Herman Melville - Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories

New readers are advised that this introduction makes the details of the plot explicit.

Amasa Delano is uneasy. The American ship captain, who takes center stage in Benito Cereno, Herman Melvilles hypnotic tale of 1855 , strides the deck of a distressed slave ship and wonders what he is about. He has come aboard to provide aid to the Spanish vessel San Dominick, which has been ravaged by illness and violent turns of weather. But as the day unfolds he feels more and more that something on the strange ship is, if not quite alarming, indefinably amiss. Disquieted by the stilted, pantomimic manners of the San Dominicks captain, Benito Cereno, as well as by unexplained breaches of shipboard decorum, unruly slaves, and misbehaving sailorsAll this is very queer now, thought Captain Delanothe American tries to keep his composure and to recall to himself the better angels of his nature. Here he is gazing upon his own boat as it nears. The less distant sight of that well-known boat, Melville writes,

Rover by name, which, though now in strange seas, had often pressed the beach of Captain Delanos home, and, brought to its threshold for repairs, had familiarly lain there, as a Newfoundland dog; the sight of that household boat evoked a thousand trustful associations, which, contrasted with previous suspicions, filled him not only with lightsome confidence, but somehow with half humorous self-reproaches at his former lack of it.

Reader: keep an eye on that dog. Reference to its kind will recur in the narrative, perhaps prickling the attentive reader with the same subarticulate qualmish sort of emotion that visits Delano on occasion. It is characteristic of Melville, and especially of the compressed power of Melvilles shorter fiction, that nothing marks this passage as particularly noteworthy or revealing, though we do come to know a bit more about how Captain Delano regards himself. (What, I, Amasa Delano, Delano thinks, I to be murdered here at the ends of the earth, on board a haunted pirate-ship by a horrible Spaniard?Too nonsensical to think of! Who would murder Amasa Delano? His conscience is clean.) And, with the exception of that Newfoundland dog, even less marks these as sentences that tremble and strain, that struggle to contain an anger so corrosive and distilled that it threatens to devour everything near it.

But they are, these sentences, and they do. They are a part of one of the most poised, implacable, raging pieces of literature in the whole of the American canon. To see how they are so requires some attention and some explanation.

Herman Melville was a writer who made himself at home in a tremendous range of idioms and genres, both established and emergent. This is so much the case that reading Melville can feel at times like an exercise in astonishment. He had an ear tuned to the cadences of classic literatureno one who rides out Moby-Dicks storms of grandiloquence can doubt this. (Id strike the sun if it insulted me, says Captain Ahab, in the iambic pentameter toward which his speech often tends.) But his sentences could be spare as well as orchestral, his figures at once outlandish and indelible. And he was capable, too, of inhabiting a great breadth of dispositions and emotional climates, moods of spirit. To read widely in Melville is to find that he could be mordant and melancholy; that he could be fantastically comic, in ways as energized by slapstick and dashes of teasing obscenity as by the intellectual imperatives of satire; that he could trace out passages of otherworldly tranquility as well as of rending desolation, of a sorrowfulness without hope of consolation; and that he could well be said to specialize in the depiction of a kind of awe, a half-horrified amazement in the face of a universe full of beauty and warm abundance but punctuated, too, by a cold, frightful vacancy. Any of these moods we might properly call Melvillean.