Knave, Fool, and Genius: The Confidence Man as He Appears in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

122 Pages·1973·1.38 MB·English

by  Susan Kuhlmann

Knave, Fool, and Genius
Knave, Fool, and Genius
The Confidence Man as He Appears in Nineteenth-
Century American Fiction
by Susan Kuhlmann
The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill
Copyright © 1973 by The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Kuhlmann, Susan, 1942–
Knave, fool, and genius.
Bibliography: p.
1. American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Deception in literature. I. Title.
PS377.K8 813’.009’352 73–493
ISBN 0–8078–1208–0
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed by Heritage Printers, Inc.
ISBN–0–8078–1208–0
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 73–493
For my mother and father
Contents
Preface
The Confidence Man
Part I: Exploiting the Territory
Chapter One: From the East
The confidence man shows up as a backwoods hunter of men in the works
of James Fenimore Cooper, the Southern humorists, and, in particular,
Johnson J. Hooper.
Chapter Two: To the West
He is among the gold-seekers, gambler heroes, and western individualists
of Bret Harte and the San Francisco literati.
Chapter Three: And Back Again
In the works of Mark Twain the confidence man appears in many forms and
is important as an instrument of social satire.
Part II: Inveigling the Spirit
Chapter Four: From the Other World
The confidence man plays the role of false prophet and religious imposter
in the works of Hawthorne, Howells, and Twain.
Chapter Five: To the Old World
Henry James adapts the confidence man to an international milieu and the
purposes of psychological fiction.
Chapter Six: And Back to Melville
The confidence man appears as main character, metaphysical punster, and
social critic in a novel by Herman Melville.
The Fictive Imagination as a “Useful Art”
Works Consulted
Index
Preface
This study is the result of a longstanding affection for Melville
coupled with hesitation in accepting the role of a “Melville-ist.” Or a
Hawthorne-ist or a Twain-ist. In my own case, I have found a lack of
congeniality in the usual relationship between the critic and the author whom he
adopts for the purposes of a temporary—or a lifelong—exercise of scholarship.
The result of this kind of association is normally the scholarship of reconstituted
reality, based on the facts of the real world in which Melville, Hawthorne, and
Twain coexist. Without this kind of investigation, of course, literary criticism
would be bankrupt; furthermore, the debts that one owes such scholars are
beyond calculation. This work, however, is an attempt at what might be called
the scholarship of reconstituted fiction, based on the qualities of the fictional
world in which, for example, Ishmael and Coverdale coexist. It is obvious that
such a fictional world is neither that of Moby-Dick nor that of The Blithedale
Romance; rather, it is a hypothesis that comes into being for a short time as a
result of the projection of the critic’s mind over, let us say, the field of
nineteenth-century American literature.
Perhaps the ideal, of which this study is only a first approximation, is the
sustaining of a critical perspective within a narrative context in which the
personae are the fictional characters of a period or a fashion of literary endeavor.
The relationship thus established between critic and author would be a less
formal one. It would seem to have the potential for mediating more successfully
between the appreciative interest of the fiction lover and the private world of the
fiction maker.
The differences between the two kinds of scholarship are perhaps less
apparent in the subject matter than in the approach to it, although it has indeed
seemed to me that the confidence man invites one to deal with him as a
coconspirator. He is a fictional character who deals in fictions, and it is easy to
respond in kind by inducing a quintessential confidence man and endowing him
with a “real” existence as a literary phenomenon. And in fact I have come to
accept some such hypothetical character as my protagonist. I have seen him as
playing a number of roles, as being reincarnated in various forms which reveal
the special qualities of each author who tricks him out in a new disguise. I have
found that his equivocal nature places him at the right hand of creators who face
their own moral and aesthetic dilemmas in handling the art of illusion. Thus,
despite my tendency to treat the con man with the familiarity of a creator toward
his creation, he has always chastened me with the vigor of his claim to be taken
seriously and the proof of his appeal to the nineteenth-century American
imagination. After all, he has been taken seriously by Hawthorne, Melville,
Howells, Twain, and James. In the end I have had to accept him on his own
terms as an oracular figure, although not forgetting that he is, after all, a fiction.
Among those who have read and shown interest in the initial stages of this
project, I should like to thank William M. Gibson for his advice and
encouragement. At the same time, I wish to free him from the imputation of
consent to all of the later twists that have been given to the original conception. I
should also like particularly to acknowledge the help of the librarians in charge
of the sections on American literature in the New York Public Library and the
special collections of the New York University Library.
Knave, Fool, and Genius