“Something Further May Follow”: Melville’s Legacy and Contemporary Adaptations of The Confidence-Man

In his introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (1998), Robert S. Levine stated that “in Melville criticism a divide has arisen between … the ‘bookworms’ and the ‘creative readers,’” between critics who are “committed to recovering Melville’s intentions by paying close attention to what is known about his biography, reading habits, compositional methods, and so on” and critics “who explore from more theoretical and speculative perspectives the cultural discourses, logics, and concerns informing Melville’s texts” (Levine 4–5). The distinction that Levine describes echoes the debates of the 1960s and 1970s, which opposed a strictly textual or philological approach to literature to an emphasis on the historical, social, and political contexts of a work of art. In my view, a synthesis between the two approaches is not only possible but also altogether necessary for any understanding of Melville’s complex and multilayered works.

Once a book becomes a “classic,” it comes loaded with several strata of interpretations. As Richard Hardack writes, “we are usually engaging with at least two Melvillean texts when we read: one as it was perceived in its day, and one as perceived in the present; and yet another text when it becomes ‘rehabilitated’ by the academy or is received in popular culture” (Hardack 9). Similarly, Andrew Delbanco talks of the contemporary “stream of new Melvilles, all of whom seem somehow able to keep up with the preoccupations of the moment: myth-and-symbol Melville, countercultural Melville, anti-war Melville, environmentalist Melville, gay or bisexual Melville, multicultural Melville, global Melville” (Delbanco 12–13). But we know we have a “true” classic when “creative readers”—and not just the critics Levine describes—rewrite the work through adaptation. Here, another kind of “new Melville” arises, one that accounts for past interpretation as well as for the popular imagination of the present, creatively recombining them into an original work of art.

Of particular interest is Melville’s last published novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). The novel, ignored by the public and despised by critics when it first appeared, is currently undergoing creative and heterogeneous adaptations and reinterpretations in contemporary America, especially in light of the new awareness prompted by postmodernist poetics and in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Re-reading The Confidence-Man through its most significant contemporary adaptations not only clarifies the reasons of the work’s failure at the time of its publication but also illuminates how Melville’s work relates to our present artistic sensibility. By analyzing the various adapters’ interpretations of Melville’s protean character in the historical context in which they are written and represented, we can also reconsider the critical reception of Melville’s novel, now that it has finally become a “true” classic.

As is well known, Melville’s reputation sank inexorably after the publication of Moby-Dick, Pierre, and Israel Potter; therefore, when the manuscript of The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade was accepted for publication in 1857, the author probably saw his last chance to reach posterity. It is significant, then, that the last lines of the last novel published by Melville during his lifetime possibly foresee a future reprise of the story. Before abruptly ending the story, the mysterious and elusive narrator states that “[s]omething further may follow of this masquerade” (NN CM 251). It is a bitter irony that The Confidence-Man marks the end of Melville’s already declining career as a fiction writer.

Disaffected and in bad health, Melville admittedly concluded the novel in haste. In 1952 Howard C. Horsford claimed to have found in Melville’s journal evidence of the author’s intention to write a continuation of the story, based mainly on some pencil additions by Melville and on an assumed misspelling by the scholar who made the transcript, but in my view a sequel seems unlikely; even though during his journey in the Mediterranean he had more Con Man ideas in mind, it seems doubtful that the author—his thoughts fixed to his imminent pilgrimage to the Holy Land and excited at the idea of visiting...