GRGR (4): the kenosa kid's confidence game.

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Kevin Won wrote:

> Just to further grind this inspection of the KK into the ground, let me propose yet another reading:
>
> I'm constantly struck by the Melvillian overtones through _GR_, particularly the ineffable kenosha kid enigma's reflection of the themes of _The Confidence Man._  The multiple rewriting of the same thing, it's Doppleganger nature (" 'Bet you never did the Kenosha, ' Kid", "Bet you never did the 'Kenosha Kid.'", etc.) appear much like the confidence man who undermines the 'confidence' of many flimsy beliefs, deeply held ethics, and whole epistemologies, in short, he destabilizes confidence in "Truth."

Satire in HM and TRP

Emerson and Poe
Cooper and Thoreau
Your optimism's spread
Your idealism's grow
But I'm the Confidence Man
I don't like your money deals
I don't like your optimism and American ideals
there's conflict between your democratic Christianism
and the cold steps of charity leading
to the door of individualism
So put on a disguise and come play my game
and I'll rearrange your faces and give you all another name
like that bobby D song we all love and know
Sing it for the weekend out on  Desolation Row.


>
>
> the Kenosha Kid ambiguity can also be seen to work in a similar fashion to this confidence game.  Much like a shiny fishing lure, KK just *begs* interpretation (at least to me it does), but, I think the discussion thus far illustrates, the evidence to support various sundry interpretations (both intra and extra textual) is anemic at best.
>
> The kenosha kid confidence game plays upon language, intra textual references, and extra textual references, etc. in a way that reflects this issue of the instability of "Truth," while at the same time presenting clues, leads, hints, etc (the movement of a comma in a short statement).  A kind of "ambiguous exactitude" that characterizes _GR_ as well as _Moby Dick_ (the White Whale:  the ultimate ambiguity), and _The Confidence Man_

Ok, Truth is what Melville wants to tell, no one wants to listen. Melville's relationship to readers, publishers, America, is key. Melville keeps trying to tell the truth. Like TRP he turns to different narrative techniques to hide his bold faced and in your face truth. The instability of that truth is another matter altogether. The quests, the epi/ onti quests that critics never tire of talking about--in both TRP and HM.  The truth? The instability of truth? The enfeeble truth? The enigmatic truth?  The zero and one busting truth? The ego shattering Zen HO truth? The truth that words give
the lie to truth? The truth of man's nature? The truth that is the world? The truth that is the limitations of understanding the truth of man and the truth that is the world? The truth that is brotherhood? You never did the truth. Snap to.

>
>
> In some ways, KK reminds me of the "Chronologicals and Horologicals" chapter of Melville's _Pierre, or the Ambiguities_  where a complete cosmos with all the 'answers' is described in a pamphlet the main character (Pierre) just happens to stumble upon.  The chapter builds a dramatic case for a kind of "complete understanding" of the universe, building to a conclusion that Pierre finds has been ripped off the last page--he never is able to read the end.  He is given a wealth of information with no confirmation.  So are we in _GR_ with the Kenosha Kid:  lots of clues but ultimately nothing.

...deep, deep, and still deeper and deeper must we go, if we would find out the heart of a man; descending into which is as descending a spiral stair in a shaft, with out any end, and where that endlessness is only concealed by the spiralness of the stair, and the blackness of the shaft.                               -Pierre-

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>
> I suppose we can just add this rather pompous KK explication to the scrap-heap; claiming anything else would be a confidence game played on April the first itself.

How does the CM sell the New Jerusalem?

"Appalling is the soul of man....Better might one be pushed off into the material spaces beyond the uttermost orbit of the sun, then once feel himself fairly afloat in himself"  -Pierre-

Enough to make a fellow shiver himself into fragments ay?

Terrance

>
>
> Kevin
> wonk at ohsu.edu
>