14 March // Melville's Benito Cereno

It's interesting that this last decade has seen another revival of interest in Melville's lesser-known works. As someone who has a tendency to lump his entire oeuvre into over-saturated Dead White Male Author territory, it is surprising for me to find unexpected relevance in Melville's forgotten pieces. Especially since I number among that guilty party: the whole Moby Dick/Old Man and the Sea/Jaws finite man versus infinite nature thing doesn't really do it for me, so my eyes kind of glaze over at the mere mention of Melville.

(This is slowly changing for me. I think Bartleby the Scrivener is awesome, in that it pretty much perfectly captures to ennui and malaise of corporate America. Speaking of which, Crispin Glover's turn as Bartleby in the 2001 cinematic re-imagining was pretty awesome. And creepy.)



(Also: "I would prefer not to" is totally and weirdly a Bukowski penchant...a la 1987's Barfly...)



Anyway. Back to Melville.

I recently came across this quote from biographer Andrew Delbanco, about the pertinence of Melville (specifically Benito Cereno) in a post-9/11 America:

In our own time of terror and torture, Benito Cereno has emerged as the most salient of Melville's works: a tale of desperate men in the grip of a vengeful fury that those whom they hate cannot begin to understand.

That correlation is one that is very interesting to me, given the racially/culturally-charged political issues that have dominated American life in the last decade. (A topic I think I'll be writing a long response on later.)

In the meantime...I found this really neat new media writing reworking Benito Cereno. It's basically the entire story via Twitter, as told in snippets of 140 characters or less. It's called "The Good Captain" and was created by artist Jay Bushman. Click on the image for a link to the project (@ http://jaybushman.com/the-good-captain).