1
Philanthropic Taste
Race and Character in Herman Melvilleâs
The Confidence-Man
All the nice and subtle questions concerning personal identity can never possibly be decided, and are to be regarded rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties.
âDavid Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature1
To interpret someoneâs character (handwriting) is to interpret his character (physiognomy) is to interpret his character (personality) is to interpret his character (some characteristic text he has written), in a perpetual round of figure for figure. To read character is to read character is to read character is to read character.
âJ. Hillis Miller, Ariadneâs Thread2
My study begins with Herman Melvilleâs 1857 novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a text that seems to announceâand perhaps to mournâthe closing of the era of character. Set on the riverboat FidĂšle as it travels up the Mississippi River one April Foolâs Day, The Confidence-Man portrays a series of swindles perpetrated by one singular, and quite âoriginal,â confidence man. The confidence manâin Melvilleâs text but also as a well-known social typeâis named for his signature method of assuming an identity and then garnering the confidence of strangers in order to extract money from themâin The Confidence-Man in the form of donations to bogus charities, purchases of counterfeit stock or worthless patent medicine, investments in pyramid schemes, or a simple loan from one trusting, even if newfound, friend to another. The emergence of the confidence man in literature, popular periodicals, and advice manuals of the 1850s has been seen as marking a breakdown of character as a regulatory principle within the social and economic exchanges and far-flung market culture in Americaâs expanding empire of the mid-nineteenth century.3 Melvilleâs portrait of the facility and ease with which the confidence man is able to pass off his counterfeit character has thus been seen as a particularly sustained diagnosis of not only a new and troublingly deceptive social type but a more troubling crisis of confidence in the concept of character itself.
Generations of critics have sought to understand the original character of the confidence man himself, therefore, by analyzing how that character is made possible by the uniquely American civic space figured by the Mississippi riverboat FidĂšle, on which the peculiar events of this April Foolâs Day take place. Ships have, for Melville, always borne more than their manifests declare, and the âfaithfulâ FidĂšle is no exception: it is burdened with no less a task than representing the diverse characters and attenuated exchanges of Americaâs expanding empire. And what most defines this civic space, Melville insists in the opening pages of the text, is the dizzying âstrangenessâ of its social and economic exchanges. What most defines this âship of foolsâ is that it is, at bottom, a ship that, âthough always full of strangers, ⊠continually, in some degree, adds to, or replaces them with strangers still more strange.â4 The âstrangenessâ of the FidĂšle has thus been understood as describing a broader crisis of character, as the familiar, stratified relations of republican society were being transformed by the new attenuations and mediations of improved long-distance transportation and communication, the representations of a rapidly growing journalistic media, and the social dislocations of urbanization, industrialization, and mass migration.5 As strangers increasingly interacting across regional, cultural, and racial divides, individuals could no longer make recourse to the sedimented reputation of familiar members of a local community and thus grew increasingly reliant on the ability to read at a glance the character of strangers. The âstrangenessâ of late antebellum society thus made confidence between strangers an increasingly necessary, yet precarious, condition of economic and social exchange.
The Confidence-Man thus charts the promise and peril of this reliance on the legibility of character at a time when the terms of that legibility were themselves increasingly unreliable. Rather than simply portraying the social implications of this crisis of character, however, Melville interrogates the cultural work performed by the rhetoric of character, this chapter argues, by restaging its formal logic in the textual and interpretive dynamics produced by the novel itself. Melvilleâs broader fascination with the concept of character is evident in many of his literary works, from the identity-altering tattoos of Typee to the physiognomic taxonomies of Moby-Dick to the phrenological fascinations of Billy Budd. But in The Confidence-Man, Melville explores the cultural work performed by the rhetoric of character by aligning that work with the operations of literary characterization itself. This is most apparent in the novelâs three metafictional chapters (14, 33, 44), in which the narrator, in unexpected and seemingly candid asides to the reader, explicitly defends what seem to be improbable moments in the text by reflecting on the improbabilities, inconsistencies, and impenetrabilities common both to the act of literary characterization and to the social constitution of character. More significantly, Melville draws on the conventions of literary representation to foreground and to examine critically the interpretative conditions necessary for characterâs appearance as a social object. Melville does this by predicating the coherency of his narrative on the presumption that there is a single, masterful character behind the many disguises and âcharactersâ of the confidence man, while also studiously failing to confirm such an assumption. In aligning the manipulative intentions of the confidence man with the depth of literary character to which Melville continually points but never reveals, The Confidence-Man thus raises, I argue, the question of characterâs fictional construction, a construction as important to the novel form as to the liberal agency such a form was imagined to inspire.6
The confidence manâs unmatched ability to capitalize on any situation and turn it to his profit has led many critics to describe him not as a national âthreatâ but as an extreme, even parodic, embodiment of the self-interest and enterprising pluck that were being identified with the âAmerican characterâ as the individualistic ideals of liberalism were eclipsing the earlier republican ethos of civic virtue. Or as one critic of The Confidence-Man has more flatly declared, âAmericans have always been, in one sense or another, confidence men.â7 The seemingly infinite malleability of the confidence manâs character similarly evokes, as a form of self-negation, the universal perspective and formal equality that define the character of the modern citizen. But what is most striking about The Confidence-Man is that it also figures the confidence manâs strategic agency in terms of an ability to read other characters within the novel, characters who are much more cursorily sketched. By organizing each of the chapters of the first half around the contrast between the impenetrabilityâand superior strategic agencyâof the confidence man, and the all-too-transparent character of his many victims, Melville frames the novel around a contrast between two distinct genres of literary characterization: the character sketch and the romance novel.8 We thus perceive the transparency of the various characters sketched in the early chapters, while also seeing such a transparency appropriated by a confidence man whose inner motives and intentions must be assumed by the reader yet can never ultimately be confirmed or revealed. Rather than integrating these two generic forms into the conventional narrative form of the modern novel, however, Melville separates and juxtaposes them in order to foreground the dynamic that drives the broader rhetoric of character itself. Melville emphasizes, in other words, the dependency of the liberal agency figured by the confidence manâhis capacities for character reading and the universality embodied in his ever-changing characterâon the production and consumption of a stream of completely legible character types.
In delineating the literary dynamics of Melvilleâs novel, this chapter ultimately aims to make visible the racializing effects of the confidence manâs spectacular self-constitution as both a social agent and a literary character. In the opening pages of the novel, Melville portrays the FidĂšle and the many characters it conveys as representative of the demographic diversity of the Jacksonian era:
[On it] there was not lack of variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men of pleasure.⊠Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fé traders in striped blankets ⊠Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists ⊠grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. (9)
The opening description of the FidĂšle establishes it as a public space defined by its ethnic and racial diversity, a place where âthere was no lack of variety, ⊠a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, manâ (10). What such a framing suggests is that the agency of the impenetrably deep and supremely self-interested confidence man finds its expression among and in contrast to individuals defined by the particularities of race and ethnicity. We might thus read The Confidence-Man as an allegorization of the relationship of the liberal agency of the confidence man to the particularities of race and ethnicity that exclude individuals from the privileges of that agency; we might read it, in other words, as an allegorization of the âdistinctly modern, epistemological interdependence of universalism and particularismâ through which, as David Kazanjian and others have argued, the privileges of citizenship are distributed in the United States.9
But what is most conspicuous about this insistence on the diversity of the riverboat FidĂšle is that none of the novelâs characters end up representing that diversity. What is most conspicuous about Melvilleâs invocation of the category of race is that it presumes to mark everything on board that âship of foolsâ and yet fails to be the distinguishing mark of its particular passengers. âBlack Guineaâ of course walks its diegetic decks, but he only serves to foreground the unreliability of racial marking altogether. His minstrel performances are suspected to be those of a âwhite masquerading as a blackâ (31). What has often been viewed as one of Melvilleâs most satirically cutting works of social critique, in other words, seems at first glance less an interrogation of Jacksonian pluralism than a kind of self-enclosed game in which white men genially conspire to out-charm one another.10
Such a refusal to make racial difference the distinguishing feature of what Melville otherwise insists is a âpiebald parliamentâ of diverse character types might announce a repudiation of the concept of race and its visual economies of social classification. It might, if such a refusal did not belie the persistent reliance on the figure of race in the central dilemmas of the novel. In a novel perhaps most famous for its indecipherability, questions of race and ethnicity emerge most conspicuously at moments of possible thematic and formal resolution. Racial attitudes not only define the two central figures of the novel (the Indian-hating âmisanthropeâ and the âphilanthropicâ âtaster of racesâ), but nested stories of racial encounter are often positioned as temptingly rare allegorical explanations of characters or clarifications of narrative or philosophical ambiguities.11 Of those interpolated tales, the story of the Indian-hater, Colonel John Moredock, has provoked perhaps the greatest critical debate. At least since Elizabeth Fosterâs landmark reading of the novel, the task of exegetically disentangling the âinverted allegoryâ of the Indian-hater has been a key critical strategy of making sense of Melvilleâs conceptual and literary sleights of hand or, conversely, of proving the insistent irresolvability of the novel.12
The story of the Indian-hater is reported by a âstrangerâ (later identified as Charlie Noble) to the self-described âphilanthropistâ and cosmopolitan âtaster of races,â Frank Goodman, who dominates the second half of the novel as the final and culminating apotheosis of the confidence man. After overhearing a discussion between Goodman and his misanthropic counterpart, Pitch, the eavesdropping Charlie approaches the philanthropist to warn him of the dubious character of this âMissouri bachelor.â His warning takes shape as the story told to him by his fatherâs friend, the Judge James Hall (which he recalls âalmost word for wordâ) of Colonel Moredock in particular and the âmetaphysicsâ of Indian-hating in general. The story wraps up the episodic structure of the first half and inaugurates the new representational games of the second with its own tempting but questionable offerâan offer to puncture analogically the dissimulative surface of narration with an âexplanatoryâ fable. The fable is most immediately offered as an explanation of the misanthropic character of Pitch, an explanation that also allegorically aligns the confidence man with the duplicity of the âIndian race.â This duplicity of character is what the misanthrope is said to âhate,â and the story has long been read simply as an allegory of the misanthropic critique of the confidence manâs duplicity, the racial dimensions often factored out as âmereâ allegorical bearer.13
The story of the Indian-hater thus seems to confirm the conventional narrative of characterâs historical decline by contrasting the performative mastery of social conventions that define the confidence manâs charismatic âpersonalityâ with the skeptical social misanthropy of the self-reliant âcharacter.â While such a misanthropic character promises to defend against and even âexterminateâ the corrupting influence of the confidence man, it is one that ultimately fades away and yields to the cultural dominance of the confidence man. And yet, the Indian-hater story troubles this historical narrative as much as it seems to affirm it. For although the confidence man emerges at the end of the novel the unvanquished master of circumstance, the story of the Indian-hater documents this ascendancy of the confidence man in much more ambivalent terms.
First, the misanthropic Indian-hater seeks to wipe out duplicity in and as the figure of the âIndian.â But the âauthenticityâ and sincerity that he offers in exchange are ultimately revealed as an avowed kind of genocidal sincerity. The nostalgic call for a return to the individualistic ideals of the self-reliant character that it might be said to make is thus shown to be one with spectacularly catastrophic and genocidal consequences. The story leaves us with the dilemma of having to choose, in other words, between the genocidal sincerity of the misanthrope and the âphilanthropicâ exploitations of the confidence man. Furthermore, the story offers a highly problematic figure to represent the ascendance of the philanthropic character. While the Indian-hater is represented as a historically antiquated and disappearing figure in the story, the âIndian characterâ of the confidence man seems equally endangered as an enduring cultural icon and more importantly as a historical reality given the Native Americanâs violent removal from, or containment on, the nationâs frontiers. What then are we to make of the seemingly empty gesture here of explanation, an explanation that only installs the dilemma of having to choose between a genocidal but âreliableâ character and a âphilanthropicâ yet relentlessly exploitative one? More importantly, if the pivotal story of the Indian-hater is not itself the story of the confidence manâs ascendance, then how does the dilemma it produces provide the means for the ascendance of the philanthropic character? If we accept that the novel thematizes the dilemma of having to rely on a social assessment of character that can nonetheless never be secured, then what are we to make of such a conspicuous use of race to resolve this representational dilemma? How is race figured here as a consequence of the simultaneously literary and social problems of representation posed by the rhetoric of character itself? Why does the novel offer a story of racialization to resolve the problems of reliable character, and what might it mean if this apparent resolution turns out itself to be a kind of confidence game?
My aim, in pointing to the dilemma posed by the âexplanationâ of the Indian-hater story, is not to contest the pivotal significance that the Indian-hater story has in the thematic and formal texture of Melvilleâs novel or the allegorical force of its proffered resolution. Indeed, I argue that the story of the Indian-hater does resolve the central dialectical relation of the novel, the relation between the philanthropic character of the confidence man and the character of his one abiding foil, the misanthrope. But it does so only in order to show the costs of such a resolution. The failure of the explanation to explain is not simply another example of the textâs tautological web of self-canceling âmoot points,â as William Ramsey carefully argues, but rather is a failure that shifts attention to the racializing consequences of such a drive to interpret the inscrutable text of character itself.14 The interpretive inference that a racially unmarked, uniquely self-reliant and consolidated agent lies behind the polymorphous masks of the confidence man, like the unmasking of the misanthropeâs self-reliant character, this chapter demonstrates, requires the endorsement of an imperial allegory of racial difference and the interpretive consolidation of racialized characters. The Confidence-Man thus models in the revelations and occlusions of its literary form the cultural work performed by the rhetoric of character itself.
Philanthropyâs Gift: A Federal Taste for Race
The opening chapter of The Confidence-Man, âA Mute Goes Aboard a Boat on the Mississippi,â introduces us to the textual nature and characteristic posture of the bookâs title character, even if we are unsure whether we are meeting that character himself. The scene opens as âa man in cream-coloursâ who âwas, in the extremest sense of the word, a strangerâ (3) steps on board the riverboat FidĂšle. What is less clear, h...