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

24
Herman Melville
we feel to be so terrifi cally true, that it were all but madness for any
good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint,” the
confi dence-men have taken the “ugly view” and thereby have seen the
“deeper meanings” (p. 28) of life as well as of books.
Because they have seen these deeper meanings, much of what they
say, suitably de-ironized, is assumed and demonstrated by this book
as probable truth. In respect to the inconsistencies of character, what
they say, demonstrate, and imply is usually true as far as it goes. But
there is a more basic reason than they normally suggest for human
inconsistency. It is implied in the cosmopolitan’s injunction to the
barber, near the book’s end: “You can conclude nothing absolute from
the human form” (p. 254). Th e narrator agrees: “Upon the whole, it
might rather be thought, that, he, who, in view of its inconsistencies,
says of human nature the same that, in view of its contrasts, is said of
the divine nature, that it is past fi nding out, thereby evinces a better
appreciation of it than he who, by always representing it in a clear
light, leaves it to be inferred that he clearly knows all about it” (p. 77).
Man is past fi nding out because his mutability is extreme: he is a creature
of moods—the Negro cripple confi dence-man turns his face “in
passively hopeless appeal, as if instinct told [him] that the right or the
wrong might not have overmuch to do with whatever wayward mood
superior intelligences might yield to” (p. 11). Chapter 23 is titled “In
Which the Powerful Eff ect of Natural Scenery is Evinced in the Case
of the Missourian, Who, in View of the Region Roundabout Cairo,
Has a Return of His Chilly Fit,” and in it Pitch muses upon this aspect
of mutability, as
He bethinks him that the man with the brass plate [one of the
confi dence-men] was to land on this villainous bank [by a bluff
called “Th e Devil’s Joke”], and for that cause, if no other, begins
to suspect him. Like one beginning to rouse himself from a
dose of chloroform treacherously given, he half divines, too,
that he, the philosopher, had unwittingly been betrayed into
being an unphilosophical dupe. To what vicissitudes of light
and shade is man subject! He ponders the mystery of human
subjectivity in general. (p. 147)
Beyond this subjectivity, beyond the confi dence-man’s exploitation
of his knowledge of this subjectivity, can be seen the fundamental