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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. (256)
--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 hidden 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...