Herman Melville's Confidence Man

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Hermetic America: Transformational America
Presentation 5 of 13

Melville’s Confidence Man
Satan as a River-boat Conman
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, August 1, 1985

Transcript:
The date is August the 1st 1985. This is the fifth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on transformational America. Tonight's lecture is entitled Melville's Confidence Man, Satan as the Riverboat Conman.
When I was more alert to promotion. Drawing several hundred students at a time. They would mislabel my courses, and they would still be filled to the brim because word of mouth at the university is very good. And one of the things lacking here is that there is no word of mouth because there's no community. That's the first thing that I noticed is that in this society, there's no community. And that's the one thing that a university really has still is a community. Though it's not used appropriately from time to time. Don't get me started on the psychology of education. I know more about that than anything.
In our development what we're doing is we are revealing to ourselves the only track that we can follow of how we got to where we are. And we're in a very precarious situation. There are many ways to describe this. One of them was on the news tonight. One of the commentators on channel seven said that a multi trillion-dollar debt will ruin the United States as an entity. And the public debt is now approaching a trillion dollars and will inevitably reach there in the next couple of years. But the way it reaches there is not by spending appropriations but because of a built-in accumulation that is geometrically expanding. Which means that there is no solution other than transforming the system. But that is but a symptom of an intellectual malady. And the intellectual malady itself is symptomatic of a spiritual disease.
And we have seen now from about six different vantage points that this occurred first in this country between 1825 and 1860. In that 35-year period, which was called ostensibly and is called ostensibly the age of reform. And there were many reform movements at that time. And what was not seen at that time, that transformation is essential to the reality that you cannot reform. You stay on the outside of the wheel as the Vajrayana says. That anywhere on the wheel of life on the rim is permeable to the ghostly phantasmal apparitions of delusion. And it doesn't matter where you are on the rim you have to go to the center. And the only way to go the center is to have a structural transformation so that you cease to be contented on the rim. And you're willing to, as Melville says dive under. And the deeper you go, the more universal you find the issues. And that they're not only issues, but the in-fact life stuff. They are experience. They are consciousness. They are every bit what we dreamed as children the truth would be, but they are nowhere on the surface. They are not on the rim at all.
Keeping us on the rim are the confidence men. And the confidence men are constantly tell us it's all right. Things will change. There'll be better next year. And next year they tell us we have to do a little more work. There'll be better next year. Nothing's really wrong. And nothing is really so tremendous that it's just years apart from something that seems tragical and the tragedy is really just bad experience. It'd be better in the morning. It'll be better next year.
Melville in writing The Confidence Man has for all time given us an accurate portrayal of this universal delusion. The Confidence Man was his 10th book. And his last real book. It fell as plat then as it does now. No one wanted to hear that. No one wanted to read it. It was published simply because Melville was a very famous author, and the publisher didn't know. The printers didn't know. They didn't know what it was about. And the readers did not know what it was about. And after this Melville only published little volumes of poetry for the rest of his life. This was 1857. He died in 1891.
From 1857 to 1891 our greatest writer was silent. He worked as a customs inspector for the port of New York. And that was a pork barrel job that was thrown at him simply because he had been around for years and knew a lot of people once upon a time. Melville is still not recognized. The Confidence Man is one of the great works of we're all of at your head. He had not written Moby Dick; The Confidence Man would be his greatest work.
One of the few individuals in the 20th century to understand Melville’s The Confidence Man was Thomas Mann. And Thomas Mann wrote his version of The Confidence Man, it's called Felix Krull sub entitled The Confidence Man [Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years]. Before Melville, there was no such thing as the recognition of the archetype of the confidence man. The original confidence man in fact was named William Thompson. And he was an American. And journalism of the time portrayed him in a journalistic phrase confidence man. That he wins confidence from people in order to bilking them of something. But the larger issues of a confidence man is not bilking them of the money but bilking them of their credibility. Of their belief in reality. Of their capacity to go to the center other things. Of their capacity to transform. Bilking them of that was precious of all qualities. The human spirit intact whereby it may recover its [inaudible]. Not based on reform but based on transformation.

in The Confidence Man Melville takes a broad spread of the most prominent American figures of his day. In The Confidence Man we can detect Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau. P. T. Barnum. A number of individuals very, very famous at the time. A great actress, Fanny Kemble Butler. And all of these are characters that are brought in and put into one self-contained universe, a river boat on the Mississippi River. And it's going to leave from St. Louis and sail down to New Orleans. All the while, stopping everywhere, picking up and letting off people. So that there's a constant energy of human types on this boat but it's constantly changing.

Melville's riverboat is called the Fidèle, faithful. And it's like Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, but instead of a set population of pilgrims it's a constantly dynamically changing set of pilgrims. But what is constant always is the fullness of the house. And so, Melville writes a 21st century novel in the middle of the 19th century. He stretches the consciousness of his time to the breaking point. And if there ever was a Gnostic novel The Confidence Man is that. Because he with unrelenting honesty faces again and again the most primordial moral dilemmas and refuses to let them go away. Refuses to resolve them one way or another and keeps the tension there constantly before the reader. And again and again, the reader is tempted to take one side or another.
And in fact, the confidence man through his disguises, he becomes many different people. He's a shape changer. He is at one time when we first see him in a cream-colored suit, and he pretends he's a deaf mute and has to hold up a slate board. And on it he writes little messages from Paul's Christianity, charity and all that. The next time we see him he's a black man who is a cripple. Who has to go around on his arms and he just by opening his mouth and let people throw pennies in his mouth. And next we see him, sometimes he's and herb doctor selling universal cures. Sometimes he appears and he has a little badge that says P.I.O. the Philosophic Intelligence Operation. There's all sorts of disguises that he has.

And he's constantly taking one side or another. And it doesn't matter to him which side he takes. Because as long as you're on the rim, as long as you are diluted, by thinking that things are going to change, that is a right stance to take and a wrong stance to take. You are caught in the polarities. And that dynamic keeps it spinning. But what he cannot [inaudible] is someone who makes us pause and think what is going on here? What am I doing? What are we all doing? What does this whole pattern amount to? What is in fact, the structure of reality? Because that question is poignant. It's poignant in a doubling way. We are asking what is real and we're asking what is the structure of that reality and thus, positing for ourselves the belief that it's understandable. We can know. We can know.
Several characters in The Confidence Man Challenge the confidence man. One of them is a very tall [inaudible] looking individual who catches him in a bald-faced lie and tells him to his face in public that you are lying. And the confidence man backs off and slinks away. Another time, an American frontiersman with the coonskin cap and the rifle decides that he's not going to put up with him anymore. And he cocks his gun, and the confidence man slinks off again. There are characters who are able to survive this barrage of delusion, but they're very few.
But most of the characters think that they're surviving by taking attack opposite of him. And the confidence man is very sly. Silvery voice. And then he says, well, I admit I was trying to put one over on you. Of course you're right. And then by agreeing with them, pulls them into their own delusion. And so, it's like one of those principles of trying to fight that if you push, you will be pulled and if you pull, you will be pushed. And there is no way to fight this with yeah. In the rules of tensions in opposition. No way whatsoever. And Melville colossally portrays in the most glacial way that the only way out of this human impasse is to stop diluting ourselves. That we have to change. And that the change has to be directed towards knowing the whole. Not any one part, not any one side no matter how good it seems. And not running away from anything, no matter how evil it seems, no matter how bad it seems. Not to cooperate with it, but to see it for what it is.
The Confidence Man in fact, ending Melville's career as a writer, he knew it would. He had developed from his youth. His family had been very well fixed. His mother's father owned huge chunks of New York City. When he became a customs inspector for the port, the customs house he worked in the corner of Gansevoort Street named for his grandfather. When he went into the hotel Gansevoort that had once been owned by his grandfather and land the family had owned. And just for kicks he asked the clerk there about you know what is this name? And the clerk just said well its some old people that used to have a lot of money and they're all dead now.
When he was 12, his father went bankrupt. It was the beginning of the cutthroat economic competition in the United States. He was born in 1819. So, he was 12 in 183. And the 1830’s were the beginning of a terrible era. In fact, it led up to the panic of 1837, which was the equivalent of the wall street crash in 1929. Melville's father went bankrupt, and the family had to move out of New York City where he was born, and they went upstate to Albany. And his father became a clerk in a little mercantile store and Melville saw this. And all the Melville children then tried to help out. But the father brokenhearted died a year and a half later.
When he was very young, when he was about 19-20 years of age Melville trying to find his bearings went off to sea. Signed on board a trader and went out on the Atlantic Ocean. When he came back he tried to go home, and he found that the family was even poorer. He tried to teach school for a while. He couldn't do it. The school went bankrupt. His students didn't care. And so, in this disillusion state, he visited an uncle who lived, lived on the Mississippi River. Galena, Illinois. Galena is in the very farthest Northeast corner of Illinois. Across the river would be Iowa and the Wisconsin border would be about 10 miles North of it. Galena is the birth place I believe of U.S. Grant.
The uncle, of course, trying to help the young Melville find his way. He had gone West with a friend of his named Eli Fly. And so, the uncle realizing that Melville didn't need to work, he needed to get something out of his system. And he had once gone out on the ocean. So, he got him in a situation where he came down the Mississippi River in a boat. And we have no record. We don't know how far he went. The supposition is that he went from Galina down the whole state of Illinois to [inaudible]. And then [inaudible] up the Ohio River and back. We know that he was back in New York City within a year.
It was that experience that was the natural origins of The Confidence Man. His experience of the river. Of the kinds of people. The fact that the Mississippi river was a confluence of humanity. It wasn't a frontier where there were only pioneers or backwoods. But the Mississippi River was the great bizarre of the United States. All of the character types collected there. So that the riverboats on the Mississippi where microcosms of all mankind. And this was in direct contrast to the fact that there was wilderness still within shouting distance of the Mississippi all the way along the way. And so, we have an odd archetypal situation. We have like little spaceships of humanity in a universe of unknowns.
The Confidence Man is about a one-day voyage on the Mississippi River. Leaving from St. Louis and going as far as you would go in one day. Half the book takes place during the day and the other half takes place during the following night. So, it's a complete one-day cycle. And the day is April Fool's Day, April 1st. The All-Fools Festival. Remember now the fool card in the tarot deck is a zero. It has no place in the numerical scheme. It is there for the only common background and all the other archetypes have.
He begins it, chapter one, “At sunrise on the 1st of April, there appeared suddenly as man Manco Cápac at Lake Titicaca, a man in cream colors at the water side in the city of St. Louis.” Melville's always showing off his worldwide traveled sense. He's been everywhere. He's been to China. He’s been to Constantinople. He's been to Peru. He's been to every place there is. He had sailed on whaling ships for many years. And Manco Cápac was an Inca God that comes with the sun and mystically and magically is there. This is a very curious thing and very significant. Very potent packed in this image is an incredible cosmology, almost diluting physics. And its central issue and central point is that nothing is connected with anything else. That all things are about successions, and they just appear. And so, this man comes from nowhere. He is really going nowhere. He’s not connected really to anything. He has no family. He has no children. He has no connection with our sense of reality or history. He just appears at the sunrise. Cream-colored suit in St. Louis.
His cheek was fair. His chin Downey. His hair flaxen. His hat a white fur one with the long fleecy nap. He had neither trunk, valise, carpet bag nor parcel. No Porter followed him. He was unaccompanied by friends. From the shrugged shoulders, titters, whispers, and wondering of the crowd that is was [inaudible] in the extremist sense of the word, a stranger. In the same moment with his advent,
Note the word he didn't arrive. He was an advent. This is like the conjuring, he’s simply there
“In the same moment with his advent, he stepped aboard the favorite steamer for daily on the point of starting for New Orleans.” And so, he materializes exactly there as he’s stepping aboard the gangplank.
Stared at, but unsolicited with the air of one neither courting nor shunning regard but evenly pursuing the path of duty. Lead it through solitudes or cities on his way along the lower deck, until he checks to come to a placard [inaudible] the captain's office offering a reward for the capture of a mysterious imposter.
Evidently he had been at work all up and down the river. When there's a reward out for this mysterious imposter, like the great imposter. Hard to tell who he is or what he’s up to. So, he sees this reward sign. And the sign says that he is supposed to have been recently arrived from the East. From the East meaning the East of the United States. Meaning that he is like an 1850’s carpetbagger. He is a Yankee peddler. He's somebody whose from time to time going to sell magical erase of soap that'll clean anything. You. Your clothes. If you drank a little bit of it, your insides. Eraser soap it's the only thing in the universe that gets you really clean. You better buy some. You better buy two cakes, don't you ever a friend? Here you go. This is the confidence man. This is his game. And what he likes and what this kind of Yankee peddler really likes is the action. It doesn't matter to him if he wins or loses. You see business on that level is gambling. It's the action. The phrase, when I was growing up around con men like this was that you don't sell the steak, you sell the sizzle. You don't offer them goods. You offer them dreams and ideas. What else do they want? Everything else tarnishes, these get better. So, you just give them the sizzling dreams. The steaming ideas.
“Quite an original genius in his vocation as it would appear. Though wherein his originality consisted was never clearly given. But what purported to be a careful description of this person followed.” So, he sees all these people and they're reading the sign. And he holds up a chalkboard saying charity, think of no evil. And he never erases the word charity, but it keeps changing the message. At another time it reads charity suffers [inaudible] and is kind. And it reads charity endureth all things. Charity believeth all things. Charity never faileth. And as he's putting these signs up the barber comes out and opens up his stall and he puts up a sign, says no trust. Which means that if you want to shave you're going to have to come up with the cash. And the confidence man sees this sneers and goes off, sits down and falls asleep. End of the first chapter.
The second chapter begins with just a series of phrases, almost like Lawrence Stern in [inaudible]. “Odd fish. Poor fellow. Who can he be? Casper Hauser, bless my soul. Uncommon countenance. Green prophet from Utah. Singular innocence means something. Spirit wrapper. Moon cath. Piteous. Be aware of him,” et cetera, et cetera. Just these verbal statements called from the crowd.
And Melville says,
As among Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims or those Oriental ones crossing the red sea towards Mecca and the festival money, there was no lack of variety. Natives of all sorts and foreigners. Men of business and men of pleasure. Parlor men and backwoods men. 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 and slippers and moccasins squaws. Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers. English, Irish, German, Scotch, Dane, Santa Fe traders in striped blankets and Broadway [inaudible] caravan cloth and fine gold. Fine looking Kentucky boatmen. Japanese looking Mississippi cotton planters. Quakers in full drab and United States soldiers in full regimentals. Slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon, [inaudible], Spanish Creoles and old-fashioned French Jews. Mormons in Pappas. [inaudible] and Lazarus. [inaudible] and mourners. Teetotalers in [inaudible]. Deacons in black. [inaudible] Baptists in play eaters. Grinning Negroes and Sioux chief [inaudible] as high priest. And short a pie ball parliament. And Anna Carson quotes congress of all kinds of that multiform Pilgrim species, man.
So, they're all there. Everyone's accounted for. The wheel is complete. All of the kinds and types of mankind are present. And this is how the confidence man likes it. And it doesn't matter to him what happens as long as the melee continues. As long as no one cries halt to the process.
And as he's going along, and the situation seems to be going along in just the right way suddenly he senses that someone's not with it. And he looks, and they're standing on the edge of the railing is a young student with the book in his hand. And he's looking seriously into the water. And he's thinking about just what the confidence man does not want you to think about. What is going on in life? What is this mean? And so, the conference man can't stand this. And he goes up to him,
At this time, he was leaning over the rail at the boat side and his pensiveness and mindful of another pensive figure near a general young gentlemen with a swan neck wearing a lady like open shirt collar thrown back, tied with a black ribbon. He had a small book bound in Roman [inaudible].
So, to get his attention, he begins talking to himself and talking about the pathos of life. And the student of course in sympathy hears this. Always talking about that?
Ahh Who is this? You did not hear me my young friend did you? Why you look too sad? My melancholy’s not catching? Sir, sir, stammered the other. Pray now what sort of sociable sorrowfulness slowly sliding along the rail? P ray now my young friend what volume have you there? Give it, give me leave. Gently drawing it from him and holding it up. Tacitus.
And of course, Tacitus is the great Roman historian who weathered the terrible nightmare decades. Caligula. Nero. Claudius. Domitian. He lived through the terror. And Tacitus’ two great works, The Annals and The Histories, are the record of a civilization shredding itself and falling apart while on the surface everyone was being told it's all right. Rome is eternal. It'll always be there. Nothing's wrong. And Tacitus chronicling the incredible nightmare madness that had seized the world. Tacitus then opening at random read. And this is a quotation from Tacitus’ Annals.
In general, a black and shameful period lies before me. Dear young, sir, touching his arm alarmingly. Don't read this book. It's poison, moral poison. Even if there were truth in Tacitus, such truth would have the operation of falsity and so still be poisoned, moral poison. Too well, I know this Tacitus. In my college days he came near to souring me into cynicism. Yes I began to turn down my collar and go about with a disdainful joyless expression.
The student keeps trying to say, sure, sir, I trust me. Because the confidence man always wants confidence. He always finally gets around to this. Don't you trust me? Why not? Why don't you trust me? I mean, if you have a viewpoint of why you shouldn't trust me, tell me. And then he'll agree with you and then you can trust him, see.
He says,” Now young friend, perhaps you think Tacitus like me is only melancholy, but he's more, he's ugly. A vast difference young sir, between melancholy view and the ugly. The one may show the world still beautiful, but not so the other.” In other words, if you start reading Tacitus, you're going to start thinking that if it can fall apart scale, then maybe it's falling apart on that scale now. What is going on now? And so, he says the young man, let me throw it in the river. Says, please let me just throw this in. You'll be much better off.
He says, “of course you read Tacitus”. The student won't let him throw it. He says, “You read Tacitus in order to improve your understanding of man.” He says, “I understand this. I know why you're reading. Isn't that why you're reading?” The student says,
Upon my word, I. Nah I foresee all that. But you carry Tacitus, that shallow Tacitus [inaudible] what do I carry? See, producing a pocket volume. It coincides pleasures of the imagination. One of these days, you will know it. When you grow up. When you have more experience in the world you’ll stop reading this trash. Just makes you sorrowful.
He says, “Tacitus I have long been of opinion that these classics are the bane of colleges. They should all be thrown out there. They are, they’re too serious.” He says,
Ever since the revival of learning these classics been the favorites of successive generations of students. And studious men I tremble to think of that massive unsuspected heresy on every vital topic, which for centuries must have simmered unsurmised in the heart of Christendom. But Tacitus, he is the most extraordinary example of a heretic. Let me throw him overboard.
But he cannot, the student will not let him. And finally, he goes off.
So, he changes his shape. He comes as a salesman. In fact, he's developed a new chair. It's a protean chair. It's going to revolutionize the world. This chair is really something. He says,
My protean easy chair is a chair, so allover be-joined, [inaudible], be-patted. Every way so elastic, springy, and docile to the areas touch that in some one of its endlessly changeable accommodations of backseat, footboard and arms, the most restless body. The body most racked. Nah, I had almost added the most tormented conscious [inaudible] somehow and some were find rest.
What better to sell a chair that will rest you. Make everything easy. Take your shoes off. Have a seat. It's really all right.
“Believing that I owed it to suffering humanity, to make known such a chair to the utmost. I scraped together my little means and went off to the world's fair with it.” And the other businessman said,
Well, you did right. But your scheme, how did you hit upon that? Why was going to tell you after seeing my invention duly cataloged in place, I gave myself up to pondering the scene about me. I dwelt upon that shining pageant of arts and moving concourse of nations and reflected that here was the pride of the world glorying in a glass house. A sense of the fragility of worldly grand jury profoundly impressed me. And so, I said to myself, I will see if on this occasion of vanity, I cannot supply a hint towards a better profit than was designed. Maybe some worldwide good to a worldwide cause.
And so, he developed a worldwide cause called the World's Charity. And he's going to collect donations from every human being on the planet. And he's figured out how much this will come to. And it'll be enough to be a fund to feed all the poor. And he says, this is a real worthwhile thing, but I have to chairs in order to get started.
“The talk went on. The man in grey,” I had a father like these people.
The talk went on. The man in gray revealed a spirit of benevolence. Oh yeah, I was a con man at 14. County fairs, easy. The talk went on. The man in gray revealed a spirit of benevolence, which mindful of the millennial promise had gone overboard all the countries of the globe, much as the diligence spirit of the husband stirred by forethought of the coming [inaudible] meets him in march reveries at his fire side over every field of his farm. The master cord of the man in gray had been touched. And it seems as if it would never cease vibrating. A knot unsilvered tongue too was his. With gestures that were a Pentecost of added ones and persuasiveness before which granite hearts might crumble into gravel. Strange. Therefore, how has auditor so singularly good-hearted as he seen remained proof to such eloquence. Though not as it turned out to such pleadings. For after listening a while longer with pleasant incredulity presently as the boat touched his place of destination. The gentlemen with a look, half humor, half pity, put another bank note into his hands. Charitable to the last, if only to the dreams of enthusiasm.
All of this goes on and constantly he reappears. He seems to be leading the boat and then he comes on and another disguise. And as he seems to come and go at the population of the book begins talking about these events and it begins to have an overlay. In each episode then seems to interlock with the previous episodes. And characters that he had run across before come back. And so, the complexity builds. Constantly building. And Melville in this development stresses that the characters that are before him somehow are made up by him. That their very existence is problematical. He talks about, he becomes a man who has been cruelly treated by his wife and his divorce and his penniless because of this and is seeking help from people trying to win their confidence so that he can go back and help the daughter of this marriage.
And everything begins to devolve around the increasing complications until chapter 14. And Melville interrupts the novel. And he takes in chapter 14 a chance to talk about the reality of fiction. And this is the first time that this kind of self-consciousness really comes into world literature. And we'll see it later on in the 20th century a lot. He says,
“It's difficult to tell the reader that I am inconsistent in drawing my characters. But the truth is,” he says. “I am inconsistent because I am drawing them true to reality. Where are there consistent people that you know?” And he says, “We're all fast. So, we're all changeable.” This is in fact, the nature of life on the rim. It is never what it is. It is always a variation. It's always an intimation. It's always an imagination. There is no reality. It's all permeable. It's all osmotic. And so, there is no consistency. And what's bothering the reader he says, and by now, of course, the author is taking the reader in to the very situation.
He says,
What's bothering you is that the inconsistencies are waking you up from your own habitual expectations. You want the characters to be identifiable so that the reading is going to be a very pleasing experience for you. And you're starting to be uncomfortable because the characters are like yourself. They change. And the most changeable of them all is the confidence man. He in fact is very true to reality.
He is the essence of life on the rim. He says, “You talk about nature.” He says, “I remember a case not so long ago when a duck billed beaver from Australia was brought to London and was inspected by all the experts. And they said that definitely the duck beak had been glued onto the beaver.” It was a duck billed platypus of course. Because scientifically such a creature could not exist therefore, it had been made up. And he says, this is the extremes that we go to. So, he says that this is in the nature of what we call real.

END OF SIDE ONE
He said it, should it be absent from fiction? He says, what this? He says,
The [inaudible] of human nature are the same today that they were a thousand years ago. The only variability in them as an expression not in feature. But as in spite of seeming discouragement some mathematicians are yet in hopes of hitting upon an exact method of determining the longitude. The more earnest psychologist may in the face of previous failures, still cherish expectations with regard to some mode of infallibly discovering the heart of man.
That beneath all of this is really a conniving expectations that we're going to finally be able to, to dice things up and understand them. And that this is a compliment. It's an exact compliment of the endless variability and changeability. That these two chimeras go together. They're inseparable. You don't have one without the other. And so, The Confidence Man plays on this dynamic. That people want exactness and yet they are variable all the time. And he plays on that. And he makes everything very specific. Any way you want it, it'll be specific. You want the specifics over here, fine. Over here, this is better? Fine. But the desire for the specifics lead you into the constant delusion of the [inaudible], constantly.
So, he ends chapter 14 saying that “enough has been said by way of apology, for whatever may have seemed to miss or obscure in the character of the merchant. So, nothing remains, but to return to our comedy. Or rather to pass from the comedy of thought to that of action”. And so, he takes up again a new level in The Confidence Man.

I think we need a little break. Let's take a break. I'm going to just go down to the sidewalk to sell some cassettes. Not as a huckster, you understand, but I get hungry every day.

The first person to ever read The Confidence Man sympathetically was a man named Richard Chase. And he wrote a book on Melville because of that. And it was published in 1949. So, it took 95 years before there was anybody who appreciated The Confidence Man.

It's just, again, another situation that we have become perhaps painfully conscious of. That one of the insidious characteristics of the American tradition is just throw away our tradition. To ignore it. And it is constantly there and its a barracuda. It is real and it is there. And this is part of what Melville was writing about in The Confidence Man, that this is there in the American character. In the American experience. And it's here more than it has ever been in any other single culture. Because usually nations or cultures that have grown out of the grass roots have had built in taboos, built in balances, peasant wisdom. And the United States doesn't have any of this because the peasant wisdom in the United States would have been the American Indians. And they have been left out on purpose. Because the so-called peasant wisdom is based upon experience with the land. There's a mystical intelligence that's there. And the American experience by and large has been like puffs of clouds floating over the landscape, not touching anywhere. The glibness of The Confidence Man is an American malady, par excellence. A nation of hucksters.

Chase writes of The Confidence Man. And now this aspect of the American character.
In accordance with his way of poo-pooing, everything tragic, everything pathetic or morally complex, The Confidence Man proceeds to dissolve the moral values. He sets about systematically obscuring just behavior. Obscuring the perception of active evil. If, says the confidence man, we had met any mystery or ambiguity in moral questions people will take this to be a weakness. We must have confidence that the whole thing worked out for the best in the end despite the hardships imposed upon anyone. Yet it is of course, the competence man himself who obscures moral issues in mystery and ambiguity. Either by hedging when the issue is clear cut. Or by making a complex and difficult moral situation deceptively simple.
A phrase I used to hear as a youngster, well at six of one and half a dozen of the other. Melville's ears perk at that. Oh, who said that? What in human nature believe that?

In Dante’s Inferno the hottest spot in hell was reserved for those who are indifferent in a time of moral crisis. That was the worst sin. Melville would go one step further in his comedy. His is a divine comedy also. He would say it's not just being indifferent in a time of moral classes, but it's feigning indifference. It's pretending that you're indifferent. And he says, our country, this country, has gotten awfully good at this. He's writing this of course in 1857.

Remember what Whitman said? Whitman said that the cause of the Civil War was the fact that the entire government of the country, the entire administration was filled with the worst flotsam and jetsam of human trash. That all conscientious people had fled from the situation. And that on every level of government from the ward politics in the cities on up to the presidency was totally corrupt. Cutthroats, bandits, greedy people. So, the entire structure was rotten. That the Civil War was like a terrible virulent disease that just broke out on the surface in 1860 but was there in the body politic from the 1830’s on. From the 1840’s on. And in the 1850’s with just reaching a saturation point. And Melville was like one of those great spiritual barometers who was sensing this in the temperature, the moral temperature, of the country.

When he had written his first series of novels. The first six novels were all about the Polynesian world, which the Americans had an intrusion into. This Eden experience. Typee [Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life]. Omoo, which we talked about last week in lecture down red [inaudible]. Mardi [Mardi and a Voyage Thither], Redburn [Redburn: His First Voyage], White-Jacket [White-Jacket: Or the World in a Man-of-War]. And finally, Moby Dick, which was the culmination.

And the culmination of Moby Dick was profoundly looking at the very center of this experience. What happens when civilized man goes back to an Eden experience? There was nothing wrong with Polynesia. There was nothing wrong with the people. With the islands. And the population went from 200,000 when Captain Cook was there to 9,000 two generations later. Melville says that we brought with us the disease. And it was a very real disease. It was like an epidemic. It wasn't that they died so much as small pox or they died of measles. It was that they died of a broken spirit. Black Elk told us in our time that when the hoop of the nation is broken, the people die. Because the sacred hoop of the nation is founded upon a mystical presence of the hole in the center. And if that is not there, the hoop cannot sustain itself. And what comes in its place is a displacement. It's a displacement of delusion. And this is that rim.

I have a Tibetan Mandela that has a very good presentation of this. And every so often along the rim, there are ghostly white phantasmal figures, cloud-like, fading off this rim. And if you do the meditation right, that structure which is from shows itself to be discontinuous. And the only way to make it continuous is to include the phantasmal shapes with it. And this is the very process of believing in the diversion. Of committing oneself then that this is real. And the only way that is real is that it all must be real in the same way. And this is just the way in which the mind schemers reality with fictions. And this is what the confidence man counts on. That [inaudible] that we'll be glad to get back into the fetters. Because not being there on the rim means that we have the feeling that we're sinking. We're going into it. We don't know what's down there. And Melville says over and over again, he loves the fact that man has the courage finally to dive. To go below the surface. And then when you dive and you go below the surface you increasingly under pressure, under suffering, under fear, under death, learn to transform. And of course, the culmination Moby Dick was that the whale was the creature that can dive five miles down. Now, how can surface creatures expect to kill him. No matter how fierce and prideful their ambitions are.

But after he finished Moby Dick his next novel was called Pierre and the Ambiguities [Pierre; or, The Ambiguities] and dealt with this kind of fragmentation of consciousness that comes, this disassociation that comes when one faces squarely the fact that suffering and evil are real. They exist. The first noble truth is that suffering is real. Without that there's no way to make the cure real. Because of suffering is not real, if you believe that the cure will never [inaudible]. There is no way out. There's only the constant endless idiocy, a reform, change, permeation, variation.
Now, Melville did not have access to the Vajrayana. He didn't have, not have access to almost several dozen techniques of histories and heritages which we have today. But he was an absolute champion in his honesty because he never flinched.

And from Pierre not letting go of that theme, ge published a series of short tales which are collected called The Piazza Tales. And then he published a little short American piece called Israel Potter [Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile]. And then he brought The Confidence Man forth. And this was the end of his public writing career.

He has in here, once he gets going after chapter 14, Melville like a carnival master. And the chapter's just out one after another. And they're fascinating. And they're mostly dialogues. Dialogues between the confidence man and his people. And it's like all the stage that was set in the first 14 chapters is now turned loose.

Melville in writing Moby Dick, which we'll get to in two weeks, had deepened his tone because of a friendship which had developed with Nathaniel Hawthorne. And he says he was eternally indebted to Hawthorne for giving him the courage to plumb to the very depths without flinching. And he dedicated Moby Dick to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

After he finished The Confidence Man Melville's whole family, and all the friends feared for his sanity. So, they collected together $1,500 and they sent him to England where Hawthorne was with the U.S. Foreign Legation. And he visited Hawthorne there. And Hawthorne was appalled at Melville. Not because of fearing for his sanity, but because the man had touched bottom. And Hawthorne said in some uncanny way Melville was like some charismatic grave who refused to let go of the roots of the world. And no longer cared whether people read him or not. No longer cared because he had told the truth. And so, Hawthorne said to him you need to go to the Holy land. You've got to go to Palestine. You've got to go to Egypt. You've got to go back to the roots of Western religion and take yourself there. And Melville did that.
And he going there to the Holy land was absolutely astonished and appalled because he found the same hucksters, the same tourist schmeer in Jerusalem that he had seen in New York City. And evidently had been going on, he says in his journals, since the crusades. They're all ready. They've got all the shops and all the trinkets and all the souvenirs. And nothing is there anymore. So, he tried to go deeper. He went to Egypt. He went to Cairo. He went outside Cairo to the great pyramids. He said it was very fearful to be taken by a guide at night into the whole, the gaping hole, the pyramid of Cheops. And he went in. Forcing himself to go in. To experience that. And he forced himself to climb to the very top of the pyramid. And he sat on the top of the Cheops pyramid, watching the sun rise. And as the dawn came up in the day, it came up, he said the rising nervous anxiety in him bubbled into giddiness and into nausea and to terror. And he said, he realized this tremendously potent evil notion of a static Godhead and a mobile never ending changing humanity went together like a dumbbell, like a barbell.

And when he came back, he couldn't write. He couldn't write anymore. And when he came back within a year, the Civil War broke out and it was like the worst nightmare. So, Melville wrote during the Civil War, a series of poems called The Battle-Pieces [Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War]. And I'll try and bring some next week. And there along with Whitman's Drum-Taps, the most eloquent testimony to the fact that there were spiritual seers in the United States there to witness and to accept the terrible madness of the Civil War.

We used to read The Battle-Pieces in San Francisco in Berkeley in the middle sixties. We used to read them to the troops of rioters and the troops of police to this whole polarity. I never suppose that they had been written at any other time than 1967. And they were written in 1861-1862.

The Confidence Man constantly is finding a way to change his shape, to change his tack, to fit in with however that person is. When he comes into a woman he's a little bit different. And when he comes into an old miser, he tailors himself. He's always willing to materially change and be just right for that person. Just exactly the person.

I have to skip over many interesting parts, but I want to give you a little bit something here. Aside from the profundity of The Confidence Man, which is always there. It's what Melville would call in Moby Dick language looming. That there's constantly a sense and awareness, which looms within ourselves when we are honest, that all of this is significant. None of it can be thrown away. None of it is just incidental. That all of this is meaningful and significant. And that we are the only focus for ourselves that that significance can come together and make sense. And if we extract ourselves from that in any way we take away that center presence and the pattern cannot be seen. The experience does not ring true. And he uses the symbolism of the bell, the voice like a bell in his works many times. Where the person who speaks the truth suddenly freezes the whole environment. The whole play that's going on suddenly is brought to a halt for a moment. And then the numbness of the truth wears off and the situation goes back again and it flows again, and the conniving starts again.

The best visual presentation of this technique that I ever saw Jean Renoir. He used it in some of his films. And it was used again, most beautifully in a color film called The Lovers of Teruel which is a classic Spanish Medieval ballet. And in The Lovers of Teruel, it's a ballet, which is about a ballet company that has a love triangle in it. And at the moment of the danuma and the ballet the actual ballet troupe is going through the very same situation. And in the background, there's a train that's going by and suddenly it stops. And the smoke is caught in the air. And the archetypal level of movement happens that time was frozen. And the depth occurs just then at that moment. And as the dying hero slides into oblivion, the smoke begins to go and train goes, and everything comes back into [inaudible] back into normal time. Melville has this kind of a mystics insight. But he also is careful that one should not fall into a kind of phony mysticism. And this is why his portrayal of Emerson here as winsome. Winsome. And that he really was doing the confidence man's work by reducing everything down to a nice dull [inaudible].

In chapter 22, the comedy aspect of Melville, because he's constantly trying to keep our comic energy. Melville very much like a Dante or Faulkner. He's very alert. And like Shakespeare is very alert to the fact that we need to be agile. That this in this seeing through the choreography of our habituation, our agility is dependent in fact expressive of, our own independent mobility. And so, in order to keep ourselves agile like that, the comedy comes to help us. Not irony. Melville constantly says that I already leads to a satirical view and the satiric view is what the confidence man plays with all the time. Different levels of that. But that comedy is different. And so, he brings comedy on.

And in Chapter 22 Southern title In The Polite Spirit of The Tusculan Disputations. And of course, The Tusculan Disputations was one of Cicero's last great philosophic works. It was written when he knew that Mark Antony had marked him out for death. He was on the top of the prescription list. And so, Cicero unburdening himself of every truth that he held to be valuable, committing it to the generations and ages to come, put it into beautiful language, because they knew they would be used as textbooks for little boys to learn how to write from. And that the adults wouldn't pay any attention to what was say. And so, in this way, Cicero slipped in a time capsule the great truth to the classical world. Why it went crazy. Why it went mad. Why it turned into a nightmare. And The Tusculan Disputations is one of those great works.

Melville says The Polite Spirit of The Tusculan Disputations. And he begins, “Philosophical Intelligence Office,” in the capital letters, “Novel idea. But how did you come to dream that I wanted anything in your observed line, [inaudible]? About 20 minutes after leaving Cape Girardeau,” which is a place in the Mississippi. On the Missouri side.
The above sign was growled up over the shoulder by the Missourian to a chance stranger who had just accosted him around back Baker need man in a mean $5 suit. Wearing color-wise by a chain of small brass plate, inscribed, P.I.O. And who were the sort of canine deprecations slunk obliquely behind. How did you come to dream that I wanted anything in your line hey? Oh respect, sir whined the other crouching a pace nearer. In his obsequiousness seeming to wag in very coattails behind him. Shabby though they were. Oh sir, from long experience when glance [inaudible] the gentlemen who tells me the gentleman who is in need of our humble services. But suppose I did want a boy that they jocosely call a good boy. How can [inaudible] office help me philosophical intelligence officer.

The man is complaining that he can't find good workers and they can't find anyone to trust to help him run his business. And so, this, the confidence man now is a P.I.O. agent. He says,
Yes, respected sir, an office founded on strictly philosophical and physio [inaudible], he interrupts him. Come up here. How by philosophy or physiology either make good boys to order? Come up here. Don't give me a crick in the neck. Come up here. Come on, sir. Come. As if calling to his pointer. Tell me how put the requisite [inaudible] of good quality into a boy as the assorted mince into the pie.
Well, Melville is talking this way because that's what they did to Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, they ground up the creme of the philosophy of the ancient world and made a pablum for teaching boys. And then when they learned that, then they tell them, well, you're just young and you'll have to learn to be a man. You'll have to get over your education. You can't talk that way in the real world. That's only good for schools. Now this is a pattern that education is still locked into today. Still.

“Respected Sir, our office, you talk too much of that office. Where is it? Onboard this boat? Oh, no, sir. I just came aboard. Our office, came aboard at the last landing, hey. Pray do you know an herb doctor there? Small scamp and a snuff colored [inaudible].” The confidence man before this had been an herb doctor saying that chemical remedies are no good that only natures chemicals are good. Only herbs are good. And of course he was pawning off a lot of poisons. Poisonous herbs. He forgot to tell them, you know. So, the little elements of poisoning in there would addict people to this medicine. So, this is where he came on board. And of course he was the confidence man changed again.

So, he goes on in this vein through a very long chapter. And he ends it, “But where was slipped in the entering [inaudible]. Philosophy, knowledge, experience. Where were those trusty knights of the castle [inaudible].” In other words, how does it happen? How does the confidence man come in with this philosophic intelligence office idea. This idea that we recognize in our time, which has come again around. That there are certain agents from people who know who will be glad to help you out for a fee. And will be glad to tell you and be glad to enlighten you for a fee. This same kind of a scam.

So, he says, “How did they, how did they get into it? Was it philosophy? Was it knowledge? Was it experience? No, but unbeknown to them the enemy stole on the [inaudible] South side, it's genial one.” It comes in through geniality. Not through something philosophical. Not through experience. This need to be genial. Have community. Have friends. That's how it came.

Where suspicion the defender vacillated. [inaudible] is too indulgent. Too artless and companionable nature betrayed him. Admonished by what she thinks. He must be a little splenetic and his intercourse hence forth. Did he resolve the crafty process of social able chat by which as he fancies the man with the brass plate, wormed into him and made such a fool of him as in sense of which to persuade him to wave in his exceptional case that general law of distrust systematically applied to the race. Was the man a trickster? It must be more for the love than the lucrative? Two or three dirty dollars. That's all they got. Was that the motive of so many nice wiles? And yet how full of needs has seen me before his mental vision, the person of that thread [inaudible] that impoverished Makaveli that seedy Rosicrucian. Something of all these he vaguely deems him passes now in puzzled review. Fain his disfavor what he made out of logical case. The doctrine of analogies reoccurs. Fallacious enough doctrine when wielded against one's prejudices, but in collaboration of cherished suspicions, not without likelihood. Analogically, he couples the slanting cut of the public [inaudible] coat tails with a sinister cast in his arm. He [inaudible] sly boots, sleek speech and delight imparted by the oblique import of the smooth slope of his worn boot heels. The insinuators undeleting fluky-isms dovetail into those of the fluky beast that whines his way in his belly pain. From these uncordial reveries he has roused by a cordial slap on the shoulder, accompanied by a spicy volume of tobacco smoke out of which comes a voice, [inaudible] a penny for your thoughts fine fellow.

The confidence man is back. The man has been fleeced. He knows he’s been fleeced. The tough Missourian who says, well, I just lost two or $3. I wonder what he was after all this time. It must have been just for love of the game, the conning game. And he's gone off on all these things he’s going to be really careful from now on. Nobody's going to get into him.

“From these uncordial reveries he is roused by cordial slap on the shoulder. Penny for your thoughts fine fellow.” He’s back because he's relentless. Because there is no end to it. And this is what Melville was bringing constantly throughout The Confidence Man. There is no end to this game. He doesn't tire of it. And it doesn't matter what tack you take. You can be accepting or retreating. It doesn't matter to him. That's how it's going to be. This is this episode.

And in fact, that is one of the keys to it all is that everything for the confidence man is episodic. There is no reality. There is no pattern to life. There is no wholesomeness of experience. There is only the succession of episodes. Well, it’s all in a day’s work. Well, we did it this way. Well, we have another lifetime. Well, well, well. The scam that reality is only a fortuitous agglomeration of episodes. That it has no pattern. It has no real significance. It has no meaning and therefore it has no realization.

When Melville ends The Confidence Man, he ends in the most wonderful way. “The next moment, the warning, the wanting light expired.” He's turned off the last light on the ship. It's getting towards dawn but isn't quite dawn. And there's total darkness for a moment. And the confidence man [inaudible]. “And with it, the wanting flames of the hornet alter and the wanting halo round the road, man’s [inaudible] in the darkness, rich and sued the cosmopolitan confidence man [inaudible] of the old man away. Something further will follow from this masquerade.”
So, it ends ongoing. And it was chapter 45.

And it's interesting now to skip to the front part of chapter after 45 and end with that, because this is in the confidence man’s quarters. And here's the cosmology of the confidence man.
In the middle of the gentleman's cabin burned a [inaudible] lamp swung from the ceiling and whose shade of ground glass was all round. Fancily variegated in transparency with the image of a hornet alter from which flames rose alternate with the figure of a robed man. His heading circled by a halo. The light of this lamp after dazzlingly striking on marble snow white and round. The slab of a center table beneath. On all sides went rippling off with ever diminishing distinctness chill like circles from the stone dropped in water, the rays died dimly away in the furthest nook of the place. Here and there true to their place, but not to their functions, swung other lamps, barren planets, which had either gone out from exhaustion. Or had been extinguished by such occupants of births as the white [inaudible]. Or who wanted to sleep not see.

So, he’s presenting us with the solar system. He's presenting us with a metaphysical solar system. [inaudible]. All the other planets are dead only this one is alive. And the sun of that, of that metaphysical universe is where there is the false Christ and his brother Satan. Together in that polarity. Endless polarity.
By perverse man in a birth, not remote the remaining lamp would have been extinguished as well had not a steward forbade. Saying that the commanders of the captain and required it to be kept burning until the natural light of day should come to relieve it. This steward who like many in his vocation was apt to be a little free spoken at times had been provoked by the man's pertinacity to remind him not only of the sad consequences, which might upon occasion ensue from the cabin being left in darkness. But also, at the circumstance that in a place full of strangers to show oneself to produce darkness there, such an anxiety was to say the least not becoming. So, the lamp last survivor of many burned on inwardly blessed by those and some [inaudible] and inwardly executed by those and others. And keeping his lone vigil beneath his lone lamp, which lighted his book on the table sat a clean calmly old man. Head as snowy as the marble. [inaudible] that, which imagination ascribed to the good Simeon.
And of course, he's talking here about one of the early penitential Saints of the Greek Orthodox church, Simeon Stylite. It's this old man that finally is conned. The Confidence Man finally finds a way in the last chapter to get to him and turns out the light. Melville wrote this consciously in 1857. He said the United States was a place that had the elan, the energy, the dynamic it takes to turn out the light. The last light. So that it has the responsibility to keep that light burning until the light of day. Till the enlightenment of natural consciousness would come.

It was this quality of unswerving, moral courage and spiritual penetration that makes Melville the most significant figure in the 19th century. Even more so than Whitman. But Melville tried to work with this consciousness that had come up in him, he found that he was in fact, the voice crying in the wilderness. That the whole pattern of life in the United States was going towards the rim. Going towards this smooth, easy shifting episodic succession. And so, we'll look next week at the way, in which Melville tried to find ways in which to reflect this in his writing and make this available.

And we’ll note that this was not seen until after the First World War. That it wasn't until after the First World War that American individuals began to be able to see what images were being reflected in Melville's mirrors.

And so next week, we'll talk both about Melville again. And we'll talk increasingly about the way in which the United States, after the First World War began to change gets essential character again. Thanks for bearing with difficult.

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