Sharon Cameron on Melville's characters and equivocation
[Cameron, Sharon. Impersonality: Seven Essays. U of Chicago P, 2007.]
[on character]
In The Confidence Man character is "past finding out" not only because its variations and inconsistencies can't be accommodated by the "fixed principles" of "phrenology" or a "psychology" (equally primitive in Melville's formulation), but also because some element determining character lies outside the conceptual borders by which we understand it to be delimited. Thus in The Confidence Man, one exchange--"Where are you? What am I? Nobody knows who anybody is," which begins as a parody of the initial sentences of Emerson's "Divinity School Address"--concludes in an irresolution that can't be dismissed as parody: "The data which life furnishes, toward forming a true estimate of" character, "are as insufficient to that end as in geometry one side given would be to determining the triangle." Melville's image raises a question of whether what is missing is more data of the same kind (more characterological data) or whether what is missing is data beyond the elements that are specific to characters and persons. While the image of the triangle suggests the former, the radical openness of that triangle, its reduction to a line without the specification of the length of the sides, suggests the latter. For although the sides must be lines, they need not be lines of the same length. And without their specification nothing closes character off from what might lie outside of it. (180-181)
[on the narrator's use of equivocation]
"[Melville's] sentences identify qualities, expressions, and states, while calling into question the states being identified, which cannot be posited outside the negations, but which retain their residue. One point to make about such sentences is that they at once assert and retract assertion, speak and undo speech." (183)
[on character]
In The Confidence Man character is "past finding out" not only because its variations and inconsistencies can't be accommodated by the "fixed principles" of "phrenology" or a "psychology" (equally primitive in Melville's formulation), but also because some element determining character lies outside the conceptual borders by which we understand it to be delimited. Thus in The Confidence Man, one exchange--"Where are you? What am I? Nobody knows who anybody is," which begins as a parody of the initial sentences of Emerson's "Divinity School Address"--concludes in an irresolution that can't be dismissed as parody: "The data which life furnishes, toward forming a true estimate of" character, "are as insufficient to that end as in geometry one side given would be to determining the triangle." Melville's image raises a question of whether what is missing is more data of the same kind (more characterological data) or whether what is missing is data beyond the elements that are specific to characters and persons. While the image of the triangle suggests the former, the radical openness of that triangle, its reduction to a line without the specification of the length of the sides, suggests the latter. For although the sides must be lines, they need not be lines of the same length. And without their specification nothing closes character off from what might lie outside of it. (180-181)
[on the narrator's use of equivocation]
"[Melville's] sentences identify qualities, expressions, and states, while calling into question the states being identified, which cannot be posited outside the negations, but which retain their residue. One point to make about such sentences is that they at once assert and retract assertion, speak and undo speech." (183)
posted by John Garcia at
3:26 PM
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