Melville's Learned American Dogs

[Terrance]

After the failures of  Moby Dick and Pierre Melville attempted to change
careers, this too failed. Melville decided to write differently. He
would conform his fiction, on the surface at least, to
please the critics and the proprieties and ideological
beliefs of his readers. He would be careful, so as not to
openly challenge the moral, philosophical and aesthetic
values of the times. So Melville reached into an old bag of
tricks and played the Confidence Game. He knew that he could
not sell his books unless he appealed to the optimistic
beliefs of his puritanical, literal minded audience.
Therefore, he developed narrative techniques to conceal the
dark “mortally intolerable truth.” Melville’s fiction turned
black beneath a rich naturalistic surface. He began writing
complex ironic tales, and developed elaborate patterns of
imagery and subversive symbolism.  He experimented with the
complex relationships among narrative form, epistemology, point of view, 
vision, unreliable narrators, and limited omniscient narrators. He
engaged the reader in detective work and toyed with the mechanics of
perception. He used sexual and
excremental puns and set up jokes directed at the reader’s
prudish idealism. He satirized every institution under the
sun. As in his previous fictions he attacked the Christianity and
Commerce. He scattered allusions and insults throughout his
texts. His confidence-man satirizes the social, political,
and economic systems of America. He modeled sympathetic
characters after Milton’s Satan. He incorporated other
Satires and Satirists into his stories. The literal minded
reader of the day was tricked into thinking he was reading
an allegorical tale that would confirm his American idealism,
but Melville’s satire has men hunting not only whales and money, but
other men. 
Most of his characters lack depth and
are identifiable only as what they do in  war or in the
market or in the institution or are understood by the
complex allusions wrapped around their names. Men become
dogs, snakes, or fantastic shape shifters. 
 No institution escaped the bitter ink poured from Melville’s
satirical pen—-stock markets, labor markets, book markets,
health care, religion, philanthropy, government, schools.
Melville would expose any hypocrisy and pull back the layers
of social veneer to reveal the truth no one wanted to hear,
like Racism on every corner, north, and south. The sacred is
profane and the profane sacred, Christ is the prototypical
confidence man. Characters are broken, scattered and
shattered, or crippled or blind or DOGS.

Oh yes, the dogs. In  The Confidence Man the misanthropic
skeptics are associated with dogs, “since that is the name
for the philosophy of Diogenes and his followers comes from
the Greek for “dog.” Black Guinea, because of
his canine fawning and insinuating. Thus, if the skeptics
are dog-like in their cynicism, the operators are canine in
their simpering approaches to their potential victims. The
word “dog” carries a comparable range of meaning in Timons
of Athens, according to William Empson, as a designation for
fawning courtiers at one extreme an snarling cynics at the
other. Melville’s text crosses literal and figurative
meanings by disturbing canine characteristics to both the
cynics and their antagonists, the con men.

Palmeri sez, 


If Melville is the least successful of the works studied
here in designing a space outside existing paradigms of
meaning and value, perhaps that is because less distance
separates opposite perspectives in [The Confidence-Man]. The
lack of a sharp opposition between Christianity and capital,
between confidence-men and cynics, and between the
Cosmopolitan and the Indian-hater makes it difficult for
Melville to locate an alternative between competing
paradigms. Melville levels the two terms in each of these
pairs and demonstrates that each depends on its
complementary opposite. Yet all positions appear as aspects
of a comprehensive paradigm whose contours Melville can
describe, but beyond which he finds it impossible to
proceed.
A century later Pynchon proceeds further to depict a
free-floating paranoia as a product of the interest that
international capital has in controlling the production and
marketing of information, opinions, and goods and services.
In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon proves more capable of
parodying and juxtaposing accepted narrative modes in order
to find a space of understanding between or outside official
systems of meaning. Pynchon’s pursuit of this satiric
strategy leads his narrative to a vision of an open-ended,
seriocomic apocalypse that is less embittered and less
isolated than Melville’s.



“I see books more as time bombs: once detached from the
author, they explode in the reader’s head.”
       --Gunter Grass, “Doblin, My Teacher”



“There are books that open doors for their readers, doors in
the head, doors whose existence they had not previously
suspected.”

 --Salman Rushdie, Introduction to “Gunter Grass On Writing
And Politics 1967-1983”

BUT:

“Anyone who becomes involved with him and his mythical,
real, or visionary forests is ultimately in danger of
getting lost in a jungle wet, sweating, luxuriant trees, of
losing the author among books and theories that strive to
cancel out and refute one another.”
   G. Grass

Tough book this M&D, very tough.