Herman Melville-The Confidence Man

Any of you ever read this? Seems to weirdly pre-empt some of the Musil/Broch stuff from Europe so many years later. Obviously the style is a lot more genial and rogueish but the ambition of it I guess. It's also quite funny in its own way. It took me a long time to get into it but am really getting a kick out of this now.

I've bought but not tackled this one--it looks REALLY INTERESTING but also a bit forbidding. Maybe this is the kick in the arse I need to move it to the top of the pile.

I haven't finished it but from the bulk I of it I read it was my first time reading a novel where the allegorical part of it seemed a living entity within. How do I explain? You could see its mechanics, I mean, without it being obvious. It was like having a ghost underneath the text.

Yeah that's otm, not just that, there is a part where it kind of speaks to the reader like admitting it is a book of allegory, in this sort of prankish tone.

have tried and not got anywhere with this twice. probably still have two different copies.

i love this book, probably my second favorite melville
if you like it i would recommend reading Pierre, or the Ambiguities because it is completely insane. i mean, it is an absolutley strange, obsessive book, started as something of a pisstake on silly romance novels but then it becomes something else, sorta indescribable

tanny, did you see Carax's film adaptation of Pierre, Pola X? it's INSANE.

(i haven't read the book but it sounds like the same kind of insanity)

yeah, the film is an ok adaptation, modernized and other changes, i can't remember the details because it's been several years. but i do think the film captured the fevered and unhinged tone of the book. the movie also made the INCEST rather explicit

lol, seems we've been over this before
Pierre, Or the Ambiguities - CLASSIC & yet wtf at the same time

anyway, didn't mean to derail confidence man thread, it's great but it's been too long since i've read it to have any insights to share. weird thing is that i read all the obscure melville stuff before i read moby-dick and it was kinda an underwhelming experience when i finally did

yeah not read moby dick, no great desire to do so

Ronan, you should read Bartleby the Scrivener. it's only about 50 pages but it's 50 amazing pages.

moby dick is great, you should read it.

i'm kind of daunted by the rest of melville's oeurve, not least because it seems like no one except his biographers has read half of it since 1890. has anyone here read, like, israel potter? or mardi? or redburn?

i read mardi, and a voyage thither (LOL)

it's really dull

Pola x is on tonight at the BFI -- I'll try and make it.

H. Bruce Franklin's annotations for The Confidence-Man are so good.

anyone read Clarel?

YES. So great.

To anybody who hasn't read The Confidence-Man please just read the first chapter, my favourite first chapter in the world with my favourite first sentence

"At sunrise on a first of April, there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis."

http://www.readbookonline.net/read/13359/32214/

I started Moby Dick on Sunday - what a pace. I'm already on pg. 350.

What edition?

oh a cheap Barnes & Noble classic one, received as a present from a student one Xmas. Well annotated though.

H. Bruce Franklin's annotations for The Confidence-Man are so good.

― poxen, Tuesday, June 5, 2012 1:47 PM

Yeah, they're amazing. That's the edition w/the Daniel Handler introduction, right?

Yes. Sometimes the annotations get so dense that I reverted to the online, non-annotated version for first reading. Especially the lengthy Banquo discussions.

(The Dalkey Archive printing is aesthetically very pleasing as well)

OK, inspired by this I started reading this today. Only 20 pages in, am enjoying, though have no idea where the fuck it's going.

Remember to report back, etc.

Now at p 105--loving this, and would be amazed if Gene Wolfe hadn't swallowed this book whole. I can see why reviewers at the time didn't know what to make of it.

Just read 'The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating' chapter. THis is a very mad book, in a really good way.

Oh man I am totally getting this

Also: is this your first time reading Moby Dick, Alfred?

yep! I loved it too. It's so far from being A Great Work of Art; it's like a graphic novel or something.

I want to read Confidence-Man again right now but I'm halfway through five other books

xp ha! I remember Neil Gaiman saying something similar; when he read it for the first time as a young child (!) He said he though it'd make a terrific comic book.

Finished! So cool and so strange. Though it does just sort of STOP, rather than end.

I wonder how much I would have missed if I hadn't had a heavily annotated copy, though.

This is such a brilliant book.

H. Bruce Franklin's annotations for The Confidence-Man are so good.

― poxen, Tuesday, June 5, 2012 1:47 PM

Yeah, they're amazing. That's the edition w/the Daniel Handler introduction, right?

― etc, Wednesday, 6 June 2012 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes. Sometimes the annotations get so dense that I reverted to the online, non-annotated version for first reading. Especially the lengthy Banquo discussions.

― poxen, Wednesday, 6 June 2012 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Finished it this morning - wanna cosign on the annotation front, real tour de force. Sometimes I needed to leave it, let the (sometimes v beautiful) prose breathe a little, but I'd rather have it in there.

i read all the obscure melville stuff before i read moby-dick and it was kinda an underwhelming experience when i finally did Just now got to Moby Dick via the same route, but halfway in, and def. not underwhelmed. Can see the xpost pre-/early modernist thing, maybe influence on Borges, for inst.(ditto Twain, maybe others of Melville's era).

Its the most Pynchon-y thing I've read, just in terms of people disappearing/re-appearing, the way they...dissolve.

Probably interested in reading Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne more than Moby Dick.

those guys are all very much worth reading, but you should read moby dick too

read this last year along with a collection of his short fiction in the oxford worlds classic editions (both great!) but may have to look out for the dalkey if that's the heavily annotated edition mentioned upthread. anyone ever checked out his poetry? i have a penguin selection but haven't tackled it as yet (or moby-dick for that matter).

lol he published this on April fool's day!

no lime - the heavily annotated ed. is published by Dalkey.

Love to check out his poetry...Pierre... and Bartleby sound great! And I would probably read this over the writers he was in dialogue with in this book. I couldn't get into The Scarlet Letter when I tried it a couple of years ago although I'm sure I'd like it more now.

re: Moby Dick idk, length isn't a problem (I've read much longer books) its a bit like War and Peace where you can't see yourself caring about the subjects (whaling or the Napoleonic era) (yes I get that whaling stands for something else, but from the threads on ilx there seems to be a lot of technical bullshit). That kind adventure for boys lark (hunting, war). I suppose there must be some incredible descriptions of the sea (and many amazing digressions) and I would be up for that. His writing is unbelievably good but I also like that CM doesn't go anywhere in particular, just writing, Old testament quotes, digressions on misanthropy and well the whole issue of who you can put your trust to...this is incredibly contemporary: the loss of confidence in people, institutions. Lots of things in here I don't understand yet, a whole world in here.

ha, i'd forgotten about the april fools bit

the heavily annotated ed. is published by Dalkey

thanks, hopefully i'll spot it secondhand some day!

the whole issue of who you can put your trust to...this is incredibly contemporary: the loss of confidence in people, institutions

of course another writer melville was responding to was poe and specifically (according to the oxford intro) his piece diddling considered as one of the exact sciences and you've got all the hoaxes running throughout his work, and people not being quite as they appear: to take the most pertinent example 'the man that was used up'.

Yeah Moby-Dick incl.a diddlin' joke on a French captain who doesn't have a lick of English. Suddenly to the last 100 pages, not wanting it to end, getting better all the time, I've posted about it on What Are You Reading, so won't paste of that here, though can just barely restrain myself from doing that with scanned grafs, if not whole chapters. Reading Library of America edition, with corrected texts, also Webster's Deluxe coming in handy, esp. re archaic senses, though usuage ofoten overlaps w more modern

the napoleonic era stands for something else too, also half the book is girls at various kinds of parties iirc so it's not xactly http://img1.imagesbn.com/p/9781588657800_p0_v2_s260x420.JPG

anyway moby-dick is the most unbelievable book, the disappearing narrator (ishmael is way slothrop), the obsessive cataloging of knowledge (poor devil of a sub-sub!), the impossible expanding pov, the gradual ascent into lurid opera, the soliloquies!, the whale as the symbolically uncontainable that finally breaks the book from the inside, drags its epic protagonist into hell and leaves you back in first-person limited: only another orphan. strong acid.

What's the other half of W & P about then :-)

I'll look at Moby Dick.

I'll try to sign off on M-D with this: not so much one thing/component, in space or time, standing for another, as getting really into things-in-themselves, almost "No ideas but in things" at times, but then "only connect" often enough: how one thing and situation relates to another, with an increasing sense of hey presto, but also Ishmael really believes in each revelation, incl. re thee inner mystique of Ahab, and don't bother to ask how he knows (Ahab is I.'s own M-D, maybe?)

From the latest issue:

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2015_03_021143.php

One night, while out with her at a graduate student party, I got to talking with a group of PhD candidates reading in American Literature who to my utter shock and astonishment had never read Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. In blinded amazement and energetic fury I directed them to sit down and give American Literature a read!

Never studied lit (just read some) so I was a tad surprised that postgrads ignore it.

canon ain't what it used to be

no gaps in the literature to fill

I doubt that it's all that ignored. The guy just needed a cool way to motivate his review.

'zactly

Edmund White on Jean Giono. Features quite a bit of Melville (Giono translated MD to French).

That is amazing, thanks. And re White saying that Faulkner* was maybe improved by translation into French, reminds me of Melville maybe influenced by Poe (who was also said to be improved by Baudelaire's translations)
*Don't agree with White that Faulkner is never funny; maybe he's just not that into Faulkner.

Didn't know want to comment o Faulkner as he is a blind spot for me. Looking at the NYRB site and there were no letters about this. From what White is saying you could go on and argue that his translator took out the risk from Faulkner's writing, ultimately making him safe for the Nobel..

[...] he commits himself to the forest primeval; there, so long as life shall be his, to act upon a calm, cloistered scheme of strategical, implacable, and lonesome vengeance. Ever on the noiseless trail; cool, collected, patient; less seen than felt; snuffing, smelling—a Leather-stocking Nemesis. In the settlements he will not be seen again; in eyes of old companions tears may start at some chance thing that speaks of him; but they never look for him, nor call; they know he will not come. Suns and seasons fleet; the tiger-lily blows and falls; babes are born and leap in their mothers' arms; but, the Indian-hater is good as gone to his long home, and "Terror" is his epitaph.'

OK I should check it out, yes?

What's the worst that could happen?

it's great

I should pick this up again.

lol @ Wikipedia on Pierre: "One review which ran in the New York Day Book bore the title "Herman Melville Crazy" while the American Whig Review wrote that Melville's "fancy is diseased".[17]"

Need to reup my subscription to American Whig Review

Alfred alfred alfred you need this book in your life

Yes - Melville had his magical writerly chops till the end.

Inspired by reading Battle-Pieces and rereading "Las Encantadas."

love this book

Co-sign on the above-expressed opinion that the best way to read this book is chapter-by-chapter, once with all the footnotes interrupting, then a second time just reading the straight prose

On Chapter Four!

I checked out the Norton critical edition from the library.

started Redburn, which has a scene in a homosexual brothel!

Any good? I see the Penguin edition has one of those generic 'Nobody buys this so we can't be fucked doing a cover' covers.
https://images.penguinrandomhouse.com/cover/9780140431056

Perhaps trying to give Dover Thrift Editions a run for their money.

It's the easiest novel he ever wrote -- few of those flourishes and ponderosities we expect. Apparently he regarded as hack work.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/80/de/74/80de74a84ab840502d274651403ce269.jpg

Hmm nothing gay there, nope

found this at longform.org the other day -- it's a pretty deep critical look at HM's entire career. skimmed some of it to avoid getting too much info about a couple books (pierre) i haven't read, but there's some tremendous writing here:

https://www.villagevoice.com/2019/08/02/herman-melvilles-great-escape/

Saw that you when you linked there on the other thread and have been meaning to read, thanks.

geoffrey o'brien i remember from back in the 80s at VV (esp.the voice lit supp): one of the critics i always enjoyed w/o knowing anything abt his deal

Pretending to have finished reading “the confidence man” got me my place on an American Lit BA in the mid 90s

It also got me rejected from a UEA interview in 1997. “Ugh, The Confidence Man, minor Melville” the interviewer actually said to me.

Ouch!

It upset me at the time, but what a jerky/hilarious thing to a bookish 17 year old

* thing to say to a bookish etc

Right. Originally I was going to type “lol/ouch!”

I think the interviewer accurately assessed my fraudulence. I literally got on a train to each university interview with copies of crying of lot 49, white noise, confidence man and palimpsest stuffed in my backpack, thinking “fuck, i’ll cram what I can until the train stops”. I do remember bringing up Civilwarland (which, unlike the rest, I’d actually read) and the interviewer being, like, “George who?”

Anyway. I’ve been reading Moby Dick with my partner and we both feel like Melville is 1000x better read aloud than read on the page. It’s just so smooth. I can’t remember if the confidence man is similar though.

Last week's New Yorker published a solid Melville essay.

It prompted me to check Typee out of the library. I wasn't fond of Thte Confidence Man, but I must recommend Redburn if you love explicitly homoerotic/homosocial 19th century fiction. I may even tackle Pierre cuz Norton published a critical edition in 2017.

bbbbbbut Confidence Man is great!

That New Yorker essay was good. I’m not that far of a drive away from Melville’s Arrowhead estate, it made me resolve that this is the year I trek out there.

Pierre is a truly wild read, completely off the deep end but very fun imo.

https://www.apollo-magazine.com/herman-melville-moby-dick-artists-illustrators/

So much of this shit this year, meanwhile I’m over here like
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EakXQXgNwdQ/Ux8HD5if51I/AAAAAAAAFFM/ATbxydB9AMY/s1600/heahers8.jpg

My sis got me the LOA edition of Melville's poems. I know about a dozen of the Battle-Pieces but Clarel tempts me, especially after reading Andrew Delblanco's superb bio in February.

Haven't read the thread because I'm only on Chapter 8, but this book is getting very good:

At the sofa's further end sits a plump and pleasant person, whose aspect seems to hint that, if she have any weak point, it must be anything rather than her excellent heart. From her twilight dress, neither dawn nor dark, apparently she is a widow just breaking the chrysalis of her mourning.

Been thinking about changing my display name to "the man with the weed" but ppl would just think it was a drug reference.

I finished this book and absolutely loved it. It took me a little while to get into the rhythm of it, but it got better and better. Early on I kept trying to figure out which one was the Confidence Man until later I realized they were all Confidence Men in a country full of them. It really reminded me of Dostoevsky's Demons - the collision of characters inhabiting various philosophical/ideological positions. It also seems to attempt to illuminate a uniquely American character in the same way that Demons attempts to illustrate the Russian character.

Also, the book is so freakin' funny and ironic. The chapters with Frank and Charlie both egging each other on to drink is so good. All the little parodies of contemporary American authors. There is such a distance between the author and the characters - addressing the reader directly, commenting on the characters, etc. The way characters appear and dissolve, the stories embedded in stories is almost post-modern in ways.

I've read Moby-Dick (25 years ago) and Bartleby. What should I read next, Pierre or Billy Budd?

Redburn!