Benito Cereno

Um, sure.

And, uh, if you'll bear with me, I'm go- I'm gonna read a few lines from, uh, uh, Herman Melville's Benito Cereno.

I'm going to spoil it.

It's, uh, uh, nearly 200 years old, so you've had time to read it.

But the Spanish captain reminds him, "They have no memory.

They are not human." So one thing that we need to do in the humanities is reclaim the past, reclaim the humanities.

But returning to the text itself, we also should not be heeding the words of Benito Cereno, um, because he is the captain of a slave ship.

And so when he says, "They are not human," he is involved in an ideological project of dehumanizing human beings, the same framework that allows him to say, "The sea, the sky, the leaves, these are not human." He's been using that exact same framework to dehumanize people of African descent.

Melville's America is in trouble.

And right after Moby Dick, he's going to write, and right after the Compromise of 1850, he's going to write Benito Sereno, that little novella, that kind of a long short story about a slave ship.

And America's on those decks too.

In what some scholars call the greatest chapter in Moby, and people read Moby Dick by the, I keep Moby Dick by the bed usually, although I couldn't find it there last night.

This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, read by John Greenman.

Chapter three A, Benito Cereno, part one.

In the year seventeen ninety-nine, Captain Amasa Delano of Dukesbury, Massachusetts, commanding a large sealer and general trader, lay at anchor with a valuable cargo in the harbor of Santa Maria, a small, desert, uninhabited island toward the southern extremity of the long coast of Chile.

There he had touched for water.

But under the circumstances precisely this condition of things was to have been anticipated.

In armies, navies, cities, or families, in nature herself, nothing more relaxes good order than misery.

Still, Captain Delano was not without the idea that had Benito Cereno been a man of greater energy, misrule would hardly have come to the present pass.

But the debility, constitutional or induced by hardships, bodily and mental, of the Spanish captain was too obvious to be overlooked.

This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, read by John Greenman.

Chapter three A, Benito Cereno, part one.

In the year seventeen ninety-nine, Captain Amasa Delano of Dukesbury, Massachusetts, commanding a large sealer and general trader, lay at anchor with a valuable cargo in the harbor of Santa Maria, a small, desert, uninhabited island toward the southern extremity of the long coast of Chile.

There he had touched for water.

The questions were briefly answered, confirming all that remained to be confirmed of the story.

The negroes about the windlass joined in with the old sailor; but as they became talkative, he by degrees became mute, and at length quite glum, seemed morosely unwilling to answer more questions, and yet all the while this ursine air was somehow mixed with his sheepish one.

Despairing of getting into unembarrassed talk with such a centaur, Captain Delano, after glancing round for a more promising countenance, but seeing none, spoke pleasantly to the blacks to make way for him, and so amid various grins and grimaces returned to the poop, feeling a little strange at first, he could hardly tell why, but upon the whole with regained confidence in Benito Cereno.

How plainly, thought he, did that old whiskerando yonder betray a consciousness of ill desert.