“Insane Terrors of the Present”: Melancholic Temporality in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno

Abstract

This paper explores the issue of temporality in Benito Cereno. My analysis sheds light on the way temporality operates in tandem with historical memory in the novella, in particular on its distinctive rendering of the ‘present.’ While a considerable volume of criticism regarding slavery and racial stereotypes has been produced, not many of these works have examined the way Melville deals with time as a political and philosophical matter in Benito Cereno. My reading turns attention to the black servant Babo and his unique performance of the slave. In his enactment of submission and silence, Babo repeats and recasts the stereotype of the colonized, which is termed the logic of mimicry in postcolonial theory. In his repetition of the given image of the slave, there is a surplus and excess that threatens the seamless progress of time. By demonstrating that Babo’s mimicry embodies the ‘present’ as a disjunctive temporality suspending historical closure and spacing alternative time, this paper argues that Melville not only prefigures postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha’s formulation of mimicry but also explores melancholic temporality as a way of historical memory. Extending the temporal logic of melancholia from an individual psychic structure to a collective historical one, the melancholic ‘countless struggles’ with loss can be understood as a language of resistance to the forgetting of dominant historiography. In Benito Cereno, the melancholic temporality of counter-discourse emerges through the incessant interruption of the ‘present’ signs that disrupt Delano’s epistemological desire for a seamless historical narrative―the slaves’ sensorial performances and Babo’s mimicry of submission and silence.