At this point-one of the first of what will be many on-the-brink-of-consciousness moments of the narrative-Captain Delano must deal with several incontrovertible facts: (1) the San Dominick is a Spanish slave ship in severe distress; (2) all the Spanish officers of the ship, except Don Benito, are dead; (3) the African captives on board are roaming freely and some are sharpening hatchets; and (4) the ship's captain, Don Benito, is constantly shadowed by an African "servant" named Babo, who appears to be giving orders to the captain.

Yet Delano's response to this conjuncture is to relate to Don Benito a "sympathetic experience" about how he once lost his own best friend on a voyage. The experience taught him "'never to have for a fellow voyager a man I loved, unless, unbeknown to him, I had provided every requisite, in case of fatality, for embalming his mortal part for interment on shore'" (158). This leads Captain Delano to inquire about Aranda's remains, which throws Don Benito into convulsions and then unconsciousness. He is carried to his room by Babo. Readers later learn, in the legal deposition at the end of the narrative, that Aranda's remains were stored by the African leaders of the revolt, in a brilliant strategem, inside a homemade canvas tomb that they had wrapped around the ships's figurehead, under which they had painted the Spanish words "Seguid vuestro jefe" (Follow Your Leader). However, like all the signs on board the San Dominick, the canvas tomb was always visible to Captain Delano and Melville's white readers; as for Captain Delano, he worked hard at refusing to interpret it according to the facts of the situation at hand. Instead, Captain Delano uses the hard facts as a departure point for his own melodramatic narrative of personal loss and suffering, which produces nostalgia for the good old days-a deep regression into the self where personal safety is linked with white racial solidarity and friendship. In terms of Melville's blueprint for the critique of white identity, the preference for white racial melodrama in the midst of intense social crisis functions as a re-embellishment of whiteness, and a re-romanticization of what it means to be "white" in a world of epic class struggle. It is a deepening of the delusion that one is safely insulated from it as long as one stays in the "white race."

Further, there is in Melville's objectification of the white identity an analysis of white psychic disintegration that is extremely rich in what it reveals to the analyst of such problems in the U.S today, where a significant portion of the population is dependent on psychotropic drugs of one sort or another. For instance, in the face of Don Benito's fragile mental state on board the San Dominick, Captain Delano concludes that Don Benito is merely a "hypochondriac" (161). In fact, a great deal of the story's narration turns on Don Benito's unstable mental condition. His demeanor is talked about in a variety of ways, and on nearly every page: "moody," "resentful," "innocent lunacy," "wicked imposture," "savage," "infantile," "splenetic," "apathetic," "mute," "contemptuous," "settled dejection," "unstrung," "distempered," "nervous," "somnambulant," "dreary," "spiritless," "saturnine," and "unhappy." But Captain Delano's flippant assessments of Don Benito are completely outside the context of class struggle. Melville's inclusion of the legal deposition at the end is, in this respect, the forced injection of class-consciousness, since it thoroughly rationalizes each and every one the Spanish Captain's so-called mental weaknesses. The implication is that the class-conscious reader does not need the legal deposition; only a white race conscious reader would. Similarly, the class-conscious U.S. psychologist must see in every white psychosis the bad seed of white identity.

In racialized America, Captain Delano's analysis of Don Benito misrecognizes badly the root of the problem: he persistently confuses symptoms for the origin. Today the same could be said of the psycho- logical diagnoses imputed to millions of people by state social workers and counselors, pop psychologists, psychiatrists, and professional clinicians. This is a psycho-social issue and not a literary one, it might be said. Yet the white racial imaginary from whence these diagnoses typically come is most systematically rendered in literature, as shown by Melville's "Benito Cereno." And this is Melville's historic inter- vention: that the white racial imaginary is productive and enabling of great modern storytelling precisely because it seals off from itself everything that could throw into question its own historical origin. In the words of Langston Hughes, the "white race" is "a tragi-comedy place where human beings block their own doorways. a really wonderful place where Alice-in-Wonderland walks upside down" (83). And so it blunders on, gathering psychic force by its own privileged self-isolation-from its addictive remove from social reality-where, as Morrison terms it, "the subject of the dream is the dreamer" (17).

Almost a hundred years later, Sinclair Lewis attempted the same inversion but with tremendous popular success as well as critical acclaim. His Kingsblood Royal was the best-selling novel of 1947, and in the immediate postwar period one of the most talked about books among U.S. literary critics (O'Connor, 129). A significant crack in the "white race" monolith is the best explanation for the sea change, since the novel's sensational story line was all about the horrors and absurdities of the white identity a la Melville.By 1946 the thousands of African Americans who had served heroically in Europe during the war against fascism found back in the U.S. a system of white racial oppression totally unchanged. Moreover, their dignified treatment in Europe by people with the same skin tone as the white Americans who had never stopped oppressing them, and continued to oppress them in spite of their honorable service during the war, produced a new lucidity. Writing for the Chicago Defender in 1945, Langston Hughes captured this mood well in a piece entitled "The Fall of Berlin." "Berlin was the capital of all the race-haters in the world," he wrote...

the apex-city of white supremacy, the center of the Hitler-Aryan blood theory that influenced even our American Red Cross. Moscow is at the opposite end of the poles in terms of race relations. Moscow teaches that all races of men are brothers-and practices it as well. There is no Jim Crow in the Red Armies that took Berlin. Washington, center of the world's democracy yet the city where, on the trains from the North and East, the conductor comes through the cars and says, "Washington! Colored passengers change to the colored coach ahead". Washington, where Marian Anderson was barred out of Constitution Hall. It is well that Washington did not first capture Hitler's Berlin. It is well then that it was Moscow that first captured Hitler's Berlin. Moscow has no colonies, no voteless citizens, and no Jim Crow cars (Hughes, 136-7).

Like Melville's white protagonist, Lewis's is also a captain. Neil Kingsblood, captain of infantry in Italy, returns home from the war with one leg an inch shorter than the other but otherwise unscathed. Like Captain Delano, Captain Kingsblood is blithely ignorant of the world-historical events in which he was, and continues to be, actively involved. And like Melville, Lewis sets the stage deftly for his white protagonist's systematic objectification. In one of the first glances at Captain Kingsblood's whiteness-a dialogue between him and his wife Vestal-Lewis describes Neil with the same irony as Melville did Delano ("a person of a singularly undistrustful good nature"): "'Still and all,'" says Neil unironically to his wife, "'even hating prejudice, I do see where the Negroes are inferior and always will be. I realized that when I saw them unloading ships in Italy, all safe, while we white soldiers were under fire'" (11). Like Captain Delano in 1799 amidst the Haitian Revolution, Neil during World War Two was in the thick of a world-historical freedom struggle-the African American popular movement to de-segregate the U.S. armed forces. It was a fight led by A. Philip Randolph, and it prompted President Roosevelt's famous Executive Order 8802 in 1942 outlawing racial discrimination in war plants. Yet during the war African American soldiers were routinely blocked from serving in combat units; instead they were relegated to menial tasks such as loading, cooking, and cleaning. To all this, the worldly Captain Kingsblood is somehow blind.

Here the profound effects of the African American civil rights struggle on the nation's consciousness are felt in the approach of the Euroamerican writer. For unlike Melville, who wrote against what he saw as an unyielding, blundering monolith, Lewis perceived in the "white race" monolith a widening crack, and showed a joyful eagerness to exploit it to the fullest. A different way to put this is to say that, while the key terms are the same for both Melville and Lewis ("white race" solidarity and class collaborationism), there is in Lewis's project a whole story to tell, a grand narrative of the times. And it would require the structure of the novel to speak it. In contrast, Melville's pessimistic outlook on the prospect of a collapse of the "white race" monolith is reflected in his choice of literary forms-the novella. Marginalized and isolated in the U.S., the nineteenth-century African American antislavery movement did not, apparently, give Melville the confidence needed to imagine in epic form the collapse of the nation's oldest social formation. But for Lewis, the moment was clearly at hand, enabled by two contingencies: the defeat of fascism in Europe and the militant response to white supremacy at home from African Americans.

Georg Lukács in The Theory of the Novel argued that the hallmark of the novel, compared to the older, epic forms of literature, is that in the novel the contingent world and the problematic individual "are realities which mutually determine one another" (78). "If the individual is unproblematic," Lukács wrote...

then his aims are given to him with immediate obviousness, and the realisation of the world constructed by these given aims may involve hindrances and difficulties but never any serious threat to his interior life. Such a threat arises only when the outside world is no longer adapted to the individual's ideas and the ideas become subjective facts-ideals-in his soul. The positing of ideas as unrealisable and, in the empirical sense, as unreal, i.e. their transformation into ideals, destroys the immediate problem-free organic nature of the individual (78).

In "Benito Cereno," Melville's inversion of the "white" dreamer from subject into object-of white identity from normal into pathological-is motivated by a situation in which the destruction of "the immediate problem-free organic nature of the [white] individual" by world-historical events, such as the Haitian Revolution or the "irrepressible conflict" between North and South in the U.S., is mysteriously averted. Melville's answer to this mystery is that it is averted precisely because to problematize this "new man"-the white American male-is the same as destroying him altogether. The white man cannot be questioned, for to do so would cause a crack in the monolith and lead ultimately to its collapse. Melville's genius was to show that the endurance of the white identity is attributable to "white race" solidarity, that an injury to one white man is an injury to all white men. But because this solidarity is based on an illusion (the illusion that there is no class struggle among Euroamericans), its undoing is just a matter of time.