From Action to Essence

TV ELL OVER A DECADE AGO Elizabeth S. Foster, herself one of leaders in trend she described, asserted that Melville's The ,Confidence-Man was, at last, being rescued from the dust of neglect and murk of obscurity.1 Professor Foster apparently means by obscurity simply ignorance, both of novel and its general significance. If, however, rescue means general agreement regarding a demonstrable reading of The Confidence-Man, then it is questionable whether diverse critical comment on this novel has appreciably reduced its obscurity.2 Taken by itself, of course, mere fact of multiple interpretations of a novel is not necessarily cause for either concern or confusion. But when those interpretations are often contradictory, and more particularly, when interpretations are derived from wholly differing assessments of novel's structure, and most particularly, when a given assessment of structure does not support interpretive conclusion, then something is clearly amiss. Proceeding from what seems to me to be a reasonable premise, namely that Melville attempted to compose

Action (physics) · Epistemology · Physics · History · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism