Benito Cereno
IN THE year 1799, Captain Amasa Delano, of Duxbury, in Massachusetts, commanding a large sealer and general trader, lay at anchor, with a valuable cargo, in the harbour of St. Maria- a small, desert, uninhabited island towards the southern extremity of the long coast of Chili. There he had touched for water...Please Note: This book is easy to read in true text, not scanned images that can sometimes be difficult to decipher. The Microsoft eBook has a contents page linked to the chapter headings for easy navigation. The Adobe eBook has bookmarks at chapter headings and is printable up to two full copies per year. Both versions are text searchable.
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- If you're looking to read Melville without tackling the lengthy Moby-Dick, I highly recommend the short story Benito Cereno:
http://www.esp.org/books/melville/piazza/contents/cereno.htm...
- They're all right, somehow.
A film teacher of mine used to always quote Northrop Frye as saying "The category judgement precedes the value judgement." As in: it's a great thriller, but a terrible romance. Moby Dick is hard to classify, and (by this logic) harder to judge. Those approaching it as a novel had every reason to call it a failure. Melville was pushing himself. In jazz I've heard this called "going out." It's something you earn.
His lesser-known works like "Bartleby the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno" are much more coherent and approachable (they stick to a familiar category), but still have much of that slow, mysterious otherworldly quality and are well worth reading (in my humble opinion).
- No. It was followed by the highly experimental flop Pierre. Maybe the closest he came later to getting back to his marketable sea-adventure formula was Benito Cereno.
Aside: There's a grossly unjust moral presumption in Cereno, one that can perhaps most charitably be accounted for by a desperation for book sales on Melville's part, and his assumption of benighted social attitudes among the intended readership.
- I read this in 1995 in a freezing cold bedroom lying atop a pale pink candlewick bedspread with the dismal damp Irish night wind howling outside. Pages from Benito Cereno were falling periodically out from the thirty year old penguin paperback. I was on a very mild acid trip (first and last). It was wonderful.
Reading it on a screen with these dull minded annotations? I'd hate for this to be anyone's first experience of it...
