The DissemiNation of “Benito Cereno”; or A Polychromatic Experiment in Bhabhaian Syntax, Brought Forth in Good Faith by the Author

“If the ambivalent figure of the nation is a problem of its transitional history, its conceptual indeterminacy, its wavering between vocabularies, then what effect does this have on narratives and discourses that signify a sense of ‘nationness’: the heimlich of pleasures of the hearth, the unheimlich terror of the space or race of the Other; the comfort of social belonging, the hidden injuries of class; the customs of taste, the powers of political affiliation; the sense of social order, the sensibility of sexuality; the blindness of bureaucracy, the strait insight of institutions; the quality of justice, the common sense of injustice; the langue of the law and the parole of the people.” (Bhabha Nation and Narration 2)

(Author's Note: Colors above will correspond with those below.)

In posing this question above, Homi Bhabha simultaneously provides an answer to how one might go about discerning the narration of nation, or narrating the narration of nation.  If he characterizes this process as existing in the collective iteration of every item on the list above, its deep construction, its seemingly (at times) insurmountable conceptual nuance, then Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (as if it were planned this way) proves an undeniable participant in this process:  Delano’s (or “Jack of the Beach’s”) heimlich remembrances of his household boat and life back in the US, the unheimlich terror—“now with scales dropped from his eyes”—of the San Dominick’s transformation from a strange boat with docile slaves and sickly crew worthy of his charity into the place of flying hatchets and hidden daggers from the Africans Delano had reflected so kindly on (if comparable to the dumb devotion of a “Newfoundland dog”); the comfort of Delano naturally belonging above the slaves alongside Don Cereno as a fellow captain (taking lunch together, discussing routes, etc.), Delano’s simultaneous assessment of Cereno’s ineptitude and discourteousness as a captain being perhaps due to his Spanishness or otherwise “ill-breeding”; the customs of captain-to-captain exchange Delano expects (a more welcoming demeanor, a personal farewell upon his departure), the narrator’s (and by extension American captain’s) frequent reflections on national identity—“But as a nation—continued [Delano] in his reveries—these Spaniards are all an odd set; the very word Spaniard has a curious, conspirator, Guy-Fawkish twang to it” (179)—with his suspicions emblemized so richly by the rag-flags in the cuddy during the shaving scene, in which national distinctions are discarded as fabric yet make possible the ruse of the mutineers, themselves tying their hopes to reaching the nation of Senegal; the American captain’s hyper-awareness of the bizarre social hierarchy of racially marked Spaniards, mulattoes, Black Africans, and sickly Spanish Captain on the San Dominick, the acknowledgement of scantily-clad “negresses” sleeping “like a doe” and occupying the lowest place of social order on the ship; the methodically litigious reckoning of Benito Cereno’s deposition to the Peruvian authorities, the church providing Delano and Cereno’s ultimate sense of institutional legitimation; the story’s ending on a complex sense of embodied retributive justice (Babo’s head on a spit, Cereno’s skeleton in the crypt), a slight acknowledgement of the harshness of the slave trade coupled with a tacit assumption of an African’s "natural" disposition to servitude; Bhabha’s “langue of the law”—“I, Don Jose De abos and Padilla, His Majesty’s Notary for the Royal Revenue…Do certify and declare, as much as is requisite in law, that, in the criminal cause commenced the twenty-fourth of the month of September, in the year seventeen hundred and ninety-nine…” (207); and “parole of the people”—“On the testimony of the sailors alone rested the legal identity of Babo” (222-3). 

Each of these aspects in Melville’s story reflects a national consciousness not centered in a specific “nation” (largely made possible by the maritime setting) yet absolutely concerned with an orientation to one’s national identity—Senegalese, Spanish, American—that sets in motion Delano’s ruminations on what he sees while aboard the San Dominick.  The nation, as Bhabha demonstrates so well, informs the personal, and in so doing the person, simultaneously, makes the “Janus-faced” narration of nation.