But this promise of collusion with an omniscient narrator turns out to be a trap. The story transpires for the most part within the limited consciousness of the credulous American, but Melville takes pains not to mark Delano’s thought, especially his racist thought, as conspicuously Delano’s own. On a second reading, we might spot the trick, the smooth ventriloquizing of Delano’s mind via the narrative permissions of free, indirect discourse. But, like Delano on the San Dominick, we are not at first afforded the luxury of rereading. When the narrative says, blankly, at the start of a paragraph, “There is something in the negro which . . . fits him for avocations about one’s person,” we have only our own perceptiveness to mark it as anything but credible omniscient narration. If we do not at once recognize this for what it is, a burlesque of Delano’s racist fantasies of innate black servility, then we, too, have been the insufficiently curious victims of an elaborate ruse. Our distancing condemnations of Delano begin to ring hollow.

That Melville designs the tale to execute precisely that ruse and to disable its readers’ recognition of the scene aboard the San Dominick, that the narrative itself identifies with the slaves’ practices of masquerade, is telling. Being anything other than Delano, the tale says, is work, requiring scrupulousness, imagination, and a ruthless skepticism in regard to commonplace stories of racial difference and racial capacity. In “Benito Cereno” Melville gives narrative form to his festering suspicion that the American reading public was not up to the task—was, in fact, catastrophically incapable of it. (The roaring success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, appearing only three years earlier and glutted with precisely the fantasies of black character and black docility that blind Delano, could only deepen this suspicion.) Good readers of America, Melville says, I have taken your measure. I know you.

 • • • 

In less than two years, Melville’s career as a novelist was finished. He collected many of his magazine pieces into The Piazza Tales and published both Israel Potter and The Confidence-Man, the latter a work whose fatalism has been understood to venture more nearly into nihilism. And that was it. Melville did not, however, abandon writing. He turned to poetry, and in fact he wrote several singular volumes of verse, animated by his habitual skepticism, by his attunement to languages both antiquated and modern, and, often, by a haunting, angular music. And it was from out of the work of poetry that, after a hiatus of more than thirty years, Melville returned to prose. “Billy Budd,” which was left unfinished at his death in 1891, began as an elaborate headnote to a ballad Melville had written called “Billy in the Darbies.” It became the story of three characters—young and beautiful Billy Budd; John Claggart, the master-at-arms; and the contemplative Captain Edward Fairfax Vere—and a meditation on desire, law, unbearable knowledge, and the entanglements of love and speech. If Melville is thought of today as among literature’s exemplary stylists of charged ambiguity, a writer who sets incompatible necessities into colliding proximity, “Billy Budd” is as much the reason as Moby-Dick.

Just as the poetry of Battle-Pieces marked a rupturing departure from the writing that had preceded it, so, too, is the prose of “Billy Budd” a departure from the headlong gusty eloquence of Moby-Dick. Elliptical, digressive, and spare, the writing of the tale moves with little of the propulsiveness, or the coiled mysteriousness, of Melville’s other short fiction. There are mysteries enough in “Billy Budd,” but Melville approaches them at a different angle. Among them are Claggart’s “depravity according to nature” and his antipathy to Billy; Billy’s own inarticulacy, as well as his loyalty to his captain; and Vere’s dogged adherence to law in its most unmerciful construction, as applied to a young man to whom he is also vehemently, if a bit obscurely, attached. The story is without question a tragedy. Guilelessness, beauty, youth: none of these survives. Readers have seen in the story a lament for the doom of youth, a reckoning with the inscrutable forms of human malignity, a shipboard staging of nothing less than the Fall of Man.

But it is also, “Billy Budd,” a thing considerably stranger. Its background is the Napoleonic Wars, a historical fracture point in which the old orders of empire are under threat from the revolutionary energies convulsing the continent. Authority and order are matters both local and of large-scale consequence for the story. On the Bellipotent they arrive in the guise of mutiny, or its slumbering possibility. Billy is an impressed man—a sailor snatched from his ship (the ironically named Rights-of-Man) and inducted into the British navy—which would make him an easy object of suspicion, were it not for his preternatural innocence of character. Claggart knows this, and his use of the shadow of that suspicion drives the story’s plot.