Reading Melville Reading Character

I spent my first night with The Confidence-Man during a particularly subterranean stretch of graduate-school reading. Ever since, the novel has been wedged like a splinter in my mental picture of antebellum America. I can’t seem to absorb it fully, neither can I shake it loose. It remains a curiosity and a necessity, anomalous but somehow indispensable; it haunts classroom attempts to historicize adjacent classics; it exerts a mysterious gravitational pull on new work addressing models of secular sociality in American writing. As with most deeply seated splinters, a perverse joy inhabits each new effort at tugging it out.

Encounters with The Confidence-Man are the sort one enjoys, in other words, without always knowing where exactly the pleasure comes from or whether the experience is altogether safe. I find it addressing questions about social relationship, for instance, that we elsewhere seem barely able to ask. And I repeatedly fall for its wicked promise to liberate social life from the confines of the individual. If you’re drawn to texts that detach experience from identity, Melville’s permission to let go the priority of the self can be deliriously fun. But such pleasure, we should admit, finds its coordinates in a world comprised of cons. Undaunted, this novel proposes that our irremediable separateness somehow generates the terms for our relationships. Stranger still, it often voices the human as a machine, suggesting that what founds the social looks less like a contractual bond between persons than a sort of fiduciary software responsible for generating the things we think of as selves. Whether the resulting model of sociality amounts to a bad dream or a good one seems to me the novel’s irrepressible question.

It’s worth remembering that The Confidence-Man mostly baffled its handful of readers in 1857 and then lay in wait nearly a century before Melvilleans saw its usefulness for piquing graduate students. So I presume some part of the pleasure I take in it reflects a fetish for exotic artifacts—in this case, a last-ditch missive from a modernist who came too early, finally breaking from every conventional idea about how novels are made. Melville’s prose goes underground after this final publishing failure, only secretly flourishing again three decades later in Billy Budd. But that story—the one in which the book’s esoteric history underwrites our exoteric work on it—is just a part of the larger story about this novel’s curious appeal. I find that hunkering down with it once more, or submitting again to its propositions, also means asking whether Melville’s late prose affords something like a social ontology, or a ground for our view of what constitutes modern life.

Indifferent to most narrative conventions, The Confidence-Man spends one day aboard a riverboat, the Fidèle, southbound on the Mississippi. Disparate passengers encounter what seem to be nine iterations of a single shapeshifting figure, Melville’s eponymous con-man, whose gambit involves putting one over on his interlocutors by appealing to a widely held assumption that survival in a secular republic depends on trust in one’s fellow passengers. Each con thus exploits the idea that fiduciary bonds among strangers underlie the coherence of the American social milieu, as if confidence in the probity of one’s neighbors were somehow naturalized. The confidence-man doesn’t want our money really, though small amounts of cash sometimes do metonymize his victories. He does famously want mastery over our collective faith in one another. His tricks never arrive at determinate philosophical insights; they rather seem to iterate, circling back though similarly delusive permutations of a perverse dialogic pattern. The ship’s passengers are severally persuaded of the healing power of mystic herbs, the imminent bullishness of the stock market, the beneficence of fictional charities, the wholesomeness of beggars, and so on. The cast is almost entirely male. The ending is difficult to spoil: dialogues framing the cons grow longer and more elaborately layered as the novel unfolds.

Readers often notice that the confidence-man’s performances, like the game he always wins, tend to...