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The Confidence-Man (Oxford World's Classics)

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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.

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.

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.

The year was 1859 but the strange novel "The Confidence-Man" is a modern, psychologically dense exploration of the human psyche. The novel begins on April Fool's day concerning itself with a cruise down the Mississippi River between St. Louis and New Orleans. A cosmopolitan confidence-man fools several passengers in his playing many different types of individuals. Melville quotes Shakespeare's "all the world is a stage and all the men and women are but players..." How true in this weird fictional journey about the "Fidele" boat. Fidelity is ironic since Melville had a skeptical, non-Christian believing view of life. He did not believe we can even trust our best friends.
Along the way we meet such strange characters as Black Guinea an old slave who is crippled. Melville despised chattel slavery. We hear tall frontier tales about a pioneer and Indian killer from Illinois who is named Moreland. Because of the quest for more land the Indians were deemed worthy of slaughter. Melville lived during the time of the Cherokee deportation from the southeast to the American West. We see
Frank Goodman (who is really a con man) cheat a barber out of a free slave.
Voltaire's Candide believes this is the best of all possible worlds. Unlike him, Melville's ironically named Frank Goodman puts on a happy face while cheating a barber out of a shave. Goodman seeks to convince the Barber that human nature is good.
The book has over 40 characters who are given time to expound their worldviews. The novel is basically plotless. Melville became increasingly pessimistic in his later years much like Mark Twain. This book is a challenge to read and comprehend. I am a neophyte in the study of its perplexing pages. I do know that Melville has something to say to us in modern America about our mask wearing materialistic culture of deception and notoriety. I enjoyed his satirical portraits of such thinkers as Emerson and Thoreau and author Edgar Allen Poe. His chapter on the art of writing fiction could be used in a writing seminar.
Those readers who enjoy philisophical discussion within the confines of a book will benefit from this novel. Those folks who want a good story and an exciting plot should perhaps stay away from these difficult pages.

... and all the passengers merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances, / and one man in his time plays many parts.

Melville knew his Shakespeare. Shakespearian allusions and inflections abound in Moby Dick as well as in his final novel, The Confidence Man. Even better he knew his King James Bible. Like his contemporary, Abraham Lincoln, Melville had internalized the cadences and syntax of the Bible, and used them to powerful literary effect. In The Confidence Man, that Biblical rhetoric manifests the bitterest irony and skepticism. Language indeed is the Con Man's chief tool of deception and obfuscation, as well as the author's chief tool of parody. Stuffed to its Mississippi gills with intricate allusions and sardonic word games, The Confidence Man is not an easy novel for a 21st C reader, which is odd in a way since it was a book far ahead of its times. Published in 1857, it has a strong claim on being regarded as the first novel of the 2oth Century.

If Father Abraham was the prophet Isaiah of an America purged of the sin of slavery and regenerated, Melville was Jeremiah, weeping over the failure of American ideals, the hollowness and hypocrisy of a Wall Street culture committed only to the fast buck at whatever cost. The Confidence man can be read as the Prophet Melville's book of Apocalypse, and as a prophet, Melville has proven painfully foresightful.

The Mute in White, the negro cripple, the man in mourning, the colorful philanthropist, the cosmopolitan, and others... they're all the same personage, the Mississippi `operator', the con man who at one point calls himself Frank Goodman. It's obvious from every angle that our Con Man isn't merely a greedy swindler, since he goes to fabulous lengths just to snatch a few coins or to cadge a free hair cut. He has preternatural talents with disguises. The single constant in his diverse impersonations is his insistence that confidence - trust, faith, belief - is the most glorious and indispensible of human virtues. His posture and dress may change, but his modus is invariable: to lure his victims into an act of confidence against their own better judgement. He almost always succeeds, though often the victims realize that they've been conned even before he fades into the crowd. A more cynical demonstration of the futility of trust and belief could not be imagined!

The targets of Melville's pessimism represent all the rampant optimisms and beliefs of his (and our) America: progress, charity, business ethics, economic expansion, rugged individualism, libertarian ideals, and underlying all of them, Christian expectations of "a better life" to come. It's the Wall Street Spirit that the Con Man parodies and exploits most ferociously. In chapter seven, the Con Man (in his role as a charity agent) expounds his notion of a `single tax' - ala Steve Forbes - on everyone in the world, in order to end poverty forever:

"For one thing," he says, "missions I would reform. Missions I would quicken with the Wall Street Spirit.... for if, confessdedly, certain spiritual ends are to be gained but through the auxiliary agency of worldly means... the example of wordly policy in worldly projects should not by spiritual projectors be slighted. In brief, the conversion of the heathen... would, by the World's Charity, be let out on contract."

As usual, the Con Man's gab is successful, even while his victim feels he's benefiting a foolish optimist. But look closely at the Con Man's scheme and see if you don't recognize the incipient hokum of Bush-age "privatization." Read this book, I urge you, with the future in mind; you'll be amazed at how presciently Melville scorns the ideals of the Gilded Age, of Social Darwinism, and of libertarian `objectivism' before such ideals were even articulated.

The last `operation' is the Con Man's sardonic exegesis of the Bible, with the Apocrypha, that he borrows from a pious old man during the darkness before dawn. Melville is expressing his own bleak despair at his loss of religious trust, you may be sure, a despair from which he never fully recovered, but he expresses it with almost diabolical humor. Several critics have gone so far as to suggest that the Con man, Frank Goodman, is in fact the Devil, or a devil at least, but Melville had something subtler in mind. The Con Man is in fact America incarnate, the glib false promises of America against which Melville found himself helplessly disillusioned.

Humor is what makes this darkly pessimistic book readable. Just get past any problems you may have with the involuted syntax, and you'll find this to be one of the funniest books you've ever read. Melville's Mississippi riverboat churned through the same muddy waters of frontier exaggeration as Mark Twain's, and the horse laughs sound about the same. The two funniest scenes in the book are 1. when another `operator' tries to con the Con Man by getting him drunk and drugged with cigar smoke -- unsuccessfully, of course; and 2. when the Con Man wheedles a free shave out of the boat's barber, a scene that would fit into a Coen Brothers film without editing.

All this in 1857? When Gaskell and Trollope were writing their sagas of manners? When novels were expected to have beginnings, middles, and very conclusive ends? No wonder The Confidence Man was an utter commercial failure and dismissed by even the most literate critics! No wonder Melville lost confidence in his ability to hold a readership, and spent the rest of his life as a psychological hermit writing only poems for his own edification! What a tragedy, this loss of confidence!

There are as many sea stories as there are sailors and their ships. This narrative cuts right through the heart of this country with clever stories of swindlers and their marks. If you enjoy colorful characters, slightly "larger" than life, swaggering along the decks of a huge riverboat; this one's a good one.

Just because you're a big Melville fan doesn't necessarily mean you will enjoy this book. Towards the end of his life, Melville's books increasingly lose traditional narrative form. The Confidence Man is the height of this break down. There is something of a story, but it is a thin one that mostly just serves to allow the characters to philosophize with one another at will.

If you're favorite part of Melville's novels are the stories he tells, this book probably isn't for you. However, if you love the tangents he tends to go off on, buy this now: this book is just one long tangent.

The book was fascinating, but not nearly so much as the different opinions about the book and its meaning.

And so here is my theory: The Confidence Man is not a shape-shifter. In fact, there is no character in the book we could call the Confidence Man. The con is within ourselves, an intrinsic part of our natures. We are not conned we con ourselves. Perhaps best illustrated in the part where Melville talks about writing.

In the end, how do you choose the outcome? You will take a walk in the dark, whether it be with faith or fear.

No other Melville novel reminds me more of William Gaddis than The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. In other words, Melville's corrosive yet understated, quintessentially American apocalypse is not an easy read but it rewards the attentive reader. Since I first read it I've never heard the word "confidence" spoken without re-experiencing something of Melville's irony. (And I've been reminded of that irony more frequently recently because the word has seems to have become a great favorite of our own president!) Melville's ironic sense, sharper here than in any of his other novels, shines in wonderfully wrought sentences. Such as:

"[H]e seemed to have courted oblivion, a boon not often withheld from so humble an applicant as he." (Chapter 2)

And, "Gradually overtaken by slumber, his flaxen head drooped, his whole lamb-like figure relaxed, and half reclining against the ladder's foot, lay motionless, as some sugar-snow in March, which, softly stealing down over night, with its white placidity startles the brown farmer peering out from his threshold at daybreak." (Chapter 1)

And, "[O]ne of those who, at three-score-and-ten, are fresh-hearted as at fifteen; to whom seclusion gives a boon more blessed than knowledge, and at last sends them to heaven untainted by the world, because ignorant of it; just as a countryman putting up at a London inn, and never stirring out of it as a sight-seer, will leave London at last without once being lost in its fog or soiled by its mud." (Chapter 45)