The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Herman Melville · The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade · a novel in forty-five chapters, each under a long descriptive title · published in New York by Dix, Edwards and Co. on 1 April 1857, the last novel Melville published in his lifetime · scored on the 1857 text as the Northwestern-Newberry edition (1984) establishes it from the first American edition, in Melville’s English, read from knowledge, with no text in hand; only words that are certain are quoted
Mode
Satire as masquerade; picaresque, philosophical dialogue, frontier tale and essay on fiction under a narrator who enters no mind
Mythos
The trickster in eight shapes, doubled with the devil and with Christ; the ship of fools; the stranger who asks for charity
Phase
One day, the first of April, from sunrise at St. Louis to near midnight on the river; the boat never arrives
Presentation
Fiction; forty-five titled chapters in two halves, a run of avatars and then one, four inset tales and three chapters on fiction itself
Register
Cold comedy in a prose of litotes and qualified qualifications; patter, sermon, oracle and toast; rising three times to dread
Scale
One boat, one day, a congress of every kind of man; the republic in small, seen only at its surfaces
Governing Proposition
On April Fools’ Day a Mississippi steamer leaves St. Louis, and a stranger, or a succession of strangers, works on its passengers: a deaf-mute with a slate, a black beggar whose colour is doubted, a man with a weed, a collector for an asylum, a coal company’s agent, a herb-doctor, an agent for boys and, through the second half, a genial cosmopolitan who talks until the lamp goes out. Each asks for confidence, and whoever gives it or refuses it pays. The wager of the novel is that in a society of strangers living on credit, trust is the currency, and the language of Christian charity and the language of the confidence trick are one language, which no one aboard, and no reader, can tell apart.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
At sunrise on the first of April a stranger in cream colours comes aboard the Mississippi steamer Fidèle at St. Louis, bound downriver toward New Orleans. He is deaf and mute. He writes on a slate, “Charity thinketh no evil”, and holds it up to the passengers, who mock and jostle him; he writes again, more texts of charity from Corinthians. Near him the barber has put up a sign of his own: “No Trust.” The mute falls asleep at the foot of a ladder. The book has set its two poles in its first scene, and it will not let either win.
The whole book is this one day, April Fools’ Day, from sunrise at St. Louis to near midnight on the river, and the boat never arrives. It is set out in forty-five chapters, each under a long descriptive title in the manner of eighteenth-century fiction, mock-ceremonious and self-cancelling, so that the titles are a small art of their own. It falls into two halves of roughly equal length. In the first, a run of figures works on the passengers one after another; in the second, from chapter 24 to the end, a single figure holds the stage in long dialogues. The narrator enters no one’s mind, and much of the book is talk.
Melville published it in New York with Dix, Edwards and Co. on 1 April 1857, the day on which it is set. It was the last novel he published in his lifetime. He wrote it after Pierre had failed, and it failed in turn: reviewers were baffled, buyers were few, and he published no novel again. The book is judged as published in 1857, in the text the Northwestern-Newberry edition (1984) establishes from the first American edition, in Melville’s English. Its last sentence leaves a door open; the book is whole as published, and the open door is part of the design.
Movement II
The passengers are an “Anacharsis Cloots congress” of every kind of man, and the boat is a world in small, a ship of fools on the river of the republic. Among them is a black beggar, Black Guinea, whose blackness a man with a wooden leg questions as a possible disguise. Asked who will vouch for him, he gives in chapter 3 a list of gentlemen aboard who know him, and the list, named one by one, becomes the book’s cast: the figures he names appear in the chapters that follow. The avatars are a promise the book keeps.
They follow. The man with the weed, who calls himself John Ringman; the man in grey, collecting for a Seminole Widow and Orphan Asylum; John Truman of the Black Rapids Coal Company, with his transfer book and his stock; the herb-doctor, with his Omni-Balsamic Reinvigorator, working on a sick miser and on a man in pain; the man from the Philosophical Intelligence Office, which supplies boys. Whether these are one man in several shapes, several men, or something other than a man, the book never says. Each dupe is a different faculty tested: charity, pity, greed, the hope of health. Inside the run comes the first of four inset tales, of an unfortunate man and his wife Goneril.
Then the hardest case. Pitch, a bachelor from Missouri, refuses trust, and answers the herb-doctor’s creed of nature by saying that nature also gives smallpox and blight. The man from the Philosophical Intelligence Office takes him on and wins with an argument from boys to men: the misanthrope is fleeced by analogy. The comic timing of these chapters is sure, and they close the first half’s case. The man who trusts is fleeced, and the man who refuses trust is fleeced for his distrust; neither pole protects anyone.
Movement III
At the midpoint the procedure changes. From chapter 24 one figure holds the stage: the cosmopolitan, Frank Goodman, a professed lover of mankind, genial and talkative, who meets the passengers not in quick encounters but in long conversations. With Charlie Noble he spends an evening of toasts, with a praise of the press and of wine. The question the second half keeps open is what his genial philanthropy is worth beside Pitch’s misanthropy, and the book does not answer it.
Into this evening comes the book’s darkest matter. In chapters 25 to 27 the story of Colonel John Moredock, the Indian-hater, is retold from James Hall’s frontier sketches, and a chapter title names its subject: “the metaphysics of Indian-hating”. The backwoodsman takes the vow and goes alone into the forest, making the hatred of a whole race his vocation. It is a frontier terror, the nearest the book comes to the register of Moby-Dick, and it opens what the national optimism hid, the frontier’s genocide given its philosophy. The Indian-hater is the confidence man reversed, the man who has made distrust universal, and the cosmopolitan hears his tale with a professed love of mankind.
Then the philosophers. Mark Winsome, oracular and cold, and Egbert, commonly taken for Emerson and Thoreau, though whether they are those men or cartoons of a type is argued, meet the cosmopolitan’s plea for charity with a philosophy of self-reliance, and the book shows it to be a refusal of charity dressed as wisdom. Egbert tells the tale of China Aster, the candle-maker, to make his point about loans; with the tale of Charlemont, the gentleman-madman, it completes the four inset tales. Here the book is at its slackest: the dialogues say again at length what the first half showed, and the form that was knowledge in the masquerade becomes a vehicle for argument.
Movement IV
Three times the narrator stops the story to argue about fiction. In chapter 14 he argues that consistent characters in fiction are false to life. In chapter 33 he answers what readers want of it: “another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie”. In chapter 44 he considers what it is for a character to be original. The essays turn the book’s question on itself: a novel that asks for the reader’s belief in its figures argues, in the middle of asking, about what that belief is worth.
The form is the argument. The serial masquerade, in which the reader cannot tell whether one man or several is at work, puts the reader in the passengers’ place, and teaches the cost of confidence by asking for it. The prose does the same at the scale of the sentence: it is built of litotes, double negatives and qualified qualifications, so that each assertion is offered on credit. The dialogue is exact in its rhetorics, the herb-doctor’s patter, the employment agent’s analogies, the cosmopolitan’s geniality, Winsome’s cold oracle, and each persuasion is a model of its kind.
The cost is in the second half. The cosmopolitan’s speeches run long and alike, the mannered negations become a tic, and the evenings with Charlie Noble and with Winsome and Egbert are longer than the argument compels; some transitions between figures in the first half are abrupt in ways that read as haste. Yet the repetition is partly the point, since trust is asked for again and again in the same words, and the second half is not detachable: its long conversations are the counter-form to the first half’s quick avatars, and the Moredock chapters and the last chapter, which carry much of the book’s weight, lie in it.
Movement V
In chapters 42 and 43 the cosmopolitan comes to the barber, William Cream, under the sign that hung beside the mute’s slate at sunrise. He talks the barber into an agreement to take the sign down, and leaves without paying for his shave. It is the barber’s victory and his defeat at once. The two poles of the first chapter meet in one transaction: confidence is given, and is taken.
Then the last chapter, in the gentlemen’s cabin. An old man reads his Bible under a solar lamp. There is a counterfeit detector, and a stool that may serve as a life-preserver. The lamp is put out, and the cosmopolitan leads the old man away in the dark. It is the book’s highest moment and its coldest, and the last sentence follows: “Something further may follow of this Masquerade.” Whether the darkness is nihilism or the last of the tricks, the book does not say.
The book was all but unread for some sixty years, until the Melville revival of the 1920s, and it entered the reading of American literature mainly through the academy after the Second World War, through editions such as Elizabeth Foster’s (1954). It has since been read as theological allegory, as satire of the market, as a book about race and as a forerunner of postmodern fiction, and the question whether its stranger is Satan, Christ, an agent of God or a satirist’s device has not been closed. It is read far less than Moby-Dick or “Bartleby”, and mostly in the academy; but the conditions it pressed upon, credit, salesmanship and the philosophy of self-help, have not dated.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the book’s design invites it, since a series can lose a member. Much of the series is required. Black Guinea’s list of the gentlemen who will vouch for him names, one by one, the figures who then appear, so the avatars are a promise the book keeps; and each dupe is a different faculty tested: charity, pity, greed, the hope of health, the misanthrope’s distrust. The second half is slack where the first is taut. The evening with Charlie Noble, the toasts, the praise of the press and of wine, and the exchanges with Mark Winsome and Egbert say again at length what the first half showed, and the tale of China Aster could go with little loss. The repetition is partly the argument, since trust is asked for again and again in the same words; but a quarter of the book is longer than its argument compels, and that holds the axis a tenth above the cap.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: in a society of strangers moving on credit, trust is the currency, and the language of Christian charity and the language of the confidence trick are the same language. The first scene sets the deaf-mute’s slate, “Charity thinketh no evil”, beside the barber’s sign, “No Trust”, and the book never lets either win. The man who trusts is fleeced; Pitch, the Missouri bachelor who refuses trust, is fleeced for his distrust. The cosmopolitan’s argument with Winsome and Egbert shows a philosophy of self-reliance to be a refusal of charity dressed as wisdom, and the Moredock chapters open what the national optimism hid: the hatred of Indians as a vocation and a metaphysics, the frontier’s genocide given its philosophy. Held off the top because the disclosure is abstract more than lived: no one is known from inside, and the condition is shown as a pattern of transactions, not as a life.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The book refuses elevation, and mostly gets the effect it wants by refusing it. Its register is cold comedy, and its rare heights are dreadful rather than transporting. They are three. The deaf-mute at sunrise, mocked and jostled, writing his texts of charity and then asleep at the foot of a ladder, has a strange grandeur. The Moredock chapters reach a frontier terror in the backwoodsman who takes the vow and goes alone into the forest, the nearest the book comes to the register of Moby-Dick. The last chapter rises highest: the old man reading his Bible under the solar lamp, the counterfeit detector, the stool that may serve as a life-preserver, the lamp put out and the old man led away in the dark. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is frequency: between the three lie long stretches in which no height is sought. The height, when it comes, is real.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The confidence man is the trickster, and the archetype bears the structure: one figure, or one spirit, in eight shapes, arriving on April Fools’ Day and likened at his first appearance to Manco Capac, the pagan bringer of civilisation; doubled through the book with the devil, in the shape-changing, the images of the snake and the old man’s Bible, and with Christ, in the mute’s texts from Corinthians, the plea for charity and the stranger refused. The book never decides, and the indecision is the myth. The boat is a ship of fools, a world in small, its passengers an “Anacharsis Cloots congress” of every kind of man. The particular stays particular: an Omni-Balsamic Reinvigorator, coal stock, a Missouri bachelor’s boys. Held a step below the top because the figures are types, and the archetype is reached by thinning the particular rather than by deepening it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the novel of character as Melville’s readers knew it, his own sea romances, and behind them the satire of Lucian, Rabelais and Swift and the picaresque. The turn is radical: a novel with no protagonist whose mind is entered, no plot that advances, a hero who may be many persons or none, a narrative made almost wholly of conversation, and three chapters in which the narrator stops to argue that consistent characters in fiction are false to life and that fiction should show “another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie”. It reaches forms that did not exist for sixty years. The stake was Melville’s whole career as a novelist: after Pierre had failed, this book failed with reviewers and buyers, and he published no novel again. The departure and its cost were one. Held at 9.0 and not above because the satiric dialogue has a long lineage that the book leans on.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The serial masquerade, in which the reader cannot tell whether one man or several is at work, puts the reader in the passengers’ place: the book asks for the reader’s confidence in its own figures and teaches the cost of giving it. The single day and the single boat make a closed world in which every transaction is repeated in a new key. The chapters on fiction turn the question of trust on the novel itself, so that the form argues what the matter argues. The open ending is not incompleteness; the book is whole as published, and the open door is part of the design. Charged: the second half’s long dialogues are a container as often as an instrument, and in the Winsome and Egbert chapters the form that was knowledge in the masquerade becomes a vehicle for an argument that could be made in another form.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence over a century of reading since the Melville revival of the 1920s. Whether the avatars are one man or several; whether he is Satan, Christ, an agent of God testing charity, or a satirist’s device; whether the final darkness is nihilism or the last of the tricks; what the cosmopolitan’s genial philanthropy is worth beside Pitch’s misanthropy; whether the Moredock chapters satirise Hall or give a serious account of hatred; whether Winsome and Egbert are Emerson and Thoreau or cartoons of a type. It has been read as theological allegory, as satire of the market, as a book about race, Black Guinea’s blackness being questioned aboard as a possible disguise, and as a forerunner of postmodern fiction. The ambiguity is built, not accidental, and it has not been exhausted. Held below the top because the yield lies more in its puzzles than in its persons.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The field is the American and English novel of the mid-nineteenth century. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganises what a novel can do with character, plot and the reader’s trust, and treats the narrator’s authority as one more confidence to be tested, sixty years before such fiction was written again. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own century, none. Reviewers were baffled, sales were small, and the book was all but unread until the revival of the 1920s; it entered the reading of American literature mainly through the academy after the Second World War, through editions such as Elizabeth Foster’s (1954). Since then critics of the American trickster novel and of postmodern fiction have claimed it as an ancestor, and Ralph Ellison’s shape-changer Rinehart in Invisible Man is often read beside it; no direct line to a later novelist is credited. Delayed influence is credited and discounted, and here the discount is heavy.
Score: 8.0 / 10
A hundred and sixty-nine years. The text survives whole as published, and its form takes no charge. Two charges fall on its life. The book was out of mind for some sixty years after 1857, and since its recovery it has been read mainly in the academy: taught in courses on American literature and in graduate study, kept in print in scholarly and classic editions, but read by general readers far less than Moby-Dick or “Bartleby”. And part of its surface is topical satire: the patent medicines and coal companies of the 1850s, Hall’s frontier sketches, the transcendentalists in Winsome and Egbert. The second charge is lightened because what the satire pressed upon, credit, salesmanship and the philosophy of self-help, has not dated. The figure stands at the foot of its step, the place for a text long neglected and read mainly in the academy.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged on Melville’s English. Command of the medium is high and deliberately turned against ease. The chapter titles are a small art of their own, mock-ceremonious and self-cancelling. The prose is built of litotes, double negatives and qualified qualifications, so that every assertion is offered on credit and the reader must decide whether to accept it: the sentence enacts the subject. The dialogue is exact in its rhetorics, the herb-doctor’s patter, the employment agent’s analogies from boys to men, the cosmopolitan’s geniality, Winsome’s oracular coldness, and each persuasion is a model of its kind. The comic timing of the Pitch chapters is sure. Charged: the second half’s speeches run long and alike, the mannered negations become a tic, and some transitions between figures in the first half are abrupt in ways that read as haste more than design.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the herb-doctor selling his remedies to a sick miser and to a man in pain, and the Moredock chapters, a frontier tale of revenge and solitary hatred told at second hand. One law governs both: whether a man can be trusted, and what follows from extending or withholding confidence universally. The Indian-hater is the confidence man reversed, a man who has made distrust of a whole race his vocation, and the cosmopolitan hears his tale with a professed love of mankind. The slate and the sign are the two poles, and every scene lies between them, to the late scene in which the barber is talked into taking his sign down and is left unpaid, his victory and defeat at once. The range, from farce and metaphysics to frontier tale and Bible reading, is wide. Charged: the China Aster tale and some of the toasts sit loosely under the law, and the change of procedure at the midpoint is a seam.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Several orders, joined by one transaction. Commerce and credit: coal stock, the transfer book, patent medicines, an intelligence office for boys, the press. Religion: Corinthians, the Methodist minister, the Episcopal clergyman, the old man’s Bible and the Apocrypha. The nation: the Mississippi as the republic in small, the frontier, the removal of the Indians and the hatred behind it, slavery in Black Guinea and the question of his colour. Philosophy, in the transcendentalists; medicine and the body, in cripples, invalids and the sick miser; literature itself, in the chapters on fiction; nature, in the herb-doctor’s creed and Pitch’s answer that nature also gives smallpox and blight. Held at 8.0 because some orders are thin or absent by design: consciousness is never entered, the family appears only in the Goneril tale and in Pitch’s boys, and labour only in its counterfeits. The book holds much of a society, seen only at its surfaces.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 9.0, then The Imperishable at 8.8 and The Bottomless Well at 8.7. A novel with no protagonist entered, no plot that advances and a narrator who argues against his own art, paid for with the end of Melville’s career as a novelist; a text whole since 1857 whose conditions, credit, salesmanship and self-help, have not dated; and a built ambiguity, one stranger or many, devil, Christ or device, that a century of reading has not exhausted.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 7.4, held by frequency: three heights, the mute at sunrise, Moredock in the forest and the lamp put out, each real, with long stretches between them in which no height is sought. Next above it, The Inevitable at 7.6: a second half whose evenings with Charlie Noble, Winsome and Egbert say again what the first half showed, and a tale that could go. Then Pressure on Tradition and The Encompassed at 8.0: a reach that was nothing in its century and came late, through the academy; and a society held at its surfaces, with consciousness never entered.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 9.0, The Imperishable at 8.8, The Unconcealment at 8.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 falls short of it by five tenths. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.4, a tenth below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.3, from a sum of 100.1, in the band of Tier IV, below the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, published in New York by Dix, Edwards and Co. on 1 April 1857. The unit scored is the novel as published in 1857, in the text the Northwestern-Newberry edition (1984) establishes from the first American edition, in Melville’s English; no translation stands between. It is scored as whole: the open last sentence belongs to its design and is not a sign that it was left unfinished. No text of the novel was in hand; nothing was measured by script, and no quotation was checked against a file. The novel is quoted only where its words are certain: the mute’s slate, the barber’s sign, “Anacharsis Cloots congress”, “the metaphysics of Indian-hating”, the words from chapter 33 on fiction and the last sentence. Everything else is paraphrased, and chapters are cited by number only where their place is certain. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the date of the London issue, the novel’s length in words, the share of it that is direct speech, the chapters of the first and third inset tales, the wording of the chapter titles, the dates of later scholarly editions but Foster’s, the extent of the book’s translation, and any direct line of descent from it to a later novelist.