Monday, August 26, 2013

A first post on Melville's Confidence-Man Which Will Be Sure of Receiving More or Less Attention from Those Readers Who Do Not Skip It

Kim was original, and full of ideas and words I did not instantly understand, and significant parts of the book slipped from my grasp to the extent that I questioned the wisdom of writing about it after a single pass.  Now I will compound my doubts, and sins, by seeing what I can do with Herman Melville’s Confidence Man: His Masquerade (1857), Melville’s final novel.

It is such a strange and difficult book, an easy candidate for my old category of Books Few People Should Read.  How Melville thought anyone but a handful of friends would understand it, or pay money for it, is beyond me.  Writing the book seemed to break his spirits, leading his family to wonder if he was going mad.  When it was finished, he took a long vacation to the Holy Land and then switched to poetry, permanently, or almost permanently, until his death thirty-four years later.

Fortunately, I have the 1971 Norton Critical Edition of the novel, ed. Hershel Parker, at hand to assist me:

… the scrupulous reader of The Confidence-Man is rewarded by an intensity of intellectual and aesthetic exhilaration comparable to almost nothing else in our literature except some early Swift (such as A Tale of a Tub) and some late Nabokov (such as Pale Fire).  To share that exhilaration is the purpose of Wuthering Expectations this Norton Critical Edition.  (xi)

Pale Fire has long been a touchstone book for me, and as for the Swift, I refer the interested reader to Sect. VII of A Tale of a Tub, “A Digression in Praise of Digressions,” which will illuminate one of Melville’s methods.  Or perhaps Sect. IX, “A Digression Concerning Madness,” is more directly relevant.

What I am saying is this is high praise from Parker.  And I think am going to try to make something out of a book like this, like those, after reading it once!  Nonsense.  Worse, after this I have convinced myself that it would be a good idea to write about a George Meredith novel (repeated throughout the Penguin Classics endnotes: “one of Meredith’s more baffling sentences,” “a baffling phrase,” and so on).  Perhaps I should stick with books for children, like another one I just finished, Tove Jansson’s Comet in Moominland (1946), written for, I don’t know, six year-olds, which should be simple enough.  It turns out to be an allegorical novel.  Has anyone read it?  Can you guess the allegorical subject?  The date is a clue.

That was “A Digression Concerning My Recent Reading.”  “As the last chapter was begun with a reminder looking forwards, so the present must consist of one glancing backwards,” as the narrator of The Confidence-Man says in one of the two – I think only two – purely digressive chapters in the novel (Chapter 14 in this case), when the narrator interrupts the characters for some metafictional chatter.  This time he is worried his reader will find his characters inconsistent, so he pauses for a defense.  The other digressive chapter is entitled “In Which the Last Three Words of the Last Chapter Are Made the Text of Discourse, Which Will Be Sure of Receiving More or Less Attention from Those Readers Who Do Not Skip It” (Ch. 44).  That last part could almost be the motto of the week; the motto of Wuthering Expectations.  The motto of all literature.

19 comments:

  1. Ooh, finally, finally! I'm very excited for this week.

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  2. Really? I mean, good! I hope I do not write them all like I wrote this one.

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    1. Funny, I hope they're *all* written this way. As a devotee of the digression, I can't help but applaud how you manage to say so much about Melville while seeming to look in the opposite direction.

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  3. I'm excited too! Melville seems even more interesting after this post, and just this morning I finished Moominpappa's Memoirs.

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  4. "Tove Jansson’s Comet in Moominland (1946), written for, I don’t know, six year-olds"
    Comet in Moominland may be understandable by six-year-olds; that doesn't mean it was written for six-year-olds. Good books are written for everyone.
    Jansson's 'adult' novels and stories are good too.

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  5. After this wonderful preamble, I can't wait for what's coming!

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  6. I seem to have failed to apply a lesson of the Confidence-Man - I should undersell. I should begin with a sense of disappointment. Oh well. There will be enough of that later.

    Let me clarify "for six-year-olds" as referring to reading level and rhetorical strategies. Just So Stories - I am still digressing - turns out to be a a master class on hitting the target age directly while also writing for everyone.

    Next year is the Tove Jansson centennial. So I am preparing. Strangely, the only Moomin book I had read before this one was the one Erik just read. I treasured it, but never came across any of the others. How funny that you were reading that book.

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  7. I'm excited three! Or four! While I've not read The Confidence Man, I have read an essay about it (as a general rule, not a good idea when one hasn't read the book) that made me very much want to read it.

    I gave Comet in Moominland to one of my goddaughters for her birthday this year; she loved, just as I had when I was her age. Those Jansson Moomin books are, as noted above, great at any age. So is the Moomin music Jansson wrote (available on an album entitled Moomin Voices).

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  8. A blog post with digressions! So very Swift-Shandean. I've got this book on my shelf but have not yet been brave enough to venture forth in it. You are a hearty fellow. Maybe you will inspire me or scare me off entirely. Remains to be seen. Doesn't Melville model one of the characters after Emerson? Or maybe I hit my head and am making that up?

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  9. What what what, reading an essay about a book without having read it is the best idea. That way you don't spoil the lovely essay with your irritating and useless knowledge of the book itself.

    Emerson, yes, Emerson is definitely a character. He is roasted on one side, turned, and grilled on the other. Thoreau and Poe make appearances as well.

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  10. Kim and Confidence Man, it doesn't get much better than that, does it?

    It must have been so frustrating to be Melville after the completion of Confidence Man. He must have known that he was the greatest, most original novelist in the world, and yet, he could only sell a couple dozen of copies of his new books , most likely to family and friends. Melville even paid for a private printing of some later work: a set of 25 copies!.

    Still, Cavafy was mostly writing for himself and some friends while working at his day job; ditto Kafka; and, for a while, Borges was on the same boat of having only a few dozen copies of his books sold. And not that many more people must have read any of Emily Dickinson's poetry while she was alive. Some writers are like oysters, they can quietly secrete pearls while living in the dark.

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  11. I am looking forward to your comments about The Confidence Man. I have read it several times, and now I hope to gain some understanding of this work.

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  12. Any understanding will likely be courtesy of Hershel Parker and other contributors to the Critical Edition. I am planning to loot it.

    I take Melville's last publications as something of a happy ending to his story. An audience of 25 - but a good 25, the right 25. It is just too bad that he did not get Billy Budd in the hands of that audience.

    The other candidate for greatest, most original novelist in the world circa 1857 was Mr. Popular, Charles Dickens, who soon would write one of the best-selling books in human history (A Tale of Two Cities). How strange to compare their careers.

    You'll like this, the conclusion to a review of The Confidence-Man in the New York Dispatch: "The book will sell, of course, because Melville wrote it; but this exceedingly talented author must beware or he will tire out the patience of his readers." (Norton, 270)

    Yes, of course, it will sell. ???

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    1. Tom, can you spring for the Parker-Niemeyer 2nd Norton Critical Edition (2006)? It is far more lootable than the 1971 edition and it's got as near as I come to a tour de force, "The Confidence Man's Masquerade" (293-303).

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    2. Yes, I can spring for the newer edition. I will. A tour de force - that is irresistible.

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  13. Oh dear, you made me curious about "Kim," and now here comes more Melville.

    Tove Jansson is a surprising, serious, and subtle writer. I recommend "Moominland Midwinter." And her daily comic strip (now published by Drawn & Quarterly) is a thing of beauty.

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  14. I will do what I can to tamp down your curiosity.

    Now, Jansson. First, I have actually read one random volume of the comic strip, which was comparable in charm, invention, and weirdness to the novels.

    Second, maybe I should try to launch a little event, get people reading for the centennial. Why not, right? Except that I barely know her. But I can discuss my plans. Half of book blog posts are just discussions of plans.

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  15. This novel has a bad rep; it's very easy to read, and hilarious from cover to cover. The syntax is tortuous because Melville uses lots of negative and adversative conjunctions, to bring the themes of ambiguity down to the fabric of the language. When people talk about form mirroring content, they should use this novel as an example! But the short chapters, the odd humor, and the swift rotation of characters and situations keeps the reading flowing like a breeze.

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  16. Man, I did not flow. But I made it through. It is, as you say, all of a piece, down to the language.

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