“The Negro Babo” and “the Blond Beast”: Melville’s Benito Cereno as Nietzschean Genealogy
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This study reads Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno in the light of Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality, delineating specific aspects of the narrative into three categories: contentious, contingent, and dialectical, and closing with a contemplation on the question of historical subjectivity. Benito Cereno, published in 1855 and based on an actual slave revolt that had occurred on board the Spanish slave ship Tryal in 1804, raises fundamental questions about the meaning of the “slave revolt”: namely, questions on the nature of slavery, the morality of the revolt, and ultimately, the condition of humanness. Melville portrays the contentious nature of master-slave relations in multi-layered ways. The apparent master-slave roles are reversed, then staged as a show for Delano and the reader by Babo the mastermind. Babo’s staged charade is also an illustration of the contingent history of modern slavery. The meticulously orchestrated spectacle of black subservience and white supremacy is “the exteriority” of the slave revolt, which is enacted as pantomime using “the body.” Finally, Benito Cereno interweaves interrelated, overlayed histories into a genealogy of slavery, rendering it dialectical by breaking open the linear continuum of history and bringing the fragments into a sedimented moment of Now. In the final instance, Babo is human as proven by his capacity for revenge and hatred as much as his unrelenting heroic search for liberation. Ironically, however, it is due to this humanity that he fails to redeem himself, breaking free of the vicious cycle of power struggles.
Abstract
This study reads Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno in the light of Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality, delineating specific aspects of the narrative into three categories: contentious, contingent, and dialectical, and closing with a contemplation on the question of historical subjectivity. Benito Cereno, published in 1855 and based on an actual slave revolt that had occurred on board the Spanish slave ship Tryal in 1804, raises fundamental questions about the meaning of the “slave revolt”: namely, questions on the nature of slavery, the morality of the revolt, and ultimately, the condition of humanness. Melville portrays the contentious nature of master-slave relations in multi-layered ways. The apparent master-slave roles are reversed, then staged as a show for Delano and the reader by Babo the mastermind. Babo’s staged charade is also an illustration of the contingent history of modern slavery. The meticulously orchestrated spectacle of black subservience and white supremacy is “the exteriority” of the slave revolt, which is enacted as pantomime using “the body.” Finally, Benito Cereno interweaves interrelated, overlayed histories into a genealogy of slavery, rendering it dialectical by breaking open the linear continuum of history and bringing the fragments into a sedimented moment of Now. In the final instance, Babo is human as proven by his capacity for revenge and hatred as much as his unrelenting heroic search for liberation. Ironically, however, it is due to this humanity that he fails to redeem himself, breaking free of the vicious cycle of power struggles.
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