Big Wheel Keep On Turning
On Herman Melville's final novel, "The Confidence-Man"
There are some times where you understand why Herman Melville wasn’t appreciated in his own time; you’d think Moby Dick is the most obvious masterwork you could encounter, but the people then weren’t quite ready for it, the public usually can’t comprehend genius right away. But a book like Pierre? Parody of Christian Enlightenment with incest subplot and midbook swerve into jeremiad against critics? Yeah, that one might’ve thrown folks for a loop. Mardi? The book that Enrique Vila-Matas once perfectly described in Bartleby & Co as “a fairly unreadable novel … about an endless pursuit over an endless sea”? Not quite the seafaring tale the masses were expecting. A (nearly perfect) book of short stories, The Piazza Tales? Well, same as it ever was, no one wanted to read a book of short stories. And that last published novel, The Confidence-Man? Shapeshifting conman bilking suckers on a Mississippi Riverboat trip, published and set on April 1st? Is this guy fucking with us? HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY? Maybe so, but there’s method to it. Like all great authors, Melville was both ahead and behind his own time, up there in the ether with the greats like Cervantes and Shakespeare but also thrillingly in tune with the future – Faulkner and Morrison language-wise, but also in form the wooly American modernists and postmodernists of the 20th century. The Confidence-Man is a trickster’s tale, a rambling multi-vocal novel that runs verbal circles around the idea of ‘Goodness,’ a book obsessed with performance and dissemblance and play in a way that feels not only modern but startlingly contemporary – what else are we now but awash in the age of the Huckster, being pitched from all angles, sold to, hustled, beseeched, influenced, sweet talked while a hand reaches into our pocket: every brand has a story to tell you, every person is a brand in themselves, and we somehow harnessed the technological advances of the 21st century to create a newer, dumber form of speculation: currency that doesn’t even exist, but that can be quickly pumped and dumped. It’s anything for a dollar, all the way down – hey, let me just get this out of the way real quick, hope you don’t mind:
Not that many people want to face the reality of American hucksterism, then or now, but the book is its own kind of strange masterpiece, something so ecstatically real that it could never find a mass audience of admirers. It’s a photo negative of Melville’s other ‘last work,’ the unpublished novella Billy Budd, Christian goodness not under attack (as in Billy Budd) but its logic instead metaphysically subverted for financial gain. Aboard the ship Fidéle, a mysterious stranger comes aboard alongside “Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; 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.” (A classic Melvillian register, and I’m only quoting half of it.) Through various fronts (a world charity that prefigures Effective Altruism by 150 years, shell stock companies that prefigure Gaddis’s J R by 100 some years, and other smaller tales of financial woe), this stranger wheels and deals his way around the boat, sometimes finding a sucker, sometimes getting rebuffed, always unfindable when he needs to be.
I say this as someone who uses, benefits from, and has never really run afoul of the general system of credit: Melville knew that credit should be illegal. How can you spend a dollar before you have it? How can you give one away knowing that the borrower can’t pay it back? Whatever Dutch guys invented modern credit some five hundred years ago didn’t know what they were unleashing on the world: both the lender and the borrower can act in bad faith, and that’s before the speculative market (also evil) enters the fray. Melville’s titular confidence man – in his many guises – plays both sides of the ledger, picking one persons pocket in order to fill another’s, getting a donation from that guy, giving that donation to another boat patron, and then swinging back around in yet another visage in order to collect everyone’s cash, maybe with a promise to triple it down the line, as long as you just trust in him. Though not denying there is trickery and deception in the world, Melville’s conman cynically denies cynicism itself, instead wringing every argument through an appeal to the listener’s better human nature. As he says to a young student reading the works of Tacitus:
“Yes, learn from me that, though the sorrows of the world are great, its wickedness – that is, its ugliness – is small. Much cause to pity man, little to distrust him. I myself have know adversity, and know it still. But for that, do I turn cynic? No, no: it is small beer that sours. To my fellow-creatures I owe alleviations. So, whatever I may have undergone, it but deepens my confidence in my kind. Now, then” (winningly), “this book – will you let me drown it for you?”
The confidence man runs into more and more difficult nuts to crack, scam-wise, and has to answer to scenarios and examples that test the limits of human trust – a hundred variations on the story of Job, as it were – but he (it? it seems to have access, at one point, to supernatural powers) is always ready with another argument in favor of faith, no matter how convoluted and obfuscatory it may become. Every conversation and every guise is a chance for another performance that he just needs to find the right lines for. As the confidence man says: “To do, is to act; so all doers are actors” – another way of saying all the world’s a stage, and who better to rule it than someone who can seemingly change costumes at will. (Is all that performance postmodern enough for you?)
Melville scholars – the people paid to think about The Confidence-Man to the befuddlement of their partner’s coworkers – generally read the novel as an allegory for pre-Civil War American politics (the continuing bargain between Democrats and Republicans over slavery being the worst kind of dealmaking), another parody of Christian novels of the Pilgrims’ Progress (the boat descends down the Mississippi further and further from godliness, and finally into apocrypha), a Biblical retelling in itself (if you squint, you can map the novel across the Old and New Testament), or a kind of Grand Inquisitorial investigation of theodicy starring the Devil himself (famous dissembler). Melville, however, is just as slippery an operator as his main character(s): it’s impossible to pin him down, and any overarching reading is disputed by the text itself. Whenever one of Melville’s itinerant travelers seems to act inconsistently, his narrator will step aside and remind the reader that his book is meant to be realistic, and that real people are often inconsistent, as in a chapter amusingly subtitled “Worth the consideration of those to whom it may prove worth considering”:
True, it may be urged that there is nothing a writer of fiction should more carefully see to, as there is nothing a sensible reader will more carefully look for, than that, in the depiction of any character, its consistency should be preserved. But this, though at first blush, seeming reasonable enough, may, upon closer view, prove not so much so. For how does it couple with another requirement – equally insisted upon, perhaps – that, while to all fiction is allowed some play of invention, yet, fiction based on fact should never be contradictory to it; and is it not a fact, that, in real life, a consistent character is a rara avis? Which being so, the distaste of readers to the contrary story in books, can hardly arise from their untrueness. It may rather be from perplexity as to understanding him […] That fiction, where every character can, by reason of its consistency, be comprehended at a glance, either exhibits but sections of character, making them appear for wholes, or else is very untrue to reality, while, on the other hand, that author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at different periods, as much variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts.
But even beyond this cheeky rejoinder to the central tension of ‘realistic fiction’, Melville continually shows the danger of “analogical” thinking itself; wielded insidiously, analogies and allegories are just another diversion from the truth of the world, a way to cloud certainty to the speaker’s advantage by turning one thing into another, and another, and another, all tenuously connected; as one befuddled listener notes, “you pun with ideas as another man may with words.” It’s an odd swerve from the epic metaphors of Moby-Dick, but it’s almost as if Melville stepped back, looked at what he was capable of, and decided that no one else should wield that kind of power. A manic episode or two might do that to you, but it’s also easy to read some of Melville’s casual description and metaphorical bridgings and decide that maybe he was right, maybe everyone else should’ve just left ‘em alone, you shouldn’t spend a dollar you don’t have, you shouldn’t analogize one thing into another. The Confidence-Man is a dialogic kind of book, full of stories within stories and strange registers, but there are still times when Melville will flex the authorial muscles a little bit, as he does in this late description of one of the ship’s cabins at night:
In the middle of the gentleman’s cabin burned a solar lamp, swung from the ceiling, and whose shade of ground glass was all round fancifully variegated, in transparency, with the image of a horned altar, from which flames rose, alternate with the figure of a robed man, his head encircled by a halo. The light of this lamp, after dazzlingly striking on marble, snow-white and round – the slab of a centre-table beneath – on all sides went rippling off with ever diminishing distinctness, till, like circles from a stone dropped in water, the rays died dimly away in the furthest nook of the place.
Here and there, true to their place, but not to their function, swung other lamps, barren planets, which had either gone out from exhaustion, or been extinguished by such occupants of berths as the light annoyed, or who wanted to sleep, not see.
This is thick description, an obscured ekphrasis on the lantern, and then that delightfully immanent bonding of diffusing light and rippling water, and then a swing into the cosmological, the universe as swinging lanterns, and that starkly modern clause describing them: “barren planets.” Coming so late in the novel as it does, after so much deception, it’s an appropriate feeling: total cosmic abandonment, a collection of lights that have been snuffed out. It’s not a sentiment you love to hear, but one you ought to hear, and that’s what makes Melville so essential, even if he’s also so frustrating, so talented, so funny, so dour, so strange, so righteous, so epic, so essentially American, and yes, so crazy. They didn’t know what to do with him back then, and we haven’t gotten much closer now: isn’t that the best kind of consistent character, a true rara avis?
You can get The Confidence-Man at your local bookstore or local library. (You know you’re in a good bookstore if they’re stocking The Confidence-Man but you can special order it if not.) If you must order online, Bookshop.org supports independent bookstores across the country.
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