"Help My Distrust":
Melville's The Confidence-Man

September 2, 2007

In today's New York Times Magazine there is a brief article explaining the origins of the current housing market crisis. Roger Lowenstein ties the crisis to the liquidization of the housing market. As loans get traded and consolidated, there is less reason for the banks to closely vet their home loans.. and the corporations who end up holding the loans are several steps removed from them. Lowenstein cites John Maynard Keynes in his conclusion:

"Each individual investor flatters himself that his commitment is 'liquid,'" Keynes wrote, and the belief that he can exit the market at will "calms his nerves and makes him much more wiling to run a risk." The catch is that investors, collectively, can never exit in unison.. Whenever they try, panic and losses are the sure result.

Confidence, then, is a key ingredient in the markets. The lack of confidence is what sets off stampedes for the door.. and what destroys fortunes.

Melville's last novel, The Confidence-Man, was published in 1857. It is the perfect book for anyone looking at the world with newly shaken confidence. Melville constructs an episodic tale in which a single confidence-man (in the sense of swindler) gains the trust of a succession of individuals that are traveling on a steamboat down the Mississippi River. The trick of the novel, which is rather thickly laid on, is that the confidence-man is also a preacher of the value of confidence as a social good. His job in every guise is to build confidence and trust.

Melville introduces the economic distrust that brings about the dreaded "bear" market:

"The depression of our stock was solely owing to the growling, the hypocritical growling, of the bears." [891]

This economic lack of confidence is multiplied to every aspect of human experience:

...these same destroyers of confidence, and gloomy philosophers of the stock-market, though false in themselves, are yet true types of most destroyers of confidence and gloomy philosophers, the world over. Fellows who, whether in stocks, politics, bread-stuffs, morals, metaphysics, religion—be it what it may—trump up their black panics in the naturally-quiet brightness... [891]

Something like this suspicion of negativity remains at large in America.. and you can pick your level of discourse: the war, the markets, spiritual concerns.

This spirit of positivity is what Melville is hunting throughout The Confidence-Man.. but he goes about it in an oblique manner. On the one hand the importance of confidence in all human endeavors is portrayed. But then those with confidence are apt to get ripped off by the swindler who is always on hand to manipulate confidence. The other option would seem to be suspicion toward all social ties.. but that does not seem to quite work either. Melville appears to paint a world in which we need confidence, and in which we can't help but be ripped off if we do have confidence.

In one brief chapter entitled "Worth the Consideration of Those to Whom It May Prove Worth Considering".. a title that begs for confidence in the writer, I might point out.. Melville proposes a theory of fiction. His main contention is that human beings are too complex to be caught easily in fiction:

That fiction, where every character can, by reason of its consistency, be comprehended at a glance, either exhibits but sections of character, making them appear for wholes, or else is very untrue to reality.

I hear that as an attack on genre fiction of all kinds.. which has as its central assumption the idea that characters fit into recognizable types. A better methodology is for authors to present humans as "duck-billed beavers".. that is, as creatures whose parts do not fit together in an understandable way. This is, needless to say, not a theory that lends to confidence in human beings.

At various places in the novel Melville sets his characters to discussing people who are not as easily classified as the characters would like. The best example is that of the "Indian hater" Colonel John Moredock who likes nothing better than to head out into the woods and kill Indians.. yet who is also a loving husband and father, and citizen who is almost persuaded to run for governor. The confidence-man cannot abide the story:

To me some parts don't hang together. If the man of hate, how could John Moredock be also the man of love? Either his lone campaigns are fabulous as Hercules'; or else, those being true, what was thrown in about his geniality is but garnish. [1008]

The strange inconsistency of human beings will not be allowed by the confidence-man.. who after all depends on making people feel that the world is comprehensible.

Melville's game is quite different. He is letting a certain philosophical cat out of the bag: the world is not simple and one best deals with it by recognizing its complexity. Everything, from participating in the housing market to engaging in wars to sizing up your neighbor, should be done with circumspection and caution. That is not a message that has ever been popular in our country.