Wanker Punster con man queer: Melville's The Confidence-Man
Date
1994
Authors
Young, Bryan Kirk
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Abstract
Although critics have finally recognized the textual complexities of Melville's proto-post structuralist 'novel,' The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, there has been no effort to link the its avant-garde narrative strategies with the novel's plentiful homo- and autoerotic content The sexual and the textual converge in several of his works to give us a texts that are deeply 'homotextual' in nature, exhibiting a writing style that is as subversive of bourgeois literary expectations as it is of bourgeois heterocentric norms.
In this thesis I examine how Melville 'queers' a very complex set of cultural vectors on the levels of both form and content. On the one hand, Melville's writing challenges late nineteenth-century notions of literary realism by pointing out that any attempt to 'reĀpresent' 'reality' pretends that one has access to a kind of metaphysical ' truth' that postĀ-structuralist criticism has worked to discredit.
On the other hand, Melville criticizes essentialist notions of (hetero)sexuality by injecting same-sex desire into his texts. 'The homosexual' in this novel, though, is as undetectable as the confidence man himself, exhibiting an uncanny ability to 'pass' without being recognized, an invisibility which works to his advantage as he picks the pockets of his fellow passengers. This ability to 'masquerade,' has the effect of 'dragging' identity in a manner which undermines the essentialized nature of liberal humanist notions of identity which promise a centred, knowable 'self.'
Melville's The Confidence-Man is especially relevant to us now in the context of an academic atmosphere which is becoming increasing resistant to post-structuralist criticisms of Western metaphysics as they relate to political practice.