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Confidence Man (Literary Classics)

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Quite an Original

The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade
I am specifically reviewing the Northwestern University Press edition of Melville's "The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade."

There is a Norton Critical Edition of this novel edited by Hershel Parker, but it doesn't seem to be offered by Amazon.com. It is offered at at W.W. Norton's website... The Hendricks House edition edited by Elizabeth Foster is another good edition, but it seems to be out of print at the moment.

On November 12, 1856 Herman Melville and Nathanial Hawthorne took a walk among the sandhills near Liverpool, England. They smoked cigars, and Hawthorne wrote about a week later that Melville spoke of Providence and futurity, and he, Melville, had pretty much made up his mind to be annilated.

"The Confidence-Man" is the last novel that Melville published during his lifetime. I agree with Newton Arvin, who called "The Confidence-Man" "one of the most infidel books ever written by an American; one of the most completely nihilistic, morally and metaphysically."

About 150 years after the book was first published, and about fifty since the book was first taken seriously by literary critics, The Confidence-Man is not a settled matter. In fact there remains excessive discord among readers and critics about the worth of this novel. Some compare it to Swift's "Tale of the Tub," others will tell you that this book is static and formless.

The idea is simple enough. On April 1 a devil in the guise of a deaf mute goes aboard a Mississippi river steamboat, and begs for charity. In rapid succession he transforms himself into a crippled Black man, a man with the weed, the man in the grey coat , the gentleman with the big book, the man with the plate and finally the Cosmopolitan. In these different guises he gulls and diddles people. He asks for trust. He is not always successful, but he can take solace in his failures. The reason for the devil's failures is the cyniscim, mistrust and mysandry of his marks. It is their human failings that accounts for his failures. And that's not so bad for the devil.

Melville's control of his material was never greater. I recommend the Northwestern Newberry edition because it contains draft fragments of chapter 14. You can see how carefullly Melville wrote this novel. The blandness of the prose is deliberate. If you read the surviving drafts you will see how Melville purposedly silenced and muted his message. Perhaps Melville was too successful for even close readers get lost sometimes.

At the end there is an increase of seriousness. An old man closes his Bible and asks for a life preserver. The Cosmopolitan hands the old man a chamberpot which appears to be full, and calls it a life preserver. The Cosmopolitan then extinguishes the lamp, and then leads the other into the darkness.

Set aboard a Mississippi side-wheel steamer in the 1850s, Melville's novel charts the progress of the American character at a time when the old frontier was giving way, albeit slowly, to a new, urban frontier.

"The Confidence-Man" works at so many different levels that it is no wonder Melville's readers weren't quite sure what to make of his ninth novel. It is a call-and-response of idealism suborned for the purposes of sheer humbuggery, material theft and moral sophistry.

I think readers would do well to always keep the word "confidence" in mind as they read the novel; it recurs time and again in different contexts throughout the book. Melville's purpose is to highlight the rift between what things seem to be and what they truly are. It is eerily existential in tone and readers familiar with Kierkegaard and Camus will be delighted by Melville's keen appreciation for the absurdity of the human condition.

The wretched reception of "The Confidence-Man" undermined what little was left of Melville's own self-confidence as a writer whose work could support his family. In one sense, this was a grievous shame, because Melville lived for nearly four more decades and, presumably, could have spent that time producing more great literature had his contemporaries simply recognized the intellectual genius of his work.

In another sense, though, "The Confidence-Man" is a fitting send-off to a literary career hobbled by critical inattention and plain bad luck. Melville's America is not an America where dreams come true (note how China Aster is destroyed by his) and where confidence -- optimism -- is rewarded or even warranted. Yet, it is an America recognizably closer to the one we live in than those crafted by Melville's contemporaries -- Emerson, Thoreau, Irving.

"The Confidence-Man" is a very complex novel of ideas. This particular edition is very useful because it provides fairly thorough annotation throughout the book. I would highly recommend it for use in a graduate course on American intellectual history, particularly juxtaposed against Emerson and Tocqueville's analyses of American society and culture.

With "The Confidence-Man," Melville offered a final novelistic expression of his hopes, doubts, and frustrations about the American nation on the verge of Civil War in the late 1850's.

Many critics and reviewers take a negative point of view on this novel, saying that the narrative instability and episodic nature of the novel represents Melville's anger with the increasingly poor reception of his later novels, including the brilliant "Moby-Dick".

Over the course of the novel's first half, we are presented with a string of characters who spout the virtues of charity and trust, all supposedly different manifestations of one Confidence-Man. The confidence-man engages passengers of the riverboat Fidele from St. Louis to New Orleans in philosophical, literary, personal, and business-related conversations. This is the heart of the novel, even in the second half, where only one confidence-man appears. As in Cervantes' "Don Quixote," you are able to tease out more about the ambiguous purposes of the novel through speeches rather than actions.

At points amusing, horrifying, and sad, "The Confidence-Man" is difficult, if not impossible to categorize in any simple fashion. An extremely worthwhile read, especially if you read it as a prophetic work of the American Civil War and try to figure out for yourself if Melville thought things would turn out alright, or if the US was due for an apocalyptic judgment.

As I read this book, I didn't catch all the subtleties of it, and could never be precisely sure whether each confidence man was evil or not- it seemed ambiguous, or at least, the author never once allows the reader to find out definitively that the 'vicitms' are being gulled. However, by the end of the book, this becomes more clear as the second half settles into sxome extremely thought-provoking conversations and exchanges. After reading literary reviews online, the book in its totality makes even more sense as in retrospect its sublte points become clearer.

That being said, the writing is absolutely superb. Although far more wordy than Hemingway, one cannot avoid comparing to Hemingway's writing, which, like this, is extremely controlled, restrained and pointed. As you read this, you cannot avoid the feeling that the author spent hours on each sentence.

It is therefore very much so worth reading, but don't expect it to be easy. It's certainly not your verbose, nineteenth century romanctic glop, but it can be difficult, as some readers appear to have found it. But try it.

"The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade" is, as its title would suggest, a satirical farce. In spite of its wit and the occasional laugh, however, it is the hardest of all Melville's works to follow, in no small part because its lead character keeps changing his identity--and that is assuming, by the way, that there's just one lead character to begin with. If at times the novel feels like a patchwork, it's because it is: Melville merged a number of stories and travel pieces originally intended for magazine publication into a continuous, claustrophobic cyclorama.

Set on the Mississippi River on April Fool's Day, "The Confidence-Man" follows the interrelated episodes and adventures of a stream of passengers who board and disembark a steamboat. Many of the confidence men (and their prophetic counterparts) may be the same person in various disguises. (Melville's deliberate obfuscation on this point has launched a hundred academic papers.)

The various scoundrels, shills, suckers, and shape-shifters are a parade of American types: "men of business and men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters." Everyone on board is trying to sell something or to swindle someone or to raise money for a charity or to find a job or to convince a fellow passenger of his own integrity. A persistent theme is the typically American monomaniacal pursuit of money.

"I am neither prophet nor charlatan," says a peddler of medicine to a sick man. "But again I say, you must have confidence." Yet only a fool would have confidence, and this insecurity leads to an irrational paranoia. Nobody can trust anyone: "it is one of the imbecilities of the suspicious person to fancy that every stranger, however absent-minded, he sees so much as smiling or gesturing to himself in any odd sort of way, is secretly making him his butt."

For obvious reasons, "The Confidence-Man" is considered the precursor of the modernist novel. As an academic exercise, it's both intriguing and (to use a technical term) "mind-blowing." And there is certainly a steady stream of quotable aphorisms and clever anecdotes. Yet I also found the novel to be frustrating: somewhat like entering a labyrinth from which there is no hope of escape or solution--and at the end of the book you're still stuck in the maze. The farce is a lot of fun initially but it becomes a bit maddening and repetitive after reaching one too many of the novel's narrative dead ends.

As one of Melville's contemporary reviewers noted, the novel makes as much sense if the chapters are read in reverse order, and the "characters" are distinguishable not by their personalities as much as they are defined by their wholly predictable actions and reactions. Halfway down the Old Muddy, after meeting the Melville's umpteenth American stereotype, I realized that the novel had no Bartleby or Nippers, nor, for that matter, would readers be introduced to a K. or an Olga. Instead, "The Confidence-Man" is like Kafka without characters.

The Confidence Man is without question the most revolutionary work of nineteenth century fiction--enormously experimental, provocative and simply bizarre. The experimentations with flatenned characterizations; the episodic, even repetitive plot structure; and the sheer power of its hallucinatory narration make this novel a post-modern work before there was even modernism. Greatly ignored in its own day, and for much of ours, the Confidence Man is central to an understanding of narrative history and the evolution of this tortured genius who, after his novel Pierre, seems to have transformed narrative conventions in a way that few readers have ever grasped. A brilliant, absolutely central work that makes the much-lauded experimentations of near-contemporary American writers seem puny by comparison.

After Herman Melville's tales of mountainous waves, disease, apparitions, murders, suicides, cannabalism, tropical storms, tsunamis, hallucinations, lightning strikes, hangings, volcanic eruptions, starvation, giant whales and every form of terror possible on the high seas and land, "The Confidence Man" is Melville's most violent work.

It begins with an April day, the first, "April Fool's Day" on a paddle-wheeled river boat heading downstream from St. Louis, Missouri to New Orleans, Louisiana. The river is wide, 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) at certain points, but a river boat is generally thought to be a reassuring form of travel.

This is not the case, not once in the 45 chapters which follow. The concentration of psychological violence is so intense that the reader is unaware of its insidious presence which manifests itself continually in its different disguises.

In Chapter 14, in a brief aside, Melville gives the reader a kind of passepartout to his novel, when he describes the first stuffed platypus from Australia, the so-called "duck-billed beaver", which many naturalists refused to recognize as a separate species and preferred to conclude that the bill had been ably glued on.

In a letter to his friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in 1851, Melville writes: "Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister."

Obviously for many this is a totally unacceptable view of the human race. Incomprehension and

denial are natural defensive reactions. But considering that 153 years have passed since the

publication of "The Confidence Man" and considering the accumulated evidence we have at hand, this prophetic novel provides the ONLY credible conclusive appraisal of the human condition.

H. Bruce Franklin's finely annotated Melville is once again available.

Perhaps not the best place to discuss the story, at least let's discuss the edition. I have always thought these footnotes have been a necessary part of this long running joke. The book seems tough and well-constructed. Not everyone's copy will be read through, but the others will be thumbed to death, almost like an airliner in static test destruction.

And what a ride! This is a story about story-telling and about story-telling techniques. One of the longest and most absurd being Wilbur/Thoreau's honking of the story of China Aster. Everyone is fighting over how to tell this tale! Himmlerian Mark Winsome lays down the Party Line, Wilbur trying to strain off the tannins. Frank Goodman tries to redeem it. Melville attempts to hide behind it. I find myself arguing with myself about it. Is it genius? Is it that bad? Is Emerson so hateful? Did The Confidence Man actually get angry -- or did he know the barber was just about set to close up shop for the night.

Melville's greatest work in a clean new lifetime edition, available right now.

OK, well maybe read "Moby Dick" too, but if you're going to read just one book by Melville, I suggest this one. Disregarded in Melville's lifetime, this book could have been written today...except that it exemplifies the cultural moment that produced it. Lyrical, magnificent, prescient, and wonderfully confusing, I'm on a personal mission to introduce this novel to as many people as possible.

This is Melville testament. He left us with an affair we could recreate in our mind countless times , each time reaching a different conclusion.. We could peel off the confidence man mask after mask and would never reach the end. Because there is no such a thing as a face behind a mask. While in fact is the allegory and what you make of it the only thing that really matters. Melville loves to expose the blundering arrogance of man in his believing to posses the capacity of knowledge and of eternal life. The wisest man is the one that knows that he doesn't know anything. And the barber, after he got taken by the confidence man , realizes that his downfall was his pride, the worst of all sins. The very thing wich cost Prometeus eternal suffering and Lucifer banishment , set the barber back the price of an haircut. And while Melville is making us a little more humble with this, he's using the most unforgiving satire of the grotesque evolution of american society to do so. This was a dangerous book at the time it was written and it's even more so nowdays, that's why its been buried for such a long time.The masquerade is actually your perception, life it's the only reality and only the fools fear death because they believe they have to know what comes after. After the author fastened Ahab to the back of the leviatan for all eternity, he wanted make sure that we got the point.