“Past All Speech”: The Enactment of Proto-Modernist Literary Aesthetics in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”

Abstract: Written after the proto-modernist novels Moby-Dick and Pierre , both of which elicited censure from contemporary critics, Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” is recognized as an enigmatic and symbolic work that invites deep reflection on the status of literature, language, and signification. However, critics have not presented “Benito Cereno,” and more specifically the dramatic narrative that occurs aboard the slave ship San Dominick , as a crucial text vis-à-vis Melville’s experimental progression toward the genesis of the modern novel. This essay argues that in “Benito Cereno,” Melville avoided the bold stylistic unconventionality found in Moby-Dick and Pierre and continued exploring innovative prose fiction by inscribing his proto-modernist literary aesthetic into an enacted text encountered by a character who represents an uncomprehending traditional reader. In this analysis of “Benito Cereno,” the San Dominick narrative illustrates how a new literature can be written and how it must be read, such that the novella provides crucial insight into Melville’s exceptional contribution to the proto-modernist literary aesthetics that were emerging during the transition from realism to modernism.