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Camus's Absurd and the World of Melville's Confidence-Man

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Leon F. Seltzer
Leon F. Seltzer*
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Buffalo
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Extract

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 1 , March 1967 , pp. 14 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

1 “Melville's Confidence-Man,” KR, xi (1949), 136. See also his book Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York, 1949).

2 “Introduction” to The Confidence-Man (New York, 1954), pp. xiii, xxxvii.

3 John W. Schroeder, “Sources and Symbols for Melville's Confidence-Man,” PMLA, lxvi (1951), 363–380; Foster; Edward H. Rosenberry, Melville and the Comic Spirit (Cambridge, Mass., 1955).

4 Daniel G. Hoffman, Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York, 1961), p. 281.

5 See, for example, Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Vintage, c. 1955), pp. 74–75, 150. Future references to this translation of the Myth will be incorporated in the text. For other brief references to Melville in Camus's writing, see The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage, c. 1956), pp. 81, 89, 265; Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Modern Library, c. 1960), p. 203; Notebooks, 1935–1942, trans. Philip Thody (New York: Modern Library, 1965), pp. 86, 209–210; and Notebooks, 1942–1951, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Knopf, 1965), pp. 4, 6, 137, 232. For Camus's most considered thoughts on Melville, see his appreciative introduction to the author in Les écrivains célèbres, ed. R. Queneau & P. Josserand, Vol. iii: Le XIXeSiècle (Paris: Mazenod, 1952).

6 See Charles Feidelson, Jr., Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago, 1953), p. 210. Professor Feidelson uses the word in the following context: “the insubstantiality and fluidity of experience [in the world of The Confidence-Man] are such that the very question of confidence becomes absurd” [my italics]. It might, further, be noted here that while Leon S. Roudiez has written a useful article on the conceptual resemblances between Camus's famous outsider Meursault and such Melville figures as Pierre, Bartleby, the confidence man, and Billy Budd (“Strangers in Melville and Camus,” FR, xxxi, 1958, 217–226), his characterizational slant unfortunately limits his brief discussion of The Confidence-Man mostly to a few hints on the “absurd” nature of Melville's accomplished fraud.

7 Before going any further, it should be pointed out that Camus's contribution to the literature on the absurd lies mainly in his descriptions of what he terms “the absurd man” and “the absurd creation.” As far as his recognition of an absurd universe is concerned, there is, of course, nothing original in his thinking. Besides Camus, many of the so-called “existential philosophers” (and Kierkegaard and Sartre figure prominently among them) have called attention to man's inability to justify or explain the world through his rational faculties. The reason, therefore, that this study has chosen to concentrate only on the absurd in Camus's writing is simply that its interest in this concept centers not so much around the general notion of an unknowable or unreasonable universe as around Camus's much more individual ideas on the absurd man and the absurd creation (and creator).

8 Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man, ed. Elizabeth Foster (New York, 1934), p. 77. Subsequent references to this, the definitive edition of the novel, will be included in the text.

9 Melville's reasoning here is not altogether unlike the train of thought implicit in the novel's final episode with the counterfeit detector. In this scene Melville would seem to imply, naturally enough, that the only way to distinguish between a good bill and a false one is through some sort of detecting device. But because (1) the detector includes exceptions along with its rules, (2) the bills are themselves mutable, and (3) man's eyesight (cf. “insight”) may lack the sensitivity to make the necessarily subtle discriminations, the very idea of a “detector” becomes absurd. So man must have confidence; yet as this confidence cannot be based on reason, it, too, must be judged absurd. To the degree that Melville's book is, philosophically speaking, one of despair, it is so because the author investigates the only two ways of responding to reality (through reason and through belief) and exposes both orientations as adopted in defiance of “what is”—which, finally, is indeterminable by man. The counterfeit detector is a cheat, but if one turns from it to the notion of confidence, he renders himself all-the-more vulnerable to the confidence man: the arch-cheat himself.

10 Though it is generally acknowledged that Melville was Camus's favorite American author and that The Plague (La Peste) was influenced by its author's reading of Moby-Dick, the full extent of Camus's acquaintance with Melville's writings is still in doubt. It is assumed by Leon S. Roudiez (“Camus and Moby-Dick,” Sym., xv, 1961, 30–40) that Camus first made contact with Moby-Dick in its second French translation (Gallimard, 1941), especially since it is to this edition that Camus refers in his essay (1952) on Melville (see n. 5). Besides reading Moby-Dick and Billy Budd (trans. 1935), Camus, Mr. Roudiez speculates, may also have read Benito Cereno and Pierre, the French translations of which appeared in 1937 and 1939 respectively. At any rate, owing partly to the fact that not all of Camus's private notebooks have been published at this time (Gallimard is currently engaged in the project), we cannot now finally determine whether or not Camus was acquainted with these works. It is interesting to observe that nowhere in Mr. Roudiez's article does he refer to the possibility of Camus's having read The Confidence-Man, which, by the way, was not translated into French until 1950, under the title Le Grand Escroc (Paris: éditions de Minuit).

11 Feidelson, p. 209.

12 In Defense of Reason, 3rd ed. (Denver, Colo., 1947), p. 224.

13 As Melville tells us here, the crowd was not a little annoyed by the mute's aspect, “which they took to be somehow inappropriate to the time and place” (p. 2). Clearly we are to understand the action of the narrative as suggesting the comedy of the fallen world.

14 “Some Notes on the Structure of The Confidence-Man,” A L, xxix (1957), 287.

15 Hoffman, p. 304.

16 When we have an author who may be moved to remark that “goodness is no such rare thing among men—the world familiarly know the noun; a common one in every language—…” (p. 39), it is plain that we are dealing with a writer intent upon tossing us weights we can't for a moment hold onto.

17 The confidence man is not, to be sure, Melville's only inscrutable, or at least irreducible, character: just a moment's reflection will turn up others. Starting with the leviathan himself, who in the course of the narrative is paradoxically anthropomorphized, deified, and demonized, we may think of Isabel in Pierre, Babo in Benito Cereno, Bartleby the scrivener, and Claggart—Melville's final delineation of “innate depravity” in action. The incisive analyses and self-analyses of Ahab in Moby-Dick required Melville to “suspend a disbelief” he was no longer capable or desirous of setting aside by the time of The Confidence-Man.

18 “Melville on the Nature of Hope,” UKCR, xxii (1955), 129.

19 It may be worth recalling that in Camus's later work there is a great concern with establishing new moral values in the face of a meaningless universe. In this respect, The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus (both 1942) are to be compared with The Plague (1947) and The Rebel (1951). Even in his early play Caligula (composed before the Myth though published after it), Camus has his lucid but horribly demoniac tyrant-hero condemn his own behavior: “I have chosen a wrong path,” he confesses just before his assassination, “a path that leads to nothing. My freedom isn't the right one.” And in a late preface to this work (1957), Camus does not hesitate to pass moral judgment upon his hero: “But, if his truth is to rebel against fate, his error lies in negating what binds him to mankind. … Unfaithful to mankind through fidelity to himself, Caligula accepts death because he has understood that no one can save himself all alone and that one cannot be free at the expense of others” (Caligula and Three Other Plays, trans. Stuart Gilbert, New York: Vintage, c. 1958, p. vi).

20 This line, by the way, deserves much more attention than it has received. It is, I think, the author's most clear-cut indication of the con man's beguiling deceit that we get in the entire novel. Indeed, Melville may be seen as taking a liberty here in the narrative which he has scrupulously denied himself up to this point. Even so, he insists on maintaining some fragment of doubt, and thus remarks a few lines later of the barber's conclusion that in trusting the cosmopolitan he has allowed himself to be diddled: “Whether that impression proved well-founded or not, does not appear” (p. 269).

21 See John Cruickshank, Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt (London, 1959), p. 44.