Following Leaders: Deconstructing the Narrator, Deposition, and Figureheads of "Benito Cereno"

Abstract

Following Leaders:Deconstructing the Narrator, Deposition, and Figureheads of "Benito Cereno" Christopher Morris (bio) In its anticipation of contemporary debates over American racism, "Benito Cereno" (1855) deserves attention from all critical perspectives. At the same time—and despite the occasional mention of deconstruction or Derrida by critics—reception of the novella has remained steadfastly hermeneutic in attempting to define a unified Melvillean point of view from which to judge the story's attacks on innate evil, Southern apologists for slavery, Catholic theologians, readers, manifest destiny, Spanish and American imperialism, the Enlightenment, Althusserian ideology, and heteronormativity.1 While there are many overlaps in critical perspectives on the text—no one has yet consolidated them into 'Western phallogocentrism'—their proliferation mirrors a history of disputes over key passages.2 Early critics disagreed about Cereno's last words—that the pall cast over him was on account of "the negro" ("Benito Cereno" 116).3 And for years questions have arisen about the referent of the word "leader" in the story's last sentence: "Benito Cereno, borne on the bier, did, indeed, follow his leader" (117).4 Identifying an antecedent, or leader, epitomizes the hermeneutic drive to answer the question, 'What does it mean?' With regard to Cereno's "leader," some critics have proposed a specific character; others, despite the singular, argue for plural antecedents, including abstractions as well as characters, in readings that make 'leader' a metonymy. And because the story's final phrase is only the last of its several key appearances in the tale, these disagreements put at an additional [End Page 133] remove the hermeneutic grail of Melville's overall point of view—whether on racism or any other topic. For the time being, the necessity to 'follow a leader' may be understood as a shorthand for hermeneutics itself—the idea that all quests for the truth are 'guided' by some acknowledged or unacknowledged hypothesis, some assumption about the world. At the same time, "Benito Cereno" may have anticipated the persistence and futility of hermeneutics—a depressing result that may persist in this essay, too, whose deconstructive 'alternative' can suggest some of its limits, but only after having recapitulated its findings and recommitted its errors. Even Ishmael's dreamy, mostly self-effacing writing can't dispel the implication that readers will always be Ahabs, driven to pin things down. At the end of The Confidence-Man (1857), the elusive narrator says, "something further may follow of this Masquerade"; if that is to be the case in future criticism of "Benito Cereno," the inscrutability of what might 'follow' may be evident in that word's vexed sense of 'to conclude' (251). For it's inevitable that 'following' authors-as-leaders requires first reading them, then articulating the meaning of their words. But if reading vitiates belief in a unitary author with a point of view, then the conclusiondrawing operation that must follow, modeled on grammar, will be disabled, too, before it can get very far. Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller thought that a potential for such a structural disillusionment may exist in every narrative.5 From this perspective, the last line of "Benito Cereno" might be taken to mean, "Not even death could divert Benito Cereno from the mistaken course of 'following' that his future critics, too, would be doomed to repeat." Nevertheless, the story can be said to have achieved something, after all, if only as a performative, by dramatizing such cognitive paralysis: readers would at least be warned, Cassandra-like, even if they could never be expected to believe they might undergo a disastrous fate like Ahab's. In this impasse, any 'options' traditionally sought within the work—Cereno's religious withdrawal and death, Babo's silence, or Delano's deeply compromised 'normal' life—would all be rendered equally unacceptable. And if hermeneutics must at all costs find an antecedent, a referent, or a leader to believe in so as to 'follow,' so must deconstruction in the beginning, at least, as the preceding allusions to de Man and Miller already make clear. In this outcome, "Benito Cereno" would do or say little except for disabusing readers of the illusion that those verbs could describe its purpose [End...