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

Th e Confi dence-Man: His Masquerade 23
and philistine in chapter 9. Second, there is rational inconsistency:
that of the confi dence-men, who are so in order to practice “deception
and deviltry” (p. 36) for their own obvious human or obscure
satanic purposes (e.g., Charlie Noble, a cynic who pretends to be
aff able and to like the wine he drinks, which he later calls “elixir of
logwood” [p. 211] when he turns churlish, the cosmopolitan having
eluded him); that of Charlemont, “the Gentleman madman,” who
switches his character in order to “be beforehand with the world,
and save it from a sin by prospectively taking that sin” to himself (p.
210). Th ird, there is the inconsistency of those who have been led by
a confi dence-man into premature revelation of their own irrationalities:
that of the religious old man of the end, who wishes to distrust
not “the Creature; for that would imply distrust of the Creator,” yet
keeps his money in a belt because it is “never too late to be cautious”
(p. 281); that of Pitch, the Missouri bachelor who claims to stick to
what he says (p. 143), but who, because he is too well acquainted with
“facts,” the metamorphoses of nature, and Calvinistic theology, can
despite his suspicions be argued by the agent from the Philosophic
Intelligence Offi ce into accepting virtue as potential within any man,
as sainthood was potential in sinners like Saint Augustine or the
butterfl y in the caterpillar.
Th e diddling of Pitch provides a major instance of the peculiar
relation to the book’s truths that the defi nitely satanic characters bear:
perhaps because Satan doomed man to knowledge of good and evil,
the satanic confi dence-men can come closer in many respects to the
truth of the book’s actuality in certain of their remarks than the other
characters do. Always, they will use truth for their own benefi t, often
ironically reversing it, or merely warping it, as the P.I.O. agent does
with Pitch (many of his analogies, as analogies, are quite true). Used
in this way, truth has “the operation of falsity” (as the con-man says
of Tacitus [p. 28]) because of why it is spoken; like the one-legged
misanthrope of the early chapters, the con-man speaks so that “even
were truth on his tongue, his way of speaking it would make truth
almost off ensive as falsehood” (p. 34). But once his reasons for and
manner of speaking truth are taken into account, much of his irony
can be decoded and found to correspond to the actualities of the
book’s world. Like Melville in his well-known review of Hawthorne, 4
wherein he held that Shakespeare’s “dark characters . . . Hamlet,
Timon, Lear, and Iago” craftily say or insinuate those things “which