The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, first published in New York on April Fool's Day 1857, is the ninth and final novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book was published on the exact day of the novel's setting. Centered on the title character, The Confidence-Man portrays a group of steamboat passengers. Their interlocking stories are told as they travel on the Mississippi River toward New Orleans. The narrative structure is reminiscent of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Scholar Robert Milder notes: "Long mistaken for a flawed novel, the book is now admired as a masterpiece of irony and control, although it continues to resist interpretive consensus."

Summary

The novel's title refers to its central character, an ambiguous figure. He sneaks aboard a Mississippi steamboat on April Fool's Day. This stranger attempts to test the confidence of the passengers. Their varied reactions constitute the bulk of the text. Each person is forced to confront the placement of his trust.

Character list

Background

Early in 1855, there was widespread news coverage of a man who tricked people out of their money in New York by pretending to need an emergency loan. Earlier in the 1850s, magazines portrayed P. T. Barnum's promotion of hoaxes to make money as a similar kind of swindling. These accounts, along with his reading of Don Quixote, likely inspired the themes in The Confidence-Man. Melville worked on the manuscript for The Confidence-Man between 1855 and 1856. He had problems with severe sciatica pain during 1855. He wanted to publish The Confidence-Man serially in Putnam ' s, but it was not accepted for publication. While visiting New York in December 1855 (during the composition of the novel), Melville read the entry on himself in Cyclopaedia of American Literature written by Evert Duckinck and his brother. The entry described Melville as a writer who did not trouble himself with "the exactions of artificial life," and concluded that Pierre was a "literary mistake". On request from Allan Melville (Herman's brother), Nathaniel Hawthorne, a longtime friend of Herman, acted as Herman's agent while he was touring Europe and the area around Jerusalem. The Confidence-Man was published on April Fool's Day in 1857.

Reception

According to biographer Delbanco, critics were "baffled" by The Confidence-Man, and some reviews were "vicious". Whereas reviews of Moby-Dick elicited responses from Melville and caused him insecurity about the popularity of his writing, reviews of The Confidence-Man had less impact on him. It seems that after completing the manuscript, Melville had already decided to stop writing novels. Reviews from London, England were, according to the editors of the Norton Critical Edition of The Confidence-Man, of "more historical significance" than the American reviews. A recent discovery of three more American reviews found that at least some American reviewers considered The Confidence-Man with more "serious attention." Multiple American newspapers gave reviews of the novel. North American and United States Gazette called it "a sketchy affair" with occasional humor that peeks out "though buried under quite too many words." The Evening Transcript from Boston praised Melville's treatment of the archetypal confidence man and described Melville as dealing "equally well in the material description and the metaphysical insight of human life." Boston's Daily Times was less generous, calling it "ineffably meaningless and trashy." In Maine: "We have found it hard reading." In the recently-discovered longer reviews, the Troy Daily Whig found how Melville puts the confidence man on display "entirely original". The Bangor Daily Whig in Maine wrote that the novel "has a good deal of sound philosophy in it, but some of the incidents of humbuggery." The monthly newspaper United States Journal acknowledged the craftsmanship of the novel, but was highly critical of it, calling it a "desecration of the fine talents and affluent genius of the author. [...] Satire that has no mellowness is inhuman; we are made worse rather than better from it." Reviews from London were more in-depth and saw Melville's change in style as a sign of his development as an author, while being conscious of the book's flaws. The Athenaeum called the novel a "moral miracle-play" for its focus on how various characters interact in dialogue with the confidence man, either as credulous dupes or would-be followers. They acknowledged that Melville's style is "one, from its peculiarities, difficult to manage" but that he "pours his colours over the narration with discretion as well a prodigality", concluding that the novel was "invariably graphic, fresh, and entertaining." London's Leader described Melville's style as full of "festoons of exuberant fancy" interspersed with descriptions of the American steamboat and surrounding landscape. They praised Melville's use of satire, and criticized his habit of "discours[ing] upon too large a scale" and keeping his characters too rigid. A review from Literary Gazette was not as generous and described the book not as a novel, but as a series of forty-five conversations, which "so far resembling the Dialogues of Plato as to be undoubted Greek to ordinary men." The review continued to criticize the style as long-winded and obscure. They conceded that "this caldron, so thick and slab with nonsense, often bursts into the bright, brief bubbles of fancy and wit" and concluded that the book was ruined with "strained effort after excessive originality." A review at Spectator did not appreciate the "local allusions" in the work, and found the satirical style to be "drawn from the European writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with some of Mr. Melville's own Old World observations superadded." Later evaluations of The Confidence-Man have been more generous. American historian Walter A. McDougall wrote that it "holds up a mirror to the American people". Melville biographer Delbanco called the book "a prophetically postmodern work in which swindler cannot be distinguished from swindled and the confidence man tells truth and lies simultaneously".

Style

The majority of the text consists of dialogues between steamboat passengers. These are interspersed with the insertion of other texts, including essay, short story, an ode, and "The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating". Unlike in Moby-Dick, when a central narrator unites disparate accounts, these various genres of texts give multiple perspectives. While Melville authored most of these texts-within-the-text, the Indian-Hating chapters come from History, Life, and Manners, in the West by James Hall. Another story, told by one character (Egbert) in the style of another character (Charlie) comes from a short story Melville had written previously. There are three essays on fiction which address the reader directly. The essays on fiction showed Melville reconsidering some of his ideas about fiction. The essay in chapter 33 addressed realism, postulating that it was unnecessary in fiction. The essay in chapter 44 argued that authors do not create original characters most of the time. The essay identifies Hamlet and Milton's Satan as original characters where the entire plot of their narratives revolve around their concerns. As a satire, The Confidence-Man drew inspiration from British satires like Gulliver's Travels and The Citizen of the World. The highly specific chapter titles were a style popular in the 18th century in humorous books like Tom Jones and Amelia. Additionally, the character of the confidence man is an allegory for how the Christian devil works as the Father of Lies in America, using the imagery of the serpent and Biblical language to make the allegory clear. According to Melville's biographer Hershel Parker, the way that the allegory permeates quotidian conversations makes them significant on a metaphysical level. The novel is written as cultural satire, allegory, and metaphysical treatise, dealing with themes of sincerity, identity, morality, religiosity, economic materialism, irony, and cynicism. Many readers place The Confidence-Man alongside Melville's Moby-Dick and "Bartleby, the Scrivener" as a precursor to 20th-century literary pre-occupations with nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism. Elizabeth Foster, in her introduction to a 1954 edition, called it a social satire as well as "a philosophical satire on optimism" resembling Candide in its message. However, stylistically, unlike Candide, The Confidence-Man "is [a satire] of subtle, pervasive, elusive irony, of suggestion and understatement rather than exaggeration, of talk rather than action."

Literary analysis

The work includes satires of 19th-century literary figures: Mark Winsome is based on Ralph Waldo Emerson, while his "practical disciple" Egbert is Henry David Thoreau; Charlie Noble is based on Nathaniel Hawthorne; and a beggar in the story was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe. The Confidence-Man could have been inspired by the case of William Thompson, a con artist active in New York City in the late 1840s, whose actions inspired the press to coin the term "confidence man". Yoshiaki Furui, an English professor at Aoyama Gakuin University, saw the character of Black Guinea as an example of how Melville hints at his characters' emotions rather than explaining them. In a scene where Black Guinea receives alms, he swallows his "secret emotions" and winces when coins strike his face. However, it is unclear if he is wincing in pain, or as part of the performance of begging. The novel indicates that some inner emotion exists, "highlighting both its presence and its unknowability at once". English professor Caleb Doan, in an article examining gift exchanges in Melville's works, found that The Confidence-Man shows a "dystopic version of exchange" in which gifts are based not on generosity or reciprocation, but on "self-aggrandizement and exploitation." The steamer Fidele corresponds with America in general. The exchange between the barber William Cream and his customer Frank Goodman illustrates the deeply cynical outlook The Confidence-Man takes towards gift economies. Goodman convinces Cream to take down his "No Trust" sign by saying he will pay for anyone who betrays that trust. But then Goodman himself refuses to pay after his shave, telling him to trust him to pay later (which he does not do). Cream puts his "No Trust" sign back up, and we understand that, as Doan explains, "the modern-world economy has corrupted the notion of benevolent exchange." One of the main themes of the novel is unresolvable conflict, including racial conflict. In the chapter where the confidence man appears as a "non-resistant", the other passengers can't decide whether to have sympathy for him or to see him as trying to take advantage of their sympathy. This mirrors the tension between the belief that philosophy can help to resolve questions of morality and justice, and the belief that, as the title of the chapter states, "many men have many minds." This initial encounter prepares the reader for the "Indian-hating" chapters. Writing for J19, Rachel Ravina, an English professor at Boston University, saw these chapters as commenting on George Copway's writings for a white audience about his experience as an Ojibwe man. Copway also wrote about white culture as an insider-outsider. Melville's chapters focus on the generalizations made in frontier writing. The character Charlie Noble tells the confidence man stories about John Moredock which he heard secondhand. Moredock is the eponymous Indian-hater of the chapter. Ravina interprets this as a commentary on how the information is filtered through multiple people: "we are meant to notice the absence of direct Indian speech, its silencing, filtering, distortion, or inaccessibility, along with the erasure of white violence in the selective process by which colonizers rewrite the facts." Another chapter on Indian-hating is a mock philosophical treatise on the metaphysics of Indian-hating. It posits that Indian-hating may be socialized, or chemically predisposed, and that a simple difference in environment creates physical racial differences. The satire, while trying to find a rational explanations for "Indian nature" as well as Indian-hating, which Ravina states, "points to the limitations of empirical investigations of race and the limitless bias of ethnographic description, which can never have the objectivity its authority performs." The narrator of the chapter points out his own unreliability, stating that an Indian-hating backwoodsman would never use these words, but that another person "found him expression for his meaning." Ravina generalizes the issues these chapters raise, seeing them "as an impetus for readers to recognize the representational limits of their sources and the racial dynamics of power and speech." Katie McGettigan, a senior lecturer in American literature at Royal Holloway, University of London wrote a book on Melville and Modernity. She argues that the The Confidence-Man engages with mass-produced text and printing in a way that anticipates Walter Benjamin's work on the subject. The novel is modeled after various works that were published in the literary magazines of his day. This mass-reproduction of work led to "the dissolution of the link between authenticity and originality". Rather than a religious allegory, McGettigan sees the book as "novel and periodical, original and copy, frustrating and pleasurable"--a work that attests to "the aesthetic power and creative potential of multiplicity." The resulting work revels in "the partial, multiple, and modern."

Adaptations

The novel was turned into an opera by George Rochberg; it was premiered by the Santa Fe Opera in 1982, but was not held to be a success. The 2008 movie The Brothers Bloom, starring Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel Weisz, borrows some of the plot and makes numerous references to the book: One of the characters is named Melville, the steamer ship is named Fidèle, and the initial mark refers to these coincidences.

Sources