The Paradox of Slave Mutiny in Herman Melville, Charles Johnson, and Frederick Douglass

Those of us who teach American literature in all its varied hues often encounter problems of ideology when teaching nineteenth-century texts by white authors: one has to deal with the fact that a racist like Poe nevertheless has admirable narrative skills, for example, a combination that students can find troubling. Often, however, the problem stems from the fact that a number of authors of this period felt-usually correctly-that they were addressing a readership that was philosophically less broad-minded or far-seeing than they themselves, not least on racial issues, and thus they adopted covert means to, as Herman Melville put it, "preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood" (1967, 50). The instance of Melville's own "Benito Cereno" is a classic example: the initial resistance experienced by many students of color, in particular, toward the story often arises from the subtlety of the rhetorical practices that serve to mask the power of the subtext.1 The task for teachers is therefore to foster sensitivity to that subtext, because in this story, as in many such others, the Truth that is being preached-be it philosophical, political, or sociological-is hidden, but, like Poe's purloined letter, in plain view. The trick is to be able to see it, because beneath the surface may be a truth that students can embrace.With this in mind, then, this essay will study "Benito Cereno" alongside two narratives of shipboard slave rebellions by African American authors-Charles Johnson's Middle Passage and Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave, both novels frequently taught in college literature courses. Its purpose is to reveal firstly that Melville is in fact making the same point as these African American authors about such rebellions, through the subtle use of paradox as the key rhetorical strategy, and more generally that this trope is broadly characteristic of the slave-mutiny narrative genre as a whole, providing a useful approach for studying all such texts. My own approach here is not so much theoretical (although a Bakhtinian analysis might well be elaborated) as textually analytical in ways that may help to facilitate classroom interaction with the texts, and focus discussion by foregrounding both terms of the paradox: as each of these narratives tells us, everything here both is and is not what it seems.It is clear from all three texts under discussion not only that such shipboard slave rebellions are inherently paradoxical, but that so is the status quo that they seemingly invert. The sea has long been figured as a symbol of freedom, limitlessness, the absence of differentiation; an idea memorably expressed through Melville's Bulkingon, in Moby-Dick, and his "intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore" (1967, 97). Yet the world of the sailors who inhabited the oceans, "crossing borders in modern machines that were themselves micro-systems of linguistic and political hybridity" (Gilroy 1993,12), was one of rigid hierarchy in which all were mutually complicit, the ranks defining each other and mutually dependent, and ruled by a captain of god-like status ("a general social condition," Melville said in White-Jacket, "the precise reverse of what any Christian could desire" [1970, 375]).Thus not only were these sailors in a paradoxical situation with regard to the element they traversed, but there is also an element of paradox in the concept of their engaging in mutiny, given the inversion of mutually recognized natural hierarchy, based on class and capital. Far more is this the case, however, in a slave mutiny: not only are the superior/inferior, rulers/ruled binaries disrupted, but also the more fundamental human/nonhuman distinction: the cargo, in effect, becomes captain and crew, and the world is turned upside down.Hence the trope of paradox that informs the narratives of slave mutinies mentioned above, and indeed also contemporaneous nonfiction accounts of slave mutinies. …