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by Corry Shores
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[Melville’s Confidence-Man, entry directory]
[The following summarizes parts of the text, with my commentary in brackets. Boldface is my own. Proofreading is incomplete, so I apologize for my typos.]
Summary (in Brief) of
Herman Melville
The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade
2
Showing That Many Men Have Many Minds
Brief summary:
The steamer is like a passageway (as a point of confluence and distribution) for a flow of remarkably diverse types of people from very scattered origins. Quite possibly the deaf and mute man in cream-colored clothes disembarks in that flow.
Summary (in brief)
[Previously there was a crowd around a wanted sign for a mysterious impostor who may be aboard the steamer ship. A strange, deaf and mute, deck-passenger dressed in cream-colored clothes first tries to convince a crowd of passengers to have charity and trust, and later he falls asleep on the deck. Now] a new crowd of passengers witness the sleeping man in cream-colored clothes and say distrustful and critical things about him, like “Beware of him,” “Trying to enlist interst,” and “Escaped convict, worn out with dodging” (7).
The steamer Fidèle has a variety of rooms, shops, and people:
Merchants on ‘change seem the passengers that buzz on her decks, while, from quarters unseen, comes a murmur as of bees in the comb. Fine promenades, domed saloons, long galleries, sunny balconies, confidential passages, bridal chambers, state-rooms plenty as pigeon-holes, and out-of-the-way retreats like secret drawers in an escritoire, present like facilities for publicity or privacy. Auctioneer or coiner, with equal ease, might somewhere here drive his trade.
Though her voyage of twelve hundred miles extends from apple to orange, from clime to clime, yet, like any small ferry-boat, to right and left, at every landing, the huge Fidèle still receives additional passengers in exchange for those that disembark; so that, though always full of strangers, she continually, in some degree, adds to, or replaces them with strangers still more strange; like Rio Janeiro fountain, fed from the Cocovarde mountains, which is ever overflowing with strange waters, but never with the same strange particles in every part.
(8-9, boldface and underlining my own)
[The idea here is quite important, but I am not at all knowledgeable of the reference. I wish I did know. There is apparently a fountain (called the “Fountain of the Muses”) at the Botanical Garden of Rio de Janeiro. The garden is at the foot of the Corcovado Mountain. I am not sure if we are to take that to be what Melville calls the “Cocovarde mountains”. (I could not find mountains under that spelling by search.) And if so, I do not know what the water source is for the fountain, so I do not know if it is fed from waters coming from the mountain. All this does not seem impossible, but I cannot say what is really being described here.] [What is most interesting for me here however is the notion that there is a flow of people from a variety of different sources that are channeled through the steamer. We might think of our own life as being like a vessel through which the different variations of ourself flow through, or maybe as the nexus where little particles of our selfhood merge and diverge as they pass through us.]
[It then seems that the man in cream-colored clothes has disembarked, but maybe not. It says it is not unlikely that he did, seemingly leaving open the possibility that he did not.]
By-and-by—two or three random stoppages having been made, and the last transient memory of the slumberer vanished, and he himself, not unlikely, waked up and landed ere now—the crowd, as is usual, began in all parts to break up from a concourse into various clusters or squads, which in some cases disintegrated again into quartettes, trios, and couples, or even solitaires; involuntarily submitting to that natural law which ordains dissolution equally to the mass, as in time to the member.
(9)
We then are given a discription of the various different people passing through the steamer. [Thes passages are remarkable.]
As among Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, or those oriental ones crossing the Red Sea towards Mecca in the festival month, there was no lack of variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fé traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; 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 Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotalers and convivialists, deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man.
As pine, beech, birch, ash, hackmatack, hemlock, spruce, bass-wood, maple, interweave their foliage in the natural wood, so these mortals blended their varieties of visage and garb. A Tartar-like picturesqueness; a sort of pagan abandonment and assurance. Here reigned the dashing and all-fusing spirit | of the West, whose type is the Mississippi itself, which, uniting the streams of the most distant and opposite zones, pours them along, helter-skelter, in one cosmopolitan and confident tide.
(10-11)
[I note also a possible sense here that might correspond to the sense of “outlandish” in those uses of Melville that interested Deleuze (see Terence Blake’s comment to this post). Here we have many outlandish sorts of people who have come together. But also, the steamer itself is something offland, being in the river, while at the same it is something that channels the strange, outlandish things from the land. In their homeland, they are probably not so strange at all. But it is when they move out from that context that they become outlandish; but here we might think furthermore that being outlandish or deterritorializing more specifically may necessarily involve not simply being foreign but as well forming a mélange with other outlanded things.]
Chapter text [copied from Project Gutenburg]:
CHAPTER II.
SHOWING THAT MANY MEN HAVE MANY MINDS.
"Odd fish!"
"Poor fellow!"
"Who can he be?"
"Casper Hauser."
"Bless my soul!"
"Uncommon countenance."
"Green prophet from Utah."
"Humbug!"
"Singular innocence."
"Means something."
"Spirit-rapper."
"Moon-calf."
"Piteous."
"Trying to enlist interest."
"Beware of him."
"Fast asleep here, and, doubtless, pick-pockets on board."
"Kind of daylight Endymion."
"Escaped convict, worn out with dodging."
"Jacob dreaming at Luz."
Such the epitaphic comments, conflictingly spoken or thought, of a miscellaneous company, who, assembled [8] on the overlooking, cross-wise balcony at the forward end of the upper deck near by, had not witnessed preceding occurrences.
Meantime, like some enchanted man in his grave, happily oblivious of all gossip, whether chiseled or chatted, the deaf and dumb stranger still tranquilly slept, while now the boat started on her voyage.
The great ship-canal of Ving-King-Ching, in the Flowery Kingdom, seems the Mississippi in parts, where, amply flowing between low, vine-tangled banks, flat as tow-paths, it bears the huge toppling steamers, bedizened and lacquered within like imperial junks.
Pierced along its great white bulk with two tiers of small embrasure-like windows, well above the waterline, the Fiddle, though, might at distance have been taken by strangers for some whitewashed fort on a floating isle.
Merchants on 'change seem the passengers that buzz on her decks, while, from quarters unseen, comes a murmur as of bees in the comb. Fine promenades, domed saloons, long galleries, sunny balconies, confidential passages, bridal chambers, state-rooms plenty as pigeon-holes, and out-of-the-way retreats like secret drawers in an escritoire, present like facilities for publicity or privacy. Auctioneer or coiner, with equal ease, might somewhere here drive his trade.
Though her voyage of twelve hundred miles extends from apple to orange, from clime to clime, yet, like any small ferry-boat, to right and left, at every landing, [9] the huge Fidèle still receives additional passengers in exchange for those that disembark; so that, though always full of strangers, she continually, in some degree, adds to, or replaces them with strangers still more strange; like Rio Janeiro fountain, fed from the Cocovarde mountains, which is ever overflowing with strange waters, but never with the same strange particles in every part.
Though hitherto, as has been seen, the man in cream-colors had by no means passed unobserved, yet by stealing into retirement, and there going asleep and continuing so, he seemed to have courted oblivion, a boon not often withheld from so humble an applicant as he. Those staring crowds on the shore were now left far behind, seen dimly clustering like swallows on eaves; while the passengers' attention was soon drawn away to the rapidly shooting high bluffs and shot-towers on the Missouri shore, or the bluff-looking Missourians and towering Kentuckians among the throngs on the decks.
By-and-by—two or three random stoppages having been made, and the last transient memory of the slumberer vanished, and he himself, not unlikely, waked up and landed ere now—the crowd, as is usual, began in all parts to break up from a concourse into various clusters or squads, which in some cases disintegrated again into quartettes, trios, and couples, or even solitaires; involuntarily submitting to that natural law which ordains dissolution equally to the mass, as in time to the member. [10]
As among Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, or those oriental ones crossing the Red Sea towards Mecca in the festival month, there was no lack of variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fé traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; 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 Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotalers and convivialists, deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man.
As pine, beech, birch, ash, hackmatack, hemlock, spruce, bass-wood, maple, interweave their foliage in the natural wood, so these mortals blended their varieties of visage and garb. A Tartar-like picturesqueness; a sort of pagan abandonment and assurance. Here reigned the dashing and all-fusing spirit [11] of the West, whose type is the Mississippi itself, which, uniting the streams of the most distant and opposite zones, pours them along, helter-skelter, in one cosmopolitan and confident tide.
Melville, Herman. 1857. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. New York: Dix, Edwards.
PDF at:
https://archive.org/details/confidencemanhis00melvrich
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