Ever‑deceiving "comedy of fiction" : dramatical and rhetorical masquerade in Melville's The confidence‑man
著者（英） Kanako Matsumoto
journal or
publication title
Doshisha literature
number 40
page range 19‑38
year 1997‑03‑10
権利（英） English Literary Society of Doshisha University
URL http://doi.org/10.14988/pa.2017.0000014800
Ever-Deceiving "Comedy of Fiction":
Dramatical and Rhetorical Masquerade in Melville's The Confidence-Man
KANAKO MATSUMOTO
I: The Comedy of Thought
In the independent chapters such as chapters 14, 33, and 44, which are interjected in the sequence of actions, the narrator of The Confidence- Man breaks into the actions of characters and displays peculiar theories of fiction and of fictional characters. Here he intrusively defends the lack of consistency in his own characters and plot, against some imagined attacks by readers who make much importance of literary verisimilitude in accepting the world of fiction. While admitting the requirement of preserving consistency, in chapter 14 the narrator begins to justify the inconsistency of his characters as follows:
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? 1
In spite of a peculiar touch of sophistry to delude readers, here the narrator still maintains the basic attitude that what fiction writers should achieve is the representation of the real world, not of some other worlds of fantasy.
His defense of fiction is not so radically destructive at first sight when we consider the actual literary situation of those days. Together with the
Cl9J
Puritan tradition of detesting fiction, the situation for unrealistic literature was rather difficult in America: although the three decades before the beginning of the Civil War are defined by later critics as the flourishing age of American romanticism, the way is not easy for fiction writers to fully display their imaginative invention. "Strange," the narrator says in chapter 33, "that in a work of amusement, this severe fidelity to real life should be exacted by anyone, who, by taking up such a work, sufficiently shows that he is not unwilling to drop real life" (182).
Writers of fiction of those days were, as we see in the case ofHawthorne,2 required to find a persuasive logic of defending their own works in order to mediate the gap between ~riters' urge for creative invention and readers' demand for realistic stories. On the other hand, a certain tie to the factual world should not be neglected all the more because the place for creative imagination is permitted. Verisimilitude, in this sense, is an essential device to make literary works acceptable for readers and to keep the works from falling into a groundless fantasy.
Without harming the standard logic of defending fiction, the narrator of The Confidence-Man cunningly distorts the use of "verisimilitude" as the safest device by substituting the epistemological idea of what is believed as "real." For him, real human beings are not so consistent and shallow as to be easily understood. So he does not mind if the inconsistency of his characters perplexes his readers because "the distaste of readers" derives from the difficulty of understanding his characters, not from "any sense of their untrueness" (69). The narrator reverses the function of verisimilitude into the rhetorical device of justifying his inconsistent, contradictory, and ungraspable book on the ground that inconsistency is more characteristic of real life than the false consistency of conventional literature, since the truth is more strange and complicated than the product of human imagination. The more
21 contradictory and inconsistent he is, the more precisely the book reflects the complexities of real life. It is a cunning trick of thought which transforms not only the characters' inconsistency but also the other negative elements such as structural disorder and queer characterization into positive ones: the narrator claims that these defects result from inquiring the more perfect representation of reality which is never grasped by human understanding, and the impossibility of writing out reality confirms its unfathomableness, just as Ishmael's failure of grasping the whale by vain accumulation of words proves the enormousness of the whale.3
When the narrator defines the part of fictional theory as "the comedy of thought" (71) at the very end of chapter 14, the connotations of the phrase make us doubt the seriousness of the narrator's discussion. The doubt is developed by "that [comedy] of action" (71) in which his theory of inconsistency is practiced so exaggeratedly and even ridiculously as to the point at which we cannot allow it as faithful representation of the intricacies of real life. Moreover, as if the narrator breaks out our trust to his seriousness, he makes us confront the eighth personage created as queerly as possible. Now the ever-changing disguises of the central character settle into one role as a cosmopolitan,4 garbed in an odd mixture of national costumes associated with the harlequin costume of traditional fool: the existence itself embodies the inconsistent, contradictory and chaotic nature ofthe world of The Confidence-Man.
When this last and most queer personage displays his eccentricity for a while, the narrator interjects the second "comedy of thought" which advances the conception of "reality" in chapter 14 a step further:
And as, in real life, the proprieties will not allow people to act out
themselves with that unreserve permitted to the stage; so, in books of fiction, they look not only for more entertainment, but, at bottom, even for more reality, than real life itself can show. Thus, though they want novelty, they want nature, too; but nature unfettered, exhilarated, in effect transformed. (182-183)
What the narrator's ideal readers demand for fiction is neither real stories just as the people expect from Melville "as a 'man who lived among the cannibals'"5 nor realistic stories in the sense that the narrator meant in chapter 14, but is "more reality, than real life itself can show."
The argument is not so far off the point: one of the characteristics of The Confidence-Man is that the world which is grotesquely exaggerated to the extreme offers us the sense of "more reality, than real life itself can show." What perplexes readers is that the narrator occasionally weaves acceptable truth into the web of his deceptive talk. At the next moment, however, the narrator plausibly affirms that readers would never be surprised even if a harlequin "appear[s] in a coat too parti-colored, or cut[s] capers too fantastic" (183), and extends his argument to the absurd level in his usual manner, as if he cannot help destroying the persuasiveness of the previous argument.
The narrator does not leave his readers settling down with a single and static idea: every established idea is betrayed and ridiculed by the following effort of persuasion, and the seeming persuasive· argument turns out to be a mere deceiving mask behind which another deeper meaning lurks. Readers are bewildered, wondering whether the narrator really believes that the true exists only in the gestalt-like alternation of opposite extremes or whether he just intends to plunge us into the labyrinthine puzzlement of thought, his deceiving masquerade of rhetoric. John Bryant rightly defines the narrator as an unreliable and
deceptive figure "who is himself a kind of confidence man." 6 As the confidence man incessantly changes the disguises in "His Masquerade,"
the narrator unperplexingly changes both principle of fiction and logical strategy in his masquerading "comedy of thought." As a result, just as the confidence man's sophistry is more conspicuous than its content, the narrator's use of logic is more focused rather than the conveyed conception: the conceptual emptiness that underlies the loquacity of the theoretical chapters holds readers in skeptical suspension of judgment, and establishes our self-conscious distance from the story. Although at first sight the narrator expresses his own theory of fiction to defend the action part of his book, the argument gradually comes to produce an opposite effect of making his own characters and plot absurd; moreover, the almost ridiculous sophistry deconstructs his own theory of fiction itself.
Another characteristic shared by the narrator and the confidence man is the self-reference accompanied with the full consciousness of the effect of reflecting and dramatizing themselves. The narrator of The Confidence-Man explains and demonstrates the process of creating and devising fiction in detail, and even instructs readers to appreciate his
"[comedy] of action" (71) in the same way as auditors enjoy the masquerading "play" (182) acted at the theatre. As an effect, readers are kept being made conscious that they are reading fiction and are prevented from being fully absorbed in the world presented: whether consciously or not, the narrator's defense of inconsistency contrarily destroys the reality of the whole work. At the end of chapter 44, the narrator even describes his own withdrawal with a comic touch:
[W]e have, at unawares, been led into a dissertation bordering upon
the prosy, perhaps upon the smoky. If so, the best use the smoke can be turned to, will be, by retiring under cover of it, in good trim as may be, to the story. (239)
By showing his own figure as the author-narrator in visible form, he makes us notice the apparent but consciously ignored nature of fiction that fiction would never reach the autonomy of the real world, no matter how perfectly it succeeds in achieving the sense of reality. Now the sense of reality reveals its original nature as a delusion accurately created by the author's devices. One of the contradictory natures of fiction is that the more successfully it seems to approach the real world, actually the more artificial and fictitious it becomes. In a touch of comedious self- parody, The Confidence-Man deliberately reveals to us the ironical contradiction that the urge to go beyond the limitation of fiction conversely makes the work recede into the matrix of fictionality.
Together with the "dissertation bordering upon the prosy, perhaps upon the smoky," such self-caricaturing passages provide an atmosphere of
"comedy," a confidence-game of thought.
II: The Comedy of Action
The setting and theme of the action part of the work are presented from the very beginning in the form of a: static picture: among multitudinous passengers on a Mississippi river-boat, a lamb-like mute in cream-colors "persever[ingly]" displays biblical quotations about
"charity" on his slate whereupon a barber hangs out a sign in his usual practical manner (4-5). The mute's slate and the barber's sign constitute a tableau-like imagery and shape a clear contrast which summarizes the dialectic and metaphysical conflict of the following drama. The way in which they present their own inscriptions and their use of words
25 effectively epitomize the characteristics of each position: the mute's maxim-like definitions of charity are presented in abstract terms as direct quotations from the enigmatic biblical words without any contextual cares, and with such an arbitrary way that "[t]he word charity, as originally traced, remained throughout uneffaced, not unlike the left-hand numeral of a printed date, otherwise left for convenience in blank" (5); while the barber's sign is briefly but decisively summed up in two words, "No TRusi' (5). Though the confidence man always wears the mask of defending the ultimate confidence, it does not mean that he always stands on the side of trust: incessantly changing disguises and methods, he manipulatively makes people and readers perplexed between these opposite extremes.
Although the crowd do not hide their irritation for the "mildly inoffensive" (4) but actually offending mute in cream-colors, they whimsically welcome Black Guinea, the second figure, who offers them a somewhat cruel pleasure by his grotesque "game of charity" (12).
Considering the author-narrator's obsessive effort of achieving readers' trust in "the comedy of thought" which we bave examined in the previous section, it may be possible to read the people's distrust and whimsical attitude as the literary atmosphere of those days, and conjecture that the confidence man's appeal has some connection with the literary authors' desire for being accepted.7 In this context, Black Guinea's servile flattery seems to be the caricature of popular authors who earn miserable money by entertaining the vulgar readers. Being told the strange story of Charlemont, Frank Goodman asks the cosmopolitan, "but is it true?"
(187). The cosmopolitan's answer echoes the narrator's irritation in the theoretical chapters, the irritation for the readers who demand the
"severe fidelity to real life" in reading "a work of amusement" (182):
Of course not; it is a story which I told with the purpose of every story-teller - - to amuse. Hence, if it seem strange to you, that strangeness is the romance; it is what contrasts it with real life; it is the invention, in brief, the fiCtion as opposed to the fact. (187)
It remains ambiguous whether we should take his words seriously or not:
the connotation of the statement itself alternates between straightforward and ironical. On another occasion, the narrator insists on the importance of being unaffected from the characteristic bias of the original story-tellers. When the merchant begins to tell the story "of the man with the weed, whose story, as narrated by himself, and confirmed and filled out by the testimony of a certain man in a gray coat, whom the merchant had afterwards met," the narrative voice intrudes into the story and says: "But as the good merchant could, perhaps, do better justice to the man than the story, we shall venture to tell it in other words than his, though not to any other effect" (59). The function of story-teller is also playfully examined with the complicated positions of the other interpolated stories such as " . . . the Metaphysics of Indian- Hating, according to the Views of One Evidently Not So Prepossessed as Rousseau in Favor of Savages" (Chap. 26) and " ... the Story of China Aster ... at Second-Hand Told by One Who, While Not Disapproving the Moral, Disclaims the Spirit of the Style" (Chap. 40). These stories are told within the framework drama where some fictional characters take the role of self-conscious, detached, and ideologically-biased story-teller and others take that of skepticallistener.
Under the influence of the opposite claims of "trust" and "no trust," the crowd's attitude undergoes drastic changes over and over again. So when the narrator says that "instinct, though knowing, is yet a teacher set below reason," and borrows Shakespeare's phrase which proclaims "[t]he
will of man is by his reason swayed" (12), we notice that it is not the ultimate superiority of human reason, but the uncertainty of human judgment which fully depends on reason. For the confidence man, reason is not an impartial faculty but a quite unreliable one, to be easily persuaded and dissuaded by rhetorical strategy. It is significant that the people cannot gain a "documentary proof' (13) for examining the true identity of Black Guinea.8 There is no outside evidence which enables the people to judge his true identity objectively: the whole problem is concluded to the utterly subjective question whether they believe his utterance or not. In The Confidence-Man, neither truth nor reality is displayed in the strict sense: what only exist are fictional and illusory matters which the people believe as true and real. Even if there exists grave truth in the world, the confidence man claims that it should be kept away from people's eyes by means of "charitable" distortion because
"such truth would have the operation of falsity" (26) and the malicious
"way of speaking" would easily "make truth almost offensive as falsehood" (31). In this work of comedy, there appear no great tragic characters who audaciously speak intolerable truth as once argued in
"Hawthorne and His Mosses":
Through the mouths of the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, he[Shakespeare] craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them. Tormented into desperation, Lear the frantic King tears off the mask, and speaks the sane madness of vital truth.
("Hawthorne and His Mosses" 244)
The protagonist of this nihilistic comedy does not "tear off the mask" nor
speak "vital truth," but flauntingly and almost defiantly displays his various masks themselves. What he speaks out and enacts is apparently unrealistic "logic of charity" which awkwardly masks the possible evil of the world. When we consider that his logic of charity reflects the professed ethics and morality of the actual society, its deliberate awkwardness makes us notice how fictitious the actual systems of society and human thought are: actual life is an unrealistic and fictitious masquerade which is fabricated against either the fundamental evil or vast emptiness at the very core of the reality. In this way, The Confidence-Man claims that the actual world, which is undoubtedly regarded as being authentic in comparison to the nonexistent fictional world, is nothing but fiction.
The confidence man's masquerade of ever-changing masks also shows the fictitiousness and transience of human identity. Since the world is "a stage" where "all the men and women [are] merely players" who play many roles in their lifetime (224), the best actors achieve the reputation of the highest reality. "To do, is to act," a wooden-legged man says, "so all doers are actors" (31). Thus the practical strategy and thematic view of world in "the comedy of action" faithfully, even too meticulously, echoes the epistemological conversion of the realistic and the fictitious in "the comedy of thought," which is reacted and reexamined deliberately and thorough.
However, the author, the deceitful creator of this "comedy of action,"
does not content himself with the mere representation of the idea of fiction: again and again, he makes the confidence man exaggeratedly replay the dramatic conversation about human confidence, and sarcastically enhances the sense of absurdity. The confidence man, who is not only frequently changing his own masks but also obsessed with a desire to unmask the others, persistently exposes their hypocritical
29 pretension or performative act by means of parodious reenactment: his excessive confidence on unearthly virtue does not confirm the innate goodness of human nature but paradoxically suggests the possibility of hypocrisy which each member of society deliberately ignores by tacit consent. Moreover, the confidence man even exaggeratedly reenacts the illogical demand for confidence taken by his former selves in a more inconspicuous way. "Downright confidence, or none," a herb-doctor decisively says to an old miser, "So help me heaven, I will have no half- confidences" (75). He does not permit middle ground and forces the embarrassed people to choose each of the opposite extremes, without offering a bit of objective ground. In spite of the embarrassment at the beginning, most of the characters who encounter the various disguises of the confidence man are finally trapped in the sophistical rhetoric of the latter: the absurdity of his logic is exaggerated to the extreme as if the author wants readers to surely notice that it is cunning rhetoric, not persuasive logic, which motivates the crowd to make a decision.
Victims of the confidence man are usually asked some amount of money for the proof of confidence, but as the wooden-legged man also points out,9 money itself is less important for the cofidence man than the people's declaration that they have total confidence in him. One of his patterned tricks is to replace the meaning of the ambiguous word "trust"
for the convenience of his sophistry: it is mentioned with financial terms while connected to ethics in the next moment. Referring to various charitable activities, he appeals to the faith of religious persons and the conscience of earnest ones, as well as to the hypocritical mind of the others; in the same way, financial terms stimulate the greedy instinct of those who are interested in amassing money. Manipulatively choosing the most effective logic, the confidence man gains money in the name of
"trust." His use of the word "trust" for each victim does not always have
one-to-one correspondence: he occasionally alternates and mixes several connotations in the conversation with a single victim. One of the most credulous dupes is the country merchant who simply offers "trust" to the confidence man three times: he is first moved with sentimental pity for the wretched Black Guinea (17), then with "commiseration. ; . [n]o sentimental pity" (21) for a man with the weed, and finally with financial desire stimulated by an agent of coal company (56). In this way, various attributes and exchangeable ideas of the abstract word "trust," the word which occupies the center of topic throughout the work, are manipulatively and almost playfully utilized by the confidence man for forcing the others to swear total confidence in a state of confusion, not for making them fully appreciate the word's idea; moreover, the logic of the confidence man is utterly relative in the convenience of his persuading effort and he is totally irresponsible for his previous utterances. As a result, business trust, trust for individual persons and for humanity in general, religious faith, and faith for merciful nature are all confused into and absorbed by the problem of rhetoric. It is only the words and rhetoric, not the deeper layer that the verbal surface refers to, which surely exist in the world of The Confidence-Man.
Ill: "Comedy of Fiction"
Those who are kept from knowing something behind the visible appearance are not only the characters, but readers as well. The whole book is wordy and loquacious as the Missourian Pitch impatiently says to the P.LO. man, the fifth disguise of the central character: "Ah, you are a talking man - - what I call a wordy man. You talk, talk" (125). The exaggerated wordiness of the book always misleads readers into the inescapable circularity of rhetoric, and refuses our expectation for the deeper realm behind it. Edgar Dryden briefly sums up as follows:
[F]or each newly discovered clue, each new operative pattern or allusion, leads not beneath the verbal surface but across it to another mystery or, more often, to an example which subverts the implications of the original pattern.IO [Italics mine]
The rhetorical vector of each argument in the work is never directed toward the final answer but deliberately induces readers into vicious circle of endless questioning, as the confidence man repetitiously puts his listeners back to the very beginning of the argument after the lengthy and labyrinthine entanglement of sophistry and quibbling. "The best way . . . to get out of a labyrinth," he says after the full discussion with a mystic, "is to retrace one's steps" (194).
When the deluded Pitch designates the central character as "the most extraordinary metaphysical scamps" (136), the reputation which critics often turn back to the work itself/l he and the critics are doubly deluded in the rhetorical trap of the confidence man and the work. Metaphysics expressed in the work is nothing more than rhetorical assumptions for gulling the others. The work The Confidence-Man is utterly verbal and rhetorical: unlike Moby-Dick and Pierre, The Confidence-Man, for all of its seemingly philosophical talk, is less concerned with the metaphysical and ontological questions than the rhetorical ones. Although Ishmael's loquaciousness derives in his effort to express the inscrutable truth behind the visible appearance of the world, the loquaciousness of the confidence man is completed and self-contained in itself. On occasions, the work tells what readers might accept as plain truth, but it is not for the truth but for the benefit of its own rhetoric. A certain biblical passage is recalled to our mind: '''Believe not his many words - - an enemy speaketh sweetly with his lips'" (242). Although the confidence man expresses decisive discontent with it, this suggestive passage from
Ecclesiasticus is alluded twice by the end of the work, and backwardly enhances our accumulated suspicion about the previous utterances of both the confidence man and narrative voice.
Then what Brotkorb says about the confidence man may be applicable to the whole work: "once his reasons for and manner of speaking truth are taken into account, much of his irony can be decoded and found to correspond to the actualities of the book's world.,,12 In The Confidence- Man, words and rhetoric are neither the means of expressing "a mighty theme" (Moby-Dick 456) nor that of revealing "deeper secrets than the Apocalypse" (Pierre 273), but themselves are the theme and subject ofthe whole work. Just like "the comedy of thought," the whole work situates readers in the verbal and rhetorical circularity of the endless self- reflection, the nightmarish masquerade of the ever-transforming masks, behind which nothing but vast emptiness is indicated.
Elaine Barry points out that disguises in The Confidence-Man "have become verbal as well, and more subtly deceptive" in comparison with rather "visual" disguises in the earlier works.13 Disguises in The Confidence-Man are different from predominantly visual ones such as
"pasteboard masks" (Moby-Dick 164) and the seeming pastoral tranquility in Pierre, but the transition is rather moderate and gradually achieved through the work. Among the several figures of the confidence man, disguises of the earlier ones are more visual and less verbal than the later ones: his transformation starts from the mute in cream-colors who speaks nothing and evokes the image of Christ with his visual appearance. The second figure, Black Guinea, is also eminent with his visual disguise rather than the sophistrical loquaciousness as we see in the following figures. The visual disguises of the confidence man become simpler and less realistic till the cosmopolitan who "ties himself to no narrow tailor ... in costume" (132) and does not change his costume any
more, but freely alternate verbal and 'rhetorical disguises in his persuading strategies.14
Language is transformed into a tool for deceiving others and gradually reduced into a mere object of conceptual emptiness. When the reduction is promoted to the extreme level, language falls into incommunicable punning and word plays; for instance, a semantic conversion of polysemous word such as between "a Mississippi operator" and a surgical
"operator" (196) and between "a good shave" as cleanly cutting off the beard and "a shave" as the synonym of "an imposter" (226), and an alternation of homonyms such as between "rites" and "rights" (206). The significant misunderstanding between "apocrypha" and "Apocalypse" in the last chapter (243) also results from verbal instead of conceptual similarity. The point is that these puns and word plays are not utterly meaningless and contain some ironical insinuations. What the confidence man puns with are not only words but ideas as well: both he and the narrative voice play with ideas and logic as the Missourian misanthrope calls the confidence man "a punster" (124) and cries to him, "you pun with ideas as another man may with words" (124). In this way, verbal and rhetorical arbitrariness in the work are lighted upon: the narrator's defense of fiction and the confidence man's opportunistic encouragement of trust are both undermined by more insinuated comedy of words, in which language is the most deceiving disguise.
As language is more focused upon than its meaning, fiction as a means of representing human life is more deliberately foregrounded than its achievement of representation. Together with the confidence man's exaggerated enactment in "the comedy of action," the narrator's intrusion, almost obsessive adherent to the defense of fiction, playful and awkward treatment of ideas, and incessant self-reference in "the comedy of thought" concentrate our attention to the fictionality itself. The
conventional theory of fiction as a mimesis of human life has stood on the assumption that there exists the truth in the very axis of reality;
therefore, what the fiction-writer should do is only to make his works represent real life. However, if the entire universe is absurdly meaningless and nothing but fictitious, what should the fiction-writer try to inquire about in his works? No convincing alternatives are presented in The Confidence-Man15; the work completes itself within the sphere and devices of fiction, and no truer realm is indicated. In spite of the narrator's pretended effort of making fiction approach to the real world, The Confidence-Man imprisons readers in the rhetorical circularity and the superficial maze of fictionality from which we would never get out.
As for the self-reflective superficiality of The Confidence-Man as an entity by itself, Nina Baym acutely observes some destructive elements which absurdize fiction by means of its own fictionality:
For while Pierre continues to try to mediate between the worlds of reality and fiction, aspires to truth telling and examines fiction in its incapacity to fill that function, The Confidence Man drops metaphysics altogether. The self-contained world of fiction is its sole subject. Its seriousness resides not in any attempt to reach higher truth but in its systematic exposure of the absurdity of fiction - - the banality, futility, circularity, pointlessness, and artificiality of plots, characters, settings, narrations, themes, even such conventions as chapter titles. 16
Itself being stuffed with as many literary defects as we can imagine, The Confidence-Man displays the self-destructive theory of fiction and even enacts the destruction by itself. A close look at the work reveals nothing but deliberate narrative elusiveness, ideological ambiguity, ontological and metaphysical emptiness, and endless rhetorical circularity, all of
which annihilate and absurdize the accepted significance of the act of fiction-writing and fiction-reading. For all the eloquent defense of fiction, the lengthy titles of the theoretical chapters themselves foreground the act of fiction-writing by containing self-referencial terms such as "words,"
"chapter," and "text," and that of fiction-reading by referring to the reading process of the assumed readers: "Worth the Consideration of Those to Whom It May Prove Worth Considering" (Chap. 14), "Which May Pass for Whatever It May Prove to Be Worth" (Chap. 33) and "In Which the Last Three Words of the Last Chapter Are Made the Text of Discourse, Which Will Be Sure of Receiving More or Less Attention from Those Readers Who Do Not Skip It" (Chap. 44).17
As literary verisimilitude is turned into unreliability, and trust into distrust, the seemingly earnest defense and practice of fiction themselves are paradoxically transformed into the unconquerable offense against fiction. To focus on the fictionality itself rather than metaphysical, ontological, ethical, or ideological problems often treated in fiction, the mask itself rather than the possible deeper layers behind it, is a rad~cal
challenge to surpass the established frame of literature of those days;
paradoxically, on the other hand, this creative act itself contains a destructive element that the exhaustive examination of the foregrounded fictionality ironically deconstructs and absurdizes The Confidence-Man as a work of fiction. Observing the fiction-writing of the protagonist, the narrator of Pierre has once asked, "Is it creation, or destruction?" (Pierre 304). The Confidence-Man expands the gestalt-like nature of fiction- writing to the level of the whole work neither in a magnificent form of great tragedy nor in that of realistic story which manifestly despises fictionality, but in a more desperate form of sarcastic comedy, the confidence-game of fiction.
Notes
1 Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Harrison Hayford et aI., vol. 10 of The Writings of Herman Melville, The Northwestern- Newberry Edition (Evanston: Northwestern UP and Newberry Library, 1984) 69. All quotations from Melville's writings, unless otherwise identified, are taken from The Northwestern-Newberry Edition, and subsequent references to The Confidence-Man appear in the text by page numbers only.
2 Hawthorne, who dramatizes the author's irritation for the readers' demand of "severe fidelity to real life" in works like "Main-Street," thinks out a compromised theory of romance as "a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other" (Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, ed. William Charvat et al., vol. 1 of The Centenary Edition of The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne [Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1962] 36).
Melville's literary career as a prose writer is also a continuous struggling against this demand; already in Mardi (1849), the author-narrator sardonically announces that the fact that his previous narratives "were received with incredulity" makes him write "romance" on reverse, in order "to see whether, the fiction might not, possibly, be received for a verity" (Mardi
• xvii). Even after the miserable reputation of Mardi, Melville still keeps inventing much more experimental defense against the demand both in theory and practice. The difficulty of '''being a romancer' in a hostile culture"
is examined in detail by Michael Davitt Bell (The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980] 29-36).
3 Ishmael, the narrator of Moby-Dick paradoxically enhances the greatness of the whale by showing the total impossibility of writing it out. The intended effect of suggesting the unexpectedness of reality, however, may not be only to show the unfathomableness of the real world; but also to mock the established literature which is satisfied with the poor representation of the simplified reality. As for the discontent with the established form of literature, the germ is already seen in Pierre which parodies the convention of pastoral romance with its plain stereotypicality.
4 Although the identity of eight personages from a lamb-like mute to the
cosmopolitan remains ambiguous, here I stand on the assumption that all are identified as the same person in different guises.
5 "Melville's Letters," Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford et aI., A Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1967) 559.
6 John Bryant, "Melville's Comic Debate: Geniality and the Aesthetics of Repose," American Literature 55 (1983): 152.
7 In his works and letters, Melville repetitiously describes himself as an ignored writer who is too stubborn to flatter the vulgar readers and expresses his hatred for the contemporary popular writers. However, we should not easily conclude that Melville was utterly detached from the literary trends of his days: recent studies on cultural contexts analyze how he tried "to balance the conditions of the marketplace and his own literary interests" and reveal his "fundamental indebtedness to and assimilation of antebellum cultural trends" (Sheila Post-Lauria, Correspondent Colorings: Melville in the Marketplace [Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1996] xii-xiii. See also David S.
Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989]).
8 It is simply because Black Guinea possesses "none 0' dem waloable papers"
(13), but in the world of The Confidence-Man even the documentary proofs such as "a memorandum book" of the man in gray (33) and a transfer-book of Black Rapids Coal Company (47) are mostly unreliable. They are mere stage properties as much fictitious as costumes and confessed personal histories.
9 The wooden-legged man cries to a clergyman and the man in gray, the third figure of the confidence man who cunningly defenses Black Guinea on the ground that his earning is too slight for tolerable labor of deceiving the others:
"You two green-horns! Money, you think, is the sole motive to pains and hazard, deception and deviltry, in this world. How much money did the devil make by gulling Eve?" (32). The similar view is also contemplated by Missourian Pitch: "Was the man a trickster, it must be more for the love than the lucre. Two or three dirty dollars the motive to so many nice wiles?" (130).
10 Edgar A. Dryden, Melville's Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1968) 151-152.
11 Bryant points out the undeniable similarity between the narrative voice
and the confidence man, as we have already seen in note 6, and says: "Along with this synthesis of comic types, Melville also used the confidence man in his experiments with unreliable narration. Moving beyond the limits of the ironic, first-person speakers of his early tales, he gradually introduced into his fiction the 'metaphysical scamp' as a detached, third-person voice" (Bryant 152).
12 Paul Brodtkorb, Jr., "The Confidence-Man: The Con-Man as Hero," Studies in the Novel 1 (1969): 424.
13 Elaine Barry, "The Changing Face of Comedy," Herman Melville, ed. Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House, 1986) 130.
Wadlington argues that the work "rhetorically situates us in regard to a verbal world . . . by putting us out": he thinks that reader's self-conscious detachment from verbal surface paradoxically causes words to swallow up everything in the world of The Confidence-Man (Warwick Wadlington, The Confidence Game in American Literature [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975] 139- 142).
14 The harlequin costume of the cosmopolitan attracts our attention at the moment of entrance, but after that his physical appearance is slightly mentioned in contrast to the growing conspicuousness of loquacious talk.
15 As for the question that Melville solves the problem afterward, his virtual retirement from professional prose-writing suggests the answer.
16 Nina Baym, "Melville's Quarrel with Fiction," PMLA 94 (1979): 92l.
17 There are some action chapters which contain self-referencial terms in their titles; for example, "Only a Page or So" (Chap. 11), and "Upon the Heel of the Last Scene the Cosmopolitan Enters the Barber's Shop, a Benediction on His Lips" (Chap. 42). [Italics mine]
