(Black Rebel Motorcycle Club: Shuffle your Feet)
We did it! We read The Confidence Man and survived this most complex of Melville's novels, his final April Fool's gift to the reading public that had largely ignored most of his novels. We went deep into that most riddled passage - on Indian Killing - which comprises chapters 25-28. For that part of his novel Melville drew largely on James Hall's Sketches of History, Life, and Manners, in the West (the passages we read are here), and we gathered some points on the differences and changes Melville made.
Melville
- black and white – drastic stories
- “Beware of the Indian!”
- “friendly Indians rare”
- The Moredocks in Ohio: John Moredock the only survivor
- the white man not depicted as an aggressor at all – only the evil Indians are
- backwoodmen described as Alexander the Great, which is here meant as a compliment, maybe an ironic compliment of sorts, as Alexander had a rather massive trail of blood in his back when he marched on India.
Hall
- white man: aggressive invader, pushing his expansion
- but also: aggressive Indians (assaulting the Moredock family)
- “an eye for an eye…”
- the white man is to blame first, as he commited the first aggressions
- (white) backwoodmen outside civilization: rather negative image of the backwoodmen
We then read a short passage on All Races: "Made in the Image of God" - actually taken, as the gracious Norton edition informs me while I'm typing this, from a review of Francis Parkman Jr.'s The California and Oregon Trail; being Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life, written by in 1849.
Melville was not an Indian hater himself, that much was clear from the passage. Why then does he give us such an unequivocal regime of Indian hating? The headline of crucial chapter 26 runs -
Containing the Metaphysics of Indian-Hating, according to the Views of One evidently not so prepossessed as Rousseau in Favor of Savages.
- which is, of course, an allusion to the French philosopher's notion of the noble savage, pioneered not by him alone. The notion, roughly, describes the "savage" as potentially happier than whites, as he/she knows how to treasure and savor the simple things: "savages" had an innate sense of moral that was not inferior.
Melville doesn't give us a noble savage, or any savage at all: he gives us rather the confidence man in yet another disguise (that reading was first introduced by Elizabeth Foster, in edition of the novel, in 1954, and it still seems valid. The signs are there, at least.
We picked out paragraphs from chapter 26 -
And though, knowing the Indian nature, as he thinks he does, he fancies he is not ignorant that an Indian may in some points deceive himself almost as effectually as in bush-tactics he can another, yet his theory and practice as above contrasted seem to involve an inconsistency so extreme, that the backwoodsman only accounts for it on the supposition that when a tomahawking red-man advances the notion of the benignity of the red race, it is but part and parcel with that subtle strategy which he finds so useful in war, in hunting, and the general conduct of life.
[that is, the Indian may lie to himself and pretend he is friendly and kind, but the backwoodsman will not make the mistake of trusting him, or: giving him his confidence, as he knows about the depravity of the Indian/Confidence Man]
Then -
Years after, over their calcined bones and those of all their families, the chief, reproached for his treachery by a proud hunter whom he had made captive, jeered out, "Treachery? pale face! 'Twas they who broke their covenant first, in coming all together; they that broke it first, in trusting Mocmohoc."
[the chief refers to the covenant of the Wright and Weaver families, explicated in a previous paragraph, namely: that never should all five brothers Wright-brothers come to Mocmohoc's camp together, that is: they made a pact that there should always be a back-up outside the camp - they broke that, and Mocmohoc (nice idea here - to mock - it certainly fits here) derives from that a justification for his killing them. Indians, as the passage describes them, are never trustworthy.]
- and lastly we have the cosmopolitan play Indian himself:
"One Moment," gently interrupted the cosmopolitan here, "and let me refill my calumet."
(all passages taken from chapter 26)
So. Is Melville's Indian just another masquerade of the confidence man? I wasn't quite sure, hence I tried to push that frontier point, going back for a short moment to the Mathers and their image of the Indian as a satanic messenger, deployed to make the Puritan frontier experience just a little more difficult.
We had it that the Fidèle, "our" Mississippi steam boat, was a stand-in, an allegory of the world as a whole and the USAmerican world in particular. I'm sure we noted that somewhere - it is going down the river, to New Orleans: passing through territories that had very recently (prior to the 1850s, in which, as I take it, the action unrolls) been frontier land. Was Melville trying to create a sophisticated, advanced frontier villain here, when he turned the Indian into a diabolic figure? Hershel Parker, editor of the Norton edition, mentions in one of his contributions to the edition ("The Politics of Allegorizing Indian Hating") that one of his ancestors had fought as a volunteer in the Mexican war of 1848. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 had cleared the way for "negotiations" that would help move tens of thousands of native Americans into frontier country west of the Mississippi. Maybe the Indian confidence man, playing tricks on the white man, is a sort of avenger for the crimes acted on the Indian nations even at that time, especially this dubious removal act, see above?
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