Details
"Benito Cereno" (1855) is Melville's fictionalized retelling of the revolt on a Spanish slave ship, based on an original account given in Captain Don Benito Cereno's Voyages and Travels (1817). Over time, the story has been increasingly recognized as among Melville's greatest achievements. Melville biographer Hershel Parker calls it "an intensely controlled work, formally one of the most nearly perfect things Melville ever did."
It has been studied for its relation to the Toussaint Louverture-led slave rebellion of the 1790s in Saint-Domingue. One scholar describes it as an "an oblique comment on those prevailing attitudes toward blacks and slavery in the United States that would ultimately precipitate civil war between North and South."
The story was first published in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine and later included in the collection The Piazza Tales. "Sometimes Melville gives you trick endings.... But more often, he gives you trick realities. The world looks one way, and then he moves you about, and it looks different, though nothing has really changed.... Melville gives you a chance to see what brightness or darkness is... on the side of you that you don't often see." It is this aspect of the story that warrants its inclusion in The Piazza Tales and attracted the attention of Ralph Ellison.
The Piazza Tales:
Supplemental:
This meetup is part of a series on Muses and Monsters.