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  • History as Spiritual Healer:The Messianic Vision in Leon Garfield's The Confidence Man
  • Roni Natov (bio)

The past carries with it a secret index to redemption.

—Walter Benjamin "Über den Begriff der Geschichte"

As a writer of historical fiction, Leon Garfield uses the past—the eighteenth century in his earlier novels and the nineteenth century in his later ones—as the psychological place we enter to explore the roots of the present. The fact that he never sets his fiction in his own time suggests a sense of impotence about the present—that to make something happen, to move a character through time and space, requires a dynamic or power he does not associate with contemporary life. Early in his writing career he wrote, "I admit I find the social aspects of contemporary life too fleeting to grasp imaginatively before they are legislated out of existence" ("Writing for Childhood" 59). Perhaps his intense concern with his own time urges him to remove himself and his readers from the present to bring it more sharply into focus. For a writer of moral and political concerns like Garfield, a central problem is how to confront his readers with those current issues he regards as crucial. How can he disarm them, much as the writer of satire or fantasy does, so that they can observe and reevaluate the values of their culture by experiencing them through a fresh perspective? Such a writer needs to protect his readers, be they children or adults, from the immediacy of the moment in order to radically expose them, through his own gaze, to what he believes has been hidden from them, intentionally or unconsciously, in the culture.

What distinguishes The Confidence Man from Garfield's other historical fiction is that it centers on a real event, a specific moment in time. And although Garfield's use of the historical moment in this novel is idiosyncratic, he does adhere to a certain sense of verisimilitude. He thoroughly researches time and setting, particularly with regard to the daily lives of ordinary people. In terms of the perspective of his characters, he tries to remain true to what they could or could not have known at [End Page 116] the time, without adjusting for twentieth-century hindsight. As Garfield said, "The story is in the hands of the characters. Whatever is seen is what they see. They look about them. They take for granted what is commonplace and remark only on what is unusual" ("Historians and Storytellers" 23). With The Prisoners of September, for example, his other major novel based on a specific historical event, Garfield included details about the French Revolution that he knew were distortions of the truth or essentially untrue; but as they were ideas and opinions that were popularly believed, they are embedded in the point of view of his characters. However, since the incident upon which The Confidence Man is based is relatively unknown, Garfield makes no effort to explore its actuality; adherence to its authenticity seems essentially irrelevant. While Garfield is interested in verity, it is more psychological than historical in emphasis. And in The Confidence Man, Garfield incorporates into a psychological perspective a messianic projection of a future society.

The Confidence Man is virtually an ecstatic vision of Utopia. In this novel, Garfield turns away from the Old World of Europe toward America as the new landscape onto which he can project a historical spiritual renewal. Of course, hindsight tells us that America hardly sustained that promise, and the fact that Garfield chose to project a futuristic second-coming into a historical moment whose past we can not help but reconstruct in all its racial, if not class fragmentation, almost invites an ironic stance. But he is not suggesting irony as the prevailing tone or his conclusive note. The novel ends with a dance of ecstasy between two youths, a German immigrant and an Indian, who bond together, without a common language or tradition, in a religious or mystical vision. Considering the history of the oppression of Native Americans by European Americans, one is left wondering about the optimistic nature of Garfield's message here. However, the present historical moment of choice...

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