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144 six From Typee to The Confidence-Man Herman Melville and the (Im)possibility of the Gift The natives, actuated by some mysterious impulse, day after day redoubled their attentions to us.Their manner towards us was unaccountable. Surely, thought I, they would not act thus if they meant us any harm. But why this excess of deferential kindness, and what equivalent can they imagine us capable of rendering them for it? —Typee (Melville 1963, 210) The lady was, in an extraordinary way, touched. She sat in a sort of restless torment, knowing not which way to turn. She began twenty different sentences, and left off at the first syllable of each. At last, in desperation, she hurried out,“Tell me, sir, for what you want the twenty dollars?” —The Confidence-Man (Melville 1971, 38) When he comes to live with the Typees,nothing baffles Herman Melville’s main character Tommo more than their “unaccountable”generosity. Where does the “mysterious impulse” to give and to extend themselves come from,he wonders?Their“manner”is unfathomable,outside of any logos of which Tommo can think.He cannot understand the “excess”of their gestures and their hospitality, and he wonders what they might mean and how he might be able to offer an “equivalent” return. In his first novel Typee (1846), Melville stages the conflict between gift economies and market economic thinking that is at the center of many colonial encounters.How can one comprehend one through the lens of the other? And even though Typee is often seen as the opposite of Melville’s last published novel, The Confidence-Man (1857)—chronologically and in terms of ambition and style—this central preoccupation with the gift connects the two texts. How is giving and trust possible, the late novel asks, in a thoroughly alienated world,a world of “extreme strangers”full of self-interest and distrust? The question is tormenting,bringing Melville’s characters and the From Typee to The Confidence-Man 145 novel itself over and over to the brink of language and reason.1 Reminiscent of Jacques Derrida’s writings about the gift, Melville’s 1857 novel obsesses about the moment of giving, that moment of the possibility of goodness and faith (I can give at this instance, and I feel I should or want to give) and its simultaneous near impossibility (how can I trust the one who asks for the gift and part with what I give). Discontinuous and self-aborting, The Confidence-Man can be read as a series of movements toward the (im)possible moment of the gift—its aporia.2 As a narrative, it struggles with moving toward, desiring to capture the moment outside of logos, the moment of the gift, and yet always, of course, as a narrative it is bound by logos itself. Melville’s last novel again and again stages this paradox brilliantly and reveals the human and literary consequences of the (im)possibility of the gift—utter disconnection and the end of narrative respectively. Typee and The Confidence-Man mark Melville’s entrance and exit from the literary market of American fiction, respectively, and they also show the two poles of Melville’s reflections on the (im)possibility of the gift as either governing a tribal “primitive”economy or a metaphysical desire.Melville’s response to the gift—entirely overlooked by critics—lasts as long as his writing of fiction and mirrors the span of the later academic conversation about the gift: from Marcel Mauss, who observes and theorizes gift exchange in exotic, supposedly “primitive”nonmonetary cultures, to Jacques Derrida, who reflects on the philosophical questions about the (im)possibility of the gift and its relation to faith, responsibility, goodness, and God. Each text, each pole of Melville’s thinking about the gift, suggests both the gift’s centrality and its ultimate (im) possibility.Obviously,Melville uses Typee and The Confidence-Man to reflect on the (im)possibilities of the gift in “savagery” and “civilization” respectively, but he also uses both texts to reflect on capitalism and the spirit of the gift.The gift economy described in Typee can be best understood as a foil to the hard labor conditions of a whaler—and of industrial production in general—through which it is framed. In The Confidence-Man, on the other hand, Melville moves away from labor conditions and exploitation to think through the trappings of finance capitalism. Depicting its absurd workings of trust and betrayal, he portrays it as little...

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