Mourning and Utopia in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man

What is the relation between mourning and utopia? Is a form a critique always embedded in utopias? What is the place of loss and of mourning for utopian projects? And provocatively: Can mourning ever be considered utopian?

 

In this presentation, I consider these and similar questions from the vantage point of Herman Melville’s 1857 novel The Confidence-Man. In this notoriously difficult novel, a cast of strange characters sow confusion aboard The Fidèle by tricking some of its passengers. The titular confidence-men’s success relies on an array of false charities, cure-alls, and other large-scale schemes to which the passengers fall prey. Melville’s novel, however, does more than representing a series of “tricks” that exploits the confidence of oblivious agents. It seeks instead, I argue in this representation, to reflect on early and mid- nineteenth century Utopian movements––socialist groups, communal living, and radical political currents–– in order to account for contemporaneous critiques of the nation.

 

Paradoxically, Melville also uses his novel to defend literature’s autonomy from having to represent “real life” with “fidelity.” The question of fidelity (treated through a theory of literary autonomy) and the question of utopia, far from being separate matters, go hand-in-hand and structure the novel. For Melville, I argue in this presentation, utopias (as thought-experiment, attempted social praxis, or confidence-man trickery) remain inseparable from mourning, and rely on an interrogation of several kinds of fidelities.

 

My presentation argues that The Confidence-Man Melville mourns not only the failed “utopias” of the period, but ultimately also seeks to mourns the relation of writing to history, i.e. the expected “fidelity” to “real life” of literature that biographical readings require. In both cases, this mourning opens up a creative horizon for Melville’s work, by freeing the author from the kinds of reductive interpretive methods that the myriad confidence-men of the novel reenact. If mourning is central to The Confidence-Man it is also, for Melville, a dubious political stance, a critical object of suspicion: mourning too, like the language of utopias, is exploited by the confidence-men of the Fidèle for various ends.

 

Gabriel Briex is an international PhD Candidate in English at the University of Toronto at work on a dissertation titled “The Politics of Mourning in the American Renaissance.” Before joining the University of Toronto, he was a graduate student at the École Normale Supérieure and Paris-Sorbonne Université. In his doctoral research, Gabriel examines a corpus of texts written by American 19th century authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and focuses on the relations between mourning and politics. In particular, his dissertation argues that the works of these authors problematize representations of mourning in the context of rapidly increasing political tensions over America’s national future and revolutionary legacy. Gabriel’s research seeks to confront his interpretations of these authors with psychoanalytic (and more broadly philosophical) accounts of mourning and its relation with the social and the political.