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

Abstract

In Herman Melville's Pierre, Plinlimmon's pamphlet uses the term to denote the transcendent, heavenly, sacred, and timeless, and the term 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 of this 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 of the ages, the new promised land-all of the variations on the myth of American 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 Cereno. 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 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 of the dominant culture and for Europeans in the vanguard of New World expansion (such as the European characters in Benito Cereno), 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 of object. Whereas