Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

Th e Confi dence-Man: His Masquerade 21
about human character as related to the book’s apparently satirical
mode of being.
Much of Th e Confi dence-Man’s irony is directed against ordinary
unconscious humanity because it blandly assumes that it knows itself
when in fact it does not; usually, it is directed against the opposition
between the Christian principles mouthed and the un-Christian principles
acted. Th ose genuinely liberated from this unconsciousness are chiefl y
the various confi dence men, satanic and merely human, who are free to
be hypocrites and “under an aff able air . . . hide a misanthropical heart”
(p. 201); who are chained to nothing, not even misanthropy; who are free
to be consciously inconsistent. But the book’s basic irony is not satirical:
it is directed against neither the con-men, nor ordinary human hypocrisy
which, presumably, could be changed into “sincerity” by a cognitive act of
will. Instead, it seems non-satirically to point out that, given the nature of
selfhood, sincerity and consistency of belief are impossible.
Th e idea of human selfhood advanced by the novel is the one
partially elaborated in chapter 14, which defends the inconsistency
principle in man. 3 “No writer,” writes the narrator, “has produced
such inconsistent characters as nature herself has.” Because character
is so inconsistent,
all those sallies of ingenuity, having for their end the revelation of
human nature on fi xed principles, have, by the best judges, been
excluded with contempt from the ranks of the sciences—palmistry,
physiognomy, phrenology, psychology. Likewise, the fact, that in
all ages such confl icting views have, by the most eminent minds,
been taken of mankind, would . . . seem some presumption of a
pretty general and pretty thorough ignorance of it. (p. 78)
Apart from chapter 14, there are several narrator’s asides which
unironically make the same point: for example, the one at the beginning
of chapter 13, where readers are warned not to be “tempted into
a more or less hasty estimate” of John Ringman, the Black Rapids
Coal Company agent, in order “that they may not . . . be thereupon
betrayed into any surprise incompatible with their own good opinion
of their previous penetration” (p. 70). Part of what the narrator means
in such asides is summed up by Mark Winsome’s disciple, Egbert:
there is no bent of heart or turn of thought which any man
holds by virtue of an unalterable nature or will. Even those