnerable to modes of aggression, with the female gender additionally functioning to augment that vulnerability. What should be noted is the uncanny similarity between being vulnerable and being a thing, more specifically the way in which “slumbering” (60) invokes passivity, vulnerability, and immobility which uncannily resonates with thinglike or deathlike inanimateness. And the soothing feelings of “pure tenderness and love” (61), as Delano feels, furtively feed upon these modes of figurative thingification. Thus, the strategy Delano unconsciously resorts to in order to restore white camaraderie is not only to make an imagined affiliation with African explorers, as Nelson argues, but also to deny blacks any type of agency, subduing them to their original status as inanimate cargo, precisely a state of being in which the slave-ship enjoins slaves to be. As historian Stephanie Smallwood has aptly put it, on the ocean-crossing slave-ship “the practices of commodification most effectively mut[e] the agency of the African subject and thereby produc[e] their desired object: an African body fully alienated and available for exploitation” (122). Likewise, “the negress” in sleep resembles “crates and bales” (43), neither aggressive nor resistant, but merely subjugated to the slave-ship regime of domination. Ontologically and conceptually, all slaves on the slave ship must resemble a freight of things unindividuated, unnamed, undifferentiated to be stowed, stacked, or arranged within the limited space below the deck like any other cargo.

The scene summons Frederick Douglass who exposes the stark truth of slavery by highlighting that slaves are “the silent dead” from whom “comes no voice” (Autobiographies 423). Taking a cue from Yellin, Carolyn Karcher has used Douglass’ pertinent characterization of slavery to explain why Babo consistently refuses to speak after he is captured (Karcher 141; Yellin 687-88; Beecher 57-58). Indeed, it is precisely because Babo knows slaves’ testimony will not be legally recognized as bearing any truth that he remains so resolute to be silent. Yet what Karcher—and for that matter, Yellin—does not address is the question of whether the Yankee captain might harbor a repressed, invisible desire reminiscent of the treatment of captured Africans in the Middle Passage and whether Delano craves for the subjugation of slaves to silent death, precisely like the slave cargo. Indeed, Melville’s consistent target is how Delano’s professed benevolence is contradicted by his unconscious desire for the incapacitated agency of the inanimate cargo. To see Benito Cereno in this context, Melville might have intended his novella to be an exposure of Delano and the Northern complicity on a more profound level than critics have hitherto acknowledged. Delano is only slightly better than Captain James Smith, who is involved in illicit slave smuggling in New York. For if Delano desires that slaves should return to their status as cargo, he is much more imbricated in slavery and slave trade than has been suggested. By pulling down slaves’ humanness to precarious vulnerability and incarcerating them in the zone of indistinction in which humanness is proximate to, and interchangeable with thingness, the Duxbury captain reiterates and colludes with the Southern slave regime in which humanness becomes an additional quality that slaveholders can grant or withhold, acknowledge or disavow with regard to their slaves at any moment and at their own convenience.

In Boyce v. Anderson (1829), a U.S. Supreme Court case that concerns the death of four slaves accidently drowned while being transferred to a steamboat Washington, Justice John Marshall argues that a slave is not “a package of goods” but a human being who has “volition” and “feelings.” Accordingly, the judge rules that “the carrier has not, and cannot have over [the slaves] the same absolute control that he has over inanimate matter…. The care which might be exercised over inanimate property, which could be disposed of for its security at the will of the carrier, was not to be exercised on human beings, with the powers and rights of locomotion, and of self-preservation by different means from those which were enjoined on the carriers of merchandize. The responsibility of the carrier of slaves must therefore be limited” (Boyce v. Anderson; emphasis added). When Justice Marshall conferred human agency on four already dead slaves, it was because the belated humanness of slaves did not pose any fundamental damage to the slavery system itself, although it must have meant a sizeable subtraction from the slave owner’s wealth. Moreover, in this case the humanness of the drowned slaves is minimally defined, for it is recognized only to the extent that slaves can be distinguished from non-living things that cannot move of their own volition. As Marshall says, a slave is a being that has “powers and rights of locomotion” and “self-preservation.” A slave, in other words, is a thing with the additional rights to mobility and duties to guard itself from the termination of life. Drawing from Saidiya Hartman, Zakiyyah Jackson argues that the “recognition of the enslaved’s humanity served as a pretext for punishment, dissimulation of chattel slavery’sviolence, and the sanction given it by the law and the state” (28). Indeed, for instance, black slaves were unfailingly assumed to have criminal agency and legal personhood, when there was a need to ascertain their criminality (DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows 8-11). In a similar vein, Justice Marshall’s rule relies on the firm belief that slaves are not things, but only to the extent that their humanity helps to exonerate the white transporter of slaves from the charge of manslaughter

Delano’s notion of slaves’ humanness is no less shallow than conceived by Justice Marshall in Boyce v. Anderson. Since he has offered water and provisions to the people in distress, both white and black, Delano is no stranger to the notion of humanitarianism. For his aid partly fulfills Kantian duties of humanity, which morally command us “to sympathize actively” in the fate of suffering others, and “not to avoid the places where the poor who lack the most basic necessities are to be found” (qtd. in Muthu 152). As a matter of fact, however, he recognizes the humanness of whites and blacks, only in the sense that they both have biological needs to maintain life. In this regard, Delano’s “republican impartiality” (67) can be called republican, only because it equally addresses the bare minimum that whites and blacks share as biological beings. Therefore, if Delano satisfies the biological necessities of captive slaves, it does not mean that he embraces their humanness as fellow humans, just as Justice Marshall’s legal recognition of slaves’ posthumous humanness is not intended to undermine their status as property. It is merely intended, so to speak, to recuperate the cargo value depreciated by the biological malfunction of slaves as beings who have life to sustain. A slave for Delano is a thing with additional necessity for biological life. While expounding slaveholders’ increasing expression of humane concerns for slaves in the early nineteenth century, historian Joyce Chaplin has persuasively captured the limits of slavery humanitarianism: “Humanitarianism is a sentiment one can express toward those who lack equal civil rights” (303). In this arrangement, the lack of “civil rights”—by extension, the existence of slavery system itself—becomes a precondition and abetment for the exercise of humanitarianism. Chaplin’s remarks highlight how slaveholders’ humanitarianism sends slaves back to the etymological origin of “human being”: homo in the Roman legal discourse refers to “a slave” (Heller-Roazen 148-49). Likewise, Delano’s humanitarianism, from the start, does not address slaves’ genuine human condition per se, but rather abstract, empty, biological humanness.

The fragility of Delano’s humanitarianism is further evidenced by his willingness to capitalize on his own benevolent services for an opportunity for making profits. Delano, after all, is a man of trade for whom anything can be dragged into the magnetic field of capitalist exchange. In A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages Round the World (1818), the true story on which the novella is based, the historical Delano emphasizes his humanitarian benevolence twice as his chief objective of saving Cereno, the Spanish crew, and the Tryal. In a letter to Marquis de Case Yruso, the minister plenipotentiary to the United States of America, who awarded Delano the gold medal on behalf of Charles IV of Spain, the historical Delano stated, “The services rendered off the island St. Maria were from pure motives of humanity” (Delano 352; emphasis added). In a letter of thanks to Don Juan Stoughton, Esq. Spanish consul in Boston, the historical Delano again wrote that “these services rendered his Catholic Majesty’s subjects off the island St. Maria, with the men under my command, were from pure motives of humanity” (Delano 353; emphasis added). Contrary to his alleged humanitarianism, however, the historical Delano’s Narrative might as well be seen as a sustained complaint that he has been mistreated by Cereno’s absurd refusal to pay for his aids. Haunting the historical Delano’s mind throughout the chapter is his eagerness to record, in meticulous detail, his sedulous efforts to demand post-aid monetary rewards for what he did to the people in need and distress. The historical Delano, at one point, even depicts Cereno as “quibbling and using all his endeavors to delay the time of payment” (330), complacently coupling humanitarian assistance with monetary payment. The historical Delano’s humanitarian act is in fact not an end in itself, but rather a means to an end. His humanitarianism has turned into a matter of give and take (Stuckey and Leslie 274-75). In Melville’s version, likewise, the fictional Delano encourages his sailors to pursue the fugitive rebels by announcing that “the Spanish captain considered his ship good as lost; that she and her cargo, including some gold and silver, were worth more than a thousand doubloons” (87). The cargo, of course, includes not only gold and silver but also one hundred and sixty slaves. Considering that he knows how to put a monetary value on his own humanitarian benevolence, thereby confounding the motives of humanity and those of profits, there is no reason for Delano to oppose the system that puts a value on a human being.

III

Until the mid-1980s, as Allan Moore Emery shows concisely, critical camps over Benito Cereno were divided between “those who read the tale as a powerful portrait of human depravity” and “those who view the tale as a stern indictment of American slavery” (316). The first group of critics highlighted the depravity and atrociousness of Babo in sympathy for the innocent American and the traumatized Spanish, while the second Delano’s racial prejudices in favor of Babo’s revolutionary heroism. For almost forty years since then, a predominant number of scholars have tilted towards exploring the contexts and ramifications of Delano’s racist ideas. As I have shown thus far, my take on Benito Cereno is that Delano is not only racist but he is also in complicit alignment with slave traders. As a concluding remark, I will briefly discuss the human personhood that Babo’s emancipatory performance aims to build, and then I will demonstrate how the thoughtless love of the sweet commerce compels Delano to demonize slave rebels as the enemies of humanity, burying the memory of his own involvement in the inhuman commerce.

The ocean is differentially understood by Babo and Delano respectively. For Babo and other slave rebels, the ocean is the trope that incites their yearning for liberty and humanity—an unbounded space in which slaves fulfill their collective desire to regain freedom and human rights against the slave trade. As Frederick Douglass writes in “Heroic Slave” (1853), “on the lonely billows of the Atlantic, every breeze speaks of courage and liberty” (158). Previously, I have suggested Delano’s humanitarianism partially fulfills Kantian injunction to active sympathy. Unlike Delano’s, however, the Kantian concept of humanity does not end there, but ultimately involves a human person, the recognition and development of which entails the transcending of mere human life and the conjoining of humanity with the idea of moral, social, and political life (Muthu 133-35; Agamben 127-35). In a similar vein, Babo’s aim is to restore immanent and inalienable values to slaves’ mere humanness against the instrumentalization and thingification of human life, or more precisely, as Joseph Slaughter would say, to cultivate the “human personality” (57-59). And as Kant and Slaughter have suggested, it is primarily by relinking the severed tie between the human and the person, by pressuring the conception of humanity to tally with the idea of personhood that Babo achieves this.

It is suggestive that Babo’s action throughout Benito Cereno is evocative of theatrical performance. Although critics have pointed out that Babo is an actor, a stage manager, a master-mind behind a grand performance (Tawil 207-8; Sundquist 152; Downes 474), few have probed into the full implications of his theatrical action. I would argue that Babo’s assumption of persona in his dramatic performance, together with his violent revolutionary re-inauguration of legal personhood ⑥ by killing the slave-owner Alexandro Aranda, is tantamount to the claiming of persona in social and political sense—a symbolic act to reclaim the human personhood, a performative act of self-compensation for the disavowed rights of personhood. Thus, Babo’s self-remaking in the theater of his own production is not a mere performance, but rather an action that implies cultural, moral, legal, social, and political repercussions.

The conflation of dramatic personhood and human personhood is not idle, not simply because they share the common etymological origin (Rorty 542-44). Theater, as Lukacs has remarked while discussing Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, harbors “emancipatory possibilities,” functioning as a medium through which “the human personality expresses itself through the mask of a dramatis persona” (qtd. in Slaughter 97). Although Lukacs’s human personality is based on the idea of Bildung which focuses on cultural dimensions, I would argue that Babo’s action further pressures the cultural conception of the human personality to involve socio-political personhood. For Babo’s aim is, exactly like the political action that Arendt envisages, to “[redeem] life from [the] predicament of meaninglessness” and “produce meaningful stories” by exercising “interrelated faculties of action and speech” (236). Through performative action, Babo becomes a person capable of political action and makes “meaningful stories” for himself and slaves, thereby substituting biography for biology. The slave pirates theatrical action and speech take as its target slavery and slave trade that enjoin the privation of action and speech, the suppression of agency and voice.

“While giving some directions about setting a lower stu’n’-sail,” Delano “suddenly” hears “a voice faithfully repeating his orders” (79). What he finds is Babo “acting under the pilot his original part of captain of the slaves” (79). In Delano’s occluded point of view, Babo’s take-over of command is a welcome assistance to his own authority—and nothing more than a mere replica of his command. But, as a matter of fact, when “tattered sails and warped yards [are] soon brought into some trim” (79), slaves do all those maritime labors solely under Babo’s authority. And if blacks sing and work with “inspirited[ness]” and “blithe[ness]” (79), it is because they hope their concerted work through Babo’s ventriloquist leadership will bring them closer to liberation. It is clear to them that what they do is no longer a life-draining labor enforced by slaveowners, but a work of self-fulfillment. And on a larger dimension, what Babo and slaves have achieved during the insurrection is a political community, however fugitive it might be, that helps to give rise to the strong sense of personhood.

For Delano, on the other hand, the ocean is the matrix of commerce in which trades of all kinds are unvaryingly “mild” and “human-like” (101). Melville’s intended double-entendre by “mild” trades traces all the way back to Montesquieu’s doux commerce, a word widely circulated throughout the eighteenth century and, to my knowledge, a hitherto unnoticed origin of Delano’s mild trades. As Albert O. Hirschman acknowledges, however, the term doux commerce is “a strange aberration for an age when the slave trade was at its peak” (62). But for Delano, that trades should be sweet and mild is clearly not an anomaly. For, just as the doux commerce is perceived to foster mutual civility and gentleness between two trading nations, Delano’s “mild trades” (101) have similarly ended in the re-establishment of sweet homosocial fraternity with the brother captain Cereno as well as the securing of pecuniary rewards for salvaging the slave cargo. And, unlike Cereno who is haunted and terrified by Babo’s shadow, the memory of slave mutineers is, for Delano, a thing of the past, and dissolves itself in the sweetness of the trades.

Whoever disrupts the doux commerce is a pirate or hostis humani generis—the enemy of humanity—as they were called in official legal terms which originate from the Roman Empire (Heller-Roazen 127-29). In the early stage of capitalism, the pirates’ inhumanness was mainly due to their lethal havoc on capitalist commerce. That is why their crime was regarded as “of all other Robberies the most aggravating and inhumane” (qtd. in Rediker 135). In their monstrosity against the capitalist regime of commerce, pirates were strictly excluded from all terms of humanity, and relegated to extra-legal beings who “can claim the protection of no Prince, the privilege of no Country, the benefit of no Law,” and deserve to be “denied common humanity and the very rights of Nature” (qtd. in Rediker 146). The slave rebels on the San Dominick were violently crushed down by Delano and his crew, as they were perceived to be the piratical enemies of humanity. The state and capital, according to Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, call those pirates and other rebels against the domination of capital as “hydras” (172), a trope that not only bespeaks the vexingly intractable multiplication of rebels from below but also unveils the lethal bestiality of counter-capitalist rebels. Melville also fills Benito Cereno with animal images, particularly in order to foreground black aggressiveness and viciousness, invoking their shameless manifestation of piratical criminality and their voluntary abdication of humanity. The continuation of the sweet and “human-like” (101) trades necessitates the elimination of those enemies of humanity. Fittingly, as Hirshman has noted, the pirate is precisely one of those antithetical figures that render conspicuous “the image of the trader as a doux, peaceful, inoffensive fellow” (63), the very type that the American captain Delano claims for himself. What has been lost, however, in his guileless enjoyment of the doux commerce is the fact that the American captain’s recapturing of slave rebels is also tantamount to piracy ⑦ , and that Delano is himself involved in, and complicit with, the inhuman commerce.

In his interview with New York Evangelist in 1854, Captain James Smith, the convicted captain of the slave-ship Julia Molton, has no memory of the human misery incurred by his illegal slave trade. He is oblivious of those who “lie down upon the deck, on their sides, body to body” (“The Slave-Trade” 194) as well as the myriad dead bodies that he threw overboard. The human tragedy is submerged in his exuberant calculation of varying cargo capacities of his ship for stowing slaves: “We took on board 664. We might have stowed away 800. . . .She would carry 750 with pleasure” (“The Slave-Trade” 194; emphasis original). And his elated account of enormous profits and suspenseful adventures elides the memory of the human cargo deep into the ocean bottom. Smith proudly exclaims, “But give me a well-built clipper, with six guns on a side and a long Tom in the middle, and a letter of marque to range the ocean, and I wouldn’t call the President my brother!” (“The Slave-Trade” 194). What binds Delano and Smith together is the oceanic order of capital, where commerce continues as “warm friends, steadfast friends” (101) in a perpetual motion just like the continuously blowing trans-Atlantic trade winds, and where the traces of “what humanity is capable of” (37) are washed down by the ever-surging waves of the ocean. Dishearteningly enough, slavery is still prosperous. In 2016, more than forty million were exploited as slaves world-wide (Global Estimates 5). It means that winds never stop blowing even today for the slave trade. Those descendants of Captain Smith are still busy smuggling sex slaves and child laborers to where they will be exploited for profits. We are all Delanos, if we turn a blind eye to the human misery. We are just as dim-witted as the Massachusetts captain, if we do not take “personal alarms” at the “malign evil” (37) out there.