734
PARTISAN REVIEW
of the formulas of neurosis is still the rule rather than the exception. In
spite of long and intensive discussion, the issue of psychoanalysis
in
its
application to literature remains unsettled, arousing hostile distrust
in some quarters and excessive confidence in others. From this standpoint
Arvin's book might be taken as a practical experiment, offering c.oncrete
evidence which neither the friends nor the enemies of the psychoanalytic
method can afford to overlook.
All of Melville's work, including the poems, are minutely examined
in this study, resulting in a valuation that differs considerably from
accepted judgments. Thus "Benito Cereno" is pulled down from its high
place in the canon and shown to be basically lacking
in
the imaginative
quality conventionally attributed to it. "An artistic miscarriage, with
moments of undeniable power," Arvin calls it
in
a passage of exhaustive
analysis, which lays bare the story's defective moral structure as well as
the relative poverty of its technical devices and verbal texture. In his
judgment of
The Confidence Man,
however, Arvin restores the negative
estimate of it commonly accepted until it was recently challenged by an
ambitious ideological approach which put a load of interpretation upon
the book which it cannot carry.
The Confidence Man
is a narrative which Arvin finds even more
disappointing than
Israel Potter,
and that precisely because its "ideal"
intention is such that had it been realized it might have become a "vaster,
more animated, and of course more modern
Ship of Fools,
or even an
American
Gulliver."
There
is
a wonderful felicity in the Western river–
scene that Melville conceived for it and the richest meaning
in
its theme,
the exposure of "contemporary shams, and particularly the quackeries of
a false humanitarianism, an insensate optimism." This, in fact, was the
most pertinent of all subjects
in
Melville's age. But
The Confidence Man
was never really written. It is a worse book than
Pierre,
I
think.
Though
Pierre
is a failure, and even a failure of a peculiarly monstrous kind, it
still exercises a certain appeal, a certain power of evocation, because it
is full of passion and swarms with unconscious life. Not so
The Confi–
dence Man,
which, except for its opening pages, strictly enforces the
lesson that in art nothing speaks to our mind which does not
simul–
taneously engage our senses: that is the supreme lesson, and one which
criticism fails to heed only at the risk of utter irrelevance. And the reason,
obviously, that this disputed work of Melville's remains, as
Arvin
says, "a
tantalizing scenario for a book that never came into being," is that it
is scarcely at all a living narrative. "One
is
alleged to be on a steamboat
descending the greatest of American rivers, but sensuously, pictorially,
kinesthetically . . . the river does not flow and the boat does not move
