“Since my earliest readings of Moby-Dick, I always sensed Melville’s deliberate misdirections: that he was telling some other story underneath the obvious one. So, it was not hard to suspect his manipulation of the reader as well as his tendency to hide/display deeper revelations underneath the surface narrative. Benito Cereno fell quickly (for me) into that category… Slavery was not unique; the Americas, Europe, Africa—all knew its benefits and engaged in a “moral rationale” of benevolent civilizing efforts in order to deflect from its lethal consequences. A stunningly deceitful discourse had to be developed among slaveholders and abolitionists alike.  Melville reveals to the reader the willful blindness of Amasa Delano’s language, a language that absolves him of all responsibility.”   

—Toni Morrison 

Introduction: Mise en Abyme and the Language of Denial 

As Toni Morrison argues in “Melville and the Language of Denial,” Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855/56) is a case study in misdirection and intertextuality, a paradigm for telling “some other story underneath the surface narrative.”  From the outset, the setting of Benito Cereno evokes a tone of dire disaster, pointing Captain Amasa Delano to “(s)hadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.”¹  Yet, from the moment he sees the San Dominick, Delano dismisses both his own intuition (“the deeper shadows”) and his own sensory perceptions (what he sees and hears).² Since he is the narrator, Delano’s misperception—his insistence on rationalizing the “misrule” on the ship—tempts the reader to suspend disbelief, misperceive reality, and participate in the language of denial. The reader finds herself complicit in a narrative bias that outstrips the reach of the San Dominick, suggesting that through the grayness and ambiguity of conflict we perceive both the historical situation (underneath the fictional story) and the sub-textual political discourse only from the vantage point of the narrative perspective that frames it. As much as it is a story about a slave revolt, Benito Cereno is a story about narrative framing or, more precisely, about the “narratives within the narrative” that structure it. 

Writing in 1893, Andre Gide illuminates the literary device of intertextuality, the device, which in my reading, was employed by Melville in the 1850s. Specifically, Gide, in his so-called “charter,” develops the concept of mise en abyme, deriving it from a related term, inescutcheon.³ Inescutcheon, a term taken from heraldry, literally means “placed in the center.” In the Middle Ages, inescutcheon referred to the series of decorative insignias (or signifiers) embossed on top of each other on a royal shield. Gide’s innovation was to translate a medieval construct into a modern literary device, namely mise-en-abyme, which means “placed in the void or abyss” (as opposed to “placed in the center”).⁴ Instead of a term that denotes levels of signification designed to amplify power, Gide’s neologism refers, more generally, to the reiteration of narrative meaning. In his charter, he offers the example of the “play within a play” in Hamlet: the second play re-duplicates “the subject of the work itself,” causing the work to be “self-reflective.”⁵ The device suggests that underneath the play put on by the players there could be another play in an “infinitely recurring sequence” of reflexivity.⁶  In Melville’s novella, we witness both the denotation of juxtaposed power signifiers and, more generally, the reiteration of narratives: Benito Cereno is the author’s retelling of chapter eighteen from Amasa Delano’s 1817 publication, Narrative of Voyages, itself a re-telling of Don Benito Cereno’s 1804/5 narrative about a slave revolt onboard his ship. The latter primarily consists of Cereno’s trial deposition, a legal record that establishes the “historical facts.”⁷ Of course, from our point of view, the status of the archive as “historical fact” is dubious when the published legal record not only condemns slaves to death for resisting their captors but also represses their side of the story. More surprising, perhaps, is Melville’s critical re-narration. The author’s recounting of the story evokes a sense of “archival uncertainty”: he changes place names and redates the narrative to give Delano’s Narrative a “fictional frame of reference.” As Melville’s novella unfolds, the eponymous character, Benito Cereno, re-narrates his own story to Captain Delano by using evasive and equivocating language—a tergiversating device that he is compelled to deploy since the perpetual surveillance of the Black insurrectionists means he can never directly state “what he means.”⁸ But what does Melville mean to convey by recounting the story in this way? Does Melville’s transparent re-scripting of “archival facts” and avoidance of the indicative mood suggest that behind black and white facts there is a meaningless abyss? Or is there a “truth” to be teased out of the varied accounts of the historical archive? 

In the first part of the paper, I will investigate how Melville employs the concept of inescutcheon to set the scene at the beginning of the novella and to seduce the reader into complicity with misdirection, misperception, and misrecognition of the Other. In the second part, I will investigate a series of questions suggested by the author’s use of reiteration and intertextuality: Whose story is this? Who is the protagonist? Who is the narrator? Who is the pirate? In the third part of the paper, I will engage Robert A. Ferguson’s “Untold Stories in the Law,” an essay that re-narrates a slave insurrection in Virginia in 1800.⁹ Like the incident onboard the San Dominick, the Virginia insurrection—dubbed “Gabriel’s rebellion” after its leader—was recorded, reiterated, and “repressed” in court transcripts and depositions. In this section, I will use Ferguson’s argument as a point of departure to compare Gabriel and Babo’s narratives. Specifically, I will attempt to elucidate whether “some repressed thoughts. . .escape oblivion” by navigating the interstices of official discourses, and I query whether this “navigation” follows an ontological or socio-historical logic.¹⁰ I intend to use my investigation of the devices of misdirection, misrecognition, and intertextuality to build the edifice of my argument, ultimately culminating in a conclusion, in which I will show how the various levels of meaning at stake in Benito Cereno all map onto a language of denial and “willful blindness.”

I. Inescutcheon: Necrosis, History, and Complicity

Early in the novella, Captain Delano’s misperceptions coincide with the necrotic imagery that he associates with the foreign ship coming into the bay. The San Dominick is both splendid and in a state of disarray, presenting itself with a contradictory air of “royal misfortune.” The ship itself serves as a metonym: while the American captain sees the ship as representative of the Spanish empire’s decline, his perception of the ship’s inhabitants reveals his own atavistic mindset—that is, mirroring the decaying Empire is the narrator’s American viewpoint, a vantage point determined by the nation’s fixation (from its origin) with the question of slavery and the slave trade.  

In 1787, a decade before the novel is set, twelve of the original colonies ratified the U.S. Constitution, including Article 1, Section 9, which stated that Congress could not prohibit the “importation of persons” prior to 1808.¹¹ In 1807, Congress passed a statute prohibiting the importation of slaves, commencing January 1, 1808.¹² Similarly, in 1807, Parliament passed the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, banning the trade in the British Empire—and charging the Royal Navy with enforcing the act by treating slave traders as pirates. By the time Melville wrote Benito Cereno circa 1855/56, the historical “framework” of the story—the foreshadowing of the decline of the slave trade and its “re-coding” as piracy—is one of the “frames within a frame” that the (astute) reader would “read” into the story.  

It is in the context of this history that his readers would have read: “But the principal relic of faded grandeur was the ample oval of the shield-like stern-piece, intricately carved with the arms of Castile and Leon, medallioned about by groups of mythological or symbolical devices; uppermost and central of which was a dark satyr in a mask, holding his foot on the prostate neck of a writhing figure likewise masked.” In this oval “shield-like stern-piece,” the inescutcheon bears the symbols of the royal households of Castile and Leon (castle and lion), surrounded by mythopoetic imagery. Of course, the reader might wonder about this particular symbolic device—why do the Spanish identify with an image of a goat-man, the pagan Dionysus who, for Catholics, represents Lucifer? Is it simply a means of frightening the “enemy,” such as Babo’s “follow your leader,” or does the satyr refer to a more fundamental construct of unbridled power, the type of power at stake in domination, conquest, and slavery? Is this image within an image, juxtaposing pagan myths of unbridled power with the power of the Spanish Empire, simply ironic given the narrator’s premonition that far from evoking absolute power, the imagery is a “relic” of death and decay? 

Intended to evoke and amplify imperial power, the stern-piece, the ship itself, and its Captain all signal the opposite—the decline of empire.  The image of the satyr, at top center, is a focal point—commanding the narrator’s attention as an elemental part of an “image within an image” that “foreshadows deeper shadows to come.” The “dark satyr” and the “writhing figure” remained masked—neither the oppressed nor the oppressor can see the Other’s face. As Delano suggests, this image in particular is “evocative,” but “evocative” of what? When the reader sees the “symbolical device” of domination—as it is depicted by the narrator—what does he “see”? Does he see what the narrator sees? Does he see what the imperial powers want him and the narrator to see? Does he see what the historical “frame within a frame” invites him to see? 

Or is the narrator the guide who prompts the reader to participate in the  misperceiving of reality? Or, alternately, is the narrator placed in the story to invite the reader’s opposition to his ignorance? 

Unlike the Spanish Empire, the Atlantic slave trade (circa 1799) is not dead (as an economic system), but it is a dying ideology.  So, by 1855/56, when Melville re-tells the tale of the real-life Captain Delano, the slave trade has been outlawed (for nearly a half century) in America and throughout the British Empire. By the time the story is re-told, the “vile” acts of piracy committed by Babo, and the rest of the revolting slaves are “re-coded” so that it is Don Benito Cereno who is now a “pirate.” Thus, it is open to Melville’s reader to ask a fundamental question: Who is the oppressor? Who is the oppressed? While it is unclear how the reader will “read” the relation between Benito Cereno and Babo, there is a possibility that the reader will see more than Delano sees.  Melville intentionally leaves open the possibility that the reader will see an inversion of the victim/perpetrator symbolism, a kind of transference of the master/slave roles so that is possible to identify with the revolting slave and his performative mastery. Of course, we can also read Melville, the author, as identifying with his narrator’s blindness and thus inducing the reader into complicity with misdirection and misperception.   

The irony that the slave fighting for his freedom can be indicted for piracy may or may not  have been lost on Melville’s audience; however, the contemporary reader can see that Captain Delano (like the Vice-Regal Court that ultimately takes the depositions) gathers facts and then fits the evidence into categories which, in turn, leads to the misperception of the truth. Because Delano fits all that he observes into an array of “idee fixe,” he is incapable of attributing human agency to Black people—this, despite the fact that every sign points to their organized mutiny. Intuition tells him something must be askew; yet his senses drag him away from reality, leaving him at the mercy of his own ignorance. When asked at what point in the novella did, she perceive Melville’s misdirection, Toni Morrison responded that, given her familiarity with Melville’s other texts, she anticipated misdirection, but also that, more generally, she could not suspend disbelief: “I didn’t believe a kidnapped African slave en route to ownership by a stranger in a foreign land would be so accommodating. Why would he (Babo) care about the health and well-being of his captor?”¹³

Toni Morrison recognizes in Delano’s various misperceptions the “‘happy loyal slave’ antebellum discourse” that played a special role in American history.¹⁴  Who could accept Babo’s performance as the slave whose loyalty to his master trumps his own will to be free but a man who has already determined that Babo and all other Africans, possess no agency, and that this is exactly the trait that has fitted them for their role as slaves? Reading into the San Dominick everything that he has already presumed to be true, everything Delano sees is false; yet, of course, it is precisely his inability to see the truth that saves his life while aboard the ship—suggesting that, at a meta-level, willful ignorance can be quite the powerful defense mechanism.

II. Mise en Abyme: Performance, Narration, and Piracy

Of the three primary characters, Captain Delano, Benito Cereno, and the leading “pirate,” Babo, it is unclear who exactly is placed at the center of the story. If life onboard the San Dominick is performative, and the interaction between the three men is part of an act, then which actor is the agent driving the action/struggle, i.e., the proto-agonist? On one level, it seems clear that Delano is the protagonist, that the story is narrated largely from his perspective, and that his perception/imagination serves as the primary narrative device.  Benito Cereno’s singular action, jumping off the San Dominick, causes the story to come to an abrupt climax; yet, aside from this, none of his words or actions are his own. Don Benito Cereno appears to be the master, but he is only playing a part written for him by another.   

Throughout, there are clues that indicate to Delano that he is not witnessing the familiar performance he is used to: 

First, the affair of the Spanish lad assailed with a knife by the slave boy; an act winked at by Don Benito. Second, the tyranny in Don Benito’s treatment of Atufal, the black; as if a child should lead a bull of the Nile by the ring of his nose. Third, the trampling of the sailor by the two negroes; a piece of insolence passed over without so much as a reprimand. Fourth, the cringing submission to their master of all the ship’s underlings, mostly blacks; as if by the least inadvertence they feared to draw down his despotic displeasure.

Before he has these suspicious facts at his disposal, Delano has a kind of intuitive unease. Babo’s smile, for example, displays his cunning—that is, Delano thinks he sees “Babo chang(e) his previous grin of mere animal humor into an intelligent smile…”. Still, his disposition to see an animal when he sees Babo cannot entirely quell his misgivings: “…if I could only be certain that in my uneasiness my senses did not deceive me…”. Delano posits that “(c)learly any suspicion, combining such contradictions, must be delusive”—after all, “Captain Delano took to Negroes, not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs.” 

Despite his suspicion and intuitive misgivings, he always returns to the foundational presuppositions that have predetermined what he will and will not see on the San Dominick. This is what allows Babo to be, in the classic sense, the protagonist. Ironically, Babo is the hero of Benito Cereno’s story: he leads the slave revolt, serves as the ship’s stand-in captain, and constructs the web of misdirection that seduces Delano. In carefully tailoring his performance to meet the White man’s expectations, Babo’s mimicry becomes a mockery of their rigidity. Babo masterfully plays off Delano’s misperceptions, but this is only possible because Delano surrenders his role as agent before the story begins; that is, Babo’s performance is dependent on Delano’s starring role as a co-conspirator who is the victim of a series of idee fixe. On one level, it might appear that Delano seduces the reader into complicity with his misperception of reality; yet, on another level, Delano is himself seduced into complicity with the slave rebellion by playing to perfection the role Babo assumes he will play. 

In addition to the question of who is the primary agent in the story, there is another dimension to the question of whose story it is. Arguably, the more foundational question refers to the narrator’s identity. When he publishes Benito Cereno, Melville “pirates” the original narrative written and published by Captain Delano, who, in turn, reiterates Benito Cereno’s story—even copying and appending his depositions. On one level, we are witnessing “piracy” of intellectual property. On another, more fundamental level, this recursive structure of storytelling suggests that narratives cannot be traced to an “original” storyline: “(O)ne cannot stably…. determine which is the origin and which is the copy. There is no unique, singular, ‘first time,’ preceding other instances of repetition temporally or qualitatively.”¹⁵  In other words, narration is about the act of “narrating” itself. As we see from the example of Hamlet’s “play within a play”  (and from Guido’s “film within in a film” in Fellini’s 81/2), the totality of an artwork can be composed via duplication and self-reflection. According to Gide, this is the essence of mise en abyme—its reproduction of the “subject of the work itself.”¹⁶  One famous critic notes that while the word sujet is unclear—it may designate either the subject-matter or narrating subject—Gide “was interested primarily in the power of the narrating subject, a power which seems to increase when the subject doubles itself.”¹⁷  To further explicate the concept, Gide depicts mise en abyss as “a relationship of relationships, the relation of the narrator N to his/her story S being the same as that of the narrator/character n to his/her story s.”¹⁸  In short, N:S::n:s.¹⁹ Applying Gide’s reduplicating device to Benito Cereno, we can see that Delano is the narrator of Benito Cereno’s story, but also a character in it. In the deposition (appended to the end of both Benito Cereno and Delano’s Narrative), Benito Cereno is at the once the main character in and the narrator of his own tragedy.  

Finally, Babo’s unpublished narrative offers another possibility: a story narrated from his perspective with himself as the main character. Ultimately, if we take Melville’s story at face value and recognize Delano as the narrator, the split in the narrator/character role (the subject that doubles itself) does in fact amplify the power/authority of the narrating subject. The juxtaposition between the subject who is a character in a performance “authored” by Babo (who simultaneously puts words in Benito Cereno’s mouth and anticipates and manipulates Delano’s complicity in misperception) and the narrator, who tempts the reader to participate in his own misperceptions of reality, is the heart of the story. Given his skillful construction of this juxtaposition, one wonders if Melville intends to point towards the recursive nature of his own narrative about slavery or if he posits a more generalizable claim about the nature of all narratives? 

III. The Untold Stories of Babo and Gabriel

In “Untold Stories in the Law,” Robert Ferguson focuses on the “iterative power” of repressed speech acts, or the power of a speech act to outlive its original context and “haunt” the future. Specifically, he focuses on the trial that follows the events of a slave insurrection in Virginia in 1800. Sometimes referred to as Gabriel’s rebellion, after an enslaved blacksmith who conspired to lead several hundred slaves in insurrection, the event is an object lesson in “structural amnesia” and the way in which public memory operates to transmit some stories and repress others even as its own “principles of institutional ‘coherence’ allow some repressed thoughts to escape oblivion.”²⁰ 

Due to a storm and the betrayal of two informants, Gabriel’s rebellion was quashed; nonetheless, Gabriel’s trial (and that of his twenty-six co-conspirators) was recorded and thus survives as part of the historical archive. The few words that Gabriel is said to have spoken at his trial are recorded in an unofficial archive; as Ferguson points out, in this instance, “the archive” refers to the transmission of oral history. The official trial transcript records much of the evidence and witness testimony of the co-conspirators, but not the words of the leader of the insurrection. Gabriel’s own words were recorded by two sources: an English Quaker who was visiting the United States may have heard of Gabriel’s 1800 testimony in 1804 (and may have written it down or transmitted it for others to commit to writing in 1811); and Robert Sutcliff, a businessman visiting Virginia for work, recorded a conversation he had with a lawyer who claimed he heard the words spoken at trial. In short, Gabriel’s story is redacted from the official story, but the repressed narrative nonetheless survives in the form of a “double transmission” that follows different pathways to ensure that the story is repeated. For Ferguson, the reiteration of this story operates as a counter narrative that evades repression even as the archive elides it.  It is as if narratives of slave insurrection must return again and again and haunt/horrify American consciousness. “[T]his return of the repressed takes the form of the uncanny,” and thus reminds us that the familiar violence of slavery is always there as subtext–as an unconscious thematic–recurring  in both literal and metaphorical forms.²¹ 

According to Ferguson, the uncanny counter narrative of the United States’s constitutional tradition is not the “original sin” of slavery but the counter-revolutionary movement of slave insurrection. Eloquent leaders, leaders whose stories are repressed in official stories and thus can only be transmitted as “narratives within narratives,” are central to the story of the United States: “The uncanny resides in the interstices of a narrative that contains, at once, the repressed voice of a speaking slave, the reiterated oral tale of an apprehensive Virginia lawyer, the receptive recapitulation of a Quaker Englishman, our own reactions, and the critic’s realization of all four.” In the end, Gabriel’s rebellion survives not only within layers of narrative/counter-narrative, but it also becomes an ideal version of “narrativity” in the rhetorical domain of political advocacy. 

In this sense, Gabriel’s story runs parallel to Babo’s. Like Gabriel, Babo says very little yet is the author of a counter-narrative that is irrepressible.  In both cases, we know very little about the historical man; for both, we are left with the residuum of the oppressor’s recording of a slave’s voice. Taking up this residue, others (like Melville) can use “fiction” to give depth and structure to a  barely recorded voice.  In the deposition Delano appends to his narrative, Don Benito Cereno’s servant is Muri, and Babo is Muri’s father; in his dramatization, Melville gives Babo a leading role, perhaps even making him the protagonist. Like Gabriel, Babo is a leader who claims the right of rebellion against tyranny. According to Melville’s version of the deposition, as soon the negroes saw the Bachelor’s Delight, Atufal (Babo’s second in command) and Babo conferred:

“the negro Atufal was for sailing away, but the negro Babo would not, and, by himself, cast about what to do; that at last he came to the deponent, proposing to him to say and do all that the deponent declares to have said and done to the American captain…the negro Babo then accounted the plan to all his companions, which pleased them; that he then, the better to disguise the truth, devised many expedients, in some of them uniting deceit and defense…” (1562)

In leading his fellow slaves in performative misdirection (a performance tailored to the White man’s own rigid misrecognition of Black men), Babo demonstrates the sort of agency that provides a powerful rhetorical refutation of his status as object. 

Similarly, Gabriel appropriates the master’s cultural tools. Gabriel claims ownership of the American Revolutionary tradition (and its appropriation of the Lockean thesis of the right to rebel); Gabriel simultaneously takes General Washington as a model and lays claim to Paine’s “give me liberty or give me death,” and thus “gives the best conceivable answer available to him from the field of ideological concerns established twenty-five years before in the Revolution.” Though both Gabriel and Babo may have remained silent in their “actual” trials, Gabriel’s utterance has survived in the form of an “ideal” speech act:

I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British and put to trial by them. I have adventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice to their cause: and I beg, as a favor, that I may be immediately led to execution. I know that you have pre-determined to shed my blood, why then all this mockery of a trial? 

As I suggested in the introduction, there are two different ways of understanding the idea that cultural texts are multi-layered. In one view, mise-en-abyme is ontologically irreducible: all cultural texts are multi-layered and hence contain infinite traces of meaning. If this is true, then the type of political regime is irrelevant to the dissemination of cultural texts. In this view, institutions exert repressive power (“principles of coherence”), but gaps (interstices) are an ineluctable feature of cultural reproduction (or the structure of human language). Also, in this view, all language is subject to the possibility of parody or mockery, etc. In my view, political regime matters: it is precisely because the United States purports to lay its foundation on democratic ideals that Gabriel has at his disposal a powerful argument, namely, the idea of performative contradiction; and, similarly, I think this is why Melville’s retelling of the Delano, Cereno, and Babo dynamic through narrative/counter-narrative is powerful. In this context, the “power” of the slave’s counter –narrative resonates and reverberates; it is akin to what Arendt means when she refers to the distinction between power and authority– power can authorize speech, persuasion and resistance but it lacks the authority to adjudicate nominalistic meaning

It is not necessarily the case that “repression outlives its original context and that it returns to haunt the consciousness that created it.” In a Stasi regime, we might anticipate a Kafkaesque (rather than a Melvillian) storyline when a protagonist mocks the court that condemns “conspirators” who claim the right to rebel. As Ferguson points out, in Gabriel’s case “(p)ower and not law holds him in place” in a nation founded on the principle that “‘absolute, arbitrary power’ constitutes the greatest evil in the social contract.” Just as General Washington had the right to rebel against what he called “enslavement to the crown,” “the Black George Washington ” possessed the right to rebel against American slavocracy. Enslavement is nothing other than a continuation of the state of war, wherein “a slave retains the right to resist, ‘whenever he finds the hardship of his Slavery outweighs the value of his life.’” 

In addition to the contradiction disclosed by Gabriel’s ideal speech acts, the trial itself reflects a second performative contradiction. How can slaves be both property and legal subjects capable of criminal intent? This contradiction is already present in a constitution that affirms that slaves are 3/5 of a person. While both Gabriel and Babo’s political actions are powerful affirmations of subjectivity, the fundamental contradiction has to do with the legal fiction that someone/hing can be tried as both subject and object. Ferguson reckons with this when he points to the most fundamental repression that haunts the American slavocracy: “repression in the mind of the slavocracy takes the form of ‘not yet.’” From the turn of the nineteenth century (the period of both Babo and Gabriel’s stories) to the decade leading up to the Civil War (the period in which Melville publishes Benito Cereno), the slavocracy repeats the same refrain: the “peculiar institution” cannot end yet. Accordingly, when a Black person demands equality “that person can be seen only in twisted or unnatural form.”  Melville captures this dynamic perfectly in his depiction of Delano’s “misrecognition” of Babo. At a more fundamental level, the Constitution itself appears twisted or unnatural when it is complicit in not only reducing persons to property but in presenting an entire system of law in which the text itself acts as if it is undecidable when a person is property as opposed to a pirate or insurrectionist capable of moral culpability (and entitled to mount a legal defense “recorded” in the official transcript). Writing in 1855, Melville is on the precipice of the moment when this performative contradiction can no longer be repressed by simply repressing the stories of Black men who dare to rebel. 

Conclusion: The Language of Denial, Willful Blindness and Misrecognition 

In 1952, Ralph Ellison—who names Melville as his most important American literary ancestor—addresses concepts of misperception and misrecognition in Invisible Man. The epigraph to Ellison’s book—composed of two quotations, one of which is from Benito Cereno—serves as a prelude to the famous prologue: “You are saved,” cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; “You are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?” Ellison leaves the question unanswered, perhaps assuming the reader will investigate Melville’s own. The answer, of course, is given on the last page of Melville’s story when Benito Cereno responds to Delano’s question: “The negro.” Unlike Delano (who is wedded to a language of denial to the very end), Benito Cereno “sees” the indelible mark—the shadow—left by the “Negro.”  

In Ellison’s work, his protagonist remains nameless —he is an invisible man— not because he is phantasmal, but because Others refuse to see him: “The invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.”  In the prologue, while walking in the dark, Ellison’s character bumps into a white man, who calls him a racial slur. After beating the man, the Invisible Man is at the point of slitting his throat, when it occurs to him “that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far as he knew, was in the midst of a walking nightmare!” The Invisible Man asks himself, “would he have awakened at the point of death? Would Death himself have freed him for wakeful living?” In this instance, the misrecognition of the Other seems to be a sickness unto death, yet is it necessarily so or is this failure due to a given social construction of reality? 

Like Melville’s Benito Cereno, Ellison’s Invisible Man is layered. The latter is a book about a man who is writing a book about himself. Ellison’s protagonist is the narrative’s subject and the narrator—that is, the “subject” is writing a memoir in which he is, from the beginning, a protagonist acting in anticipation of an end already known to the narrator: “The end was in the beginning.” Ellison’s Invisible Man splits the narrative voice: specifically, there is a distance between the naive subject or romantic hero (alazon) and the narrator or ironic commentator (eiron). The character/subject of the story and narrator/subject of the story redouble the power of a third voice—the author. This, at times, can be a point of confusion: when, in the novel, are we seeing and hearing what the (naïve) protagonist sees/hears as opposed to what the critical eiron sees and hears? Yet, this confusion or ambiguity can also function as a new standard for art: if we take Gide’s charter seriously, is mise en abyme, and the self-reflexivity it induces via recursivity, not only a device but a standard by which we should now judge (post)modern art? At the moment, I think the answer to this question is “yes.” Moreover, I think Morrison’s commentary on Melville anticipates this shift, a shift wherein all critical narratives become, consciously or unconsciously, efforts at bringing forth subterranean (repressed) layers of meaning in order to defeat the language of denial.

1. Robert S. Levine, The Norton Anthology of American Literature 1820-1865, ninth ed. (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2017), 1512.
2. Melville changes the name of the ship from Tyral to San Dominick. In Delano’s account, Narratives of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817), both his own ship and Cereno’s ship have different names than those recorded by Melville: The Perseverance becomes the Bachelor’s delight and the Tyral becomes the San Dominick. See Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales (Oxford University Press/World Classics, 2009), Explanatory Note 164 (at 393).
3. Andre Gide, 1893 Journal Entry in Iddo Dickmann, The Little Crystalline Seed: The Ontological Significance of Mise en Abyme in Post-Heideggerian Thought (SUNY, 2019), 10-15.
4. Gide in Dickmann, “The Little Crystalline Seed,” 11.
5. Gide in Dickmann, “The Little Crystalline Seed,” 11-12.
6. Gide in Dickmann, “The Little Crystalline Seed,” 12.
7. See Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales, Explanatory Note 164, 393. In addition to changing other relevant facts, Melville changes the date of the events depicted in Delano’s Narrative of Voyages from 1805 to 1799.
8. For example, see Melville, Norton Anthology, “Benito Cereno,” 1519. Here, Delano recounts his questioning of Don Benito when he boarded the ship, a ship that is in disarray and clearly subject to “misrule.” Don Benito begins to tell his tale, but equivocates: “Oh, my God! Rather than pass through what I have, with joy I would have hailed the most terrible gales; but—” Retrospectively, it will be clear that Don Benito is alluding to the slave insurrection on board the ship, but, in the context of his early conversation with Delano, his evasive response is a form of misdirection.
9. Robert A. Ferguson, “Untold Stories in the Law,” in Narrative and Rhetoric in Law, ed. by Peter Brooks and Paul Gerwirtz (Yale University Press, 1996).
10. Ferguson, “Untold Stories in the Law,” 89.
11. Howard Gillman, Mark A. Graber, and Keith E. Whittington, American Constitutionalism Volume II Rights and Liberties, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2017), 109.
12. Gillman, Graber, and Whittington, American Constitutionalism, 109.
13. Toni Morrison, ”Melville and the Language of Denial,” The Nation, January 2014\
14. Morrison, “Melville and the Language of Denial.”
15. Gide in Dickmann, “The Little Crystalline Seed,” 12.
16. Gide in Dickmann, “The Little Crystalline Seed,” 12.
17. Gide in Dickmann, “The Little Crystalline Seed,” 13.
18. Gide in Dickmann, “The Little Crystalline Seed,” 13.
19. Gide in Dickmann, “The Little Crystalline Seed,” 13.
20. Robert A. Ferguson, “Untold Stories in the Law,” in Narrative and Rhetoric in Law, ed. by Peter Brooks and Paul Gerwirtz (Yale University Press, 1996).
21. Robert A. Ferguson, “Untold Stories in the Law,” in Narrative and Rhetoric in Law, ed. by Peter Brooks and Paul Gerwirtz (Yale University Press, 1996), 89.