The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville

Philosophical dialogues with a riverboat grifter

Herman-Melville’s satirical novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade was published in 1857. A “confidence man” was the term used in Melville’s day for what we now refer to by the abbreviated designation of a con man—“confidence” in this case meaning “trust”—one who preys on the trusting souls of others. The story takes place on a Mississippi River steamboat traveling from St. Louis to New Orleans. The novel takes the form of a series of dialogues between two or three characters, different in each chapter, one of whom is a con man seeking money through various deceptive mean such as outright begging (with a feigned disability), soliciting investments for an imaginary business, collecting alms for a faux charity, or practicing ineffective medicine as an “herb doctor.” The title and subtitle of the book tell you that all of these con man are the same person who has adopted various disguises, but there’s nothing in the text to indicate that, and it really doesn’t matter to the story, thin as it is.

The Confidence-Man is not a novel in the traditional sense of a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is more a patchwork of scenes, most of which take the form of philosophical dialogues. The theme of the con man is often abandoned entirely in favor of extended digressions on varied topics such as Native American rights, the reliability of boys (as young employees), whether one should loan money to a friend, and the difference between a loan and a gift. Some of Melville’s stylistic choices make for difficult reading: Very few of the characters in the book have names. Most are referred to by generic appellations such as “the stranger,” “the cosmopolitan,” “the merchant,” etc. Sometimes in the middle of a long chapter it’s difficult to remember who’s even talking to whom. Is the stranger in this chapter the same stranger as in the last chapter? Which one of these characters is the confidence man in disguise? To whom are these ubiquitous “he” pronouns referring? Most annoying is the way the characters utter the word “Confidence!” over and over again throughout the text as if it were some kind of mantra.

The characters in The Confidence-Man call to mind the caricaturesque figures in a John Caleb Bingham painting (a Missouri artist who painted a few riverboats in his time). They come from all backgrounds, classes, and walks of life. In Melville’s dialogues, however, they all speak with the flowery, erudite speech of characters in a Shakespearean play. Speaking of which, I’ve always found it rather amazing that Melville evolved from a sailor who wrote about his personal travels to America’s premier man of letters. Much like Shakespeare, however, most of today’s readers would need a bevy of explanatory footnotes to really understand all of Melville’s antiquated lingo and historical and literary references. The Confidence-Man is a comic novel, but only someone with a master’s degree in 19th-century literature would laugh out loud at the humor. Literary critics love The Confidence-Man because its hodgepodge amalgamation of fiction, dialogues, essays, and poetry makes for a precocious work of modernism that maybe even shows inklings of postmodern metafiction. Most nonacademic readers, however, will likely find that although the book has its insightful moments, the sum of its disparate ingredients adds up to something less than its individual parts. Even Melville admitted that The Confidence-Man was a vehicle for publishing short works that were rejected elsewhere.

I’m generally an admirer of Melville’s work, but I hated this. Every once in a while I would think “good point” or “that’s clever,” but I can’t say that at any point in reading The Confidence-Man I ever enjoyed it. Melville is one of America’s greatest authors, but this book is far from the Great American Novel, and one could argue that it’s not a novel at all, just a dumping ground for thoughts.