He makes exquisite the narrator’s sense of obligation, of mutuality, as if in the effort to discover what species of care might be possible once the ruses of a bullying reason, an exploitative contractualism, have at last been surrendered: “I would prefer not to quit you,” he says to the lawyer, as if wondering what a love released from these confinements might prove to be. What he gets for his labor is abandonment, the police, a rich man’s bribe. “I know you,” Bartleby says to the lawyer when he finds him in the Tombs, with the ruefulness of a spurned lover, “and I want nothing to say to you.” There is sorrow enough in Bartleby, certainly, but we do well to remember that its elegiac and pastoral tones come from a narrator whose conscience may well be smarting. Bartleby looks for a mode of human cherishing outside of those sanctioned by Wall Street and its narrow blank-wall vistas. He decides he will be nourished by nothing else. In his starvation there is, for the Melville who has stood behind the lawyer all along, something larger than sadness, and more dire.

 • • • 

“Bartleby” appears in 1853 and in the two years between its publication and that of his next story of similar reach and power, Melville’s anger had contracted itself into new forms. The outrage of “Benito Cereno” was to be of a different order, more intricate, more entrapping, and more lethal.

The tale unfolds as a seafaring mystery, laced with hints of gothic intrigue. At the center of it is Amasa Delano, of Duxbury, another of Melville’s men of blithe heart and worrying credulity. Delano passes through a series of strange tableaux—a high-strung Spanish captain and his “private servant,” the slave, Babo, who shadows him; slaves clashing hatchets, in and out of chains; surly Spanish sailors—like a man struggling to rouse himself from a trance, registering throughout the insinuating strangeness of the circumstance aboard the San Dominick but unable to assemble its separate parts into coherence. The extended first section of the tale is in large measure the record of his attempts to read the scene before him, to transform these baffling episodes into a story he can comprehend. As Melville depicts it, Delano’s consciousness rocks pendulum-like between gothic suspicion, in which he fancies himself at the center of some diabolical Spaniard’s plot (“the very word Spaniard has a curious, conspirator, Guy-Fawkish twang to it,” he thinks), and a style of self-reassurance in which, like the sentimental man he avows himself to be, he recalls the elemental beneficence of human nature, the benignity of the God-ordered world, and the folly of imagining himself as anything other than a grateful recipient of God’s special grace. In this way Delano succeeds in “drowning criticism in compassion” and keeps at bay his more uncharitable surmises.

But these stories, however they reinforce his faith in “the ever-watchful Providence above,” do not by themselves do the work of putting Delano’s suspicions to rest. He must join them to others, to stories that, though they differ in tenor, in fact attend every stage in the unfolding of what the narrative calls not Delano’s trustfulness, but his “undistrustful good nature.” These are stories about slaves. They are stories about their faithfulness, their good cheer, about “the peculiar love in negroes of uniting industry with pastime” and all the winning characteristics “arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind.” Delano swathes the slaves he sees in figures: Babo is like “a shepherd’s dog,” the chained Atufal a “bull of the Nile,” the slave mothers “leopardesses.” Indeed, “like most men of a good, blithe heart, Captain Delano took to negroes, not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs.”

By the end of the story we learn the nature of the mystery: the slaves are in revolt and have enslaved the Spaniards, forcing them at the threat of death to perform their assigned roles for Delano. Like so many other of the nested ironies of Delano’s portion of the tale, the rancorousness of the reference to the dog, the narrative’s moral revulsion at Delano, comes most to light in this clarifying retrospect. But by withholding this revelation and mystifying it, the story does something else. Melville compels us to watch, in grinding slow motion, the intricate inner workings of a vast misrecognition. What Delano looks at is enslavement: subjection and horror, violence and desperation. Everywhere the captive Cereno looks is the threat of death; Babo’s knife is never far from his heart. But what Delano sees is remarkable. He understands the enslaved as faithful companions, bestial but hearteningly devoted in their loves, not quite a different species of being from himself and Cereno but certainly a part of a different, lesser order of creation. What other conviction could permit Delano to do so intimate a business with the unconscionable commerce of transatlantic slavery and to assure himself, all the while, that his “conscience is clean”? “Benito Cereno” is in these respects the account of a man who cannot see what is happening, directly in front of him, and of the specific narrative machinery with which he transposes subjection into devotion, a rage for freedom into cheery docility, cruel exploitation into God’s plan. It tracks, down to their grammar and syntax, the stories with which the American beguiles himself into tranquility.

It’s not hard to read the tale as a comprehensive assault on Delano, whose thin piety and easy self-regard—whose offhand white supremacism—sustain his protracted misapprehensions. So much of the rest of the story bears out such a reading. Melville adapted the story from an actual event (the real Delano had written a memoir that included his 1805 encounter with a Spanish slave ship), but his alterations are significant. He sets the tale backward in time, to 1799, situating the slave uprising firmly within the Age of Revolution. “[W]hat Babo has done was but duty,” the slave leader tells the uncomprehending Delano, and he sounds in the moment not a little like his revolutionary precursor Thomas Jefferson, who in 1776 noted of free peoples that “it is their right, it is their duty” to commit acts of revolutionary violence in the name of freedom from oppression. Then, too, there is the legal deposition that appends the initial tale, wherein Melville reminds us pointedly which voices are allowed entry into the official documents of historical recording and which are not. Babo, executed as a conspirator, meets a “voiceless end,” and his Iago-like silence from the moment of his capture onward points us toward the excision at the heart of the story of the New World, the terrible unremediated vacancy. A slave owner’s whited skeleton takes the place of Columbus as the ship’s figurehead: this is Melville’s concise emblem of the murderousness without which the New World does not come to be, and of the impossible volume of the unnarrated dead.

But in our rush to identify ourselves with the tale’s contempt for Delano and the racist liberal sentimentality for which he stands we can miss much of what’s lastingly unnerving about “Benito Cereno.” The story tells us at the outset that Delano is a bit cretinous, not possessed of a “more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception.” The narrative voice separates itself from Delano here and whispers to us conspiratorially behind his back.