CM and litotes

[Ffrangcon Lewis]

Dear Hardeman, Phil, and Gordon,

                                                       It's good to be exchanging thoughts again.  Thanks to Hardeman for the latest response which contains a number of helpful if quite demanding links.  I like the idea of exploring Queequeg as a forerunner of the confidence man, both for their similarities and their instructive contrasts, and I also take the perceptive point about the relevance of 'The Two Temples' to this discussion.  I need to think carefully about some of these hints and tips rather than sound off about them, but this phase of Melville's writing and life is fascinating in that there does indeed seem to be a line of consistency, persistence, and defiance even as the turmoil in his society and his personal life exerts such contrary pressures on him.  The other comment I would make is that while many people seem to read Melville for his modernity, it also seems true that his writing is a complex response to a very wide range of distinguished forebears:  in this sense, I am interested in Hardeman's reference to 'Don Quixote', though I do not know it well myself.  I have though just been reading Godwin's 'Caleb Williams', and found that another interesting study of confidence and narratorial ambiguity.

Good night all,

Ffrangcon Lewis 

[Phil Walsh]

I’ve only been through it one time so far, but one of my reactions to CM is that it seems a more consistent and focused work than, for instance, Moby-Dick. Melville seems to be holding to a more carefully defined narrative voice and structure here. (Much like he is in Benito Cereno, to my mind.) (Of course, it’s dangerous (and I suppose in truth impossible) to make confident assertions about how carefully defined and executed M-D is.)

[Hardeman]

Dear Ffrangcon,

I have been reading in the Ishmailites  archive from 2008 where an interesting discussion of the relevance of Clootz and Melville's confidence or not in mankind was probed. I am still digesting those gems but I wish to make a comment about Cervantes influence on Melville. As it happens Don Quixote is the most gloriously funny, profound, inspirational book in my life. So I have a certain bias in reading the Confidence-Man who quixotically lives in confidence of Charity and the noble knight who lives in confidence of Chivalry.

I do not have my Melville library with me in France but I recall that he bought a copy of Don Quixote just before he wrote the CM. I find many links between the two that bring a softening humour to the CM. I wonder if others have experienced the same aha.

Hardeman