Personal Narrative, Melville's "The Confidence-Man", and the Problem of Deception

Abstract

Students of expressive culture must, by definition, assume that the aspects of culture they study express something, whether about a social group or an individual human being. We might ask, for example, what the songs and stories of an Appalachian woman have to say about Appalachia or what they have to say about that woman (or, of course, both). Of all the genres of folklore, the personal narrative seems logically to be the single genre most revealing of the individual narrator or performer. But the fact that human beings are capable of deception, that we are able to fabricate something that sounds like a personal narrative but that has absolutely no truth to it, makes problematic this basic assumption. In this essay I will examine this problem using as my text Herman Melville's 1857 novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. The action of The Confidence-Man takes place aboard the steamer Fiddle on the Mississippi river between dawn and midnight of April Fool's Day. A great number of odd and engaging characters appear, starting with a deaf-mute in cream colors; many of these characters seem to be engaged in swindling their fellow passengers. The common reading of the novel has it that there is one Confidence-Man who