African Culture and Melville’s Art The Creative Process in
Benito Cereno and Moby Dick by Sterling Stuckey Oxford, 168 pp.,
$18.95 One of the few things I remember from my graduate school
days in English is the distinction to be made between internal
and external evidence. Internal evidence is collected from the
texts themselves, external from biographies and works of
history. So I have been surprised, whenever I have picked up a
volume of literary criticism in recent years, to see that this
distinction is not as rigorously applied as in the past.
Sterling Stuckey, professor emeritus of history at the
University of California at Riverside, gives only a passing nod
to the distinction in the footnotes of this fascinating book,
newly released in paperback. In the second chapter he writes
that, in Benito Cereno, the story of a slave uprising on a
Spanish ship and its discovery by a dunderheaded Captain Delano,
“Melville created Atufal [a huge African of noble bearing]
mainly from a nameless Ashantee found in Jose