Not Exactly Infinite: State Machines and Algorithms of the Interior in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man

Well, I see it’s good to out with one’s private thoughts now and then. Somehow, I don’t know why, a certain misty suspiciousness seems inseparable from most of one’s private notions about some men and some things; but once out with these misty notions, and their mere contact with other men’s soon dissipates, or, at least, modifies them.

—Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man (1857)

Anything but a private man, the bumbling Peter Coddle is nevertheless the star of a most suspect nineteenth-century children’s narrative—indeed a misty lack of information characterizes the text at every turn. In the course of a wearying journey to New York City from rural Hogginsville, he takes to his carriage for some rest and recuperation: “I put my quizzing glass away, laid back in my seat, and took a good snooze, with a cup of coffee for a pillow.”¹ Alternatively, “I put my quizzing glass away, laid back in my seat, and took a good snooze, with a quart of caterpillars for a pillow.” Moreover, there is some doubt whether it was “a quart of caterpillars;” the pillow could have been “an Irishman” as well. Or “a Dutch farmer.” Or “half a dozen doughnuts” (Jessie, 257). These variations are not the result of printer’s error or editorial dispute over

Walter Aimwell (William Simonds). Game Box from Peter Coddle’s Trip to New York. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

final authorial intention. They are, in fact, an integral part of the story; any one of them (and many others) might be correctly substituted. This is because “Peter Coddle’s Trip to New York” (first published in 1858) is both a short narrative and a self-described “Game of Transformations,” the nineteenth-century equivalent of what we today are most familiar with as Mad Libs (Jessie, 241). Using premade cards containing various article-noun combinations, players would fill in the blanks to produce readable (if absurd) sentences, creating a slightly different story every time they played. In this game, its creator, Walter Aimwell, had produced a “Literary Puzzle” that conceived of the text as a kind of equation, with words in the place of numerical constants and syntactic blanks in the place of algebraic variables. The “misty notion” of a narrative suggested by this form is made concrete in the manifold moments of player “contact” that comprise the game—literalizing, as I will argue in what follows, the nearly systematic interplay of anxious absence and confident social contact that defines Herman Melville’s notorious “problem novel,” The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). Making no pretensions to art, Aimwell’s game nonetheless provides an important technical perspective on the operations and operators at the core of Melville’s text, with its patchwork of dubious characters, like undefined algorithms, “modifie[d]” by a revolving door of masquerading avatars and accompanying arguments.

As a chapter in the youth-targeted novel Jessie; Or, Trying to Be Somebody, “Peter Coddle’s Trip” crystallized a functional perspective on story-making and character that suffused the work, as well as the mind of its author. Immersed in the hardware of writing and publishing for most of his short life, Aimwell (born William Simonds in 1822) took a procedural approach to nearly everything he did. He began his career as an apprentice at a lucrative Boston printing office—taking over as sole editor of the Boston Saturday Rambler at twenty-three—and persistently used a journal to quantify his accomplishments in year-end “Summar[ies]” that tallied the number of events attended, books read, dollars accumulated, and even, in an obsessively reflexive turn, the sum of notebook pages occupied by each of these entries.² As a teenager, he invented code-languages and established a set of self-governing rules that closed with the instruction to “ask [himself] each day a set of questions to be answered in writing.”³ Ubiquitous in his professional practice...