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

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 temporaryor a lifelongexercise 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 critics 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.