Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Jack Kerouac was way into The Confidence-Man. He couldn't contain his enthusiasm in a 1950 letter to Neal Cassidy, saying, "Melville in Confidence Man is the strangest voice ever heard in America." (Source)
What did Melville love more than satire and whaling? Nathaniel Hawthorne. He even wrote an essay praising Hawthorne. In it, he talks about "The Art of Truth," and about how Shakespeare often places terrible (but true) lines in the mouths of dark and desperate characters. Some critics think this is a heads up to how Melville approached his own writing. (Source)
What's all the buzz about? Some critics argue that The Confidence-Man is a powerful and sneaky text. This power comes from the fact that it's a totally self-conscious look at fiction. That's what smarty-pants lit people like to call meta. One critic points to the text's "exposure of the absurdity of fiction—the banality, futility, circularity, pointlessness, and artificiality of plots, characters, settings, narrations, themes, even such conventions as chapter titles." Yeah, it's getting contentious up in here. (Source)
Enough of your brains, folks. Literary critics, reviewers, and Melville's readers were all super confused and kind of miffed when The Confidence-Man was published. They wanted more adventure stories. Melville was like yeah no. (Source)