The Confidence-Man (Oxford World's Classics) [Paperback]

Herman Melville (Author), Tony Tanner (Introduction), John Dugdale (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 11, 1999 | ISBN-10: 0192837621 | ISBN-13: 978-0192837622

Male, female, deft, fraudulent, constantly shifting: which of the 'masquerade' of passengers on the Mississippi steamboat Fidele is 'the confidence man'? The central motif of Melville's last and most 'modern' novel can be seen as a symbol of American cultural history.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A challenging text....An excellent edition--very useful introduction, appendices, and explanatory notes."--Kenneth D. Pimple, Indiana University

About the Author

Tony Tanner is at King's College, Cambridge.

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (November 11, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0192837621
• ISBN-13: 978-0192837622
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 4.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #927,403 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An American Classic on the Nature of Trust, October 3, 2006

By 

Charles Hugh Smith (Berkeley, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Confidence-Man (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

Why read a book from 1857 which flopped so badly as commercial literature that Melville stopped writing and ended his career as a customs official? Because this book masterfully explores the entire nature of trust, confidence and cons. Though the setting is a riverboat on the Mississippi River just before the U.S. exploded into Civil War, its insights cross cultural boundaries.

This is not an easy book to read for several reasons. First, it is undoubtedly one of the first "post-modern" novels which breaks from traditional narrative storytelling. ( Another example: Dostoevsky's Notes From the Underground.) The Confidence-Man is a collection of 45 conversations between various people on the riverboat--beggars, absurdly dressed frontiersmen, sickly misers, shysters, patent medicine hucksters, veterans (of the Mexican-American War) and the "hero" in the latter part of the book, the Cosmopolitan.

In typical Melville fashion, you also get asides--directly to the reader, in several cases, as if Melville felt the need to address issues of fiction outside the actual form of his novel. The lack of structure, action and conclusion make this a post-modern type book, but if you read each conversation as a separate story, then it starts to make more sense.

For what ties the book together is not a story but a theme: the nature of trust and confidence. In a very sly way, Melville shows how a variety of cons are worked, as the absolutely distrustful are slowly but surely convinced to do exactly what they vowed not to do: buy the "herbal" patent medicine, buy shares in a bogus stock venture, or donate cash to a suspect "charity."

In other chapters, it seems like the con artist is either stopped in his tracks or is conned himself. Since the book is mostly conversations, we are left to our own conclusions; there is no authorial voice wrapping up each chapter with a neatly stated ending. This elliptical structure conveys the ambiguous nature of trust; we don't want to be taken, but confidence is also necessary for any business to be transacted. To trust no one is to be entirely isolated.

Melville also raises the question: is it always a bad thing to be conned? The sickly man seems to be improved by his purchase of the worthless herbal remedy, and the donor conned out of his cash for the bogus charity also seems to feel better about himself and life. The ornery frontiersman who's been conned by lazy helpers softens up enough to trust the smooth-talking employment agency owner. Is that a terrible thing, to trust despite a history of being burned?

The ambuiguous nature of the bonds of trust is also explored. We think the Cosmopolitan is a con-man, but when he convinces a fellow passenger to part with a heavy sum, he returns it, just to prove a point. Is that a continuance of the con, or is he actually trustworthy?

The book is also an exploration of a peculiarly American task: sorting out who to trust in a multicultural non-traditional society of highly diverse and highly mobile citizens. In a traditional society, things operate in rote ways; young people follow in their parents' traditional roles, money is made and lent according to unchanging standards, and faith/tradition guides transactions such as marriage and business along well-worn pathways.

But in America, none of this structure is available. Even in Melville's day, America was a polyglot culture on the move; you had to decide who to trust based on their dress, manner and speech/pitch. The con, of course, works on precisely this necessity to rely on one's senses and rationality rather than a traditional network of trusted people and methods. So the con man dresses well and has a good story, and an answer for every doubt.

The second reason why Melville is hard to read is his long, leisurely, clause upon clause sentences. But the book is also peppered with his sly humor, which sneaks up on you... well, just like a good con.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars have confidence, April 7, 2006

By 

Thomas J. Phillips (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Confidence-Man (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

Hardly any action, absurd labyrinthine plot, hilarious mis-pronunciation of the word 'herbs'. I want to convey just how uncanny it is that a book can be both a disturbing vortex of meaninglessness AND a jolly good read AT THE SAME TIME. I don't want to sound pretentious, but there's no way around it: Melville's final and supremely unpopular novel pushes the conceptual boundaries of the traditional novel genre, the act of writing itself, and indeed the very idea of representation. What is at stake here is the foundation of Western thought and self-fashioning. Meanwhile, following along with the ruses and rhymes of the trickster con-man (or con-men) and the sly narrator makes for a very amusing trip.

I just hope nobody ever tries to make a movie out of this.

PS make sure you get the oxford classics edition because the introduction essay is especially good; it points out all sorts of interesting stuff about the novel's composition and resonances with American culture and intellectual history in a lucid and enlightening way.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ah, sweet charity., April 9, 2006

By 

R. Cohen (Middletown, CT) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Confidence-Man (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)

What is it that makes us trust someone we don't even know?

Melville's novel constantly asks this question of the reader as we follow the progressive duping of passengers aboard the Fidele. By doing so, the novel actually functions to question our methods of representation; do we trust someone based on the clothes they wear? What they say? By showing the limits of these kinds of representational efforts it seems as though Melville may also be forcing us as readers to question our perspective of what we read. Should we inherently trust the narrator as reliable, or is it possible that we can also be duped, even being "outside" of the text?

It is, however, a wonderful book and I highly recommend it.