AN APPROACH TO MELVILLE
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the Promethean fire and so
is
able to defeat the "follies," leaving
the
field to "the all-engendering heart of man."
The Image of Narcissus.
This is important in Melville. It is sometimes touched on in
M oby
Dick;
it is the theme of the short story called "The Bell Tower."
In
Pierre,
the hero reflects that his cousin Glendinning Stanly, whom
he shoots, is "the finest part of Pierre." The shooting of Stanly is part
of the hero's suicide (etymologically Pierre Glendinning and Glen–
dinning Stanly-for "stone field"-are virtually the same name).
Nearly everyone in
Pierre
is a relative of the hero; even Lucy comes
to New York as his "cousin." His mother is himself "translated into
another sex." Like a child, Pierre "dabbles in the vomit of his loathed
identity." The deaths of Pierre's father and mother, of Lucy, of
Isabel, and of his cousin are planetary catastrophes involved in Earth's
general suicide. The whole Ptolemaic universe is a mocking hypo–
statization of the young Titan's ego.
The Conftdence Man.
No account of Melville can afford to ignore or underestimate
The Confidence Man.
To begin with, it is a great book (and almost
unobtainable in America). It is not at all a chaotic cry of despair
but a buoyant, energetic piece of writing, on the whole free of Mel–
ville's often clumsy rhetoric. It is even a finished work, if read in the
light of Melville's over-all themes; by no means is it a fragment,
broken off in a fit of neurotic nihilism, as some writers have dra–
matically proclaimed.
The Confidence Man
(like
Israel Potter)
is a
book of folklore. It is a wonderfully perceptive study of the American
character, done at the folklore level, where character is clear and vul–
nerable. Many of the characters can be found in Constance Rourke's
American Humor:
the Yankee peddler, the Negro, the frontiersman,
and so on. Also, the confidence man, peddling phony wares to his
compatriots on a Mississippi river boat, is another false Prometheus,
Prometheus in a loud American suit. He is a do-gooder, a Progressive
in fact, and an emotional-intellectual-spiritual cutpurse. The ironical
joke about him is that among other things he sells an Omni-Balsamic
Reinvigorator- the life-principle or Promethean
elan,
patented and
bottled.
The Larger View.
Melville's books have enough energy, coherence, and intelligence
