Black Impact on Classic American Literature, Part Two

frican American Impact on Classic American Literature

June 19, 2018

 To repeat a key word from last week ---subterfuge, I will say Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno" is a masterful expose of subterfuge in the history (verifiable narrative) of the United States and 19th century American literature.  Moreover, a  21st century reader who  recognizes  the evasion may wish to make it a part of her or his equipment for living. She or he may ponder the difference between aesthetic reading and efferent reading under the guidance of Louise Rosenblatt's  The Reader the Text the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1978). That option is valuable. So too is reading Sterling Stuckey's Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History (1994).

Melville served his 1855 Putnam magazine audience well; he  serves us well from the distance of 163 years .  Both audiences are made aware of the ambiguity  of what the eye sees and what the ear hears as evidence to support  interpretations.  Note how the narrator depicts the scene in paragraph 3 of the story:  The morning is "peculiar to that coast," possessed of a special quality.  All is silent (mute).  All is gray --the sea is waved lead; the eye sees gray birds; they  are relatives (kith and kin) of gray vapors ---already the mind has begun to make connections and interpret the visual; the motion of the birds is like the movement of "swallows over meadows before storms.  Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come."  The extended simile transforms sea into land. The final sentence is an invitation to read in pursuit of discovering ; the scene is an omen.  We shall not understand the moral, the deeper shadow of the story, until the end. We can only surmise at the paragraph's end  that mysteries will unfold, that the story will be more than an entertainment.  It promises to be a learning experience, an exercise in applied morality.

 Readers who have more than average exposure to literature in English recognize that "borrowing"  (with or without due acknowledgement) from printed stories has a family resemblance with "stealing" and "theft."  Appropriation has  its own long history in writing, especially  in literary enterprises. Appropriating the language and ideas or intellectual property of another merits  discussion in law and aesthetics.   What is the ultimate aesthetic experience of seeing, however momentarily, the enslaved (the stolen human beings treated as cargo or property) exercise their will to freedom by transforming the agents of slavery into new versions of themselves, into characters who perform in a drama of absurdity for the benefit deluding  Captain Delano?  If we emphasize that aesthetic feelings  begin with perceptions, we can recast that question: Just how honest can "Benito Cereno" force us to be about what we see and hear daily in 2018?  And what might we come to know about the historically situated immorality of law itself as we participate in making sense of the narrative?  Deep questions foreshadow deeper questions to come! Who owns a story?

 There is a great deal of deliberate irony  in how Melville borrowed from Chapter XVIII of  Amasa Delano's 1817 book, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres; Comprising Three Voyages Round the World; Together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery, in the Pacific Ocean and Oriental Islands.  African American impact enables irony to boomerang in Charles Johnson's 1990 novel Middle Passage, because Johnson appropriates characters from Melville's narrative in his own demonstration of what facts of slavery and uses of creative imagination can bring into being. As far as "borrowing" ( let us call it benign  theft)  goes, it is Shakespeare who modeled how to plagiarize with gusto;  the stories in his plays are not original. Like Shakespeare, Melville and Johnson use the license of appropriation as they deal with what Morrison indentified in Playing in the Dark (1992) as Africanist presence in the Americas. They  follow a literary leader. Impact isn't a one-way street. As we shall discover in the coming weeks, Stowe, Twain, Ellison, and Morrison also borrow in different ways to produce different effects as they provide vistas of knowing.

Contemporary discussion of literature  often maims  the pleasure of the text  with all its clever "theorizing" and shadows the civility of the conversation Harry Levin tried to promote in The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (1957).  Levin addressed "two broad assumptions: the symbolic character of our greatest fiction and the dark wisdom of our deeper minds" (xii), and I think these assumptions still hibernate in the heart of whiteness. For Levin, "Benito Cereno" was Melville's "most forthright confrontation of blackness" (189) as he portrays Amasa Delano as"  the innocent American who…finds himself inadvertently drawn into the evils of the old world"…The implication, for the new world, is a change of course: from discovery to corruption.  Though Don Benito is saved and sustained, he guiltily pines away.  When Captain Delano asks him, "What has cast such a shadow upon you?," his response is "The Negro." Perhaps the most significant commentary on "Benito Cereno" is one of Melville's epigraphs to "The Bell Tower," his Frankenstein parable of a mechanism which destroys its inventor: "Like Negroes, these powers own men sullenly; mindful of their higher master; while serving plot revenge."…..That higher master can be no other than nature itself, which, outraged by slavery, authorizes the vengeance of the enslaved" (189-190).

Attention to African American impact does not contradict Levin's insights about Melville, but it reveals what Levin either would  not or could not see: neither Amasa Delano nor any other white male American in the 19th century was "innocent."  The old world (Europe) had no monopoly on the evil of slavery; that evil was inscribed in the racial contract of the so-called New World.  Levin didn't lie. He evaded.  And in so doing he affirmed that  we are never free of our shadows.  As D. H. Lawrence warned us, we should expect that the 20th century scholarship of Harry Levin and his peers would, like the  classic  American literature they examined, revel in subterfuge. The so-called "culture wars" of the late 20th century only minimized subterfuge.  We are predisposed  to evade ad infinitum.

Knowing is symbolic, and we would symbolize our bottomless curiosity about history and morality  by dealing with Frederick Douglass, the mutiny on the Creole (1841) and The Heroic Slave; we provide evidence of what we see in the affair of La Amistad (1839), the agency of Cinque, and the trial and eventual return of the once enslaved   to West Africa; by reading "Benito Cereno" we position ourselves to deal more seriously with the fictions of Stowe, Twain, Ellison, and Morrison.  By denial of subterfuge, we enable those fictions to become components of our nonfiction.  We allow them to articulate how American literary imagination confronts or retreats from  African American impact and American histories.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.