A Ge'mman wid' a Big Book
Raymond Nelson
The recent history of the reputation of Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man is nearly as suggestive as that novel's own episodic narrative. Since Elizabeth Foster's edition of 1954, it has revealed itself to new generations of readers less as the hypochondriacal, cynical, tedious work that Lewis Mumford and other earlier commentators found it than as a masterpiece of 19th-century intellect and sensibility. To judge by the number of articles, dissertations, and cultural studies it has informed during the last decade, it has all but replaced Moby-Dick among younger Melvilleans—not as Melville's greatest book so much as his most modern and intriguing.
Gary Lindberg in a sense culminates this awakening feeling for the preeminence of The Confidence-Man by suggesting that it is not only technically and psychologically masterly, but that it is representative, that in the United States the confidence man is a "covert culture hero," a builder of identity and order, rather than an essentially marginal or criminal figure. He extends his analysis of various avatars of the American confidence man to an important new description of 19th- and 20th-century American literature, which may ultimately claim as much power of definition and reorientation as R. W. B. Lewis" American Adam of nearly 30 years ago. The purpose, Lindberg says, is to acknowledge, as others have, the disturbing implications of the confidence man and his game, but to complement them by defining and
