The gaze of history in 'Benito Cereno.'

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1995 by Dennis Pahl

- Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History"

Historiography is as much a product of the passion of forgetting as it is the product of the passion of remembering. (214)

- Shoshana Felman, Testimony

Throughout the first segment of Melville's "Benito Cereno," we are as mystified about what is taking place aboard the Spanish cargo ship the San Dominick as is the American captain Amasa Delano, whose dominant perspective we are forced to follow. It is only later, in the legal deposition that constitutes the second segment of the narrative, that we finally discover the "true history of the San Dominick's voyage" (103). Here we learn in detail about the bidden facts of the slave rebellion and the elaborate masquerade of "normalcy" that was, all along, taking place before Delano's (and our own) eyes. The deposition, in recounting such details, thus would appear to resolve all of the mysteries to which we have so far been witness. As the narrator comments at the beginning of the brief epilogue to the tale,

If the Deposition have served as the key to fit into the lock of the complications which precede it, then, as a vault whose door has been flung back, the San Dominick's hull lies open to-day. (114)

If the "complications" just mentioned are supposed to refer to the previously concealed facts of the events - that is, to what actually took place aboard the San Dominick during Delano's visit there - there can be little doubt that they are meant, likewise, to refer to the exact moral implications of those events. After all, is it not the purpose of this deposition, this "legal" narrative, to clear up those questions of innocence and guilt, of good and evil, that have so much troubled both Delano and the reader throughout the course of the narrative? Indeed, what else is Babo's "legal identity" (as established by the deposition [116]) but a clear testimony to his essential evil? And by the same token, is not Cereno, who was earlier suspected by Delano of possible wrongdoing or even of potential evil, now completely redeemed by this deposition? Does not this legal history, delivered by Cereno himself at the Lima court, serve just as effectively to demonstrate his own essential goodness?

It should perhaps not be surprising that what passes, in the form of the deposition, as the "true history" of the San Dominick affair includes not merely the hard facts of the case but also a certain moralization of those facts: for it may well be in the nature of all history, or historical narrative, to function exactly in this fashion. As Hayden White has argued, "The demand for closure in history is a demand . . . for moral meaning, a demand that sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama. Has any historical narrative ever been written that was not informed not only by moral awareness but specifically by the moral authority of the narrator?" White goes on to claim that not only historical narrative but in fact any attempt to narrate reality adequately - such as might be discerned in some fictional discourses - must necessarily involve the representation of the moral under the aspect of the aesthetic. "Could we," White finally asks, "ever narrativize without moralizing?" (22, 25).

Inasmuch as White is correct in assuming that narrativity as such necessitates a certain degree of moralizing, we might then conclude that the entire narrative of "Benito Cereno" - and not just the legal deposition alone - carries within it a specific moral dimension. Perhaps nothing so much supports this view as the way Melville's narrative has, during its long critical history, tended consistently to inspire lively debate as to its precise moral significance. As far back as his monumental study of the American Renaissance, for instance, F. O. Matthiessen strongly hinted at Melville's moral irresponsibility in depicting the San Dominick's blacks as evil and "savagely vindictive"; thus Matthiessen charged Melville with "a failure to reckon with [the] fact" that "the Negroes were slaves and that evil had originally been done to them" (508).(1) More recent analyses (see Carlisle, Dryden, Karcher, Kavanagh), trying to justify Melville's aims and so keep them consistent with what is often perceived as a typical Melvillean radical politics, emphasize rather the text's deeply ironic stance toward Captain Delano who, along with Cereno, becomes the embodiment of white oppression. Thus, in these analyses, it is the white-controlled institution of slavery - and not the black mutineers - that becomes the real emblem of evil and barbarism within Melville's tale.

In a certain way, the critical-moral controversy as just described may be understood quite simply as a conflict between two alternative methods of interpretation, namely the opposition between a literal reading (where, to schematize the issue, "black" becomes the traditional symbol of evil and "white" stands for innocence) and an ironic reading (where those traditional valuations become reversed).(2) But while such readings obviously stand in sharp contrast to each other, we may wonder if they do not ultimately serve the same purpose, in the sense that they do nothing more than preserve intact those binary opposites of good and evil that Melville's works seem always at pains to put into question. Must the moral truth of Melville's text be painted in such black-and-white terms, or is the problem more complicated than this? Can Melville even be said to be taking a moral position in this narrative, or is he really making of any such position a problem - one that he is allowing the complications of his text to ponder?