Hoax Lit PDF
Hoax Lit PDF
Hoax Lit PDF
A Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School
Of
Yale University
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
By
Jinan Lucille Saleh Joudeh
December 2009
UMI Number: 3392505
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements iv
Abbreviations v
Introduction 1
Chapter 1:
Poe's Pose 23
Chapter 2:
Melville Confidential (1):
Early Hoax Writings, Typee, Moby-Dick, and Pierre 92
Chapter 3:
Melville Confidential (2):
"Benito Cereno," The Confidence-Man, and Billy Budd 164
Chapter 4:
Splitting in Twain 240
Conclusion 314
First of all, I would like to thank my parents, Saleh and Lucy Joudeh, for their ceaseless
patience, strength, encouragement, and love. They've supported me in so many ways, up
to and including the final logistical complexities of submitting transatlantically—it could
not have happened without them. A special thank you also must go to my sister, Kinan
Joudeh Copen, whose copies of Invisible Man and The Great Gatsby I stole and still
treasure, and who got me interested in the first place. My grandmother, Jeanne Fournier
(1917-2009), taught me so much early on and is still teaching me. She is dearly missed.
This dissertation is for the most part a sustained reflection of what so many teachers of
literature have shared over so many years. Among them, I would like to acknowledge
especially, Tom Doelger, who had the humor and good spirit to induce rooms full of high
school students to find something to have faith in, offering literature, friendship, and
laughter as possibilities. Tom Ferraro's generosity, kindness, and intellectual camaraderie
drove me on.
I would also like to thank those who in some way (both through friendship and
collegiality, teaching and listening) played a part in making this dissertation possible, in
particular: Peter Boxall, Anna Chen, Harley Copen, Wes Davis, Bill Deresiewicz,
Elizabeth Dillon, Shoshana Felman, Kelly Fox, George Gopen, Jeff Glover, Carol Jacobs,
Matt Jacobson, Jeff McCutcheon, Hugh Miller, Laura Nussbaum, Thomas Pfau, Alan
Sinfield, Anisha Sood, Lea Sugimura, Jeremi Szaniawski, Terry Terhaar, Sharon Walker,
and Ariel Watson. Thank you to Wai Chee Dimock for taking on the role of advisor.
Thank you also to Vicki Shepard for her marvelous support through-out. Sebastian,
Alexander, and Elena Royle deserve a great big thank-you for their smiles, laughter, and
distraction.
And so much gratitude, in so many ways, goes to Nick, my genius of the sea, for eight
years of inspiration, partnership, writing, laughter, and love. You teach me how to live,
what to do.
JLSJ
Seaford, East Sussex
September 2009
IV
Abbreviations
Hoax Literature:
2009
the "real," what is true, "in the world," and the non-fictional, hoax
discussed but powerful essay "The Great Hoax" (1957), with its emphasis
the House of Usher," and other texts, I suggest that Poe was not only a
"hoax" writer but also the first producer of hoax literature and first figure
Mysterious Stranger."
Introduction
This study seeks to provide a new critical appreciation of the writings of Edgar Allan Poe
(1809-49), Herman Melville (1819-91), and Mark Twain (1835-1910) in particular, and a
new thinking of literature more generally, through an elaboration of what I call "hoax
referring to literary works (or even critical or theoretical works) that are about hoaxes,
and also as referring to works that are hoaxes. The neologistic force of "hoax literature"
rests on this calculated duplicity. In other respects, too, the term is supposed to sound
strange chords: almost oxymoronic, it juxtaposes and mixes up the ostensibly extra-
textual (a hoax is generally understood to be something that happens "in the world," "in
reality," etc) and the textual (literature in this respect understood to be something cooped
up in books, mere "printed matter"). At the same time "hoax literature" is also intended
to evoke tensions around a more traditional conception linking literature (and especially
canonical literary works) with "authenticity," the "genuine," and so on. This dissertation
attempts to explore these paradoxes and frictions, in a bid to suggest that "literature" and
"hoax" do indeed belong together. This is not to demean or trivialize literary works: on
1
Les Murray, "The Hoaxist," in The Biplane Houses (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), 60.
the contrary, my concern is to show that literature has more subtle, insidious and
disruptive potential and effects than is often supposed, especially by those whose
principal academic focus is, in the words of J. Hillis Miller, not "literary study" but
"cultural studies, postcolonial studies, media studies (film, television, etc.), popular
culture studies, Women's studies, African-American studies, and so on."2 At issue in the
following pages is indeed the very sense and efficacy of "American literature," for
questions of nation and national identity are also, as I hope to make clear, integrally
bound up with the notion of hoax. "American literature," in a sense, is hoax literature. To
elucidate this claim it is necessary to go back to some of the earliest appearances of the
word "hoax" and to consider some of the most important earlier figures in the history of
though the resonances and implications of my argument spread beyond that. Nowhere are
the stakes of "hoax literature" more evident, however, than in Poe, Melville, and Twain,
Before going any further let us consider the definition of "hoax" as given by The
What immediately stands out in this definition is a sense of funniness or duplicity. The
word "hoax" functions both as a noun and a verb. Related terms (confidence
2
See J. Hillis Miller, On Literature (London: Routledge, 2002), 10.
2
man/confidence game, practical joke/practical joker) lack both the grammatical
ambiguity and duplicity of "hoax." There is a doubling of hoax from the start. The
"hoax" can be at once the person and/or the event, the doer and/or the deed. There is
something constitutively funny about the hoax. This is indicated in the dictionary's
and "mischievous," "fabrication" and "fiction," "fictitious" and "erroneous." The hoax is,
allegedly, one or the other, though it might also be both. "Hoax" does funny things with
our sense of what is serious. It has fun, apparently, at the expense of meaning itself.
"Hoax" entails funny sense. In other words, it is perhaps never simply amusing or
correspondingly, while the OED definition makes clear a certain literary dimension at the
heart of the hoax, it is never simply fictional or fictitious: "fiction," in the space of the
hoax, is and is not the same as "fabrication"; what is "erroneous" is and is not the same as
"fictitious."
The editors of the OED evidently choose their words carefully here: to say that
the hoax is (or can be) mischievous is not the same, for example, as saying that it is evil.
We might usefully recall the etymology of "mischief as that which is, literally, lacking a
head (Old French meschef from the Latin minus and caput). If a certain sense or feelings
of headlessness seem to figure in the OED definition, then, this is perhaps not entirely
Freud at the end of one of his "hoax" lectures on occultism, who walks about for a while
3
after his beheading. There is something ghostly and haunting about the "hoax." As we
shall see, the term seems to have uneasy associations, from the very beginning, with the
be seeking to foreground and explore the haunting, funny, double meaning of "hoax" as
both humorous and strange, amusing and/or mischievous, erroneous and/or fictitious. The
incipient duplicity entailed in thinking the hoax gives rise to various kinds of uncertainty,
or indeed undecidability. Is the hoax a who or a what? When is a hoax a hoax? Who
decides, and according to what authority or criteria? What is the relation between hoax
and intentionality? How much is the hoax tied up in language, in a performative speech
act that names it as such? In what ways might it be true (if perplexing) to suppose that a
hoax is no longer properly a hoax once it has been classified as such? Can a hoax be
posthumous? What might it mean to speak of a spectrality of the hoax? These are some of
both to post-Enlightenment concerns with the limits of human agency and intelligence,
selfhood, and self-determination, and with the emergence of the United States as a nation
(and the concomitant attempt to form and define a national literature). The "hoax,"
however, first appears in England. The OED cites the first usage of "hoax" from 1796 in
a dictionary of vulgar language, and records a second, four years later, also bearing this
"vulgar" dimension:
Freud uses this example to suggest that when it comes to believing in telepathy or occultism, it is only the
first step that counts. See Freud, "Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy," The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955),
193. In calling them "hoax" or "fake," I am following the (at times very funny) account given by Jacques
Derrida in his essay, "Telepathy," trans. Nicholas Royle in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed.
Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 226-261. In this text,
he refers repeatedly to Freud's lectures as "fausee."
4
1796 GROSE Diet. Vulg. T., Hoaxing, bantering, ridiculing. Hoaxing a
quiz; joking an odd fellow. University wit. 1800 Gentl. Mag. LXX. 947
Hoax, Hoxe, or Goaxe, a word much in vogue in political circles. It
signifies to make any person the object of ridicule by a species of
acclamation. The word is borrowed from the kennel.
The fact that the OED's first recorded usage is itself a reference to a dictionary gives the
word an odd, even faintly hoaxical-looking provenance from the start. It suggests that the
word was already in circulation, yet relies for its sense on confirmation from another
dictionary, precisely as if the proper "place" and significance of "hoax" were concerned
with a kind of veiled repetition. From these OED citations, two further striking features
of the hoax may be noted: one has to do with how the word is bound up with speech or
impropriety and ridicule, an effective messing around with the proper (despite its being
Hoax literature
Like the related and more familiar term "literary hoax," "hoax literature" is a paradoxical
paradoxical because that which falls under the category of "literature" and "the literary"
those forms of concealment, deception, and trickery in the real world that are associated
with the hoax. "Hoax literature" is intended to remark the fact that things are clearly more
5
elements of pretense and feigning (and even pretending to pretend, feigning to feign, etc)
that are common to literature as well as to the hoax. According to a certain conventional
understanding, the literary text always already announces itself as not-real or not aspiring
to truth. It asks nothing of our belief in its reality except insofar as we must suspend our
disbelief (as Coleridge suggested is the basis of all poetic faith).4 Literary fiction, in this
respect, can be realistic, but it is not a factual account of something real. It may, on the
contrary, provide a kind of safe distraction from the real world. It offers, at any rate, an
account or representation of the real that can be readily identified as literary. There is in
inevitably constitute a primary focus in this dissertation, and that may also serve to
explain why I am dealing almost exclusively with the prose writings, as distinct from the
a double sense.5 A hoax, on the other hand, while inevitably also dealing with the
announce itself from the beginning. It keeps hidden or unclear what is fictitious or
fabricated. A hoax deceives and tricks its audience into thinking it is something else, true
writing that proves to be fake in some way: often the text in question transpires to be
written by someone other than the author to whom it was initially ascribed. On other
See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria: or, Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and
Opinions, ed. George Watson (London: J. M. Dent, 1975), 169.
5
My concern with prose-writings as distinct from poems has to do first and foremost, then, with the rather
prosaic fact that literary prose is, in its form, in ways crucial to the hoax-as-text, indistinguishable from
non-literary writing. While potentially fascinating, a study of the hoax in relation to the poetry of Poe and
Melville lies beyond the scope of the present study.
6
occasions a work will be described as a literary hoax because (as in the case, for example,
of certain texts by Poe and Melville) they have been read as true and genuine accounts of
certain events or experiences which transpire not to have happened. I propose that we try
to hear in addition, however, a more unsettling and less resolvable strangeness in this
phrase, akin to the more obvious paradoxy of "hoax literature." Hoax literature, as I will
come to elaborate it, has to do less with the nature of a diagnostic tool (spot the hoax,
of what happens in and around a literary text, especially as regards the peculiar,
disorienting and perplexing experience of reading it, of getting drawn into the disturbing
possibilities of reference (Can this be true? What if it is?), into the undecidable, even
The "hoax" of hoax literature, as I seek to elaborate it here, is also not necessarily
the invention or intention of an individual or group—the agency of the hoax, how a hoax
becomes a hoax, in and around a literary text, is less certain and more diffuse. "Hoax
literature" implodes all easy or straightforward assumptions about a fixed concept and
meaning for either "literature," on one side, or "hoax," on the other. In this fashion, the
usefulness of the notion of hoax literature can be enumerated as follows: (1) it lays bare
the hoaxicality at stake in every literary text, revealing the meager and insufficient
conception which would pretend that what is fictional in a work of literature is simply
will make clear, an integral dimension of the experience of "hoax" and "literature"
7
alike); (2) it is calculatedly duplicitous, evoking the textual and extra-textual at the same
time, referring both to literature on a hoax (the writings, critical or otherwise, about or in
work as an experience of hoax; (3) it facilitates a special attention to the singular, often
strange and unsettling combination of the mischievous, playful nature of a given piece of
writing and what might be called its perception- or belief-altering power, its capacity to
provoke, to change the way we think and act in the real world.
improper. As we have seen, "hoax" (as word and event) is bound up, from the start, with
impropriety, duplicity, and uncertainty. In many ways, however, it is quite easy to see
that this kind of characterization is also true of "literature" itself, at least if we are
following the kind of accounts of the literary provided by Maurice Blanchot and Jacques
dissertation. Let us take, for example, a remark that Derrida makes in "Demeure," his
essay on literature, fiction, and witnessing in the context of Blanchot's text The Instant of
See Jacques Derrida, "This Strange Institution Called Literature": An Interview with Jacques Derrida
(1989), trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 48.
7
Jacques Derrida, "Demeure: Fiction and Testimony," trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, in The Instant of My
Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 28-9.
8
At the heart of "hoax literature" is this conception of literature's singular capacity—
through its very duplicity, deceptiveness, and trickery—not only to pretend, fake,
simulate, but also to pretend to pretend, fake, and simulate. A clear difference is here
signaled from the more traditional conception of literature that we encounter, for
example, in Rita Felski's recent book The Uses of Literature. This is a notion of literature
that "stretch[es] back to Plato," as she puts it, whereby "literature's relationship to the
imitation."8 Derrida's description ups the ante in crucial and compelling ways: literature
would be not just "semblance" but semblance of semblance, not just "counterfeit" but a
counterfeiting of the counterfeit. The distinction may seem small, but it is central to the
force of "hoax literature" as I elaborate it here. Put perhaps rather bluntly, it matters
because it is part of the idea that, far from being (only) a simple simulation or copy,
literature can outsmart or counter the so-called real, twisting and dislocating our
experience of sense and reference in ways that go beyond merely being an escape from or
mimicry of the real, even showing up the "real" itself as a "great hoax."
The notion of a "great hoax" encompassing the world comes from a short and little-
discussed essay by Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003), first published in 1957, titled (in its
English translation) "The Great Hoax."9 The importance of Blanchot's essay for my
8
Rita Felski, The Uses of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 77.
9
Maurice Blanchot, "The Great Hoax" (1957), trans. Ann Smock in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael
Holland (Oxford and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1996), 157-66. Further page references cited in text.
9
purposes is two-fold. First, it stresses the historicity of the hoax. Blanchot prompts us to
see how precisely the hoax is a phenomenon of modernity. And second, he gives special
attention to the question of literature in the context of this history. The essay is full of
"Men have always sensed a huge deception. The entire culture of the East tells us so"
(158). In the West, too, he argues, a sense of being deceived has long been an opiate of
the people. Here is the magisterial, labyrinthine but compelling opening sentence of "The
Great Hoax":
That we live in a fraudulent world where our gestures, our words and
thoughts—our writings too, of course—come to us supplied with a
deceptive meaning which we do not detect, which not only gets accepted
by us as our own, as if it came naturally from ourselves, but which within
us and by means of us dodges and divides and changes form, with the
result that we ourselves employ this duplicity, sometimes for our own,
barely conscious purposes, sometimes in the service of greater powers
whose accomplices or victims we are: none of this, presumably, should
surprise us, since Montaigne, Pascal and Montesquieu, then Hegel, Marx
and Freud, in short an impressive number of thinkers and learned men
have pointed it out and demonstrated it to us, sometimes with a precision
well able to dispel all doubts. (157)
The deception goes back to time immemorial, it may seem. The felicity of Ann Smock's
translation in rendering the original French title of Blanchot's essay ("La grande
the hoax as specific to modernity. As the earlier citations from OED have already hinted,
the hoax is a product of the Enlightenment period, one that is marked, in the context of
the history of philosophy, by Hegel's concept of alienation, prior to its—in many respects
very different—elaborations in Marx and Freud. As Blanchot puts it: "The idea of
alienation comes expressly from Hegel, and Marx simply limited its application—
10
originally in economic and social phenomena" (159). In theorizing dreams and the
unconscious, on the other hand, Freud generates a new understanding of the hoax within,
the sense that we can never be sure about the extent to which our thoughts and desires are
programmed or deceptive, in other words, not our own. As he says in his celebrated essay
"The Uncanny," "we ourselves speak a language that is foreign."10 Or as Blanchot puts it,
in a nicely litotic formulation: "we must learn to distrust ourselves" (157). We must
suspect a logic of the hoax even in our innermost desires and dreams. Blanchot sums up
the historical dimension in commenting that "[i]t is in the eighteenth century that the idea
of a plot secretly fomented by some men against others brings trickery down from heaven
and ignites within each individual a specific distrust, ready to flare up in violent action"
(158). With the Enlightenment, the hoax is no longer a matter of the divine: it lies around
us, in ourselves, between ourselves. To analyze this notion of the hoax is, Blanchot
Blanchot's terms, has a special sense, one to which I shall give particular attention in the
course of this dissertation. It is not simply "poetry" or "narrative fiction," but rather a
discourse characterized by what he calls "its perpetual opposition, its violent contrariness,
its refusal of itself and of all natural legitimacy" (165)—in other words, by the way in
Freud, "The Uncanny" (1919), The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14, trans. James Strachey, Alix Strachey
and Alan Tyson, ed. Albert Dickson (London: Penguin, 1985), 341.
11
referential or "of this world," and so on.11 As I will explore in greater detail in my study,
"literature" in this context is a strange and spectral affair. Literature thus comes to have a
unique place in what Blanchot calls "the struggle against the great hoax" (166). His essay
provides the basis for a central argument in my dissertation, namely that the literary work
itself comes to constitute the resistant and contestatory force of what might best be
transforming the meaning its individual words might at any given time appear to have.
This slipperiness of literary language, this essential duplicity is, as he puts it, "not much
to count on... [but] here weakness, and the language that models itself on what lies short
of all force, impede the trickster more than strength, his inevitable accomplice" (166).
with military strength or violence. Literature has the capacity to contest—literally "to
bear witness" (an etymological association to which we will return, in Chapter 2), but
more generally, to contend or strive (with or against), to dispute, to call into question
(OED, "contest" v., II, senses 4 and 5). This notion of contestation is very important to
11
Blanchot's essay, it is worth noting, is a rather extraordinary review of Roland Barthes', Mythologies
(1957) (see Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), which tries, as Barthes
puts it, "to draw all the consequences" from the notion that "myth is a language" (9). That is, Barthes
wished to show that apparent "naturalness" in language is actually what he calls "mythic," part of a
complex system of signs, and therefore deceptive, or, to follow Blanchot's lead, hoaxical.
For this use of the term "counter-hoax" I am indebted to Nicholas Royle and, in particular, to the essay
"Jacques Derrida's Language (Bin Laden on the Telephone)," in his In Memory of Jacques Derrida
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 89-112.
12
the established power, contestation of what is... contestation of language and of the forms
1^
powerful, literature effectively contests that power. The "counter-hoax" entails thinking
about ways in which literature contests, bears witness to the great hoax that Blanchot so
eloquently articulates.
As is no doubt already evident, this dissertation draws heavily on what has been
designated by the term "French theory." Together with the work of Maurice Blanchot
(especially his essay "The Great Hoax"), it is particularly indebted to the writings of
refers to it in one of his most important interviews), informs every page of this
university life and thought in the 1970s and 1980s (in particular, of course, at Yale), his
perceived importance in the fields of literature, cultural studies, history, and philosophy
has now generally receded. The book I cited a few moments ago titled Uses of Literature
(2008), by the well-respected American scholar Rita Felski, for example, which is
evidently written in the wake of what "literary theory has taught us," makes not a single
13
Maurice Blanchot, "The Great Reducers" in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997), 67; cf Blanchot, "The Great Hoax," 166.
' See Derrida, "This Strange Institution Called Literature," 33-75, in particular his notion that:
The institution of literature in the West, in its relatively modern form, is linked to an
authorization to say everything, and doubtless too to the coming about of the modern idea
of democracy. Not that it depends on a democracy in place, but it seems inseparable to
me from what calls forth a democracy, in the most open (and doubtless itself to come)
sense of democracy. (37)
5
Felski, Uses of Literature, 3.
13
precisely, gestures. It is not possible simply to wish away or permanently airbrush out of
history the radical questions, challenges and arguments associated with Derridean
deconstruction. I would argue, indeed, along with Nicholas Royle that "Jacques Derrida
was the most original and inspiring writer and philosopher of our time. He made—and
his writing still makes and will continue to make—earthquakes in thinking."16 Royle's
Literature and English. The "if not more" comes from a desire to register that, in the
course of the writing of this dissertation, the United States has been in an unprecedented
position of global authority, evangelically preaching the necessary evils of war, the
omnipresence of terroristic threat, and its own dominance in any present or future "world
picture."'8 If American Studies is, as Philip Deloria argued in his presidential address at
especially in terms of intersecting with "ethnic studies" and "African American studies,"
responsibility, law, and justice continues to fissure and open up the very grounds on
16
Nicholas Royle, In Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), ix.
Royle, In Memory of Jacques Derrida, ix.
18
This phrase "world picture" is the subject of ironic play and critique in the impressive new online journal
of that name. See <www.worldpicturejournal.com>.
19
See Philip J. Deloria, "Broadway and Main: Crossroad, Ghost Roads, and Paths to an American Studies
Future," American Quarterly 61:1 (March 2009), 1-25. For an exemplary account of these aspects of
Derrida's work, see Michael Naas, Derrida From Now On (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008).
14
To clarify what I envisage here it is necessary to go to another recent French
thinker, Michel Foucault.20 His brief but memorable summary of Gaston Bachelard's
work might serve as a description of what I have in mind here for the work of American
As Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman note, this description also rather nicely evokes
99
"the specific talents of Foucault himself." To follow the example of Bachelard (and
Foucault) here would be to open the field of American Studies up to other cultures, minor
or foreign writers, and obscure or forgotten sources, but most of all it would be to engage
with the notion of "trapping one's own culture." That is, in turn, a way of characterizing
what is at stake in this dissertation, insofar as Foucault's words also serve as a fair and
fitting description of hoax literature, of what I argue Poe, Melville, and Twain themselves
are up to in their work. Each of these writers is, like Bachelard or Foucault, "a skillful
Foucault is another so-called post-structuralist thinker whose influence on the way in which we think and
write is often elided. For example, Deloria in his address also speaks, without reference to Foucault (to
whom Deloria's thinking owes a significant debt), of the ways in which
American Studies tries to trace the institutional structures that produce these narratives
[historical, political, narrative of why and how we go to war, etc.] for distribution and
consumption, to follow the money and power back to concrete interests, and to consider
the complex ways those interests both generate and benefit from the production of
ideology, discourse, and culture ("Broadway and Main," 19).
21
Michel Foucault, "Trapping One's Own Culture" (1972), trans. Arthur Goldhammer, in Literary Debate:
Texts and Contexts, Postwar French Thought, vol. II, ed. Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman (New York:
The New Press, 1999), 370.
22
Editors' note to Foucault, "Trapping One's Own Culture," 370.
15
chess player who knows how to capture major pieces with his pawns." Indeed, the traps
we will encounter in Poe, Melville, and Twain range all the way from chess games to
My engagement with "French theory," then, is closely aligned with the critical
"French theory" in the U.S. Cusset argues for the continuing importance of the encounter
with French thought, proposing that, in order to make sense of the American scene, "a
few radical French texts may be more timely today than ever." He goes on:
Cusset clearly sees the continued value of reading the work of those heterogeneous
23
Foucault, "Trapping One's Own Culture," 370.
24
From Francois Cusset, Preface to the English Edition, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze,
& Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008), xx-xxi.
16
possibilities mobilized when "interpreting a canonical work." These thinkers provide us
with "texts and concepts," Cusset argues, which help us to read in ways in which the
future is not "lock[ed] up," and there are still chances for kinds of reading that can lead to
the "empowerment of the powerless." Like Cusset, I would like to avoid the "taxonomic
violence" entailed in that lumping together (called "French theory") which undermines
"the singularity of the works, as well as their explicit divergences."25 Instead, I regard
relatively small number of texts. My aim is to foreground and illuminate what certain
texts by Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, as well as Helene Cixous and more
recent critics writing in English (such as Peggy Kamuf and Nicholas Royle), have to
university, intellectual, and political life. I am thinking back to the impropriety and
original vulgarity of the emergence of the word "hoax" itself, to the way in which these
what Cusset calls "a lawless zone between the original appraisers of meaning and value
76
and future owners." This is a zone, as Cusset goes on to suggest, "formed completely
of interstices, within which, far from the guardians of the Work, texts themselves will be
77
put to work," or rather, as this dissertation tries to show, put us to work, in all the ways
17
Mischievous Trinity: Poe, Melville, and Twain
My study begins and ends with the two American writers perhaps most often associated
with the notion of the hoax. In 1835 Edgar Allan Poe was the first person to use the word
"hoax" in relation to a literary text, and did so in a way, as I argue in Chapter 1, that was
substantially different from the conventional notion of literary hoax. Poe also wrote a
number of works which were later described as hoaxes, but his connection to what I call
"hoax literature" runs much deeper. Through the combined oddity of his fiction and his
evident fascination with the notion of hoax, I will argue that Poe was the first writer in
notion of "the great hoax" in literary works. Hoax literature, in short, necessarily begins
with Poe. Mark Twain presents another obvious point of reference for the elaboration of
hoax literature. One of the most highly regarded comic writers of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century, Twain began as a journalist, writing hoaxes for regional papers,
but he continued to play undecidably and mischievously with truth and fiction, the
serious and comic, throughout his career, always interested in deception and the nature of
man's knowledge and belief. Twain's late writings, in particular, voice a nearly prophetic
sense of America's role in the world, as he suspiciously and darkly meditates on the
various linguistic as well as military ruses which allowed it, for example, to spread its
Herman Melville is perhaps the writer whose inclusion here might seem least
obvious. He is not usually associated with hoaxes. However, more than either Poe before
or Twain after him, Melville's work, I will argue, provides us with what I call a "poetics
18
of the hoax," which then provokes and illuminates new possibilities for thinking about
American literature in the nineteenth century and beyond. This poetics in Melville
and a plotting in the very depths or surfaces of words. His work, as I try to show,
haunting effects that are characteristic of Poe's texts. Together the hoax literature of these
of a traditional canon, along the lines of writers interested in the possibilities and
medium for political expression, witnessing, contesting, and countering. I hope that what
of the links between the works of Poe, Melville, and Twain, a new critical perspective on
of literature today.
28
I read Melville, in other words, not only as one of the greatest literary practitioners of the nineteenth
century, but also as one of the greatest thinkers or theorists, in his writing, of many of the primary critical
or conceptual terms with which I am concerned in this dissertation. It is thus, I would contend, not too
much to say that his novels and shorter fictions themselves furnish a poetics, in the sense given to that term
by Benjamin Hrushovski:
[Poetics is] the systematic study of literature as literature. It deals with the question
"What is literature?" and with all possible questions developed from it, such as: What is
art in language? What are the forms and kinds of literature? What is the nature of one
literary genre or trend? What is the system of a particular poet's "art" or "language"?
How is a story made? What are the specific aspects of works of literature? How are they
constituted? How do literary texts embody "non-literary" phenomena? etc.
See Benjamin Hrushovski, "Poetics, Criticism, Science: Remarks on the Fields and Responsibilities of the
Study of Literature," Poetics and Theory of Literature, 1 (1976), xv.
19
exploits and mischievously plays with the as if dimensions of literature. Through close
readings of several of his short works (in particular, "The Angel of the Odd," "The Facts
in the Case of M. Valdemar," and "The Fall of the House of Usher"), I look at the ways
in which his work comes to define "the literary" through singularly "odd" mixtures of
bizarre event, mesmeric or related trance-state, and narratorial delirium. Poe's entire
writing career is built around exploring the possibilities for playing with the necessary
suspension ofdisbelief entailed in reading literary fiction, together with the less certain or
more wavering nature of belief'in the experience of a hoax. As I seek to make clear, Poe
is in effect the first thinker or theorist of the literary hoax, as well as a founding figure of
American literature. In the light of a series of in-depth readings that force us to wonder
what kind of text we are witnessing, I show how Poe becomes a founding figure not only
of American, but also of hoax literature. The legacy of such writing is still evident
I take the space of two chapters for Herman Melville because of the richness,
complexity, and intricacy of his engagement with the relations between literature and
history, literary and non-literary language, as well as the rigor and gravity of his
determination to reckon with what Blanchot would later call "the great hoax" in ways that
do not lay his work open (as Twain does) to the danger of being characterized and
from Melville to Twain, a critical thinking and elaboration of the counter-hoax would
lead on from Twain by going back through Melville. The future and promise of literature
as counter-hoax, in other words, would seem to me to entail following on from the radical
20
playfulness of Twain's writing through a return to the more nuanced, meticulous, and
and Pierre" I look at his early forays into hoax writing, including "hoax dispatches"
from the frontline of the Mexican-American War. I then move on to discuss the furor and
confused reception around the publication of his first book, Typee. The remainder of the
chapter considers two of Melville's most substantial works, Moby-Dick and Pierre,
through themes of deception and feigning, duplicity, undecidability, excess, and lying.
Throughout, I seek to show how Melville's poetics of the hoax are indissociably bound
up with the ways in which he exploits and disturbs all conventional notions of confidence
Cereno,' The Confidence-Man, and Billy Budd," but here particular additional emphasis
is given to the operation of a series of linked motifs in these three later works: spectrality,
deferred sense or effect, and silence. At the same time, I try to show how these texts
explore a kind of double movement: on the one hand, they provide new ways of seeing
how literature is constitutively bound up with confidence, tricks and traps, deception and
a kind of jokiness; and, on the other, they highlight and meddle with the possibilities of
the fact that the ostensibly non-literary (history, actuality, the real, up to and including the
world of finance and capital) is in fact never purely or absolutely separable from literary
concerns. These concerns are effectively crystallized in the bizarre figure of what
Melville calls the "inside narrative" (as Billy Budd was explicitly sub-titled) and in the
21
astonishing conjoining, in his final brief masterpiece, of the hoax and the death penalty in
Twain in terms of what I call "splitting." Adopting and adapting this concept from
psychoanalysis, I look at the ways in which Twain prefigured Freud's later insights into
the human ego and unfold a kind of poetics of splitting in relation to reading Twain's
work. There is always a split in play in his texts, between the real and fictional, historical
and imaginary, serious and comic, and so on. Through a close consideration of his work,
from his early journalistic hoaxes to his writings on "mental telegraphy," from his
notorious "esophagus hoax" to his late writings, I try to suggest that the split in Twain is
precisely the place where literature as counter-hoax lies. My most extended reading here
focuses on the strangely split or double text Pudd'nhead Wilson and "Those
Extraordinary Twins." These works provide a remarkable investigation into the nature of
irony, laughter, cruelty, and absurdity. I read Twain not merely as a "funny man" or
democracy, justice, and law are always in play—and his strongest meditations on these
subjects occur in the space of "splitting." Twain's writing is at once testament to the
troubled and unjust founding and development (through slavery) of the nation (and later
sometimes through absurdity, that finds its counter-hoaxical force in laughter. But this
22
Chapter 1
Poe's Pose
In order to investigate the logic of the hoax in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, I will
explore a range of closely related topics: madness and the literary, mesmerism,
democracy, sovereignty, and genius. I will analyze a number of his fictional as well as
non-fictional texts, seeking to read these quite closely in order to draw out a sense of their
singularity or "oddness" and to elaborate a notion of hoax literature. In the process I hope
to elucidate some of the more resonant and generative ways of thinking about what I
If we want to develop a sharper sense of Poe's inventiveness and his topicality, in this
context we could do worse than turn to one of the most remarkable and theoretically
1
Walter de la Mare, "A Revenant," in Short Stories, 1927-1956, ed. Giles de la Mare (London: Giles de la
Mare Publishers, 2001), 297.
23
remarkable work, Manhattan (2002). Manhattan is a book that, as Eric Prenowitz
describes, "attempts to tell the impossible story of its own prehistory."2 The narrator is a
young woman, who has not yet become an author, researching versions of the story of
Ulysses for her doctorate in various locations ("from continent to continent... from
library to library... only to return, full circle, to a certain shore...") including, in the
This fateful primal scene, the "evil eye" scene, takes place in reality (just
as if it had been written by Edgar Poe) in Yale University's tombstone of a
library. Sometimes for a mote in your eye, the world is lost.4
The narrator is and is not Cixous. The narrator is a woman called Eve, who shares many
Ulysses. It is a strange and singular text, not least for its peculiar genre-crossing between
fiction and autobiography, dream and waking, reality and phantasm. As the brief passage
just cited indicates, it is a work of disorienting uncertainty: we are asked for a moment
inside this fiction to step outside of it and to comprehend that what is being narrated, in
the middle of this sentence, actually happened in reality. We are left with the sense that it
might have happened in reality, it might have happened only in fiction, it might have
happened in a dream.
In this work of so-called literature something, we are told, takes place "in reality."
What are we to make of this? As Jacques Derrida remarks in his recently published book
2
Eric Prenowitz, "Make Believe, Manhattan's Follitterature," New Literary History 37:1 (2006), 148.
3
Cf Prenowitz, "Make Believe, Manhattan's Follitterature," 149.
4
Helene Cixous, Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory (2002), trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2007), viii.
24
Such is the reading situation into which we are thrown: in a work of
fiction, we are told, and asked to believe, bearing in mind, above all, the
visible emphasis of the italics, that what happened there happened in
reality. But, such is also the law of the Omnipotence-other, therefore of
Literature, that we are never allowed to decide, in this case as in the case
of literature's great works of fiction, those of Poe in particular, whether
this "in reality'" hides a further simulacrum.5
"The Omnipotent-other" is Cixous' term for the kind of power that literary works (but
also dreams) have. It is, in particular, the power or "omnipotence" that, in Jacques
Derrida's words,
consists in giving you (it is a gift, of genius, and generous), in giving you
to read at the same time it prevents you {from reading}, or rather thanks to
the power {pouvoir}, thanks to the grace granted you to withdraw and to
deny yourself the power and the right of deciding, of choosing, between
reality and fiction, personal testimony and invention, between what really
happened and phantasm, between the phantasm of the event and the event
of the phantasm, etc. This omnipotence that governs you gives you the
power and takes it back again, it gives you the power and the right to read
while refusing you any position of authority, making you yield to it.7
Jacques Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive (2003), trans.
Beverley Bie Brahic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 15.
6
Cixous takes her inspiration for this term "Omnipotence-other" from Sigmund Freud in order to account
for the strange power of literature or literary writing to inhabit the realm of the "might." In Totem and
Taboo, Freud discusses belief in the omnipotence of thoughts, finding this belief in three arenas: childhood,
primitive people, and art (see, in particular, Totem and Taboo (1913), Pelican Freud Library, vol. 13, trans.
James Strachey, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson, ed. Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin) 147-9).
Freud writes:
In only a single field of our civilization has the omnipotence of thoughts been retained,
and that is in the field of art. Only in art does it still happen that a man who is consumed
by desires performs something resembling the accomplishment of those desires and that
what he does in play produces emotional effects—thanks to artistic illusion—just as
though it were something real. People speak with justice of the "magic of art" and
compare artists to magicians. (148-9)
Derrida elaborates on why and how, out of these three arenas, art, in particular in terms of writing, is the
exception, the most provocative, for Freud (see H. C. for life, that is to say..., trans. Laurent Milesi and
Stefan Herbrecther'(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 107-120). Through Freud and Derrida we
understand the "magic of writing" as consisting in an inhabiting of the "might" (the might have been, the
might be). See, in particular, Jacques Derrida's powerful account of the supu {might-have-been} in Cixous'
writing, in Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius, 84-87.
Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius, 48.
25
Derrick is calling attention to the strange experience of a fictional text asking a reader to
believe something, to make (oneself) believe that something has happened in reality. Poe,
in particular, is singled out for his ability to catch the reader in this tricky, even mad,
position of being "never allowed to decide...whether this '/« reality' hides a further
simulacrum."
understood in all the oddity of its singular homophony and quasi-delirious doubling.
"Poe's pose," "Poe's Poes," "Pose, Poes!" and so on: if there is a singular "pose" to be
identified with Poe's writing, it is bound up with the multiple ("Poes") and with making
the common singularly odd or oddly proper (from "pose" to "Poe's"). Whereas Cixous'
text explicitly marks itself as wanting to divide itself from itself, wanting in some way to
put into relief what happened in reality while at the same time wanting to stress the sense
of the incredible or the "as i f and thus to mobilize the power of fiction to alter our
conception of the sense and significance of this reality, Poe's texts at once presume and
provoke a sense that, no matter how fantastical or absurd it may sound, what is being
approach foregrounds the way in which the reader can never be sure, in Derrida's words,
26
lead us on and stitch up elsewhere, in a thousand guises, the reference to
what in fact happened, to what really took place, in reality.
It is for Derrida the way in which "what we call literature" presents the reader with a
undecidability... between the fictional, the invented, the dreamt event, the
fantasized event (including the phantasm of the event, not to be neglected)
and the event presented as 'real,' there in this situation handed to the
reader.. .lies the very secret of what one usually designates by the name of
literature.10
Prenowitz elaborates on this notion of "making believe" or "make belief," which turns on
the idea that "one can only believe the unbelievable." As he puts it:
contribution not only to Cixous studies, but also to a more general understanding of
reading and experiencing literature. Literature turns on this question of make believe and,
27
more critically perhaps, making belief. There is, as Derrida's readings of Cixous show,
something magical or miraculous about belief—hence the supposition, just referred to,
that any belief worthy of the name is belief in the unbelievable. Or to put it differently,
paraphrasing him in Specters of Marx: belief in general is, in a sense, belief in ghosts.14
There is no belief without some kind of engagement with the power of the phantasm and
or ghostly.
produced out of thin air. As Derrida puts it elsewhere: "[tjhere is no literature without a
suspended relation to meaning and reference." This is not a matter of doing away with
meaning and reference but rather of the "suspending" them. "Suspension," as he goes on
characters to some real and intelligible world, but these characters maintain a suspended
relation to that real world or reality. Poe's "The Angel of the Odd," for example, a text I
will discuss shortly, is a fantastic text, centering on a character who is quite unbelievable,
and yet we still read Poe's account of this unbelievable being in relation to the real world,
however strange or suspended that relation might be. The suspension—or the experience
of this suspension—often becomes foregrounded in the work, and this indeed is what
marks it as a literary, rather than a non-fictional, text. To go back to the example from
See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994): "...theology in general is 'belief in ghosts'
(Gespensterglaube). One might say belief in general..." (146).
15
Jacques Derrida, "This Strange Institution Called Literature": An Interview with Jacques Derrida (1989),
trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 48.
16
Derrida, "This Strange Institution Called Literature," 48.
28
happening in reality. She calls on us to believe, even when and perhaps especially when
extraordinary content, syntax, structure, and narration. There is nothing proper about
Manhattan even though—or perhaps precisely because of the way in which—it simulates
and plays on the familiar myth of Odysseus; it is, explicitly, "Cixous' response to
Derrida's intriguing and apt phrase "hyperrealism"?19 As Prenowitz summarizes: One can
"never [be] sure what is in the book and what is in the world, what is fiction and what is
reality."20 Manhattan might be included in that group of texts that Derrida calls
all have in common [the fact] that they are inscribed in a critical
experience of literature. They bear within themselves, or we could also say
in their literary act they put to work, a question, the same one, but each
time singular and put to work otherwise: "What is literature?" or "Where
does literature come from?" "What should we do with literature?"
The relationship between critical and literary discourse is not what it used to be. Derrida
suggests that the "strange institution called literature" has been undergoing signification
changes, especially since the kind of explicitly reflexive writing of Stephane Mallarme
and later modernists. The most distinctive and enduring works of literature, for Derrida,
17
Prenowitz, "Make Believe, Manhattan's Follitterature," 148.
18
Prenowitz, "Make Believe, Manhattan's Follitterature" 149.
19
Derrida, H. C.for life, that is to say..., 29.
20
Prenowitz, "Make Believe, Manhattan's Follitterature," 149.
21
Derrida, "This Strange Institution Called Literature," 41.
29
are those that question and prompt their reader to ask: what is literature? What is it
doing? What should we make of it? It is part of the purpose of this dissertation to suggest
that this reflexive or critical dimension of fictional works is not something peculiar to
modernism, however, but is also visible and active in earlier writings such as those of
Poe, Melville, and Twain. Indeed, as I hope to show, reading Poe, Melville, and Twain
can help us develop a new, more critical appreciation of American literature more
generally, especially in its engagements with fictionality and reality, the simulacrum and
the undecidable, the tricks and traps of reading. At the same time, what Derrida suggests
here is that, although these texts all "have in common" certain features, each text works
in a singular way. That is their genius. We should understand "genius" not in the overly
romanticized meaning that "makes us squirm," but in the nuanced account elaborated by
Derrida in Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius, as bound up with giving and the
gift: "Genius gives without knowing it, beyond knowledge, beyond the awareness of
what it gives and of the fact, of the performative event that constitutes the gift, if there is
99
one." Genius then is not something that is, nor simply what someone is or has (in the
sense of a property or something proper to oneself). To think of the genius of these texts
30
transformed and transforming formulation, it gives us not only a way of thinking about
"what happens" in Manhattan, but also in powerful works of literature more generally, by
means of literature's relation to the performative and the gift, to the non-proper and
question of) genius and whether or not genius can be faked. "Everywhere," writes
Derrida, "the idea of counterfeit genius steals in. Genius can be faked, but there is also a
genius for fakery." In Manhattan this question of genius and fakery is tied up with the
the words themselves are contagious, they infect each other... the words
folie and litterature are metamorphosed into folitterature. Indeed, the
contagion is such that even an apparently sane word like folie begins to
decompose in broad daylight, to come unglued.28
25
Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius, 69.
26
See French edition: Helene Cixous, Manhattan (Paris: Galilee, 2002), 38. Translated in English version
as "literary madness" or "literary-madness" by Brahic (23, English edition).
27
Prenowitz, "Make Believe, Manhattan's Follitterature," 153.
28
Prenowitz, "Make Believe, Manhattan's Follitterature," 153.
31
An intriguing and disturbing image: a sane word decomposing. (I will return to the notion
of decomposition later on.) What Prenowitz is getting at is the strange way that "folie
false literature, faux literature. This is a particularly concise and neat way of thinking
about Cixous' text: both as mad or "madness literature" but also as writing bound up with
the fake, the false, with the counterfeit and counterfeit genius.
wonder, then, that Edgar Allan Poe is invoked at the beginning of Cixous' text. Who in
American literature more than Poe has been so extensively identified with, or
aggressively denied the title of, "genius"? But the links with Poe go beyond the question
of genius. There are several features that Manhattan shares with Poe's tales, including:
the strange autobiographical sounding narrator, the genre crossing, in particular between
the literary and non-literary, real and fictional, the factual and fantastic, and, finally, the
explicit attention to the odd and the singular. Perhaps what most links Manhattan to the
work of Poe is its preoccupation with madness and fakery: figuring out whether Poe is
faking it or not, the experience of reading can itself become a kind of madness. For
example, Daniel Hoffman in his celebrated 1972 study, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe,
calls him "Hoaxiepoe," suggesting that "one can never be sure when Poe is being serious
and when he's putting us on. Because his put-ons are always serious, one way or
another." In an important more recent study, Reading at the Social Limit, Jonathan
Elmer echoes this sense of trickiness in Poe, arguing that there is a "notorious tonal
29
Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Garden City: Doubleday, 1972), 153 and 185.
32
instability of Poe's work—in which, for example, it is never finally clear whether we are
"destabilization of the critical perspective and its wished for, reflective self-exemption
from the disturbances of aesthetic experience." In other words, the trickiness of Poe is
not merely thematic: it draws in and implicates even the ostensibly most disinterested
Timmerman calls Poe "a master trickster"; Nicholas Royle suggests that "all of Poe's
writing" is "tongue-in-cheek"; Daniel Royot opens his recent essay, "Poe's Humor," with
the appositely provoking question, "Sphinx or hoax?"32 Charles Baudelaire described him
as "always great, not only in his lofty conceptions, but also as a hoaxer." And, of
course, one cannot forget what is arguably one of the most famous quotes from James
Russell Lowell, characterizing Poe as: "three fifths of him genius, two fifths sheer
As Cixous' Manhattan intimates, Poe can thus be seen as the precursor for a
"American," writing in English, whose literary and cultural importance comes from what
30
Jonathan Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture and Edgar Allan Poe (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1995), 175.
31
Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit, 175.
32
John Timmerman, "House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," Papers on
Language and Literature 39: 3 (2003), 229; Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2003), 170 n. 56; Daniel Royot, "Poe's Humor," in A Cambridge Companion to Edgar
Allan Poe, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 57.
33
Charles Baudelaire, "New Notes on Edgar Allan Poe," trans. Raymond Foye, in The Unknown Poe, ed.
Raymond Foye (San Francisco: City Lights, 1980), 94-5.
34
From James Russell Lowell, A Fable for Critics (Boston: Houghton MacMifflin, 1891), qtd. by R.B.
Johnson, Introduction to The Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe (London, 1909), 306.
33
he does with, and even his gift to, the English language. But the genius of his writing
overflows English at the same time as inscribing itself silently within it: there is his effect
in France—his "genius" perhaps most recognized there—but also his often silent gift to
American literature. I shall return to the question of silence, of silent genius, and of the
workings of silence in Poe's texts, in due course. For the moment, I would simply note
Manhattan, to being blinded in the realm of the odd and unbelievable, lets Poe's genius
silently sneak in, it would be as something to which we in turn are often both deaf and
work—which would have more to do with fooling, with the fool and the windbag (fool,
from Latin "folis" meaning windbag). For with Poe, as I shall argue later in this chapter,
it is precisely a question of air and of wind, of atmosphere in particular, that animates the
foolery and the hoax in his writing. It is a matter, as one of his story-titles has it, of
1-7
As John Dillon remarked in his study, only in France and England was the "originality of his genius"
fully recognized. See Edgar Allan Poe, His Genius and Character (New York: Knickerbocker Press,
1911), 44.
36
A "[gjenius," Derrida remarks, "gives without knowing it, beyond knowledge, beyond awareness of what
it gives and of the fact, of the performative event that constitutes the gift, if there is one. And those who
receive from him/ it (individuals or institutions) do not know, must not know what it is they are receiving,
and which is always more, always something other, older and more unforeseeably new, more monstrously
unheard of and inexhaustible, less appropriable than anything one is capable of representing" (Derrida,
Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius, 74-5).
37
See Edgar Allan Poe, "Raising the Wind (Diddling)" (1843) in Tales and Sketches, vol. 2 (1843-1849),
ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 867-882.
34
Where does such a text as Manhattan belong, with its scenes happening in reality
but also just as if they had been written by Poel The occasion of Derrida's comments on
The librarians will have a hard time deciding how to classify Cixous' work, says
Derrida—and for him, that is part of her work's power, its importance, and its gift. But
this power is not limited to Cixous' work. It is also a striking feature of Poe's—of Poe's
pose. Cixous' reference to Poe, to the experience that seems to have happened "just as if
it had been written by Edgar Poe," is taken up again by Derrida. Poe seems to be the
silent progenitor of the kind of literary text produced by Cixous. Any researcher or
with the way in which Poe's texts are constantly asking us to make believe, to feel as if
something happened in reality. So when Derrida writes, "The librarian will always find it
difficult to decide if the referent of such and such a text and document is real or
fictional," his words might be felt to resonate as clearly in relation to the works of Poe as
to those of Cixous.
35
Angel Dreaming
All of this becomes, then, more acute and provoking in the context of this "primal scene"
in the Beinecke. Poe is invoked by his proper name but there is also, in this scene,
oblique but crucial reference to one of his only dream texts. The reference to Poe does
not end with the full stop; it bleeds into the next sentence: "Sometimes for a mote in your
eye, the world is lost." This echoes and recalls one of Poe's lesser-known stories, "The
Angel of the Odd" (1844).40 Comparatively little has been written on "The Angel of the
Odd" and most of what has been written has centered around the notion that it is easily
written out of "Poe's well-know dislike for the spirit of social reform," as well as his
hatred of "utopian excesses," which he found "fraudulent and indigestible."41 One such
excess, offering a sort of cure-all approach, was "hydropathy," which could purportedly
heal a man after a forty-five foot fall.42 For many, "The Angel of the Odd" is simply, in
the words of editor Thomas Mabbott, "a bit of good-natured buffoonery" (1098). Yet
Tzvetan Todorov, it is the very essence of "the uncanny"; he describes the tale as an
Hoaxing, ed. Dennis W. Eddings (Port Washington: Associated Faculty Press, 1983); Lynda Walsh, Sins
Against Science: The Scientific Media Hoaxes of Poe, Twain and Others (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006). His
texts do this even at the level of which national literature they belong to. Is Poe an American writer? I take
up this question, along with the question of the hoax and its relation to literature and national identity, more
fully in the latter part of this chapter.
40
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Angel of the Odd," in Tales and Sketches, vol. 2 (1843-1849), ed. Thomas Ollive
Mabbott (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 1098-1112. Page references will be cited
in the text.
41
Gerald E. Gerber, "Poe's Odd Angel," Nineteenth-Century Fiction 23:1 (1968), 89 and 90.
42
Gerber, "Poe's Odd Angel," 90.
36
example, in fact, of "the meta-uncanny." For others it appears simply unremarkable and
indeed simply passed over, unremarked upon. In short, the range of critical views seems,
dare one say, odd. This oddity is perhaps most clearly signaled in Todorov's invocation
of the term "meta-uncanny." What is it about the tale that incites Todorov to his "meta-"
of the story. The tale outdoes itself in the invocation of the unhomely within the home,
but what perhaps makes it meta-uncanny is its transformation of the perfectly familiar
(eating, drinking, and reading) through exaggeration into the radically unfamiliar or
incredible. It is all about ingesting, ingesting food and drink, about being drunk, but also
about ingesting books and about reading. It is concerned with the soporific and
stupefying effects, not only of food and drink, but also of reading, of losing oneself and
In many respects "The Angel of the Odd" is classic Poe. It is in his most common
narrative mode, the first person singular. It is, like all of Poe's texts, about the question of
make believe and making belief. It plays on familiar motifs, such as hot air balloons, the
odd or strange, the incredible. It is based on something purportedly real (in particular in
between what is real and what is not, thereby suggesting a critical faculty in the narrator
which makes him believable). Thus, for example, it begins with a juxtaposing of texts
"Griswold," which consist of epic poetry, works of topography and "curiosities," on the
one hand, and newspapers, on the other (1101). But it is also distinct and singular, in
43
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cleveland: Press of Case
Western Reserve University, 1973), 48.
37
ways that seem consonant with the resorting to hyperbole in Todorov's terminology
humor—there is a silliness that is not present in other Poe texts, not least in the form of
the titular "angel," who has kegs for legs, bottles for arms, a canteen for a head, with a
funnel on the top for a hat (1102). At the same time this "angel" seems to be literary
through and through, most pointedly perhaps in being attributed "a truly Falstaffian air"
(1102).
Let us turn, then, to the beginning of Poe's text. "The Angel of the Odd" opens
with a man having finished his dinner, drinking a good deal of wine, and wondering what
to do next. Earlier in the day, he tells us, he had been reading a number of books
including, most suggestively perhaps, Griswold's "Curiosities."44 Now, feeling "a little
stupid" and at a loss, he turns to "a stray newspaper in despair" (1101). In what follows, a
delineation between what is literary and what is real, what is "curious" in literature and
what will be called "odd" or a "hoax" in so-called real-life is brought about. Here, after
perusing various apparently insignificant material, the narrator finally reads a story about
the outlandish and "singular" circumstances surrounding a man's death during a game of
"puff the dart." The deceased had accidentally inserted the dart backwards into the tube
and inhaled, drawing the dart into his throat and killing himself. In reaction, the narrator
reports:
The reference is to Rufus W. Griswold, Curiosities of American Literature, first published by itself in
1847 but published earlier in a volume with I. C. Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature; and the Literary
Character Illustrated (New York: D. Appleton, 1844). As the single edition was produced three years
(1847) after Poe's text (1844), Poe must have been referring to the combined volume. It is unclear why Poe
made reference to Griswold's but not Disiraeli's text. Cf W. T. Brandy's note in "Marginalia," from Poe
Newsletter 3:1 (June 1970), 21-22. Griswold later also, of course, became an editor of Poe's writings,
producing The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, 4 vols. (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1850-56).
38
Upon seeing this I fell into a great rage, without exactly knowing
why. "This thing," I exclaimed, "is a contemptible falsehood—a poor
hoax—the lees of the invention of some pitiable penny-a-liner—of some
wretched concocter of accidents in Cocaigne. These fellows, knowing the
extravagant gullibility of the age, set their wits to work in the imagination
of improbable possibilities—of odd accidents, as they term them; but to a
reflecting intellect (like mine," I added in parenthesis, putting my
forefinger unconsciously to the side of my nose,) "to a contemplative
understanding such as I myself possess, it seems evident at once that the
marvellous increase of late in these 'odd incidents' is by far the oddest
accident of all. For my part, I intend to believe nothing henceforward that
has anything of the 'singular' about it." (1101-02)
This entire passage is the bizarre sort of narratorial double speak whereby the "I" can tell
"unconsciously"—it is an odd kind of narration beside itself, an "I" speaking out loud ("I
"Angel of the Odd" for the first time. The Angel speaks in a fake, at times apparently
German, at times apparently French accent, accuses the narrator of being drunk, and then
goes on to tell him that he, the Angel, is the sole perpetrator of all these "singular" and
"odd" occurrences: "I gleaned from what he said that he was the genius who presided
over the contretemps of mankind, and whose business it was to bring about the odd
accidents which are continually astonishing the skeptic" (1104). What Poe seems to be
doing in this passage might be described as a sort of staging or performance of the very
oddity of the "odd" itself. "Odd," of course, is not just "strange," "queer," "standing
apart," but also "left over," "additional," "extra." It is as if Poe's narrator were a kind of
embodiment of this double meaning. The word "odd" comes into English from the Old
English "ord," from Old Norse "oddi," meaning "point" (a meaning which I will return to
39
later) {Chambers). Finally, what is perhaps the most the striking thing about this passage
is the association of "genius" with "the odd." The Angel of the Odd is a genius, a sort of
a genius anyway, the kind perhaps that Cixous writes about in Manhattan, a kind of
genius that can be faked but also with a kind of genius of or for fakery. I will come back
The narrator talks to the Angel for a while, insisting that he does not believe in
odd incidents such as the one he read in the paper. This angers the Angel who finally
leaves and the narrator falls asleep in his chair, reflecting on the necessity of waking
within a half an hour in order to attend an appointment to renew his house insurance,
which expires that night. He sleeps through the time of appointment and decides that it is
no great matter, he can renew it in the morning. He then falls into a deep sleep in which
"[his] dreams were terrifically disturbed by visions of the Angel of the Odd" (1106). We
may note here, in passing, the further disorienting ambiguity, akin to Coleridge's "Kubla
dream.45 Also like Coleridge, moreover, Poe's narrator falls asleep in the midst of
reading, in this case "some pages of the 'Omnipresence of the Deity'" (1106).However,
See S.T. Coleridge, "Kubla Khan: or A Vision in a Dream," in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan
Wu, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 522. It is also perhaps pertinent here to note that Poe's early
biographer George Woodberry acknowledged Coleridge as "the guiding genius of Poe's early intellectual
life" (qtd. by Richard Kopley in his introduction to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, ed.
Richard Kopley (New York: Penguin, 2000), xxiv). Kopley goes on to suggest several of Coleridge's
poems, including, perhaps most explicitly, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" were influences on Poe's
Pym. Regarding that influence, Kopley writes:
Coleridge's assertion of a literary problem [after the publication of The Ancient
Mariner]—and his own failure to solve it—would have intrigued Poe. We can reasonably
infer that Poe would have thought about Coleridge's challenging comment regarding "the
only subject now left for an epic poem of the highest kind" and worked up the novel Pym
in part to accomplish what his hero Coleridge could not—to offer the "genius or skill" to
"preserve the interest for the hero" by allegorizing the destruction of Jerusalem, (xxiv)
40
in Poe's version, the narrator's house catches on fire in the middle of the night, and trying
to escape the blaze, he falls from a ladder and breaks his arm.
Uninsured, homeless, and having had all of his hair "singed off by the fire"
(1107), he decides to take a wife. This marks one of the funniest moments in the text. The
first attempt with a "rich widow" goes badly when, after a passionate night, "I arose with
a shining pate, wigless; she in disdain and wrath, half buried in alien hair. Thus ended my
hopes of the widow by an accident which could not have been anticipated, to be sure, but
which the natural sequence of events had brought about" (1107). By now we are drawn
far into this odd story, much more ridiculous and singular than the newspaper account
which the narrator first read and called "a poor hoax." He tries again to secure a wife, and
here, in this second attempt, comes the strange doubling of Cixous' "primal scene":
"Meeting my betrothed in an avenue thronged with the elite of the city, I was hastening to
greet her with one of my best considered bows, when a small particle of some foreign
matter, lodging in the corner of my eye, rendered me, for the moment, completely blind"
(1107). In this way he offends and loses his fiancee. It is, for the narrator, an accident
"which might have happened, nevertheless, to anyone under the sun" (1107). And so,
The Angel of the Odd appears once again on the scene, this time to offer
assistance. Even faced with this gesture of compassion, the narrator feels "it high time to
die, (since fortune had so determined to persecute me)" (1108). He takes off his clothes
and enters a river in order to drown himself, but before he gets very far, a bird flies off
with his clothes. The narrator gets out to chase the bird, then finds himself running over
Cixous, Manhattan, 2.
41
the edge of a cliff. But just then a hot air balloon comes by and the narrator grabs the
guide-rope (as might occur in a "Wiley Coyote" cartoon). Over the edge of the hot air
balloon once again appears the Angel of the Odd. "Und you pelief, ten," he inquired, "at
te last? You pelief, ten, in te possibility of te odd?" (1109). The narrator consents to make
belief (in the odd, to believe in the odd) but is unable to show his affirmation sufficiently
strongly for the Angel, and so the Angel cuts him off and the narrator falls into his house
"which, during my peregrinations, had been handsomely rebuilt" (1110). The story ends
by revealing itself as a dream, with the narrator waking up at home in his chair next to an
empty bottle: "Thus revenged himself the Angel of the Odd" (1110).
We might pause to reflect on the notion that this is, perhaps rather surprisingly,
Poe's most explicit text about a dream.47 There is also the singular oddity of ending with
"it was just a dream" in a text that also features dreams in its middle, dreams that thus
disrupt and overturn all logical sense of where dreaming or reading starts and finishes.48
To say it was all a dream disrupts and disturbs the reading that comes before this
revelation. Such an ending intensifies the statement made by the narrator in the middle of
the story, "my dreams were terrifically disturbed" (1106). In some ways its easy
explanation—it was all a dream, we do not have to worry, odd or not, it is just a bit of
buffoonery on the part of Poe—is also what makes it so provocative. Part of the
fascinating connection between Cixous and Poe here turns on the question of the dream
and dreams in relation to literature. Certainly Cixous' work, as well as Derrida's, is much
47
The only other text explicitly taking place in a dream is "Some Words with a Mummy" (1845), in Tales
and Sketches, vol. 2 (1843-1849), ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2000), 1175-1201.
I return to the subject of dreams and reading, and the uncertain split between dreaming and waking, in
my discussion of Mark Twain, in Chapter 4 (below).
42
concerned with how and why dreams and phantasms are neither as simple nor as innocent
as we think.49 There is, as Derrida puts it, in Cixous the possibility of a "dreamexistence"
or what Cixous herself calls hyperdream.50 The oddness of Poe's text reveals itself in its
claiming to be a dream of waking and dreams, a dream with dreams inside it, in other
words in its broaching something like Cixous' notion of the "hyperdream." In this way
Poe's elaboration of the odd in this tale, especially in relation to the singular and to
genius, is especially valuable in trying to come to terms with the unique style or signature
"Odd" was a significant word for Poe; the odd occasion gave rise to new thoughts and
anonymously, 1839):
In regard to The Canons of Good Breeding, the critical reader who takes it
up will, of course, be inclined to throw it aside with contempt, upon
perceiving its title. This will be his first impulse. If he proceed so far,
however, as to skim over the Preface, his eye will be arrested by a certain
air of literature-ism (we must be permitted to coin an odd word for an odd
occasion) which pervades and invigorates the pages.52
49
For a wonderful account of phantasms across Jacques Derrick's work, see Michael Naas, "Comme si,
comme ca: Following Derrida on the Phantasms of the Self, the State, and a Sovereign God," in Derrida
From Now On (New York: Fordham, 2008), 187-212.
50
Derrida, H. C.for life, that is to say..., 157; and Helene Cixous, Hyperdream (2006), trans. Beverley Bie
Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).
51
Cixous, Hyperdream, x andpassim.
52
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Canons of Good Breeding," in Essays and Reviews, ed. Gary Richard Thompson
(New York: Library Classics of the U.S., 1984), 455.
43
"Literature-ism" is indeed an odd word, not least because of its near associations with a
counterfeit or forged quality. The Canons of Good Breeding is not literature but it bears
some relation to literature; it sounds like literature, even if we know it is not literature but
merely a sort of simulacrum, a fake. An odd occasion suggests both singularity and a
certain air or atmosphere. Let us note here also that Poe's neologism, "literature-ism," is
Literature-ism, like something that appears out of thin air, like ghosts, is a reading-effect.
At the same time, this neologistic irruption also refers us to the very condition of
possibility of the hoax. The hoax in Poe, as I hope to make clear, entails breathing the air
One of the most striking things to be discovered about revisiting some of the
earliest critical writings on Poe is how odd his work appeared, even at the time. To clarify
this further, I want to return to the question of genius. Genius as a figure in "The Angel of
the Odd" is bound up with the odd and the singular, with a sort of madness and
unbelievability, but also with the undecidable, with fakery, and, indeed, the question of
the hoax. No doubt it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to get away from the critical
decades of the twentieth century but in many ways (some more implicit and insidious
than others) still evident today. However, should we not seek to distinguish between the
writer as genius and the writings as genius? Is not genius above all a work, the works and
illuminating on this subject. In particular, I would like to consider The Genius and
44
Character of Edgar Allan Poe (1929) by John R. Thompson, Edgar Allan Poe: His
Genius and Character (1911) by John M. Dillon, and Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in
writes after Poe's death as an acquaintance (though the account was not published as a
book until 1929) wanting to distinguish a figure of Poe the genius from Poe's reputation
as a drunk. Thus he suggests that "Poe was eminently what the Germans would call a
many-sided person"; and again, "there were several Poes at work simultaneously, but
apart from each other..."54 Regarding in particular the pose of genius, or the Poes of
Perhaps the secret of the great success of Poe's fantastical stories may be
recognized in the circumstantiality with which they are narrated. He starts
off on an impossible voyage, which we know beforehand never could have
been made, which is in conflict with the well-understood laws of the
physical universe, and yet before he has accomplished a tenth part of the
distance we are cheated into a belief in the whole narrative by the
naturalness and congruity of the incidents connected with it—the state of
the thermometer, the appearance of the stars, the botany on the wayside,
the behavior of the vehicle or animal that supports him, whether ship or
balloon or horse or griffin, and other such matters which seem to have
nothing to do with the main fact, the impossibility of the story, but which
really give it chief support.55
singular. Thompson sees his ability to move from an odd occasion into the realm of the
seemingly normal as unprecedented: no other writer "has surpassed Poe in the probability
53
John R. Thompson, The Genius and Character of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James Whitty and James
Rindfleisch (Richmond: Garrett and Massie, 1929); Dillon, Edgar Allan Poe, His Genius and Character,
Joseph W. Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (London: Knopf, 1926).
54
Thompson, The Genius and Character of Edgar Allan Poe, 7 and 8.
Thompson, The Genius and Character of Edgar Allan Poe, 20.
45
imparted to his fantasies by the trifles embodied in them." In comparison with Poe,
Thomson's account suggests, neither Swift nor Defoe has such a capacity to force the
willing suspension of disbelief. Poe's genius comes in his ability to make the singular
look natural, the impossible probable, to make belief in that "such as will happen now
John M. Dillon writes in a similar vein: "The spell of his genius is unresistible
en
[sic] and one abandons oneself to its sway." Hinting at the supernatural or unreal, there
is something mesmerizing and inevitable about Poe's style. We can see immediately how
apt Thompson's and Dillon's descriptions are for many of Poe's tales, as I hope to show
from two tales that I will be looking at more closely later in the chapter, "The Facts in the
Case of M. Valdemar" and "The Balloon Hoax." In the former, the scientific tone, the
strange attention to details such as the initials of the medical students and nurses present
at the scene, all of what Roland Barthes will call a "reality effect" conspire in a
mesmerizing tale about mesmerism that readers, especially in England, took as real, and
later called a "hoax."58 In the latter, precisely the "behavior of the vehicle that supports
him" and the state of the thermometer made at least a portion of original readers believe it
was true and are perhaps, in fact, responsible for the naming of this text as "The Balloon
46
Hoax." Most of all, these elements noted by Thompson, of course, come together in The
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, where we are sucked into a completely impossible and
"The Angel of the Odd" works differently. It takes a wholly believable situation, a
man after dinner reading the paper, and turns it into a kind of farce, with a supernatural or
at least preternatural, angel. But the story turns on the danger of not being able to see
when something is real and when something is a phantasm, when there is a "spot" or a
"mote" in your eye. It suggests that you may not fall for or be fooled by a "hoax" once,
but that does not prevent you from falling another time and, indeed, further, that the hoax
is not what is designated as the hoax, anymore than the time of the hoax is when the
narrator is given to understand, and gives us to understand, that it is. As with the irruption
words and of occasion. The narrator catches the improbability of the newspaper story but,
when confronted by a far less credible or far more obviously incredible little figure, he
finds its existence and actuality, however much he tries to deny it, inescapable. This, of
course, is the madness of the dream, a dream enfolding dreams, but it happens—before
anything else—in the dream world of literature, in a fictional text that is also a meditation
on literature, fictionality, and phantasms. In reality, a man would not suck a needle down
his throat by mistake, but in a dream a keg-legged angel may peer over the edge of a hot
air balloon. Furthermore, the impish angel comes on stage as if in the figure of Poe
59
First published in The Extra Sun (13 April 1844), the story was titled as "The Balloon Hoax," in
Griswold's The Late Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Cf Mabbott note, Tales and Sketches, vol. 2, 1068.
47
himself, the odd genius himself. This is, in a sense, already intimated in the ambiguity or
duplicity of the title: "The Angel of the Odd" can be read as a reference to the fantastical
figure described in the text that follows and at the same time as a designation of what the
text itself is. The text, in other words, is itself the Angel of the Odd. Here, as clearly as
anywhere in the text, we feel the force of the etymological play of angel as (from the
ancient Greek angelos) "messenger." The text acts like a messenger, bringing this odd
message from a world of madness, convoluting waking and sleeping, reality and
literature. The force of convolution, this sense of the writing as voicing what Cixous calls
the "Omnipotence-other," constitutes the very singularity and oddity of Poe's tales.
As John R. Thompson writes of the light that Poe's texts cast: it is not "the
radiance of noonday" but "a cold and ghastly yet singularly vivid illumination, throwing
portentous shadows, and making tree and shrub and stately palace and shimmering lake
and purple mountain as unreal as the specters that move across them."60 For Thompson,
again and again, it is the question of what might be termed Poe's "language of the odd":
The machinery and the dramatis personae of his stories are alike ideas. His
landscapes are wholly different from any scenery to be found in the
tropics, in the frigid, or in the temperate zone. His mansions and castles
are more unsubstantial than the pasteboard mansions and castles of the
stage. His trees are spectral, his rocks are impalpable, his waterfalls are
not even damp, his men and women are mere ideas on legs, fitted only to
inhabit that shadowy realm to which he was instantly hurried off the
moment he gave himself to that wild courser, his imagination.61
Critics of Poe, especially the early critics, refer to his "imagination," "his mind," "his
thoughts" in reference to his fiction. This tendency to segregate and glorify Poe's internal
existence has been well documented. As Elizabeth Phillips writes: "Since reality—
60
Thompson, The Genius and Character of Edgar Allan Poe, 20.
Thompson, The Genius and Character of Edgar Allan Poe, 22.
48
according to Poe—was viewed from within, the ambience of the great solitary landscape
that he knew and the characteristics of mania that he depicted have tempted readers to
suppose that all his ingenuities were studies of his own aberrant consciousness."62 Such
"tempted readers" include the early chroniclers of his genius. For example, John M.
Dillon writes: "Poe seldom exerts his talents to overwhelm the reader with purely
denouement of intellectual horror by means of the strange and weird power of his
mind."DJ For many his genius is intensely personal. There is, as Joseph W. Krutch puts it,
"no more completely personal writer than Poe."64 Poe's singular oddness accounts for his
genius. And yet as early critics also hint, this oddness seems to border on a kind of
telepathy or dissolution of one identity into the identity of another. As Dillon nicely puts
it: "The nearer Poe approaches to the thoughts which one feels are the thoughts of others,
the more manifest becomes the unique and peculiar quality of his intellect...."65 Poe's
genius is tied up with both his very singular mind and imagination, that which is entirely
private and inaccessible, and a more open, telepathic or multifaceted mind, which seems,
To think of Poe himself as a sort of angel of the odd is to think of him as the kind
perfect sort of fake and faking genius."66 Although Dillon claims that "one never could
62
Elizabeth Phillips, Edgar Allan Poe: An American Imagination (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press,
1979), 12.
Dillon, Edgar Allan Poe, His Genius and Character, 53-4.
Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius, 17.
Dillon, Edgar Allan Poe, His Genius and Character, 11.
Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius, 69.
49
assert with justice that [Poe's genius] is a sham," he later speaks of "the spell of his
genius" as "unresistible" [sic]: "It is only when one has broken the chains of bondage and
escaped from the potency of Poe's spell that a calm contemplation often reveals the
object of his art and the distortion of his thoughts."67 The suggestion is that to understand
Poe's genius is to understand the difference between a fake genius and a genius at faking.
However, in the context of Poe's work it, is always a question of the undecidable status
of the occasion: one can never securely distinguish between being a fake genius or being
a genius at faking.
In so many of Poe's texts (and few of them give the ostensibly easy way out, the
apparent but still convoluted and deceptive it-was-all-a-dream of "The Angel of the
Odd"), we are up against what Derrida calls "a vertiginous kind of truth, an essence of the
truest kind of genius: namely the risk, never ruled out, of an undecidable fakery."68 Part
Dillon, Edgar Allan Poe, His Genius and Character, 35, 56.
Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius, 69. We might here recall a text about the very
dinstinction between a "fake genius" and "a genius at faking," namely "Maelzel's Chess-Player," in The
Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 14., ed. James A. Harrison (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell,
1902), 6-37. For clarity, references cited parenthetically by Poe, page number below. In this piece, Poe
seeks to reveal the hoax behind an infamous chess-playing automaton touring in the United States in 1826-
7, while, at the same, producing another hoax. As Robert Wilcocks notes in Maelzel's Chess Player:
Sigmund Freud and the Rhetoric of Deceit (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), 173: Poe's
proffered solutions to how Maelzel's automaton worked were "wildly wrong," and the solution to the
enigma had been published as early 1834, making clear that Poe's essay was "an ingenious hoax," designed
to be taken as "scientific" truth. In his expose Poe argues that there is a "mind" behind this machine in spite
of the great lengths to which its owner, Maelzel, goes in order to assure the audience to the contrary (Poe,
11). In the first instance, Poe finds it impossible to imagine a machine, an entity capable only of
interpreting data that could respond to the uncertain and indeterminate nature of a game like chess. He then
goes on to list seventeen observations which suggest that there is a person controlling the movements of the
ostensible machine, including the notion that the exaggerated mechanical appearance of the machine, its
imperfection, is there to hide the "true cause" of its operations (Poe, 30). Maelzel, having already shown
himself to be capable of making highly life-like machines, is suspected here of trying to avoid,
unconsciously perhaps, associations with the life-like, through the exaggeration of its artificiality. Poe
wants us to understand that he sees through this ruse, this pretense of pretense. Additionally, Maelzel's
language—or his silence—on the issue of whether the automaton is "pure machine"—proves for Poe that
"a consciousness [Maelzel's] of its not being a pure machine is the reason for his silence—his actions
cannot implicate him in a falsehood—his words may" (Poe, 30). See also Tresch's account in '"The Potent
Magic of Verisimilitude': Edgar Allan Poe within the Mechanical Age," British Journal for the History of
Science 30:160 (1997), 284-288, which underscores the fact that a) the "hoax" had already been uncovered
50
of this sense of fakery comes from the way Poe's characters "resemble automatons
groping in perpetual gloom." But, at the same time, to borrow the words of John Dillon:
"[t]he style is Poe, the man himself, his flesh and blood, recalling to mind what Emerson
said of Montaigne: 'Cut his sentences and they bleed.'"70 Oddness in Poe, we might say,
runs in the blood of his words. His narrators are more lifelike, his tone more real, the
narratorial voice more seductive and transfixing, than his "dramatis personae." His
landscapes are less real than those pasteboard concoctions on the stage. He uproots
location; these places are not American but they are not European either; he produces
texts that are at once multinational and denationalized, aswirl with suggestions of the
American, English, French, and tropical. Poe seems to create his own nation, sui generis,
each text creating its own hoaxical location or world, a kind of textual genius loci.
Perhaps the most obvious example of this can be found in The Narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pym. The geography of Pym's sea voyage resembles no known landscape, and
certainly the description of a temperate "South Pole" reinforces the sense that Poe's
places are of his own invention. While the novel tends towards verisimilitude, presenting
itself as a firsthand account loaded with botanical, nautical, topographical, and zoological
and that b) Poe largely stole his analysis from David Brewster's Letters on Natural Magic. Tresch
concludes, "[rjather than clarifying the boundaries between the machine and the human, which is the
ostensible aim of the expose, the plagiarized, mechanically constructed article adds a further layer of
complexity" (288). Even though it is supposedly a result of the single human mind, writing, Tresch implies,
is subject to a sort of mechanical, automatic repetition (citation, quotation, plagiarism) that cannot firmly
establish the boundary between the human mind as independent and as quasi-mechanical. I will revisit this
question in relation to Mark Twain and notions of mental telegraphy (see Chapter 4, below). Following
Tresch, we might say that the revelation of a hoax brings with it another hoax, one that is more explicitly
bound up with language: the trust in Enlightenment reason, a certain kind of rational argument (of which
Poe's article manifestly pretends to be a product), can easily be exploited and parasited.
69
Dillon, Edgar Allan Poe, His Genius and Character, 53.
7
Dillon, Edgar Allan Poe, His Genius and Character, 35-6.
51
71
detail, is also highly contrived. It is seemingly quite manifestly false or fake, and yet it
was also convincing enough that one reader wrote in his copy of Pym, "I Don't believe A
damned word of this yarn do you Sir" [sic] to keep others from being taken in. The same
reader also wrote under the name of Pym, apparently believing the book was written by
Poe's genius, it would seem, lies precisely in his ability to break with convention,
exhibiting that "character of illimitable freedom" that his contemporary Emerson found
Democracy," Perry Miller argues that Emerson turns from concerns over self-reliance to
illimitable freedom") became quite antithetical to the American democratic project and
Emerson felt the imperative to reconcile this potentially unruly conception of genius with
the rest of his philosophy. As Miller puts it: "[for Emerson] democracy raises the
problem of genius; genius the problem of Napoleon and the American politician; they in
turn raise the problem of democracy and of America."7 Genius could, for example, give
rise to a Napoleonic tyrannical figure. Emerson found in the concept of the genius,
according to Miller, "methods of its own which to others may seem shocking or
71
Cf John Tresch, '"The Potent Magic of Verisimilitude,'" 275-90, on what he calls "potential ambiguity
and polyvalence of the rhetoric of science" through a reading of several works by Poe. Tresch considers
Poe's use of the hoax form to constitute one way in which he "exploits]" the language of science,
underscoring the relationship between scientific and literary discourses (275).
72
See Richard Kopley, Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, xviii. Cf
also Gesa Mackenthun, Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature (London:
Routledge, 2004), who writes: "Poe himself called his only novel a 'silly book' and a hoax some time after
its mediocre reception by an audience addicted to 'true' travel accounts" (191 n. 36).
73
Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted by Perry Miller, "Emersonian Genius and American Democracy," The
New England Quarterly 26:1 (1953), 31.
74
Miller, "Emersonian Genius and American Democracy," 35.
52
incoherent or pernicious." Miller suggests that genius as considered in the nineteenth
century was at once too "odd," too "fantastic," and too "brutal" to be left alone; and so
Emerson in effect ironed out the singular and vanguard or maverick qualities of the
genius and redefined it as a "representative man" (even Napoleon, whom Emerson found
especially problematic for his theory of genius, was fitted into this design): the genius
may not have good manners but he would be subject to fundamental laws and the
"universal mind."76 Genius became, in Emerson's rendition, "[t]he man who hath access
to this [universal] Mind and worships it, receiving its influx with joy and obeying it,
becoming passive to it for love of it."77 "Genius," Emerson was able to write, "is never
anomalous. The greatest genius is he in whom other men own the presence of a larger
portion of their common nature than is in them."78 The genealogy of American genius
through Emerson turns genius into a democratic but also a nationalist concept, for "the
man of genius apprises us not so much of his wealth as of his commonwealth... A sort of
high patriotism warms us, as if one should say, 'That's the way they do things in my
7Q
country.""7 It was essential for Emerson to be able to connect the notion of "genius" with
the U.S. (or "my country") to make it something indigenous to America and not only
something from Europe. In addition, genius had to take a form that was not revolutionary
in the way that Napoleon's genius presented itself. The last thing the young nation
53
"must be, in some sense, a patriotic triumph." Geniuses should no longer be thought of
so that even the ostensibly lawless and individual genius adheres to a larger pattern of
rhetorically asked: "Is it, or is it not a fact that the air of Democracy agrees better with
mere Talent than with Genius?" Democracy, it would seem, is better suited to the more
tempered and indeed less odd characteristic of talent or even skill. Genius, it would seem,
is better suited to a different thinking of sovereignty and politics. We might consider this
in relation to what Shoshana Felman calls Poe's "genius effect," which she explains as
"the impression of some undefinable but compelling force to which the reader is
ism as reading effect or of responding to what I have been calling Poe's pose. Poe's
writing makes something happen, its genius is its irruption: it is a question of what
54
Counter America
What is perhaps at issue in the oddness of Poe's writing, the very air of its oddness,
counter-hoax. The singularity of Poe's writing, its literature-ism, its oddness and
conception of the term, including Emerson's) has to do with its foregrounding and
fake and what is genius, a countering of all the ruses that enable a humanist, nationalist
ideology of literature.
To be witness to the spectacle of a world that does not exist in reality through
finding oneself in a closed fictional space that, paradoxically, seeps into, or even
remakes, the so-called real world: this is the experience of reading a Poe text. The link
between Poe and sovereignty, on the hand, and sovereignty and hoax, on the other, has
leanings in particular, have been much touted, but there has been comparatively little
85
See Bennington, "Derrida and Politics," in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed.
Tom Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 193-212, qt. from 199.
55
critical work done on Poe's "predilection for hoaxing" and its relation to questions of
These topics turn, above all perhaps, on the question of the nation-state and
national literature. It has become commonplace to note the injunction in the mid-
nineteenth century by Emerson and others to create and nurture a sovereign national
literature, calling for American writers, as Emerson put it, "[to] look from under its
[America's] iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something
better than the exertions of mechanical skill."87 The project, it would seem, was not
completed until 1941, when F. O. Matthiessen wrote his definitive book chronicling the
Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman. It has even become commonplace to
note his elisions, most glaringly perhaps Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe.88
Dickinson is given a paltry three references. Although Poe stacks up nearly two dozen,
most are passing and often in reference to another writer's work (for example, the notion
that Hawthorne's tales were "thrice told" rather than "twice told" or Poe's objection to
century after Baudelaire's translations of Poe into French—but that, perhaps, is precisely
the point: Matthiessen, in the line of Emerson, was most concerned with a sovereign
86
Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit, 175.
87
Ralph Waldo Emerson. "The American Scholar" (1837), in Essays and Poems (New York: Library of
America, 1996), 53.
88
F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman
(London: Oxford University Press, 1941).
89
Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 218, 247.
56
It would seem, however, that Poe would not have minded his exclusion from the
In throwing totally off that "authority," whose voice had so long been so
sacred, we even surpassed, and by much our original folly. But the
watchword now was, "a national literature!"—as if any true literature
could be "national"—as if the world at large were not the only proper
stage for the literary historio. We became, suddenly, the merest and
maddestpartizans in letters.. .90
What could be a clearer call for a sort of deconstructive or thinking of nationality and
sovereignty? All the world's a stage for literature; it cannot be bound by the borders of a
nation-state and certainly not used as a tool in reinforcing state sovereignty. Echoing
Poe's sentiment over 150 years later, Wai Chee Dimock in Through Other Continents
argues: "Literary relations are idiosyncratic relations; they make time idiosyncratic. They
bring distant worlds close to home, give them a meaningfulness that seems local and
immediate even though they could not have been so initially, objectively."91 As Dimock
goes on to observe, the act of reading thus runs counter to the sovereignty of the nation-
state:
90
Edgar Allan Poe, "Exordium to Critical Notices" (1842), in Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, ed. G.
R. Thompson (New York: Library Classics of the United States, 1984), 1027.
91
Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2006), 133.
Dimock, Through Other Continents, 133.
57
This sense of something "more chancy" corresponds with what I have been trying to
elucidate here under the rubric of the "odd occasion" in Poe. Dimock questions the idea
of a national literature, in a way consonant with Poe, arguing against the notion that
"literature...is the product of one nation and one nation alone, analyzable within its
Crucially, these ties are temporal as much as they are spatial. Dimock adapts the term
"deep time" to describe the frame in which texts from massively different historical and
notion of "genre" becomes for Dimock, at one point in her book, an explicit alternative to
texts. She cites Derrida on genre: "As soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a
norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, once must not risk impurity, anomaly, or
monstrosity." She adds: "This sort of border policing is madness, he says, for the law of
much so that the law is honored only in its breach."96 Instead, Dimock proposes that we
understand genre "less as a law, a rigid taxonomic landscape, and more as a self-
58
obsoleting system, a provisional set that will always be bent and pulled and stretched by
its many subsets."97 Such self-obsolescence and stretching out correspond to the
expansive, indeed effectively limitless perspectives of what she calls "deep time." "Deep
time" becomes a way of thinking about time and history which is not simply linear,
chronological, and western, so that texts and authors are not associated with one another
or grouped together based on these rather restrictive and, she argues, culturally reductive
boundaries, as well as beyond any conventional notions of genre, "binding events and
no
easily be added to her study. Indeed the logic of the "odd occasion" in Poe allows us to
think about his work in terms of a "deep" future as much as a deep past. For in a sense,
literature come into being and look forward to, prefigure or usher in, for instance, the
writings of Helene Cixous (in particular, for example, in Manhattan), but also more
generally the sort of genre-crossing or generic inventiveness of what, in the first section
of this chapter, I called "fooliterature," or literature as "raising the wind," in other words,
in hoax literature. The concept of hoax literature, as I am trying to suggest here and
genre, genesis, and sovereignty, including the nation-state and the self-identical, unitary
self.
97
Dimock, Through Other Continents, 73-4.
98
Dimock, Through Other Continents, 3-4.
59
In his recent book, Intimacy in America (2005), Paul Coviello suggests that
whereas other nineteenth century American authors had once been interested in the
possibilities of a nation-state, the nation, for Poe, was "something too horrible to be
citizenry might be imagined."100 "National belonging" for these writers, then, would have
national, that is signifying connection, commonality, or intimacy among many. For Poe,
argues Coviello, the case was slightly different. Rather than looking for common ground,
it is "the near-impossibility of any intimacy in Poe, of any human proximity that is not
attachment among the mutually anonymous—virtually unthinkable for Poe."101 Poe was
that "what we identify in Poe is his idiom, even more than his personae."102 Poe's
narrators share not "a single pathology but a single rhetoric—a single style—of self-
rhetoric," points to a special kind of singularity in Poe. More than any other writer Poe
stands out, for Coviello, as singular, and indeed odd—emphatically odd, I would like to
99
Peter Coviello, Intimacy in America (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2005), 89.
100
Coviello, Intimacy in America, 3.
101
Coviello, Intimacy in America, 61.
102
Coviello, Intimacy in America, 64.
103
Coviello, Intimacy in America, 64.
60
add, in that singular fashion that I am seeking to elucidate in this chapter. Poe is his own
odd man out. He simply does not fit in; he plays by rules of his own making. Coviello
calls also draws attention to "the odd indeterminacy of tone in Poe."104 Like Daniel
Hoffman and Jonathan Elmer, Coviello notes the way in which "you can never be quite
sure, when treading on the taut surfaces of Poe's prose, of the degree to which he is, or is
There was much questioning in the 1840s over what constitutes not only a
Elizabeth Phillips puts it: "[Alexis] de Tocqueville [was] in the air."106 Among the
questions de Tocqueville was posing were questions about sovereignty, about how
sovereignty can be held by the majority of a group ("the people") rather than by a
singular, god-like individual. However, even this "new" version of sovereignty was
fundamentally and crucially a Christian concept, above all in its being invested in the
For the principle or phantasm of sovereignty is, in the end, always haunted
by the phantasm of a divine sovereignty at the heart of political power, not
only as it once was found in the monarch but in modern democracies in
the form of the people—which is held, like every sovereign, to be
1 07
In modern democracies, the "sovereign" (and certainly the "sovereignty of the people")
does not exist alone but in a long line extending from God, to the monarch, to the
61
majority, to the individual. An individual does not have sovereignty as an individual, but
rather in, or as part of, a mass. This mass in turn paradoxically relies on the original
majority of people) and "state sovereignty" (wherein states acquire the kind of
sovereignty in the federal arena as an individual has in the mass, but also hold a certain
amount of sovereignty, apart from the federal government to determine their own laws).
A state's sovereignty can be overruled or checked by the federal government and vice
democratic sovereignty of the majority in itself modifies the conventional political notion
of sovereignty as belonging to just one monarch or leader, disembodying the concept and
making it, in effect, the power of no one. However, the establishment of this dual form of
sovereignty (state and federal) contradicts and transforms the traditional singularity and
The notion of a sovereign self or self as sovereign was, of course, a product of the
Enlightenment and very much on center stage throughout the period of the creation of the
United States. Emerson, in "The American Scholar" (1837) remarks on the presiding
"political movement," which shows the "importance given to the single person."108 He
views this positively but only in a tentative fashion (because, as we have already begun to
see in our discussion of genius, too much individuality does not serve the community or
108
Emerson, "The American Scholar," 70.
62
his call for an "American scholar": "Every thing that tends to insulate the individual,—to
surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his,
and man shall treat with man as sovereign state with sovereign state;—tends to true union
as well as greatness." This spirit forms the basis of the nation (and indeed the U.S.
Constitution). And yet because the individual must submit to the rules and laws of the
sovereign state, the ostensible sovereignty of the individual, which is mimicked in the
larger state structures, is also necessarily dislocated, placed in the higher authority of the
state.
This double-bind (the sovereignty of the one, on the one hand, and of the
majority, on the other) was not only not lost on Poe, but also became a central trope in his
writing. "The Man of the Crowd" (1840) is perhaps the most obvious example of the
individual's loss of sovereignty to the much larger and more powerful mob. Likewise,
being "at much trouble in impressing the Count [a revived mummy from ancient Egypt]
with a due sense of the advantages...enjoyed in living where there was suffrage ad
libitum, and no king."111 The mummy reports that thirteen colonies in ancient Egypt also
drafted an "ingenuous constitution," but it ended in the "most odious and insupportable
63
despotism that ever was heard of upon the face of the Earth." It is fiction, of course,
impossible and fanciful fiction, but what is Poe telling us? At issue here seems to be the
sense that the inevitable fallout of e pluribus unum would be a single individual or small
group taking over and pronouncing the will of the majority. Correspondingly, in
"Mellonta Tauta" (1849), we read that Pundit, a passenger on board the hot air balloon
"Skylark" (an event supposedly taking place in 2848), "has been occupied all day in the
himself confederacy..."113 This skeptical or even ridiculing stance toward both the
"every-man-for-himself' (that is, the individual as sovereign) and "confederacy" (that is,
and dislocating "stance" that might be heard in the phrase "Poe's pose."
In transporting himself and us to another time deep in the future (2848), the
narrator of "Mellonta Tauta" is in a sense doing precisely what Wai Chee Dimock also
urges us to do in Through Other Continents, that is, to get outside of our all-too-limited
frames of reference, temporal or otherwise. Poe was particularly alert to the fact that
people exist en masse, while at the same time each person refuses to be anything but an
individual, at the center. His fiction in turn immeasurably complicates this tension in its
Dimock has called "internal difference," in other words of the ways in which the
individual (and above all, in this case, the figure of the narrator himself) is always already
112
Poe, "Some Words with a Mummy," 1194.
113
"Mellonta Tauta" (1849), in Tales and Sketches, vol. 2 (1843-1849), ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 1299.
64
divided, double, impishly perverse, internally at odds, haunted and other.114 The situation
in America (or in Allegania, to recall what was formally proposed, in 1845, as a possible
"proper name" for the U.S.) was also very different from England.115 In England, as Poe
himself puts it, "satire abounds, because the people find a proper target in the aristocracy,
whom they ("the people") regard as a distant race of beings, with whom they have
nothing in common..." Thus, they delight in "even the most virulent abuse of the upper
classes with a gusto undiminished by any feeling that they (the people) have a personal
concern in it."116 What is satire in England turns into hoax in America. It is as if the
distance between "people" and "the aristocracy" in England is sufficient for the satire not
to reflect back onto the "people." The hoax, I would argue, has a strange way of drawing
"people" in. In America the "aristocracy," at least in the British sense, is missing. In other
words, the American scene of hoax is, in Poe's terms, a more democratic: class is not the
issue or the object of critique. Anyone but also everyone (leveled and grouped together)
can be a target for the Poe hoax. However, as Poe writes, "all this [is]... more verisimilar
than true... no individual ever considers himself as one of the mass. He, the individual, is
the pivot—the immovable and central pivot, on which all the rest of the world spins
round."117
Poe shows how the pivot is the point, "immovable and central," and the point is
odd. He targets not only the individual, but the individual en masse, that is, each
114
See Wai Chee Dimock, "Feminism, New Historicism and the Reader," in Readers and Reading, ed.
Andrew Bennett (New York: Longman, 1995), 124.
115
See Kenneth Silverman, Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New York:
Harper Perennial, 1991), 248.
1,6
Edgar Allan Poe, "Satirical Poems" (1845), in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 12, ed.
James A. Harrison (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902), 107-9.
117
Poe, "Satirical Poems," 107.
65
individual as individual but also, crucially, in relation to others. The hoax (in literature),
rather than a parody, works in this democratic situation: it creates a kind of public which
is ostensibly centered on the individual, but turns on the hoaxicality of the notion of the
"sovereign subject." As Jonathan Elmer writes, in his essay "The Cultural Logic of the
Poe's work should be understood not under the sign of parody, which requires its
audience to have a fully delineated sense of the parody's separation from the
object of parody, but rather as hoax, that is, as a form in which the very grounds
for understanding the form are put into suspension."118
It is in this context that I want to elaborate the notion of hoax literature. "The grounds for
understanding" are the very ground one stands on, what one is grounded in, the self itself.
This is not a matter of parody for, as Elmer suggests, a parody can be separated from the
real thing, so that if one individual is the subject of a parody, that individual knows it and
sovereign subject of a hoax, in Poe. To put it another way, the subject of a hoax is always
Hoax Literature
I want, then, to begin to formulate a theory of literature that takes into account questions
of both sovereignty and the hoax. Hoax literature is fundamentally bound up with the
sovereignty, as laid out by the U.S. Constitution, on the other. I choose "hoax literature"
118
Elmer, Reading at The Social Limit, 180.
66
to describe Poe's style rather than "literary hoax" because a literary hoax is a rather
familiar, well-worn, and easily recuperated term, usually denoting a text by an author
pretending to be someone other than who he or she is or a text trying to pass off
the Spectrists in the 1920s, the hoax holocaust memoirs of Binjamin Wilkomirski, and
more recently, James Frey's fake autobiography A Million Little Pieces.119 As I suggest
in the Introduction, one of the attractions of hoax literature, by contrast, is its very
ambiguity or duplicity: it can refer both to the literature on a hoax (the writings, critical
noted that the OED defines "hoax" as both a verb ("to deceive or take in by inducing to
erroneous, told in such a manner as to impose upon the credulity of the victim"). The
hoax as we are most familiar with it is perpetuated by someone or some group on another
person or group. For example, there is the infamous Dreadnought hoax (1910) in which
Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephens) and friends pulled off impersonating foreign
dignitaries to the British Navy. More recently in Great Britain there was a well-
publicized "hoax call": the comedian Rory Bremner phoned a cabinet minister, Margaret
Beckett, pretending to be the Chancellor Gordon Brown, and fooled her for ten minutes
119
For an entertaining and fascinating account of the Spectrists, see William Jay Smith, The Spectra Hoax
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961); Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a
Wartime Childhood (New York: Pantheon, 1996); James Frey, A Million Little Pieces (New York: Random
House, 2003).
120
Cf Adrian Stephen's first person account of the hoax: The Dreadnought Hoax (London: The Hogarth
Press, 1936), especially 16-47.
67
or more, evidently eliciting some politically embarrassing "personal" views she thought
she was confidentially sharing with the Chancellor. The British media more or less
191
comforting about these sort of hoaxes is that they are somehow cordoned off from the
"real" world—once identified as hoaxes they are (at least ostensibly) contained,
With Poe, however, things are more complicated and paradoxical. This becomes
clear even in the case of what might initially appear to be a conventional news hoax. In
1844, Poe wrote, but published anonymously, a "news extra," for The Sun, reporting the
successful transatlantic voyage of a hot air balloon. The hoax was largely unsuccessful:
readers were generally "unimpressed," seeing it for what it was: hot air.122 Although the
story fell flat as a piece of "news" and was easily identified as a hoax, it lived on as a
short story. It was given the title of "The Balloon Hoax" in Griswold's edition of Poe's
works in 1850.123 Significantly, the title (and specifically the designation of "hoax") and
consequently the text's status as "literature" were brought in after the event. What is
happening, in fact, to this word "hoax" when it is put in quotes, when it is made into the
title of a story? In the case of "The Balloon Hoax," the literary or the notion of literature
haunts the hoax, and, by the same movement, the "hoax" comes to inscribe itself in
literature as such. In no other text by Poe are we presented with such an explicit
121
< http://news.bbc.co.Uk/2/hi/uk news/politics/6394553.stm> (accessed 30 August 2009)
122
Poe, "The Balloon Hoax" (1848), in Tales and Sketches, vol. 2 (1843-1849), ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000),1066-7.
123
See Mabbott's note to Poe, "The Balloon Hoax," 1068.
68
denomination of hoax become literature and literature as hoax: it marks the birth, in a
So far as I have been able to determine, Poe is the first writer to use "hoax" to
describe a literary work. In a note to "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall"
(1835), he writes:
Strictly speaking there is but little similarity between the above sketchy
triffle and the celebrated "Moon Story" of Mr. Locke; but as both have the
character of hoaxes (although one is in a tone of banter, the other of
downright earnest) and as both hoaxes are on the same subject, the
moon—moreover, as both attempt to give plausibility by scientific
detail—the author of "Hans Pfaall" thinks it necessary to say, in self
defense, that his own yew d'espirit was published in The Southern Literary
Messenger, about three weeks before the commencement of Mr. L's in
The New York Sun.
Poe here is referring to another hoax, a "real" hoax, the "Moon Story," promulgated by
Richard Adams Locke in August 1835 in The New York Sun, which bore several
similarities to Poe's account: they both recount a balloon journey to the moon and were
ironic, somewhat hedging, faintly humorous language whereby Poe speaks of texts
having "the character of hoaxes" (emphasis added) rather than simply calling them
hoaxes. Poe shows a special interest in the question and nature of tone, where he
distinguishes between "a tone of banter" and a tone of "downright earnest." I will come
back to this issue of tone toward the end of the chapter, but for now let us simply remark
on how "Hans Pfaall" has lived on as literature, and Richard Locke's piece, as a hoax.
What I am calling hoax literature brings into question the border between hoax and
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" (1835), in The Complete Works of
Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 2, ed. James Harrison (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902), 103.
69
literature; it entails, on the one hand, a hoaxing of the very concept of literature, what it
"is" and what its place, status, and significance in the world might be, and, on the other, a
complicating and even countering of the notion of hoax as such. It is a matter, then, of
primarily textual or not, of reckoning with the "suspended relation to meaning and
reference" that structures any hoax, and that is indeed its condition of possibility, the very
and exacerbating the uncertainties that can be generated by a piece of writing vis-a-vis its
status as fiction or fact, fantasy or autobiography, and so on. What "The Balloon Hoax"
and "Hans Pfaall" point towards is another thinking of literature and the hoax, the
I want now briefly to return to the remarkable essay by Maurice Blanchot, "The Great
Hoax" ("La grande tromperie") (1957), as a way of circling around to a reading of "The
Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" and "The Fall of the House of Usher." In that essay
Blanchot argues that "the hoax" has become less something that happens between one
individual and another in a closed arena of deception and revelation and more a sort of
generalized condition of being. It is all around us, everywhere, always. The great hoax, in
Blanchot's terms, has no obvious limits: nothing exceeds or escapes it except, perhaps,
70
"literature," a certain conception of literature in the service of what I have been calling
Melville and Twain, later in this dissertation.) The great hoax is not, as Blanchot puts it,
"a question of us and our responsibility with regard to our dreams or our souls"—as it
may have once been, or as it may be suggested by the OED, in which there is a deception
or a fabrication and a victim and an agent. For Blanchot, and I would argue for any
critical project of thinking about sovereignty today, "now it is the whole wide world that
is at issue."126
of all rooted in and as an effect of language. As he writes in his opening: "our words and
meaning which we do not detect.. ,."127 He locates the deception and the influence, what
Hegel might call "an alien power,"128 not in another stronger-willed individual but as an
unconscious, an air of hoax that has become, in effect, the very air we breathe.
Through the combined oddity of his fiction and his evident fascination with the
notion of hoax, Poe came to be, I would argue, the first writer in American literature,
indeed in literature in English, at once to testify to and to theorize a notion of "the great
hoax" in literary works. Hoax literature, in short, begins with Poe. The stakes of this are
perhaps legible in an anecdote regarding one of his most notorious "hoaxes" and most
126
Maurice Blanchot, "The Great Hoax," trans. Ann Smock in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland
(Oxford and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1996), 162.
127
Blanchot, "The Great Hoax," 157.
128
See Hegel's Philosophy of Mind (1830), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 117.
71
read "stories" exhibits. On November 30, 1846, Arch Ramsay, "druggist, of Stonehaven,"
Scotland, wrote Poe, asking if "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" was a hoax. In
reply, Poe wrote on December 30: " 'Hoax' is precisely the word suited to Valdemar's
case... Some few persons believe it—but / do not—and don't you." Perhaps
understandably, Ramsay did not know what to make of this and wrote Poe again on April
14, 1847, "I thought you could at once affirm or deny it... this appears not to be the
,,129
case.
This anecdote succinctly illustrates what I have been calling Poe's pose. It
exhibits not only a characteristic uncertainty vis-a-vis the believability of his tales, the
possibility that the substance of this "case" was true, not only what Thomas Mabbott calls
will come back to Mesmer again in a moment or two—but also, more radically, an
unsettling of the status of Poe's story as literature and a questioning as to who or what
determines what is literature and what is not, what is literary and what is a hoax, leaving,
in the end, the question suspended in the air.130 The uncertain playfulness or playful
uncertainty of the Valdemar text as "hoax" has fascinating implications for thinking
about literature and the literary in more general terms, the way in which the story as hoax
129
See Mabbott's notes to Poe, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845), in Tales and Sketches, vol.
2 (1843-1849), ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 1228.
Further references cited in text.
There is also the ultimately self-reflexive power of Poe's subject matter, an almost mesmeric effect it
has on readers to believe, to be taken up and taken in. John Tresch suggests that reading "Valdemar" and a
related piece on Mesmerism, "Mesmeric Revelation" (1844), "as enactments of mesmerism upon the reader
would present Poe's reflexive play on the concept of mechanization in another suggestive idiom" ('"The
Potent Magic of Verisimilitude,'" 284). A conception of the strange and intoxicating effects of reading Poe,
however, need not be confined to explicit cases of Mesmerism, as I have tried to suggest in my discussion
of "The Angel of the Odd" (above).
72
It would be part of the nature of Poe's text, as I am trying to trace it here, that it
goes beyond merely a conventional sense of "hoax," the sense to which Ramsay and
others seem to refer, and engages us with the more pervasive and more insidious kind of
questions of sovereignty are posed, analyzed, and, in a sense, experimented upon. In the
tale's very figure of mesmerism, Poe takes up questions of self, of the authority or
sovereignty of the "I"—the "I" in literature and the "I" in real life—suggesting, perhaps
above all, the ways in which one "I" necessarily dissolves or decomposes into the other.
The moment of the fictional "I" which is supposedly a hoax (i.e. pretends to be real but is
not) is not so decisive, so atomistically separate from the "I" of real life that is
purportedly not a hoax. It is a question of what happens to the ' T of the narrator and the
denouement, the moment from which all unravels and the supposed source of amazement
for readers. For how can one say, "I am dead"? Can you pronounce yourself dead? This
utterance became a philosophical talking point (or, perhaps, a "talking pivot") thanks to
an essay by Roland Barthes, who unequivocally averred that "[one] can't say T am
dead.'"131 In 1966 in a celebrated response first pronounced in public, in fact, in Poe's old
haunt, Baltimore, Derrida counters Barthes's supposition. Far from seeing "I am dead" as
131
Barthes, "To Write: An Intransitive Verb?" in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of
Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1972), 143.
73
the condition for a true act of language is my being able to say "I am
dead".... [T]he power of meaning of language is, to a point, independent
of the possibility of its object. "I am dead" has a meaning [even] if it is
obviously false. "I am dead" is an intelligible sentence. Therefore, "I am
dead" is not only a possible proposition for one who is known to be living,
but the very condition for the living person to speak is for him [sic] to be
able to say, significantly, "I am dead."
What is interesting here, in particular, is how Derrida's remark applies equally to both
Valdemar and the narrator. Being able to say "I am dead" is the condition of language,
rather than a miraculous incident in this one case. A little ironically perhaps, given the
remarkable powers of close reading evidenced in so many of his texts, Derrida does not
relate this proposition back to a reading of Poe's text as such. It is nevertheless clear that
what Derrida's comment here implies is a reading of "Valdemar" as a text the hoaxicality
of which goes all the way down—"I am dead" becomes an utterance appropriate to any
speaker. The hoax of the text, the text as hoax, resides not only in its perplexing
manipulations of the apparent language and laws of science, but also in its eerie
revelation of a sort of deadly play of language in which the speech act (here specifically
What happens with Poe's response to the druggist Arch Ramsay is, above all
perhaps, a certain putting into suspension of notions of authorship and authority. The
author is presented as something other than the sovereign principle through which every
pronouncement about a text must pass and pass^/br truth. Poe doubles himself, he makes
132
Derrida's response to Barthes, The Structuralist Controversy, 156.
133
Cf Scott Peeples, who argues that "[Poe] dissolves categories, often spoofing his own style in an
ostensibly serious tale or making a 'serious' claim about human understanding or the afterlife in a hoax or
broadly comic tale." See The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe, (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2007), 82.
74
himself odd: there is a Poe who knows and a Poe who does not know, who hints at the
out-of-controlness of his own text, at the way in which any text has a sort of life of its
own. It is as if Poe were saying, in his letter to Arch Ramsay, "I am dead," while at the
same time of course testifying to the contrary in this act of saying or writing. For, in time,
"Valdemar" became known as a hoax, in spite of or quite apart from Poe.134 Who decides
both? The suspension in which Poe leaves the answers to these questions could indeed be
said to mimic and mirror the suspension of Valdemar in his life-death state.
It seems over-determined that the subject matter of the text in question should
concern precisely issues of individuality and sovereignty. We might regard the question
of the sovereignty of the individual as part of, as Poe's narrator puts it, "[the] immensely
important character of [the] consequences" of being able to arrest death, of being able to
take ultimate control over another being (1233). If mesmeric intervention could take
would have earth-shattering effects, not only on any definition of science, but also on any
science might appear to allow man to acquire a quite new sovereignty, namely the
sovereignty of God. Thomas Mabbott suggests, in the mid-nineteenth century, there was
"mesmerism," wherein one person, the mesmerist, has the ability to affect and control
another's mind and/ or body (1229-30). In her admirable social and cultural history of
134
Cf Walsh, Sins Against Science, 101.
75
this literally fascinating topic, Alison Winter describes how mesmerism "could transform
a conscious individual into a living marionette." She shows how, far from being a
during this time."136 Notably democratic in its effect, anyone from "factory worker to
From the 1830s to the 1860s belief and interest in, as well as the influence of, mesmerism
doctor, familiar and comfortable with scientific terminology.138 The narrator's final
qualification that he will give the facts "as far as I comprehend them myself (1233) is a
particularly nice example of the maddening and delightful aspects of reading Poe or of
on us, the readers caught in his textual tunnels. Even though the narrator evidently
presents himself as a scientist or a doctor, with the air of authority and knowledge that
comes along with such a designation, there is also the peculiarity of mesmerism as at
once essentially unprovable and also undisprovable, the sense that, in the mid 1800s, the
Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), 3.
136
Winter, Mesmerized, 4-5.
137
Winter, Mesmerized, 1.
138
Cf Roland Barthes, "Textual Analysis of Poe's Valdemar," in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist
Reader, ed. Robert Young (Boston: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1981), 140.
76
validity and authority of empiricism was being questioned and disturbed, that all science
to the forefront "the larger question of who could pronounce upon any scientific and
medical controversy."139 Her use of the verb "pronounce" here is apt, suggestive as it is
of a language that is at once medical and performative—precisely the sort that Poe
exploits in the logic of "pronouncing dead" or "dead but alive" in the "Valdemar" text.
Furthermore, Winter argues: "rather than occupying a different world from orthodox or
legitimate intellectual work, animal magnetism (the original term for what has become
known as mesmerism) called into question the very definition of legitimacy itself."140
Because there was no "scientific or medical orthodoxy" at the time, mesmerism could not
simply be relegated to the fringe but became "a means—a 'medium'—for Victorians to
explore and even to forge definitions of authority wherever they were open to
question."141
that will not go away. As Julian Jaynes writes in The Origins of Consciousness in the
139
Winter, Mesmerized, 4.
140
Winter, Mesmerized, 5.
141
Winter, Mesmerized, 6. The play on "forge"—to construct but also with possible connotations of
counterfeiting and fabricating—is perhaps also worth noting here.
77
type of behavioral control.
his book Suspensions of Perception: "Modern suspicion of hypnosis begins with Hegel's
reflections in 1830 on Mesmer and 'magnetic states,' which Hegel saw as an illness."143
To quote Hegel:
The very notion of "consciousness" to which Hegel refers would be divided, multiplied,
transformed and diffused so that one would not possess a single, unified consciousness—
the mesmerizer and mesmerist alike, sovereign and subject. What is more, this happens
even within oneself, so that it is not necessarily a matter of another taking control: there
is division from the start, between "the psychical" and "the intellectual." It is not just that
such phenomena renders such unified individuality untenable, failing or falling at the
origin.
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1976), 379.
14
Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1999), 70 n. 172.
See Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, 116-7. Qtd. also Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 199.
78
To trace the history of hoax is to see it evolve from the powerful control of one
individual agent over another, as described in the work of Hegel (and as exemplified in
mesmeric state: we know we are living a hoax but we do not, for the most part, appear to
mind. This hoax is, in Blanchot's view, everywhere, starting with the language that we
(think we) use but in truth just as effectively uses us. The alien, even autonomous
possibilities of language here connect with the magical connotations of "hoax," the sense
of a kind of hex on and of language, a kind of mesmeric trance wherein we are, for
example, made to say at once more than we might think we are saying and nothing at
all.145 As Blanchot writes: "We hardly ever say anything; we just move like fugitives into
even speaking it, but letting ourselves be spoken in it or simply letting it speak in our
suspended, "a living marionette." The speaker thus becomes, as Blanchot writes in the
The etymology of hoax is ghostly and uncertain but may have a certain magical or mesmerizing root.
The OED notes that the sense and form of "hoax" (as a verb), which appears slightly before 1800 suggest
that it may be a contracted version of the verb "hocus" ("to play a trick on," "hoax"), itself a contraction of
"hocus-pocus" (to conjure, "play tricks on," and, as a noun, the appellation of a juggler or magician), but
that there is no direct evidence of a connection. In another interesting etymological twist, however, the
OED observes that "hocus" was revived in the nineteenth century, "perhaps," it ventures, "under the
influence of hoax."
146
Blanchot, "The Great Hoax," 164.
147
Blanchot, "The Great Hoax," 164.
79
Failing, faltering, falling. A hoax always must fall, curtains parted, the hoax
nonetheless perhaps never total. For it is much like the "peep behind the scenes" that Poe
promises in his essay "Philosophy of Composition," "at the elaborate and vacillating
140
show how his poem, "The Raven," was constructed as precisely and determinately as a
But (as many commentators have pointed out) Poe's essay, though a rich and compelling
"a peep behind the scenes" but suggesting an overly rigid, "too elaborate architecture" (to
conclusion that the "too elaborate architecture" of "The Raven," as presented in "The
Philosophy of Composition," can be considered as "one more hoax from the master
Composition" as itself a sort of hoax, but also points the way to a certain practice of
Edgar Allan Poe, "Philosophy of Composition," in The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings,
ed. David Galloway. (London: Penguin, 1986), 431. Further page references cited in the text.
149
See Timmerman, "House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher" 229; see also
Scott Peeples, who writes " 'The Philosophy of Composition'... is as much hoax and mystification as it is a
sincere attempt to articulate a theory of writing" {The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe, 66). Rachel Polonsky,
in "Poe's Aesthetic Theory," considers the notion that "The Philosophy of Composition" has been
considered by others as more "hoax" than "self-deception" (see A Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan
Poe, ed. Kevin Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 46).
150
Timmerman, "House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher," 229-30.
80
composition as hoax. It is as if Poe is letting it all show and showing how much writing,
above all writing "worth the name," is really just a trick, a sham, the fabrication of an
One could imagine instead that Poe might have called his essay "The Philosophy
dissolution or decomposition. With the hoax there is always a sense of falling away,
emptying, being undone. As Jonathan Elmer puts it, the experience of a hoax is that of
"the void." We might recall the way Elmer describes the process whereby parody
This is, to recall Blanchot's view, an effect of all language, of, in particular, the way in
which any statement comes also with an underlying meaning, as an effect of the "great
hoax." Because language comes to us supplied with a meaning we do not detect, we must
forms of deception, superficial and deep. We know that it is all about decomposition, we
know that something is failing and falling, but we can never be sure where the hoax
began or indeed when exactly it (the experience of the hoax, life itself) can be
151
Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit, 187.
5
Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit, 180.
81
Thus, as so often in Poe, the beginning is in the end and the end is a massive
literally, making rotten. According to the OED, in an unusually poetic formulation, it is:
rotting, corruption."153
decomposition as a way of thinking about the hoaxical power of Poe's tales in a more
general way. A few brief remarks, then, apropos another story, "The Fall of the House of
Usher." Critics have not, to my knowledge, shown any special interest in the similarity of
the endings of "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Facts in the Case of M
violent dissolution of the house into the lurid tarn. But there is in "Usher" more than a
hint of the decomposing, the stench of final decay in the suffocating air: the "decayed
trees, and the grey wall and the silent tarn—a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish,
faintly discernible, and leaden hued"; there is discoloration, crumbling stones, the house
153
This definition appears in the Second Edition (1989). The draft revision (March 2009) has modified the
wording of the definition slightly, taking away, I think, some of the poetry: "The state of being putrid;
rottenness; the process or action of putrefying or rotting; spec, the decomposition by bacteria of dead
animal or plant tissue, which becomes foul-smelling as a result" (sense 1). "Corruption" is now split off,
specified as "moral corruption," listed with "decline" and "decay," (sense 4).
154
Edgar Allan Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), in Tales and Sketches, vol. 1 (1831-1842),
ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 400. Further page
references cited in text.
82
claims, "gave little token of instability" (400). "Perhaps," as he goes on to say, "the eye
of the scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which,
extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down in a zigzag direction
We are left suspended with this contradictory description of the house as at once
falling apart and yet still seemingly structurally sound, except for this "barely
perceptible" crack. The house falls before it falls; decomposition is written into the fabric
of the work, both the text and the building, from the start. There is much to prefigure the
"fall" of the house, the fall that is announced in the very title of course, but also the
falling of the shield upon the floor in the story which the narrator is reading to Usher
(414) and the falling of Madeline Usher, escaped from her tomb, onto her brother,
Roderick (416-17). This prefiguring occurs even in the opening paragraph of the story,
when the narrator recalls the "utter depression of soul" produced by looking at the house,
comparing it with "the after-dream of the reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into
every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil" (397). There can be little doubt,
here, that Poe's use of "lapse" plays on the Latin sense of "fall"—as if, indeed, there is no
prelapsarian time either in or for this work. This peculiar "lapse" is then again redoubled
The house of course does fall, as the title promises. It falls in its title, and its title
falls in. After Roderick Usher and the narrator appear "accidentally" to bury Madeline
Usher alive, the narrator describes seeing a "radiance," as he is racing away from the
house:
83
The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now
shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure of which I have
before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag
direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened—there
came a fierce breath of the whirlwind—the entire orb of the satellite burst
at once upon my sight—my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing
asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a
thousand waters—and the deep dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and
silently over the fragments of the "House of Usher." (417)
I would like to suggest that "The Fall of the House of Usher" can be read as a tale about
the fall of sovereignty. However clipped or modest this family is, there is a sense of
hereditary loss: "the stem of the Usher race, all time-honoured as it was, had put forth at
no period, any enduring branch" (399). The story can be read simply enough as an
allegory: what happens when nobles want to keep the bloodline "pure"—how incest
biologically contaminates while seeking to stay pure. In other words, if one is following
the logic of autoimmunity in arguably its most pure form, one could say that "incest is
"House of Usher" refers to the story itself, as well as to the house, and to the line of
descendants with that name. Nothing in this respect is singular, sovereign, separate. Even
the last three words of the story "House of Usher" are quoted and italicized, as if to let
crumble together the line, the house, the very words, and the story whose final falling
84
Lodged in the heart of "The Fall of the House of Usher" is a song, sung by
Roderick Usher, about a "radiant palace" wherein "In state his glory well befitting / The
ruler of the realm was seen." This palace comes to be destroyed by "evil things" (407).
Earlier editions of the text have "sovereign" instead of "ruler": "In state his glory well
befitting / The sovereign of the realm was seen." This song offers a mise-en-abyme
demonstration of the fall of sovereignty that is at once the subject and condition of
reading and its performative experience. The song at once promises and enacts the
experience of the falling of sovereignty that Poe's story repeats. By a nice detail of irony
this experience of the falling of sovereignty occurs, not only in the song's mise-en-abyme
of the plot of "The Fall of the House of Usher," but also in the dropping of the word
"sovereignty" itself from later editions of the text. The first two editions published in
Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (September 1839) and in Tales of the Grotesque and
Arabesque (1840) contained the word "sovereign." In the third edition, published in a
I draw my section heading here, "A whiff of putrefaction," from a recent essay by
Geoffrey Bennington, "The Fall of Sovereignty," which takes up the proposition that
sovereignty "falls, or fails, or, better, is failing."157 The time of this "failing" or "falling"
sense, but rather an "essential" feature of sovereignty itself; there is this failing or falling
"inscribed" in the concept of sovereignty from the start. It is its condition at once of
possibility and impossibility. It is the logic of what Derrida has called "autoimmunity,"
156
See Mabbott's notes to Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher," 396, 406.
157
Geoffrey Bennington, "The Fall of Sovereignty," Epoche 10:2 (2006), 395.
85
whereby the very principles or features that bring something (a sovereign, a government,
a body) into being, that preserve and allow it to be, are also those which destroy or cause
it to "fall."
"superanus, gaping and horrifying" or "a big fat baby."158 But the most provocative, at
least for my interests and purposes, is perhaps less an image than a sort of state or
who summarily declares, in the essay "The University without Condition": "sovereignty
ways. The essay purports to be primarily about philosophy and politics, to lodge the
question of sovereignty in these realms. But, as the evocations of Poe's "Valdemar" and
Shakespeare's Hamlet might suggest, there seems also to be, at its heart, essential to this
thinking of sovereignty, a question of engaging with the literary, and in particular (in
158
Bennington, "The Fall of Sovereignty," 396.
159
Bennington, "The Fall of Sovereignty," 396.
1
Jacques Derrida, "The University Without Condition," in Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 207. Qtd. Bennington, "The Fall of Sovereignty," 396.
161
Bennington, "The Fall of Sovereignty," 396.
86
relation to my argument here) of breathing in the hoaxical air of Poe's art and philosophy
of decomposition.
In the course of this chapter, I have been referring to Poe's writing as "hoax literature," in
an attempt to evoke his singular style and idiom, his duplicitous oddity, his production of
a kind of fooliterature. When it comes to the fool and folly, to its fooling and fool-making
quality, it is always a case of the air of Poe's writing or (to use a term given special
emphasis by Leo Spitzer's) its "atmosphere."162 "Fool" comes from the Latin folis,
meaning "windbag." This etymology in turn perhaps inevitably calls up one of Poe's
most humorous texts, "Raising the Wind (Diddling)" (1843).163 "Raising the Wind" is a
reference to a an eponymous farce by James Kenney first performed at the Theatre Royal,
Covent Garden, 5 November 1803. It takes place in a public room in an inn where
"Jeremy Diddler" swindles various customers into paying for his meals and lending him
impertinence, and grin. Perhaps most delightful is Poe's description of the grin:
See Leo Spitzer, "A Reinterpretation of 'The Fall of the House of Usher,'" in Essays on English and
American Literature, ed. Anna Hatcher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 51-66, especially 61-
3.
163
Poe, "Raising the Wind (Diddling)," in Tales and Sketches, vol. 2 (1843-1849), ed. Thomas Ollive
Mabbott (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000, 867-882. Further references cited in text.
The first published version in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier (14 October 1843) was "Raising the Wind;
or Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences"; in its second publication in the Broadway Journal
(13 September 1845) it was retitled "Didddling: Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences" (See
Mabbott's note to "Diddling," 868).
87
Your true diddler winds up all with a grin. But this nobody sees but
himself. He grins when his daily work is done—when his allotted labors
are accomplished—at night in his own closet, and altogether for his own
private entertainment. He goes home. He locks the door. He divests
himself of his clothes. He puts out his candle. He gets into bed. He places
his head upon the pillow. All this done, and your diddler grins. This is no
hypothesis. It is a matter of course. I reason a priori, and a diddle would be
no diddle without a grin. (871)
Much like "the Angel of the Odd," it is easy to see Poe cast in this role of "true diddler,"
grinning from the beginning to the end. The grin, for the diddling Poe, is both at the end
(when all is "done" and "accomplished") and at the beginning (as "a matter of course," "a
priori").
raising the wind, not so much in the sense of being a confidence-man but rather in the
sense of stirring or whipping up, indeed winding up, the reader's attention to the
possibility, and even eventuality, of being fooled in and by literature. Everything here
might be encapsulated in that term of Erich Auerbach's, which Spitzer picks up on,
but 'atmospherically.'"165 Much like the "literature-ism" to which I referred earlier, there
is something undeniably hoaxical about not only the notion of atmospheric realism, but
also of realism itself, or of reality in literature. So many of Poe's stories begin with an
attempt to place them in some sort of real or non-fictional discourse. The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym is an especially elaborate and striking example. Poe's original
attempt to pass off the author as a man really existing called "Arthur Gordon Pym" was
164
See Spitzer, "A Reinterpretation of 'The Fall of the House of Usher,'" 63-4 n 12.
165
Spitzer, "A Reinterpretation of 'The Fall of the House of Usher,'" 63.
88
thwarted, but, in the preface, he nevertheless tries to cover his tracks by suggesting that
he, Poe, is merely Pym's ghostwriter.166 This entails quite a different and ironic way of
thinking about the figure of "literary hoax." Another example can be found at the
After the very minute and elaborate paper by Arago, to say nothing of the
summary in "Silliman's Journal," with the detailed statement just
published by Lieutenant Maury, it will not be supposed, of course, that in
offering a few hurried remarks in reference to Von Kempelen's discovery,
I have any design to look at the subject in a scientific point of view.167
scientific (in spite of the author's protestations) about the tone, and yet it will also have
substantiates this tonal effect. Something similar can be found in "The Imp of the
Perverse" (1845):
See The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 3-5. We might recall, in this context, Leslie Fiedler's remark
that "[wjhatever Poe's ostensible or concealed motives [in the preface to Pym], he completed in his only
complete longer fiction not a trivial hoax but the archetypal American story." See Love and Death in the
American Novel (Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 1997), 393. I think Fielder is on to something in this
remark. However, instead of opposing these two terms, I would suggest that the "archetypal American
story" is itself a hoax. Fiedler goes on to say that this "archetypal American story...would be recast in
Moby-Dick" (393). In the next chapter, I will consider Moby-Dick, arguably the most celebrated of
archetypal American stories, precisely in relation to "hoax."
167
Poe, "Von Kempelen and His Discovery" (1849), in Tales and Sketches, vol. 2 (1843-1849), ed. Thomas
Ollive Mabbott (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 1357. A tale about discovering a
successful process of alchemy, "Von Kempelen" is written very much in the objective, reporter style found
in Poe's earlier work and widely accepted by critics under the generic classification of hoax. Mabbot, for
example, refers to the story as a "hoax" ("Von Kempelen," 1356), while Linda Walsh argues that it was
Poe's "last hoax," as well as "the most calculated and highly engineered" (Sins Against Science, 102).
89
irreducible sentiment, has been equally overlooked by all the moralists
who have preceded them.
Here it is not so much the appeal to the outside "real" world—though it is there in the
perspective: you can never be sure which ground is firm enough to stand on when making
decisive or critical remarks about Poe, if there is any.169 It is, to recall the note from
"Hans Pfaall," Poe himself who puts together the question of tone and of hoax. A hoax,
alike.170 It is as if Poe were, in passing, and perhaps indeed inadvertently, pointing up the
strange but crucial role of double or divided tone at the heart of hoax writing. It is a
(in Derrida's words) "deprives us, in the name of literature, of the right or the power to
And having been deprived of "the right or power to choose...," we are subjected to a
force, to Poe's pose, or to what Shoshana Felman calls the "genius-effect" of Poe's
writing.
Poe is, in effect, the inventor of hoax literature and the primary theorist and
90
genie—at least the undecidably real and fictional, genuine and diddling genius of the
"literary hoax"—is out of the bottle. What is one to do, what can be done, with this
genie? How should one read or write in the wake of Poe, in other words in the wake of
his at once serious and mischievous, odd but archetypical decompositional practice? How
is one to follow the singularly odd act I have here been seeking to evoke as "Poe's pose"?
It is with these kinds of questions in mind that I propose to read—and make sense of the
91
Chapter 2
As well as arguably being the greatest American prose writer of the nineteenth century,
Herman Melville is the most astute commentator and analyst regarding many of the key
terms and concepts discussed in this dissertation. His work offers a meditation on the
relations between language and belief, language and deception, trickery and treachery,
simulation and pretence, concealment and secrecy, credit and confidence, that is
unprecedented in the history of American literature. This meditation is at once poetic and
critical: no other writer of that period, besides possibly Emily Dickinson, is so attuned to
the intricacies and reserves of language, etymology and resonance. At the same time, it is
1
Maurice Blanchot, "Idle Speech," in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997), 126.
92
in Melville that we can witness the full critical emergence of an American vision of "the
great hoax" (in Blanchot's phrase) and a singularly powerful elaboration of the notion of
"hoax literature" as I have outlined it in Chapter 1. It is part of the purpose of this and the
succeeding chapter, indeed, to foreground a sense that Melville's work still awaits us, not
particular texts, but also in terms of its pertinence for thinking about the nature of U.S.
A Melvillean "poetics of the hoax" is, I want to suggest, an effective and apt term
plotting. In Poe (and indeed, as we shall see, in Twain), what happens in a text can, and
show in the preceding chapter, what is crucial is not so much the nature of the narrative
as Poe's pose, the peculiar tone, the disorienting, even mad "air" of his tales and, above
all, their narrator. In Melville, the level of inventiveness in the very unfolding of the
something happening not only in the sense of a story, but also in the sense of an event
language, of something being entrusted to the reader and happening (or not) in
93
destroying the "superficial skimmer of pages," with the experience of reading as test, a
to preserving the secrecy of the secret, and above all to affirming a notion of literature as
secret.
I begin, then, with some brief remarks about my perhaps rather playful-sounding
As we shall see, Melville's work is intimately, confidingly, and cryptically engaged with
reference to the 1997 movie (and James Ellroy's novel) L.A. Confidential, with its
want to suggest, do indeed compel us to think about such topics, often in considerably
more subtle and probing ways than Hollywood gangster movies might appear to allow.3
But it is also a matter of construing the "confidential" in more radical and, perhaps,
unsettling terms. As with cognate words such as "confide" and "confidence" (from the
2
Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and His Moses" (1850), in The Piazza Tales and Uncollected Prose, eds.
Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern
University Press and Newberry Library, 1987), 251.
3
L. A. Confidential. Directed by Curtis Hanson. Los Angeles: Regency Enterprises, 1997; and James
Ellroy, L. A. Confidential (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1997).
94
Latin con- intensive prefix, fidere to trust), it is a question of belief, faith or trust in
general, starting with belief, faith or trust in language itself. As Melville's work makes
At first sight there might seem to be something rather incongruous about focusing
on Melville in the central two chapters of a dissertation on literature and the hoax: there
are obvious grounds for discussing the writings of Poe and Twain in such a context;
Melville, by contrast, is not generally associated with writing hoaxes or writing about
hoaxes. This is not to say he did not write any: I shall in due course turn to consider two
intriguing cases of "hoax literature" produced early on in Melville's writing career. At the
same time, and in a perhaps not insignificant way, it should be noted that, while Melville
himself may not often have resorted to the term "hoax," it makes a strikingly consistent
appearance in critical writing on his work. Implicit in this latter tendency (perhaps most
"gigantic hoax") is a sense that, though "hoax" might not be Melville's own chosen term,
it is certainly one that his work seems to provoke, encourage, and, perhaps, justify.4 Such,
at any rate, is the confidence (in a Melvillean, double sense) that impels the writing of the
following pages. In this chapter I will give particularly detailed attention to only a
selection of Melville's works—his early hoax writings, Typee (1846), Moby-Dick (1851),
analyses of what I regard as his three most important later works ("Benito Cereno," The
4
See William S. Gleim, The Meaning of Moby Dick (New York: Edmond Byrne Hackett, 1938), 3.
95
By way of a kind of epigraph for the commentary and analyses that follow, let us
cite Jacques Derrida, in his essay "Demeure," on the nature of literature and trapping:
testimony. No American writer, I want to suggest, offers a more profound and haunting
model than Melville for an understanding of hoax literature, whether in the apparently
simple or innocent context of "literature and simulation," or in the more obviously brutal
reality of what, in Typee, he calls the "death-dealing engines" with which "we carry on
our wars."6
Unlike Poe and Twain, Melville was not known for creating and writing hoaxes in
and the elusive or illusive principle of truth (and how they link up with questions of
fiction and fictionality) is ubiquitous across his oeuvre. Melville's often humorous,
5
Jacques Derrida, "Demeure: Fiction and Testimony," trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, in The Instant of My
Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 29.
6
Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, Intro. Robert Sullivan (New York: The Modern
Library, 2001), 125.
96
his work that have continued to captivate to literary critics and theorists. As Jane
Mushabac has written: "Melville's fiction is full of sexual and heretical teasing, full of
hoax and parody and spiel. His fiction plays with us, flirts with us, deliberately astounds
us with confusion and a sense of miracles."7 Above all, Melville's work seems perhaps
more topical than ever for the ways in which it dramatizes and interrogates the nature of
uncertainty, for example, that his work has in recent years become so strongly bound up
with queer theory. Robert K. Martin has argued that the "adoption of a queer model that
proposes contingency instead of certainty seems likely to offer the best future for the
study of sexuality in Melville's texts." Leland S. Person, glossing these words, adds that
"[un]certainty is such a common feeling for Melville's readers and contingency such a
common experience for Melville's characters, that a 'queer model' of approach to just
I believe that we need to maintain a sharp focus on the importance of such notions
of uncertainty and queerness. At the same time, in an attempt to avoid the pitfalls of a
reading that would merely affirm and even celebrate uncertainty as a form of
indeterminacy, and in order to mark out the distinctiveness of Melville's work vis a vis
queer theory, I want to foreground and explore the importance of the hoax as a way of
appreciating the pressing urgency, as well as the complexity, of his writing. My own
7
Jane Mushabac, Melville's Humor: A Critical Study (New Haven: Archon Books, 1981), 1.
8
Robert K. Martin, "Melville and Sexuality," in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed.
Robert S. Levine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 200, qtd. in Leland S. Person, "Gender
and Sexuality," in A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley (Maiden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2006), 244-5.
9
Person, "Gender and Sexuality," 244-5.
97
reading of Melville here is guided by what Maurice Blanchot has to say about literature
and deception:
The word trickery, and the word falsification, applied to the mind and to
literature, shock us. We think that such a genre of deception is too simple,
we think that if there is universal falsification, it is still in the name of a
truth that is perhaps inaccessible but worthy of veneration and, for some,
adoration. We think that the hypothesis of the evil genius is not the most
dreadful: a falsifier, even an all-powerful one, remains a solid truth that
excuses us from thinking further.10
If "trickery" and "falsification" are too "simple" to account for fiction, then it is because
such words have an almost paralyzing effect. Recognizing "universal falsification" would
lead to the end of thought, a solid, certain truth. Literature's secret, what it keeps
genre of deception." That is not to say literature is not bound up with trickery,
fascination with such concerns. Instead, it is a matter of thinking that hoax alongside the
operate as resistances (however "weak" their force, however subtle or cryptic their own
ruses) to what Blanchot names "the great hoax." Such an investigation demands what, in
an essay on Louis Rene des Forets's Le Bavard called "Idle Speech," Blanchot terms
respect for fiction, the consideration for the force that is in it, a force that
is neither serious nor frivolous, the indefinite power of expansion, of
development, the indefinite power of restriction and of reserve that
belongs to fiction, its ability to contaminate everything and to purify
10
Maurice Blanchot, "Literary Infinity: The Aleph," in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 95.
98
everything, to leave nothing intact, not even the void in which one would
like to revel.
Blanchot's discussion of Le Bavard seems uncannily apt for thinking about Melville's
work in turn. The literary work is fundamentally "deceptive and traitorous," Blanchot
suggests,
These notions of feigning and counter-feigning, exposure ("giv[ing] itself away") and
"dismiss[al]" provide a basis for elucidating a specifically Melvillean poetics of the hoax.
As I have been arguing, literature and the hoax are in an inveterately tricky relationship:
the literary both conditions and undermines the hoax. Melville's oeuvre is obsessed with
"universal falsification" (to recall Blanchot's phrase) and embodies a lifelong struggle
against it, both in and beyond the institution and marketplace of literature. There was, for
Early hoaxes
I began by suggesting that while the notion of hoax is often associated with the writings
of Poe and Twain, it is not a term apparently much in evidence in Melville's writing. It is
II
Blanchot, "Idle Speech," 119.
12
Blanchot, "Idle Speech," 119-20.
13
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851), ed. Tom Quirk (New York: Penguin, 2003), 247.
99
not strictly the case, however, that his early days as a writer were devoid of the hoaxical.
As a young man in Albany, Melville was involved in a fierce exchange of letters in The
Adventures, Anecdotes, Satire, Humour, Sporting and the Drama," over the running of a
local debating club, the Philo Logos Society. The Microscope was a sort of regional
tabloid. As Hershel Parker explains: "Young men bought the Microscope and tried to
keep their families from seeing it, for it reported aspects of their life better kept from
seniors."14 But it "also offered a forum for controversies in local organizations, such as
debating clubs, and it may well have been a forum for fomenting such controversies."15
In one letter signed "R.," written on 15 April 1837, about the troubles of the Philo Logos
Society, Melville's activities within the society were compared those of a "pestiferous
animal"; Melville was also called a "Ciceronian Baboon," accused of having "no fixed
principles."16 But it was an ostensible friend, Charles Van Loon, who most vociferously
charged Melville with overtaking and subsequently ruining the society. On 10 March
Hermanus Melvillian entered her happy domain, and with ruthless hand
severed the ties of friendship, wantonly injured the feelings of her most
estimable members, incessantly disturbed the equanimity of her
proceedings, abused her unsuspecting confidence; and forever destroyed
her well earned reputation.17
14
Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography 1819-1851 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2005), 110-11.
15
Parker, Herman Melville, 111.
16
Herman Melville and Lynn Horth, Correspondence, vol. 14 (Second Edition), (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1993), 552, qtd. in Parker, Herman Melville, 111.
17
Melville, Correspondence, 555, qtd. in Parker, Herman Melville, 112.
100
The Latinizing of Melville's name recalls the "Ciceronian Baboon," linking his abuse of
"confidence" to the behavior, not of a man, but of an animal. Melville offered his own
version of events on 24 March 1838, suggesting Van Loon had more than a little to do
with the bad blood in the society and its demise, describing "a certain class of
individuals" as "a band of moral outlaws, [whose] interdicted weapons [...] are falsehood
and deceit."18 Melville was writing partly in response to Van Loon but was also
addressing someone publishing in The Microscope under the name "Sandle Wood."
"Sandle Wood" went so far as to call the proceedings of the society, in particular the
a mere farce, indeed the whole concern is essentially a hoax." Sandle Wood signed off
with the words: "Hoping that you will by giving publicity to the above expose this paltry
hoax."20
suggests:
101
There is, in short, no way of knowing how serious or sincere these exchanges were,
whether or not they constituted a hoax. They may have been, as Lynn Horth suggests,
"written in part as rhetorical exercises designed to attract attention to the club," as well as
a way of getting into print. Melville himself steers clear of the word "hoax," though his
response is very much concerned with refuting the accusation of his having created one,
taking care to outline the "facts" about the society, addressing the various claims of hoax
by Sandle Wood (from the existence of the meeting place to the legitimacy of his
election): "Any individual calling at No. 9 Gallery Stanwix Hall next Friday evening at 7
o' clock will receive indubitable evidence of the utter fallacy of 'Sandle Wood's'
statements."23
Melville was also not entirely averse to trying his hand at what might be called
94
popular press "supercheries"—though this was not publically recognized in his lifetime.
unrecognized in the perpetrator's lifetime still a hoax? Melville's work would certainly
102
lead us to believe so. It is in this respect that we may be led to emphasize a remarkable
new dimension that Melville's work brings to an understanding of hoax literature, namely
that the hoax can be posthumous or spectral. In 1938, Luther Stearns Mansfield found
evidence that Melville was the author of seven unsigned articles for Yankee Doodle
magazine in 1847. These articles, with the byline "Reported for Yankee Doodle by his
Special Correspondent at the Seat of War," were letters supposedly sent from General
Zachary Taylor's front line in the Mexican-American war (1846-48), indulging in the
gently comic but increasingly reverential aura surrounding this formidable future U.S.
president. Though these tales are supposedly sent from the military front line, there is, as
Mansfield puts it, "no indication that Melville had any direct information from Taylor's
camp; apparently, like many other periodical writers of the day, he was largely dependent
on newspaper accounts for his knowledge of the man, and was manufacturing the
anecdotes." Mansfield goes on to say that "[Melville's] readers were probably as well
aware as he that there was nothing 'authentic' about his material." But this has not
prevented Melville scholars, such as Stephen Matterson, from referring to these pieces as
tone of the first of these letters, which announced that the letter could be viewed in
See Luther Steams Mansfield, "Melville's Comic Articles on Zachary Taylor," American Literature 9:4
(1938), 411-418. The magazine ran from 10 October 1846 to 3 October 1847.
26
Mansfield, "Melville's Comic Articles on Zachary Taylor," 414.
27
Stephen Matterson, Introduction to Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857), ed.
Stephen Matterson (New York: Penguin, 1990), xviii.
103
underscoring its "authenticity"), and claimed to carry Taylor's official authorization.
Yet there was in these letters, as in Twain's considerably more outrageous hoaxes, the
sense of an underlying truth claim: "The anecdotes were palpably fictitious, though they
present truthfully Taylor's 'rough and ready' character as Melville and his friends
understood it." In this sense, they might be described as early instances of Melville's
idiosyncratic practice of "historical fiction." (In Chapter 3, we will see how this
metamorphoses into the Melvillean peculiarities of the "inside narrative.") The letters
also contain multiple references to the acknowledged master of the cultural hoax, P.T.
General Taylor to be presented to his museum so that he could become a caged exhibit.
This has generally been seen as benevolent and gentle, a tribute to Taylor's
in the view of Mansfield, these articles were nonetheless included in the bound
commemorative edition of Yankee Doodle articles, collected when the magazine ceased.
Purportedly authentic, while also playful, exaggerated, and making repeated reference to
the celebrated Barnum, these letters irresistibly suggest themselves as early instances of
These early pieces circulate not only around the issue of confidence, but also around
notions of the confidential (secrets shared between members of a society and anonymous
104
authorship). They explicitly foreground a number of the themes and paradoxes I will be
and the meaning and referential status of a text, construed as a destabilizing or crisis of
inventive, original, difficult, and, as years go by, less and less confident writer, in whose
work publishers have steadily diminishing belief. The narrative of Melville's career is a
familiar and much rehearsed one: his initial success with Typee: A Peep at Polynesian
Life (1846) and Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847) fed into many
more "failures" or, at least, ambivalently received works, including Moby-Dick (1851),
until he stopped publishing novels altogether in 1857. The literary merits of such
"failures" were only truly recognized or conferred long after Melville's death, thanks to a
Elmer suggests, great texts "return rather than endure." When it comes to Melville, we
are compelled not so much to think of "the death of the author" (in Barthes's famous
bringing back to life, returning from the dead, and prosopopeia are, of course, at the heart
from the grave, as if saying "I am dead"—while at the very last second, turning the
31
The peak of this "revival" perhaps came in the 1920s with Raymond Weaver's biography and edition of
Billy Budd (1924), but Sanford Marovitz defines "The Melville Revival" as taking place "[fjhrough a
history that spans seven decades, from the first hint of its advent in 1883 through the publication of the
Moby-Dick Centennial Essays in 1953." See "The Melville Revival," in A Companion to Herman Melville,
515.
32
Jonathan Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 203. Here
Elmer is talking in particular about the work of Edgar Allan Poe, but I would like to suggest that his remark
is as applicable to Melville as it to Poe.
33
See Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" (1967), in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142-8.
105
tables, to show how he was in fact, quite miraculously, the only one to survive. It is the
ghostly and spectral power of Melville's writing that we need to reckon with if we are to
understand the depth and complexity of its hoaxicality. The "spectral 'unaccountability,'"
of Melville's fiction, to borrow a phrase from William Spanos, is a result of the "silent
excess" of Melville's writing.34 It is the singular and spectral nature of that silence which
After his involvement in Philos Logos and Yankee Doodle, Melville wrote Typee
(1846). This is the narrative of Tom, a runaway sailor based on Melville himself, who is
captured and lives (until his escape) among the cannibalistic Typee tribe on the South
accusations which were re-voiced in very different ways and for very different reasons
Bezanson comments:
What a stir it made in the 1840s, at home and abroad. Was it true? Were
there really cannibals in the Marquesas? Had Melville actually been there
or was this the kind of hoax that Poe perpetrated a decade earlier in his
wild Antarctic tale, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pymf5
See William V. Spanos, Herman Melville and the American Calling: Fiction after Moby-Dick, 1851-57
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 17, 52. Spanos calls the first chapter of his book, "Melville's Specter" and
goes on to elaborate a reading of Melville concerned with drawing out the ways in which it continues to
return and haunt the American cultural, social and political scenes.
35
Walter E. Bezanson, "Herman Melville: Uncommon Common Sailor," in Melville's Evermoving Dawn,
ed. John Bryant, Robert Milder, The Melville Society (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997), 32.
106
Geoffrey Stone notes how, even in its first published form, Typee included a "supplement
containing a curious vindication of the book's authenticity."36 In this preface we find the
claim that:
[The author] has stated such matters just as they occurred, and leaves
every one to form his own opinion concerning them, trusting that his
anxious desire to speak the unvarnished truth will gain for him the
confidence of his readers.37
Crucial to the book's success was the reader's confidence that Melville was Tom and,
therefore, that Melville, as an author, was telling a true and authentic story. The novel's
full title was Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. However pejorative or condescending the
Melville's The Confidence-Man (a text I will return to in Chapter 3), which explicitly
The controversy around Typee was significant enough for many to doubt its
veracity. Take, for example, this rather remarkable description of the power of Melville's
.. .it is difficult to say what people may not be made, by a certain charm in
the telling, to credit as perfectly veracious. The trick is one not hard to
explain, and, with Typee for an example, not difficult to understand. You
begin with an air of the greatest simplicity and ingenuousness—just as
Count Cagliostro and Mesmer (those masterly impostors) led you, by an
obscure street and a very plain vestibule, into their palaces of wonder.
36
Geoffrey Stone, Melville (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1949), 78-9.
37
Melville, Typee, xx.
One of the reasons for looking at reviews is the fact that, as William Spanos puts it, "Melville's creative
production was, perhaps more than that of any other writer in the history of American literature, absolutely
tethered to the reception of his work" {Herman Melville and the American Calling, 4).
107
Then, of a sudden, by a harmonious style and seducing images, you seize
and captivate the senses—much as the Rosicrucians set at work the
imagination of their intimates, by perfumes breathed around them, low
sweet music from unseen instruments, and the fantastic strangeness of a
great saloon, richly decorated and dimly lighted. Men's minds once
agitated in this way, through unusual and bewitching sensations, you may
proceed to play off upon them almost any jugglery you like. They are
entranced and see no longer with the eyes of their common sense, but
those of the fancy which you have opened—eyes which they the more
easily believe, because they are not conscious of possessing them...
Comparing Melville's writing to the work of Mesmer, the mysterious, defrauding Count
Rosicrucians, whose manifestos promise knowledge of all secrets, the reviewers suggest
that the power of literature lies in its nearly supernatural ability to take people in and
make them "credit," make them believe "almost any jugglery you like." This is a striking
from "common sense" to "fancy." The literary text has the power to create, in effect, its
own readerly eyes. In this account of what happens when we read, Coleridgean
diabolical hue. It is less a matter of choice and more a sort of mesmeric or spellbinding
dynamic of reading—as if the text itself were the "glittering eye" of the mariner about
reviewers' deployment of the second person. It is not "you" (the readers) who are
39
The excerpt above comes from a review of Melville's focused mainly on Typee, from the Washington
National Intelligencer (27 May 1847), reprinted in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Brian
Higgins and Hershel Parker (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 72-5.
See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria: or, Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and
Opinions, ed. George Watson (London: J. M. Dent, 1975), 169.
108
deceived, but "you" in the place of the author, as deceiver. In spite of having
deception, the reviewers go on to discuss whether or not Typee was or could be true:
As to Typee, we certainly read it with just the same delight and much the
same faith as we yielded, when some thirty years younger, to the most
charming of fairy tales...The author (Mr. Melville, we mean) of course
maintains the authenticity of all he has told: that is his business; and his
friends stand by his invariable veracity: that is their duty; for, as we have
already explained, the illusion of truth is necessary to the literary effect of
such a work. Avow it a hoax, or even a sophistication of facts, a
masquerade of reality, and the charm would be gone, except for folks like
us, who, being fond of Gulliver and the Arabian Nights, and familiar with
the court chroniclers of three or four successive Administrations near us,
have learnt to read with very little necessity of believing.41
The turn made here is complex and even rather disturbing. Typee is like a fairy-tale,
meant to take in only very gullible readers. However, unlike fairy-tales, Melville stands
by reiterating its authenticity, getting his friends to corroborate, and pulling in at least a
considerable amount of the public. The story has entangled itself in the real. "The illusion
for truth" which is "necessary to the literary effect" has overstepped its bounds. At this
point, the book is no longer confined within the literary (or even fairy-tale) realm. It now
becomes a question of hoax. But if it were a hoax, the reviewers declare, "the charm
would be gone."
What is it about a hoax (or designation of hoax) that would take away the charm?
The pleasure for most readers, according to these reviewers, is the suspension of fact and
fiction, the titillation of the undecidable, not knowing whether the thing is real or not,
whether it is a hoax or not. This is the case, they claim, "except for folks like us...."
109
Folks like us (literate, educated, men of letters) actually like it more as a hoax—for it
forges links with not only the best of satirical and allegorical literature, but also with the
realities of the political world. It is a question of reading, as they jocularly remark, "with
politicians, in the government or what it is telling us. Though written in 1847, this
sentiment could, eerily, just as well sum up the current political climate.42 The reviewers
make explicit a sense of the deceptiveness of the media and a lack of confidence in any
and every level of political life which is rarely voiced in such explicit and thoroughgoing
fashion even today. Their reading of Typee prompts us in the direction of thinking not so
much about "a hoax" as a "counter-hoax"—a feigned authenticity which brings to light a
sense of how far reality itself is constructed, fabricated, and indeed counterfeit. This
little-read review of 1847, in its modest yet quite radical fashion, thus invites the thought
that reading hoax literature, reckoning with the poetics of the hoax can help you manage
your daily existence, not so much in terms of making life easier to live, but sharpening
your awareness of the great hoax, becoming more canny in the face of everyday
deception—thanks to fiction.
For a provocative and polemical account of America's political culture of the last forty years in terms of
hoax see Nicholas Von Hoffman, Hoax (New York: Nation Books, 2004). Hoffman here retells recent
American political history in terms of it being a hoax, filled with "big lies" from its politicians. But the
"hoax" is much older than the World Trade Center bombings or Vietnam: "America's faith in its being
different, special, one-of-a-kind, and chosen by God comes from real men and women whose portraits hang
on the walls of the nation's patriotic shrines" (21). And the populace at large seems, in Hoffman's view,
more than happy to go along with these lies, these fabulous foundations and sense of exceptionality, daily
corroborating the creation of what he calls "the American biosphere," most readily found in "the separation
between the American view and the world view" in terms especially of violence and the death penalty (11).
(The question of the death penalty will be a particular focus in Chapter 3, below.) Hoffman's motivation for
deployment of the word "hoax" is not taken up specifically in his book, but the implication is clear:
whatever its jocular, frivolous connotations, "hoax" is also a term which conjures up serious accusations of
political, historical, and social deceptiveness, perpetrated by individuals, but which, in creating its own
reality, is much larger and much more rooted in language (here in political rhetoric) and "narrative" than in
any given president, CEO, or religious leader. At stake, I think, in Hoffman is the overwhelming sense of
American confidence, confidence in, above all, the nation-state's supposed exceptionality, or apartness
from the rest of the world.
110
The Washington National Intelligencer review then shifts to a much more specific
point: whether or not "Tom's" (that is, Melville's) companion, Toby, exists. Ten months
prior to the review, a man claiming to be Toby had shown up in Buffalo, writing in to the
Buffalo Commercial Advertiser on 1 July 1846: "I am the true and veritable 'Toby,' yet
living, and I am happy to testify to the entire accuracy of the work Typee so long as I was
with Melville." Apropos this, the Intelligencer review asks: "And... who can say that this
is the veritable (let alone veracious) Toby? Where is the proof of his personal identity?
For our part we cling to the story as written: we love to be persuaded that Toby was made
a roti suffoque of, was boucanise a la Polyneisenne..." In Typee, Toby's fate (escape or
demise) is left open: he might indeed have been eaten by cannibals. In that case, his
presence in Buffalo would constitute nothing less than a return from the dead.
controversy over Toby's existence is best encapsulated in his letter to Evert Duyckinck
on 3 July 1846:
Ill
letter of Toby [in which Toby had said "I am happy to testify to the entire
accuracy of the word so long as I was with Melville"] can not possibly be
gainsaid in any conceivable way—therefore I think it ought to be pushed
into circulation. I doubt not but that many papers will copy it—Mr.
Duycknick might say a word or two on the subject which would tell... I
have written Toby a letter & expect to see him soon & hear the sequel of
the book I have written (How strangely that sounds!)
Bye the bye, since people have always manifested so much
concern for "poor Toby," what do you think of writing an account of what
befell him in escaping from the island—should the adventure prove to be
of sufficient interest?—I should value your opinion very highly on this
subject.
For Melville, apparently, the case should be closed. Yet there remains something
undecidably earnest and playful about this letter which is in some ways curiously
reminiscent of Poe's line to the Stonehaven druggist (as discussed in Chapter l). Toby
exists and very possibly has another story in him, which Melville may transform and turn
44
Melville, Correspondence, 50. Also qtd. in Stone, Melville, 79-80.
45
The second installment of Toby's adventures, Omoo, was published not by Typee's publishers, W&P, but
Harper & Brothers, who had rejected Typee because "it was impossible that it could be true and therefore
was without real value" (see Stone, Melville, 80). We might infer from this stance that Harpers were not
initially interested in books that were mixing or playing with generic conventions, equating truth (veracity
or earnestness on the part of the author) with commercial value and publishability. However, the financial
success of Typee, quite possibly a result of the "is it or is not a hoax?" debate, seems have to challenged
and altered this view of what makes a narrative commercially viable. Typee's popularity ensured that its
quasi-sequel, Omoo, whether it was truth or fiction or some strange combination, was valuable, would sell
and was publishable.
46
Melville, Correspondence, 51.
112
On the one hand, Melville seems genuinely "vexed... by any questioning of the literal
truth of his book."47 The additional remark that "the editor seems to have seen [Toby]"
seems to point to a certain agitation and impatience that the identity of Toby and the
book's authenticity should still he doubted. On the other hand, it could be another
example of the kind of playfulness engaged in by Poe in his Valdemar letters. However,
unlike Poe (who refuses to settle the question of authenticity or fictionality), Melville
deepens his claims to Typee's authenticity by averring that Toby's letter is not a "hoax"
because it says things only Melville would know. This is somewhat humorous as he is
asserting corroboration through a confidence that only he has experienced (or claims to
have experienced).
Journalists are unable to take Melville's reassurances. For example, the Albany
"Dreaminess" and "ethereality" pitch Typee into a realm that is neither fiction nor non-
fiction. Disbelief is suspended insofar as the characters remain in a distant land. Bringing
Toby into the quotidian reality of Buffalo is something apparently we can choose not to
believe. Toby's existence aside, the charge of Typee as a hoax is quite curious,
considering its publishing history. John Murray, publisher of the earlier English edition
47
Stone, Melville, 79.
48
Contemporary Reviews, 58.
113
(February 1846), wanted Melville to make it more politically salient, which led him to
designing Methodist elders."49 This, as well as sexual and other political references in the
main text, were excised in the American edition. However a new appendix, "Toby's
Story" (July 1846) was added. Suppressed in the revised edition, therefore, was the most
radical material of Typee, and thus also, in Robert Sullivan's words: "its underlying
assertion that civilization, as it was being forced on the indigenous people of the South
Seas, maybe wasn't civilized at all."50 Highlighted in the "revised edition" was the fate of
Toby: focus shifted at the behest of Melville's American publishers, with the result that
the discussion of authenticity overtook the potentially more culturally and politically
critical implications of the book. In a sense, then, one aspect of the Melvillean poetics of
the hoax came (in the U.S. at least) to cover up and elide another.
read, for example, a description of the "unsophisticated and confiding [native peoples]"
as "easily led into every vice, and humanity weeps over the ruin thus remorselessly
inflicted upon them by their European civilizers." Thus, it is concluded: "Thrice happy
are they who...have never been brought into contaminating contact with the white
w
Melville, Typee, 255.
5
Robert Sullivan, Introduction to Melville, Typee, xvi.
51
Melville, Typee, 15.
114
invoking, yet taking a marked distance from, the fairy-tale extremities of "Blue Beard"
and "Jack the Giant-Killer." Searching for absolute truth lands us squarely in the
ambiguous, which is, after all, the very space of Melville's poetics. As he declares in
Typee:
kind of central but ambiguous and ambivalent space between two extremes. The center,
This logic of reckoning with two extremes can perhaps help us to understand
Melville's brief but provoking preface to Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (1849), in which
he makes his celebrated claim about wanting to have fiction received as fact:
Not long ago, having published two narratives of voyages in the Pacific
[Typee and Omoo] which, in many quarters, were received with
incredulity, the thought occurred to me, of indeed writing a romance of
Polynesian adventure, and publishing it as such; to see whether, the fiction
might not, possibly, be received for a verity: in some degree the reverse of
my previous experience.
This thought was the germ of others, which have resulted in Mardi.
New York. - January, 1849.54
52
Melville, Typee, 205.
53
Melville, Typee, 205.
54
Herman Melville, Mardi, eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and
Chicago: Northwestern and Newberry, 1970), xvii.
115
This statement leads us to thinking in terms of a kind of chiasmus. More is less and less is
more. The Melvillean poetics of the hoax explores the force of a chiasmatic reversal:
fiction would "be received for a verity," rather than verity for fiction. The peritext of the
Preface partakes of this poetics. It is, of course, difficult to know how seriously to take
necessarily the opposite of "verity"; correspondingly, the very phrase "a romance of
Polynesian adventure" would appear to discourage the sense of "verity" that the author
purportedly hopes for. Critical attempts to parse Melville here serve only to emphasize
the play and paradoxy. Thus, Hyland Packard, for example, comments: "This is a very
clear and deliberate statement of [Melville's] goal, to express greater reality than he had
revealed in Typee or Omoo but through less realism...."55 Less realism is more realistic;
verity is an effect of fiction. The reversal of which Melville speaks has some resemblance
to the truism recalled by Walter Bazanson: "Sailors at sea, like miners in their camps,
easily found more truth in good stories than in facts."56 But Mardi, starting with its
Preface, plays with language and the world it supposedly represents in new ways.
broaches the space of literature evoked by Blanchot when he declares: "Literature is not a
simple deception, it is the dangerous ability to go towards what exists, by the infinite
Hyland Packard, "Mardi: The Role of Hyperbole in Melville's Search for Expression," American
Literature 49:2 (May 1977), 242-3.
56
Bezanson, "Herman Melville: Uncommon Common Sailor," 33.
57
Cf Peter West, The Arbiters of Reality: Hawthorne, Melville and the Rise of Mass Information Culture
(Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 2008), 11. West writes of the Preface: "...if this strange preface
might seem to portray Mardi as a kind of hoax, to introduce one's work of fiction as a work of fiction is
hardly an attempt to delude the public."
116
CO
thought that "fiction" could be "received for a verity" was "the germ of others, which
have resulted in Mardi.1" The apparent frustration, with the author of Typee being called a
liar, in effect, gives way to a different rendering of the truth—not as factual narrative but
on the basis of fiction. In this sense Melville's project is akin to what Jacques Derrida has
through fiction."59 As Derrida remarks, it might only seem to make sense to speak of
deception when there is a possibility of lying, that is, outside of literature, which never
The dilemma that Derrida evokes is evident in the Preface to Mardi itself: is this Preface
not written by the author Herman Melville, effectively signed by him with reference to a
real place and a historical date ("New York.—January, 1849")? Surely the Preface to the
fiction called Mardi is not part of the fiction itself? But in truth the Preface is double: we
are faced, in effect, with "two perfectly identical discourses, identical down to their
58
Blanchot, "Literary Infinity," 95.
59
Jacques Derrida, "Faith and Knowledge," trans. Gil Anidjar, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New
York and London: Routledge, 2002), 44.
60
Derrida, "Demeure," 37.
117
commas," discourses that moreover speak of the irreducibly uncertain, chiasmatic
Of course there is the rest of Mardi to navigate; yet everything germinates out of
the duplicity of this brief but, in a sense, interminable Preface. The book called Mardi is a
trap, but the entrapment is already legible in its strange Preface, before the book. Thus we
We might reasonably wonder at the seeming naivety of this reviewer or, rather perhaps,
wonder whether he actually read the book in question. But that is in part precisely
Hawthorne's tales, Moses from an Old Manse, Melville is fascinated and even impelled
Quarrel with God: "Melville tells us more about himself in that passage...than about
Hawthorne."63
61
See Henry Cood Watson (New York Saroni's Musical Times, 29 September 1849), in Contemporary
Reviews, 249.
62
Melville, "Hawthorne and His Moses," 251.
63
See Lawrance Thompson, Melville's Quarrel with God (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952),
qtd. in Davis, Reading the Text That Isn 't There, 73.
118
At its extreme, as I hope to make clear in Chapter 3, the poetics of the hoax in
Melville entails a logic of the mantrap, the egregiousness for example of a text that would
affirm or silently enact the decapitation of the reader. The "undigested mass of rambling
metaphysics" to which Watson refers is perhaps rather the messy remains of the skimmer
he doubtless was. Mardi entails satire of the most violent and disturbing kind, as might be
seen from brief consideration of a passage in Chapter 24, the very title of which directs us
not to the "romance" of Polynesian life but to the American medical profession. The title
of the chapter, "Dedicated to the College of Physicians and Surgeons," reads as if there
were indeed a sudden amputation: the peritext of a dedication appears in the midst of the
supposed fiction. And indeed this is crucial to the mischievous (literally, we recall, the
headless) character of Mardi. Amputation and decapitation are here doubtless fictional
and figurative, but they serve as the germ of a thought that infects our understanding of
the thinking and behavior of those in so-called "civilized lands," above all no doubt
America.
119
heard; a species of amputation to which, metaphorically speaking, many
would-be independent sort of people in civilized lands are addicted.64
Mardi is, to lop off a phrase from elsewhere in the book, "abounding in details full of the
savor of reality," but wildly extravagant and explicitly fictional at the same time.65
Whoever practiced amputation on themselves, let alone "at their leisure," over "several
days"? But this seemingly outrageous image is a figure that can be "received for a verity"
in at least two respects. First, it might be said that amputation is a fitting term to describe
anthropology, natural history, political satire—here already we can see the amputative or
cut-off writing modes that will be the making of that cetological chimera called Moby-
Dick. Second, amputation (and decapitation above all) figures as a means of referring the
fiction of Polynesian life here back onto the reality of thoughtless people or headless
readers in America and elsewhere: in this satire Melville extends an arm, so to speak,
In this bizarre space, where we must doubtless also be ready to locate both
ourselves and Melville himself, amputation would be at once humorous and grave. And it
is here too that we might note one of the most profound correspondences between
Melville and Shakespeare, namely their apparent unwillingness to stop, their commitment
120
to following words into what Blanchot calls "the infinite multiplicity of the imaginary."66
So, for example, in the case of this passage of Mardi, following a somewhat lurid
character's superstitious reluctance to cast his amputated limb into the sea and his
Now, which was Samoa? The dead arm swinging high as Haman?
Or the living trunk below? Was the arm severed from the body, or the
body from the arm? The residual part of Samoa was alive, and therefore
we say it was he. But which of the writhing sections of a ten times severed
worm, is the worm proper?
"Moby-Dick is no Hoax"
"An inside narrative" may have been the sub-title only of the last work that Melville
produced (as we shall see in Chapter 3), but the notion of a poetics of the hoax, based on
the development of a new and singular kind of "historical fiction," is evident from his
/TO
121
Melville's destabilizing the credit or credence a reader is able to give to a text. The reader
is taken into Melville's confidence, or at any rate submits to the experience of a narrator
or text confiding in the reader; and at the same time, in the same movement, the reader is
left in a queer place, his or her confidence in the tone and referential status of what he or
Shakespeare's greatest works, Moby-Dick is a text with which we are (to borrow a phrase
from Harold Bloom) "always engaged in catching up."69 If it teases and even ridicules the
reader in the figure of Ahab, letting us understand from first to last the absurdity and
death-driven violence of his pursuit, it also seduces us, and keeps us in pursuit—
intrigued, fascinated, pleasurably strung along both in terms of the vast scale and scope of
the novel's vision and in terms of the intricate, strange confidings of individual words
and sentences. Another way of describing the analogy with Shakespeare here would be to
stress the importance of this co-implication or complicity of the vast and tiny. The poetics
of the hoax in Melville, that is to say, operates at once at the level of the micrological (a
particular paragraph, statement, or even word) and at the level of the most cosmological
or gigantic. Amputation, however improbably, might serve here as a figure that can help
us explicate and appreciate these dimensions of Melville's work. It might thus usefully
evoke a hermeneutic logic of removal and a procedure of reading: no critic can measure
up to Moby-Dick, no reading can encapsulate it; any reading will entail violent truncation.
In the pages that follow I propose, therefore, to try to acknowledge the inevitability of
69
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), 271.
122
such violence at the same time as sketching a reading of Moby-Dick based on analysis of
The word "hoax" does not occur in Moby-Dick, but it has had a prominent role in
the critical reception of the novel, especially in the mid-twentieth century period. It is part
of the purpose of this dissertation to revisit and reevaluate this significant aspect of
"without casting the least doubt upon Melville's sincerity, the book may be regarded as a
gigantic hoax, in which he satirized all man-made religions, and challenged the
pondering. Gleim leads us to suppose that it is possible to create a hoax without its
casting any doubt on the creator's sincerity. In other words, he appears to want to
parameters of his argument. Equally provoking perhaps is the phrase "gigantic hoax":
"gigantic" not only (whether intentionally or not) evokes the whale itself or the book of
that name, but also points suggestively towards a new and perhaps unprecedented
expansion of the concept of the hoax. Gleim's wording is more accurate and more
illuminating than he perhaps realized. For it is in Melville, I would argue, more than in
any other writer in English before him, that we encounter the kind of scale of thinking of
123
For all its suggestiveness, however, Gleim's characterization of the novel as hoax
characterization that Richard Chase appears to have in mind when he writes in his
In an intriguingly oscillatory fashion, Chase goes back and forth on the issue of Moby-
Dick and the hoax. It looks like a hoax but you would be mistaken in believing that it is.
were a museum exhibit. Moby-Dick allows for no such "comfortable belief." P.T.
Barnum is important for an understanding of the subtlety of the distinctions that Chase is
Yet Moby Dick is no hoax, or rather, the emotions and ideas he excites are
no hoax. Looking back after one hundred years, we perceive a certain
unity in American culture which embraces the kinds of thought and
feeling represented by Barnum's scientific museum and Melville's Moby-
Dick. Yet the difference is that most important of all differences: the one
between art and other kinds of organizing experience. Barnum's use of the
peculiarly American amalgam of fact and fantasy served in effect to affirm
that the high and difficult emotions of wonder and exaltation did not really
exist or did not need to be taken seriously, for he always dispersed
troublesome phantoms by the hoax, which came upon the stage like a deus
ex machina to wind up the play... But Moby-Dick uses folk spirit
differently. If there is a hoax, it is directed against those looking for a
hoax. Like any work of art, it is uncompromising in its emotions and
71
Richard Chase, Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 77.
124
intellectual quality. It is as resolutely against the American grain as it is
resolutely with it.
While Barnum employed the hoax as a kind of great redeemer, a way of setting straight,
and ambiguity, Melville's work does not account itself in this way: there is no revelation
of hoax, or of the mechanics of the hoax, to make you feel untroubled by what you just
read. The wonders and peculiarities of literary language are not commensurable with
those of "Barnum's tricks" or indeed with those of so-called real life. Melville's writing
unsettles our understanding of what is "real" and what is "life" in ways that Barnum's
"amalgam of fact and fantasy" does not. Troublesome phantoms remain. The hoax would
be on those hoax-hunting: "hoax" here seems to be indentified with a sort of fake solace
American. To the extent that Moby-Dick engages with the hoax it is in the form of what I
have been calling counter-hoax. Chase intimates that there is no relief, no space of
"comfortable belief to which the reader may resort. Rather, we are left in suspense, in
that strange space that Derrida has in mind when he proposes that there is "no literature
of Mardi.
72
Chase, Herman Melville, 81-2.
73
Jacques Derrida, "This Strange Institution Called Literature": An Interview with Jacques Derrida (1989),
trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 48.
125
The strangeness and duplicity of Melville's astonishing enterprise is already
intimated in its title: Moby-Dick or, The Whale. Is the book called Moby-Dick or is it
called The Whale? It was in fact originally published in England in October 1851 as The
Whale; and then, the following month, in New York as Moby-Dick. What is a title when
carries an "or," the second part is longer. We might think, as Melville himself was
doubtless in part thinking, of the title of a book published precisely two hundred years
earlier, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, or, The matter, forme & power of a common-wealth
ecclesiasticall and civill (1651).74 It is all to easy to overlook the sheer oddity of
Melville's title, naming as it does both a whale and a book. We might associate the title
of the great Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf or of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), with
a monstrous creature; but Melville's is perhaps the first major literary work ever to
mixes and multiplies genres. Its constitutive duplicity and hoaxical strangeness are at
work from the title onward. Is this a work of fiction or natural history? Sea tale or travel
"whale" (with or without its "letter H") and its multiplicitous different forms in other
74
As he intimates in a celebrated letter to Hawthorne, Melville preferred to see his work as more "Kraken"
than "Leviathan": "So, now, let us add Moby Dick to our blessing and step from that. Leviathan is not the
biggest fish:—I have heard of Krakens" (letter of [17?] November 1851 in Melville, Correspondence, 213.
75
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale, ed. Tom Quirk (London: Penguin, 2003), xxxvii-xxxviii
and xxxix-li. Further page references will be cited in the text.
126
destabilization of the strange act of naming an animal ("Moby Dick" or "whale")
prefigures and effectively repeats itself in the famously self-reflexive performative that
opens the first chapter: "Call me Ishmael" (3). The subterranean or submarine
anonymous "I"-"commentator" who proceeds with a warning: "you must not... take the
underway: "believe me, you mustn't believe this," the nameless narrator effectively says.
No matter how "authentic," do not take what you read as "veritable" or true.
poetics of the hoax that multiplies voices, turning the question of credence or credibility
into a "higgledy-piggledy" but imperative double-bind (authentic, but don't believe it),
mixing the biblical ("gospel") and seemingly scientific ("cetology"). Let us note simply
one further detail in this introductory warning concerning the polyphonic extracts that
follow (from the Bible to Pliny to Montaigne to Hobbes to Darwin). For here, discreetly
another strange act of naming, a singular performative perhaps all too easily glossed over.
Dictionaries today define "cetology" as "the study of whales" {Chambers) or as "that part
of zoology which treats of the whales" (OED); but the first recorded use of the word,
back to the mid-seventeenth century, and "cetacean" becomes a common scientific term
in the 1830s; but "cetology" is something else. Zoology is generated out of fiction.
Indeed, the word "cetology" is in more than one sense of the word a strange creature
127
(Melville's creature and creation)—a kind of monster. The ancient Greek ketos, we may
recall, means "sea monster." The poetics of the hoax are inscribed in this "-ology,"
study of the whale and at the same time singularly attributable to the text called Moby-
Dick. Rodolphe Gasche has concisely formulated this queer logic as follows: "As a
positivistic science Cetology is exterior to the narration, however as part of the fiction it
concerning what is exterior and what is interior, this bizarre logic of the exterior being
inside, or the inside encompassing the exterior, enables us to see a forceful link between
"cetology" (above all, Melville's novel as cetological) and what Melville years later
While the word "hoax" does not appear in Moby-Dick, "practical joke" does - and
in a particularly provoking fashion. It is in this context that we can also get a measure of
the parameters of Chase's notion of hoax and the need to extend and complicate them in
light of our reading here. As Chase comments apropos these two notions: "Often a
uncanny and then disperses the sensation of terror with a sudden revelation that the whole
thing is a hoax."77 His remark points up the intimate relation between the notions of
practical joke and hoax, while also implicitly circumscribing the force of the latter: the
hoax for Chase is identified with the dispersal of the "dangerous, horrible, or uncanny."
Our concern here, on the contrary, is to highlight—or rather, try to do justice to what is
76
Rodolphe Gasche, "The Scene of Writing: A Deferred Outset," Glyph 1 (1977), 151.
77
Chase, Herman Melville, 80.
128
singular and haunting with regard to—its "dangerous, horrible, or uncanny" character.
Nowhere is all of this more dramatic, more explicit and more gigantic than in the
characterization of "life itself as a "practical joke." It occurs immediately after the first
whale chase. At the point of near disaster, the boat of Ishmael, Queequeg and Starbuck
gets separated from the others: "the ship had given us up," reports Ishmael. Chapter 48
ends, and the narrative hangs for this brief digression, which begins the next chapter:
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we
call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke,
though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that
the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits,
and nothing seems worth disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds,
and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never
mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets
and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of
sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to
him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by
the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I
am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme
tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just
before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but
a part of the general joke. (247)
We lack closure to this practical joke or hoax of life, even as we try to swallow it. The
greater one's earnestness, the more general the joke. In keeping with the characterization
of gigantism in William Gleim, the scale of the hoax is vast, it entails the whole universe.
As this passage suggests, the hoax is bound up with the queer ("queer times and
occasions"). It is indeed difficult not to associate this word "queer" with all the resonance
no
it has lately come to acquire in Melville studies. One of the earlier senses of "queer," in
78
Cf Leland Person, "Gender and Sexuality," Robert K. Martin, "Melville and Sexuality," and Nicholas
Royle, "Impossible Uncanniness: Deconstruction and Queer Theory," in In Memory of Jacques Derrida
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 113-33.
129
fact, was "counterfeit." This denotation perhaps helps to underscore not only the
strangeness, but also the seeming fabricated or factitious quality of these "times or
occasions." It seems as if, in sensing the vast joke of the universe is on himself and
therefore, in defense, "bolt[ing] down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and
persuasions...," man actually attempts to make a sort of Barnumesque move. It's all a
joke, it's all a hoax: no longer a question of the "momentous," for it is merely "part of the
general joke," "bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker." But who is this
"joker"? Melville's text does not so much suggest the personification or embodiment of
some omniscient and perhaps malevolent other, as leave us with the uncertainty or
queerness of the double and divided thought that we are ourselves in possession of the
joker. As Melville's fictional narrator tells us: "the joke is at nobody's expense but
[one's] own." In Melville's Humor Jane Mushabac concludes her reading of his magnum
opus in this context by proposing that Moby-Dick is "celebrating the great hoax we
note of caution is, I think, called for. Melville's language does not just constitute a
celebration. "Celebration" can easily become another way of dispersing or effacing the
uncanny, slippery and uncertain, queer power of Moby-Dick, I would argue that it needs
to be thought of, in fact, precisely in terms of the counter-hoax. In these respects, it is not
This sense was found especially with reference to money: see "queer" adj. senses 2a and b (OED). First
recorded use of "queer" in this sense was in 1740: "Instead of returning the good Guinea again, they used
to give a Queer One."
80
Mushabac, Melville's Humor, 89.
130
so much celebration as contestation—a work of irreducible strangeness and slipperiness
01
In a short essay entitled "The Secret of Melville," Blanchot calls Moby-Dick "one
of the greatest books of universal literature" because "it tries to be a total book,
expressing not only a complete human experience but offering itself as the written
equivalent of the universe." The "secret of its composition" is that "Melville has
constructed a work that one can traverse on different levels and that, however profoundly
one seeks to grasp it, keeps the ironic quality of an enigma and reveals itself only by the
[t]o a certain extent we are confronted with Melville's secrets as the crew
is with Ahab, fascinated by his madness, drawn to share furiously his
adventure, leading the same battle and perishing from the same end yet
turning in vain around his solitude, incapable of understanding the fatality
of desire, obsessed by a forbidden monster.84
Moby-Dick eludes and resists us. Blanchot sums up: "[its] secrets...seem there only to
provoke denouements and, after the turns and detours that draw our attention, [the
narrative] ends with the inevitable drama in which everything is swallowed up except the
Of
81
Maurice Blanchot, "The Great Hoax," trans. Ann Smock, in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland
(Oxford and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1996), 166.
82
Maurice Blanchot, "The Secret of Melville," in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2001), 239.
83
Blanchot, "The Secret of Melville," 240.
84
Blanchot, "The Secret of Melville," 242.
85
Blanchot, "The Secret of Melville," 240.
131
As I recalled at the start of the chapter, Blanchot consistently emphasizes the
if the book is the possibility of the world, we should conclude that at work
in the world is not only the ability to make [faire], but that great ability to
feign [feindre], to trick and deceive, of which every work of fiction is the
product, all the more so if this ability stays concealed in it.86
For the book, this impossible co-existence of real and imaginary does not only "make"
but also can "feign," "trick," and "deceive." "Every work of fiction is the product" of this
"great ability," especially, says Blanchot, "if this ability stays concealed." The notion of
a matter of that strangeness that D.H. Lawrence evokes at the beginning of his celebrated
reading of Moby-Dick: the "best thing" about the novel is that Melville himself did not
really know what he was doing.87 Of this "great book" Lawrence declares:
At first you are put off by the style. It reads like journalism. It
seems spurious. You feel Melville is trying to put something over you. It
won't do.
And Melville is a bit sententious: aware of himself, self-conscious,
go
in which Moby-Dick is a kind of gigantic textual clown, a book that confronts us with a
OQ
kind of constant dilemma regarding its duplicitous, earnest yet playful status. It is a
work that at once acts the clown ("nobody can be more clownish" than Melville in Moby-
132
Dick, as Lawrence observes)90 and demands that we consider the hoaxical nature of
everything outside it, including the very notion of an authorial intention that would guide
or anchor it. What is happening when a text "put[s] something over [the reader]" but at
the same time seems to put "something over even [the author]"?
uncanny white whale itself. To illustrate this we might usefully cite another evocative
A white whale was, after all, an improbable and even comic beast. A
great, unwieldy, insentient mass of blubber, probably more mottled than
white, he was a buffoon, with no face, his eyes, a third of the way back
toward his tail, looking out at the world in opposite directions so that the
contemptible brain sunk somewhere in the ponderous protoplasm beheld a
ridiculous multiverse, made of two mutually exclusive worlds. He was a
sluggish and confused monster who, despite his speed and strength, would
allow a whaleboat virtually to beach itself on his back, a creature so
insensitive to danger that he would copulate in the very waters where the
deadly harpooners were taking aim. He was a tun of guts and gigantic cask
of oil whom men lanced, bled, butchered, and cast away to the sharks and
birds, an awkward satyr whose six-foot phallus was joked upon by mere
men and skinned to make cassocks for blubber-cutters. The White Whale,
for a moment at least, was the greatest of all hoaxes, of whom Stubb might
sing:
"Oh! jolly is the gale,
And a joker is the whale... ."91
The whale is at once a magnificent, huge, and terrifying beast, capable of killing scores of
men as well as maiming them individually, and a clownish, ridiculous figure with a
comically enormous penis and "no face," eyes on the sides of his head, beholder of "a
ridiculous multiverse, made of two mutually exclusive worlds." Like a clown, Moby
133
Dick is at once uncanny and pitiful. Most resonantly of all, perhaps, he is "the greatest of
all hoaxes." Chase's phrasing recalls the sense of the colossal evidenced in Gleim's
"gigantic hoax." There is, we might be tempted to suppose, no limit, no confinement for
"the greatest of all hoaxes." Undecidably jokey and sublime, the whale resists semantic
capture absolutely. As Wai Chee Dimock has remarked: "...the whale indeed has no
match. It will always resist the reader, it will triumph over him, because its transcendent
Moby Dick has become, for this half-consumed hero [Ahab], the
fundamental obstacle of his life, the giant enemy against which he knows
that he will break himself but that has placed itself across his existence,
the reflection of a dreadful desire that haunts him, burns him, and that he
will touch only in the abyss of his own annihilation.
Yet the figure of the whale presents a challenge for man, who is so limited. As Ishmael
exclaims: "Oh, man! Admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou too remain
warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it."95 Undecidable
duplicity, pretense and mockery (as both modeling or imitation and ridicule) are
fundamental to the whale: it is, after all, the universe itself that becomes double and
Wai Chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1989), 113.
93
Melville, Moby-Dick, 178 and 370, qtd. Dimock, Empire for Liberty, 114.
94
Blanchot, "The Secret of Melville," 241.
95
Melville, Moby-Dick, 334-5, qtd. Dimock, Empire for Liberty, 112.
134
In the remaining part of this section I want to try to sharpen an understanding of
Melville's novel as practicing a poetics of the hoax, not by focusing directly on issues of
character and plot, human bravery and cruelty, the symbolic or metaphorical, the political
or ideological readings of the work, but rather by seeking to elucidate the question of the
animal and animality and, more narrowly, notions of seeming and deceiving, pretending
and pretending to pretend. The following, necessarily brief and truncating analysis, then,
will seek to open up new ways of thinking about Moby-Dick as hoax, alongside Jacques
Derrida's provoking proposition that "man is not the only political animal."96 Before we
get to Moby Dick himself, Melville gives us an account of the behavior of whales in
general. In the following passage we are given a sense of the way in which whales can
The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently rolling
before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to
leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in advance of
our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale
when, sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while
concealed beneath the surface, mills around, and swiftly swims off in the
opposite quarter—this deceitfulness of his could not now be in action; for
there was no reason to suppose the fish seen by Tashtego had been in any
way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. (235)
This passage raises the question of whether or not the whale recognizes its pursuers and
to what extent it can pretend, deceive, and throw its hunters off its track. Perhaps he will
have made a false start in one direction and then gone off in another (as Ishmael reports is
"that singular craft" of the whale), perhaps he did not sense the hunters, or perhaps he did
and is merely pretending to have made a false start, swimming off in the original
96
Jacques Derrida, "Afterword Toward An Ethic of Discussion," trans. Samuel Weber, in Limited Inc, ed.
Gerald Graff (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 136.
135
direction, only pretending to be oblivious to his pursuers. To what extent does an animal,
here a whale, have a capacity to deceive, and to conceal this "deceitfulness"? What might
it mean to speak of latent deceitfulness in this context? And to what extent are we as
humans able to understand or master this deception? These are questions that pervade
Moby-Dick.
The white whale himself is repeatedly referred to through the uncertainties of the
verb "to seem." So, for example, despite the reversal at the end of the book, wherein
Ahab exclaims, "he's chasing me now; not I him" (614), the beleaguered and hunted
whale is apparently trying to escape from those hunting him, heading off in other another
direction: "he seemed swimming with his utmost velocity, and now only intent upon
pursuing his own straight path in the sea" (619, my emphasis)). Conversely what "seems"
to Ahab (that "he's chasing me") is, much to the consternation of the crew, not what
seems to them, as evidenced by the desperate pleading of Starbuck: "Oh! Ahab...not too
late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou,
thou, that madly seekest him!" (619). Again, in the final chase, the question of "seeming"
returns. There is first silence, then "a low rumbling sound... a subterraneous hum" (617-
Whether fagged by the three days' running chase, and the resistance to his
swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or whether it was some latent
deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever was true, the White Whale's
way now began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly nearing
him once more; though indeed the whale's last start had not been so long a
one as before. (619, my emphasis)
Here is the enigma of "latent deceitfulness." We do not know what the whale is up to,
136
It "seems" to be the former, but soon after, Ishmael leads us to suppose, it is categorically
the latter: "Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and
spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the
ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled" (622). But the force of the "seemed" is
not dissolved, any more than the question of concealed deceit. Lurking here, it seems, are
some of the great philosophical questions: Can animals keep secrets? What is "latent" in
or for the animal? What is the difference between pretending and pretending to pretend?
In order to explore these questions further, let us turn to a book that has recently
been proving especially influential in opening up new ways of thinking about animals
and animality in literature, Jacques Derrida's The Animal that Therefore I Am. One of
the remarkable aspects of Derrida's work is the attention he gives to the relationship
between animals and pretending. In a chapter entitled "And Say the Animal Responded,"
essential and defining characteristic of "animal" as distinct from "man": "the idea of an
Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (Fordham: Fordham University
Press, 2008), originally presented in 1997; for other recent and provocative critical and theoretical work on
animals see, for example, Akira Mazuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the
Discourse of the Species, and Posthumanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Zoontologies:
The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Knowing
Animals, ed. Lawrence Simmons and Philip Armstrong (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007); Donna J.
Haraway, Where Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); and Philip Armstrong,
What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2008). This last book provides a
fascinating reading of Moby-Dick, which questions the notion that what Armstrong calls "agency" is
located either with the crew (human beings) or with Moby-Dick (animals). Armstrong extends the concept
of agency to both living and non-living sources (i.e. to include, for example, the economic and political
value of spermaceti), so that both living and non-living entities or conditions drive or motivate the narrative
and behavior of humans and animals alike. (See "Rendering the Whale," in What Animals Mean in the
Fiction of Modernity, 99-113.)
137
incapacity that makes it unable to be a 'subject'..." This ensures for Lacan, according
to Derrida, that "the animal will never be, as man is, prey to language." 9 Integral to
Lacan's account is the difference between pretense [feinte] and deception [tromperie].
Animals are capable of "pretense" but not of "deception" (or "hoax," to recall here Ann
Just as Blanchot's essay situates "the great hoax" as integrally bound up with language,
tromperie is what happens, according to Lacan, in speech [la parole] and through
language. Deception manifests itself not only as "lying," but also as "pretending to
pretend." Such deception involves, in Derrida's words, "lying as what, in promising what
is true, includes the supplementary possibility of telling the truth in order to lead the other
astray, in order to have him believe something other than what is true."100 Even though
animals, according to Lacan, are "capable of.. .strategic pretense," they are not capable of
this second-order deceit. To recall Poe's terms, only man is a true diddler. From a
Lacanian perspective, it is not possible that the whale giving chase could enact anything
hunted. This much is clear enough from the passage from Moby-Dick that we are trying
Derrida is here paraphrasing Jacques Lacan (The Animal That Therefore I Am, 120). Lacan writes in
"The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious" that the animal
does not "pretend to pretend," nor "makes tracks whose deception lies in the fact they will be taken as false.
See Jacques Lacan, "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian
Unconscious," in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 305.
99
Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 120.
100
Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 128.
101
Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 127.
102
Poe writes: "Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man." See "Raising
the Wind (Diddling)," in Tales and Sketches, vol. 2, 1843-1849), ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 869.
138
to read here. But for Lacan this capacity is distinctly limited and circumscribed. To pick
... [animals] manage to put their pursuers off the scent by making a false
start. But an animal does not pretend to pretend. He does not make tracks
whose deception lies in the fact that they will be taken as false, while
being in fact true ones, ones that is, that indicate his true trail. Nor does an
animal cover up its tracks, which would be tantamount to making itself the
subject of the signifier.
theme"—in particular "the animal's profound innocence, its being incapable of the
goes on to suggest, of attributing to the animal a kind of "cruel innocence," whereby the
animal is "a living creature to whom evil is foreign, living anterior to the difference
How does this compelling animal encounter between Derrida and Lacan
illuminate a reading of the passage from Moby-Dick that we have been considering here?
Ishmael reports that the whale seems to be throwing the hunters off its track. It becomes
impossible, however, to tell whether the whale is simply "making a false start" or is, in
fact, "covering] up its tracks." For Lacan there would be no such dilemma. Derrida
argues that matters are more complex. In short, it is necessary to displace what he calls
"anthropocentrist logic":106 we cannot in fact know what the animal, here the whale, is up
103
Lacan, "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious," 305.
Qtd. in Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 129-30 (italics are Derrida's).
104
Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 130.
105
Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 130.
106
Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 130.
139
whereby "one could calmly declare that the animal in general is incapable of pretending a
pretense." For him, not only does the idea of "the animal in general" present a
profound and impassable problem (this anthropocentric hierarchizing of "the human" vs.
"the animal in general" is one of the most relentlessly exposed, interrogated and ridiculed
in his book), but there is also, and more specifically, the abiding difficulty of determining
necessary, then, to reckon with the possibility that any "pretense" might be a "pretense of
analysis, the distinction between what constitutes a pretense [feint] and a deception
one of the most remarkable aspects of Moby-Dick, namely the way Melville shifts from a
general consideration of whales to focus on just one, the unsubstitutable, radically other,
single creature who is the uncanny "subject" of the text. Of course, it is one thing to
countersign, and maintain it—to write about, or even to name this creature, without
challenge that we should situate and try to take a distance from the widespread and
perhaps inevitable tendency to read Moby-Dick as a fable, whereby the whale itself
becomes the vehicle of a sort of message to humankind. Even in the space of the novel,
men appropriate animals for the purpose of fables. As Ishmael remarks: "[Ahab] piled
107
Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 133.
140
upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole
race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's
shell upon it" (200). The history of criticism on Moby-Dick is criss-crossed by readings
of the novel as fable or as a fabulous discourse - from Lawrence to Edward Said and
beyond.108
There are, however, fundamental problems with the notion of describing Moby-
Dick in terms of the fable or fabulous. We might usefully recall here Derrida's remark in
The Animal That Therefore I Am: "we know the history of fabulization and how it
discourse o/man, on man, indeed on the animality of man, but for and in man." It is
not just a matter of noting or trying to reckon with the fact that Moby Dick is not tamed,
conventions of fable. It is rather a matter of seeing how Moby-Dick decenters the human,
and effectively propounds new ways of thinking about the relations between humans and
other animals, and between animals and writing or text. More particularly, Moby-Dick
prompts us to consider the ways in which the "animal question" (as it is sometimes
referred to in contemporary theory) throws new light on the notion of the hoax. From its
earliest appearances in the late eighteenth century through to its more recent and most
refined theorizations (in Blanchot and Jonathan Elmer, for example), the hoax has been
108
For a powerful example of this fabulous discourse see Edward Said in The Observer on 16 September
2001. He compares America's "drive for war" to "Captain Ahab's pursuit of Moby Dick." Edward Said,
"Islam and the West are Inaccurate Banners"
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4258199,00.html> (accessed April 29, 2009).
109
Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 37.
141
construed as human—as an essentially anthropocentric, indeed social concept or
however, we can see how Melville's novel effectively calls such assumptions into
question. Moby-Dick traces a poetics of the hoax on the basis or in the wake of a whale.
With Melville, it could be suggested, the hoax is no longer only human. A thinking of the
poetics of the hoax, and of a politics of the counter-hoax, goes beyond the merely human
or anthropocentric.
enables us to see how intensively Moby-Dick is concerned with dissolving the distinction
fashion to what Derrida says of "fiction" in general, namely that "the concept towards
which [the word fiction] leads is no longer merely that of the figure or simple feint but the
Lippit has suggested in Electric Animal, animals "exist in a state of perpetual vanishing":
they appear-disappear, they are apparitional.112 No work of literature perhaps shows this
briefly at just one further example of the kind of queer feigning fiction and feigning of
fiction that I have been trying to explore here. It has to do with the question of innocence
110
See Jonathan Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture and Edgar Allan Poe (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1995); and Maurice Blanchot, "The Great Hoax," 157-66.
111
Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 131.
1
Lippit, Electric Animal, 1.
142
and evil, and with the sort of anteriority (before good or evil) that Derrida identifies with
the figure of the animal. Is the whale capable of malice? What is the status of the whale's
"latent deceitfulness"? Jack Bunger, doctor of the English captain who lost an arm to
Do you know, gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the whale are so
inscrutably constructed by Divine Providence, that it is quite impossible
for him to completely digest even a man's arm? And he knows it too. So
that what you take for the White Whale's malice is only his awkwardness.
For he never means to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by
feints. But sometimes it is like the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient
of mine in Ceylon, that making believe swallow jack-knives, once upon a
time let one drop into him in good earnest, and there it stayed for a
twelvemonth or more. (481-2)
On the one hand, Bunger seems alert to the traps and ruses of anthropomorphic thinking:
he contends that malice is only feigned or projected by humans onto the whale. On the
other, his language discreetly upholds such anthropomorphism: the whale "knows," he
"never means to swallow," he "only thinks," we are told. The whale is finally
[his] in Ceylon." But the trickery and sense of "juggling" remains. Who knows? Who is
the subject who is supposed to know (to recall a well-known Lacanian formulation)? The
"knowing" ("Do you know...? [H]e knows it too") is uncertainly cetological. There is
something "inscrutable" about both amputation and swallowing. And the relation
between pretending and pretending to pretend remains undecidable here, even though the
doctor's confident manner (gained, it is worth noting, not by scientific authority but by
faith in "Divine Providence") imagines the whale "only thinks to terrify by feints" and, if
the creature does "swallow a single limb," it is a mere mistake. This discounting of the
animal through a meager comparison to man, this assumption and presumption of animal
143
intention and consciousness ("he knows it too") makes an ironic and stark contrast to the
ultimately overpowering (call it a feint or deception) of Moby Dick. He leads astray and
the ship is swallowed whole in a maelstrom that is at once attributed to him and
or, to borrow a memorable phrase from Helene Cixous, "a poetic animal machine." In
fantastical image of Melville that D.H. Lawrence evokes at the beginning of his chapter
Melville has the strange, uncanny magic of sea creatures, and some of
their repulsiveness. He isn't quite a land animal. There is something
slithery about him. Something always half-seas-over. In his life they said
he was mad—or crazy. He was neither mad nor crazy. But he was over the
border. He was half a water animal...
Melville's sea-stories, as well as a sense of fundamental ambivalence, half one thing, half
another; but his description is markedly author-centered and thus in certain respects
perhaps still too humanist. His words might aptly be read more as an evocation of the text
itself, rather than of its author. Moby-Dick does, indeed, have something oceanic,
"slithery" and "over the border," as well as interminably queer and uncanny about it.
Finally, let us merely note the pervasive force of silence in the context of this
novel. "Has the sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech?" Ishmael asks
113
Helene Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts, trans. Eric Prenowitz (London and New York: Routledge,
1998), 150.
Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 131.
144
rhetorically. "No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It
Like so many other critics, Blanchot in the end can only testify to the ways in which
Moby-Dick tricks, teases, and eludes us: "Melville has constructed a work that one can
traverse on different levels and that, however profoundly one seeks to grasp it, keeps the
I17
ironic quality of an enigma and reveals itself only by the questions that it raises."
Beyond or before the "cruel madness of language" to which Blanchot refers, however,
there is perhaps the hoaxical strangeness of what is silent and secret on the part of the
whale. The "sinuous wake" evoked by Blanchot—a fine image also of deferred effect in
reading Melville—belongs not only to the text but, first of all perhaps, to the whale.
Derrida does not specifically treat the question of animals and secrets, of whether animals
can be said to be able to have or keep secrets in The Animal That Therefore I Am, but he
115
Pushing a bit farther and in another direction, we might recall the earlier discussion about Poe and
genius (see Chapter 1, above). Melville prompts us to consider that there is nothing essentially human
about genius. Genius would be as much an attribute of a whale as of a person. With regards to this
"pyramidical silence," see also the description of the tombs in "Bartleby, the Scrivener": "The yard was
entirely quiet. It was not accessible to the common prisoners. The surrounding walls, of amazing thickness,
kept off all sound behind them. The Egyptian character of the masonry weighed upon me with its gloom"
("Bartleby, the Scrivener," in Melville's Short Novels, ed. Dan McCall (New York and London: Norton,
2002), 33. Dan McCall rightly reminds us here of what Melville says in a letter to Hawthorne: "I am like
one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and
nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greatness, and then fell to
mould. So I" (Melville, Correspondence, 193; also qtd. in "Bartleby, The Scrivener," 33 n. 3).
1,6
Blanchot, "Secret of Melville," 243.
117
Blanchot, "Secret of Melville," 240.
145
does discuss it briefly in an earlier essay, "How to Avoid Speaking." Here, in four words,
1 JO
sense, Derrida suggests, it does not matter whether it is a text or a person or a non-human
animal. Such lack of assurance is at the heart of Moby-Dick and of a Melvillean poetics
of the hoax. Like the deceitfulness attributed to the whale, we can never be sure whether
the latent is manifest or, indeed, what the non-manifestation of deceit might mean.
Ambiguities
The designation of Melville's next novel, Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852), as a "hoax"
(February 1853), in a rather ambivalent survey of his oeuvre. The article is attributed to
Fitz-James O'Brien (1828-1862), best known for his supernatural poetry and as an early
practitioner of what came to be known as science fiction. After calling it "wild, inflated,
repulsive," he ends his review with a curious description of the experience of reading
Melville's latest novel, Pierre: "When we first read Pierre, we felt a strong inclination to
believe the whole thing to be a well-got-up hoax."119 O'Brien is writing some six years
after Poe's letter to Ramsay about the notion of his "M. Valdemar" being a hoax. But he
is not suggesting that Pierre is a hoax in that sense of the term. Instead O'Brien's
118
Jacques Derrida, "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of
Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, eds. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1987), 18.
119
Fitz-James O'Brien, "Our Young Authors—Melville," Putnam's Monthly Magazine (New York) 1:2,
February 1853, 163. 155-64
<http://digital.library.cornell.edu: 80/cgi/t/text/pagevieweridx?c=putn;cc=putn;rgn=full%20text;idno=putn0
001 -2;didno=putn0001 -2;view=image;seq=0165;node=putn0001 -2%3 A7>
146
phrasing seems to suggest that there is something about Pierre that amounts to a kind of
claiming Pierre is a hoax? What happens in the space between "when we first read" and
when we make our determination as to what kind of text this is? Is our initial "strong
inclination" merely inclination or it is the same as "belief? These questions are given an
this dissertation, O'Brien's is in part interesting for the ways in which his writing
encourages us to read it against itself. The ambiguities are not just in Pierre but in the
term of praise, and O'Brien goes on to formulate a further apparent put-down in declaring
1 70
Pierre a text which "transcends all the nonsense-writing that the world ever beheld."
His description may, however, be truer than he would wish to admit. Raising
uncertainties about what is a first reading and what is a second reading, deranging the
sense of what is inclination and what is belief, Pierre might indeed be seen as a text
which "transcends all the nonsense-writing that the world ever beheld." That "well-got-
up hoax" called Pierre, or the Ambiguities is, of course, a notoriously odd text: in
on the subjects of the deceptiveness and trickery of life, as well as of writing and
authorship itself.
O'Brien's ambiguities continue. He writes:
147
We remembered having read a novel in six volumes once of the same
order [i.e. of the "well got-up hoax"?], called The Abbess, in which the
stilted style of writing is exposed very funnily; and, as a specimen of
unparalleled bombast, we believed it to be unequalled until we met with
Pierre.
Leaving in suspense here the ambiguity of O'Brien's phrase "the same order," we should
at least also note the ambiguity of his "very funnily." Is the "stilted style" of Pierre
likewise "exposed"? How does this "funnily" relate to the "well-got-up" or "hoax"?
O'Brien's ambiguities would lead us, at any rate, to suppose that "hoax," for him, has
funny with literary language, which uses a "stilted style" in order to expose itself, to
make clear that it is merely bombastic, a kind of parody or burlesque of itself. It seems
that our judgment of Pierre as hoax is dependent on how close it gets to resembling The
Abbess, multi-volume gothic novel by William Henry Ireland (1175-1835), which is,
perhaps, a hoax insofar as its "stilted style of writing is exposed"—the exposure, then,
being key. Ireland and other readers know that the author is aware of what he is doing,
121
O'Brien, "Our Young Authors—Melville," 163.
122
See William Henry Ireland, The Abbess, A Romance, 4 vols. (London: Earle and Hemet, 1799), ed.
Devendra P. Varma, intro. Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV (New York: Arno, 1974). Ireland published The
Abbess in 1799 and was best known as a forger of "Shakespearean" documents, including ostensible
marginalia, original manuscripts, and various legal deeds. Ireland reveals his forgeries in An Authentic
Account of Shakesperian Manuscripts &c (London: J. Debrett, 1796). The Abbess is a floridly overwritten
tale chalk full of scenes of torture, sexual deviousness, and twists and turns of character. We read early on
in the novel, for example, of two men, Conte Marcello Porta and a monk walking through a convent at
night:
They proceeded to the passage; at the entrance of which, within a niche, rested a stone
figure of the Virgin. The Monk placed the lamp on the ground, and, having bared his left
shoulder, knelt before the image and seemed to offer up a prayer; then, loosening the
knotted rope that girded his loins, struck himself several times with violence—the Conte
turned from the sight with disgust. The Monk arose, and, having replaced his vestment,
proceeded up the passage. (1:23, Ch. 1)
For further explication of this passage in particular, and The Abbess in general, see George
Haggerty, "The Horrors of Catholicism: Religion and Sexuality in Gothic Fiction," Queer
Romanticism 36-7 (November 2004)
<http://www.erudit.Org/revue/ron/2004/v/n36-37/011133ar.html> (accessed 24 July 2009)
148
that he hoaxes us with his "stilted prose" but also shows himself aware of what he, as a
writer, is doing, producing a simulation and not the real (bad) thing. Melville offers no
such comfort. Perhaps Pierre is just bad writing, an insufficiently exposed or "well got-
up hoax." It seems there is no way of getting away from the ambiguities either of
Pierre begins as a story about a charming and privileged young man of that name,
the central object of his mother's affections. He is affianced to a young woman, Lucy,
of whom his mother approves. His dead father, also named Pierre, is idealized by both
mother and son, so that the opening pages of the novel hint at a nearly incestuous love
created by this lack of husband/ father. However, Pierre soon discovers that he has sister
(his father's illegitimate daughter), Isabel, and feels an intense and almost unbelievable
kinship, the need to protect her and, at the same time, to be discreet—to preserve the
quasi-sacred reverence and love for his father he and his mother share. Pierre attempts to
negotiate this double-bind by going against his mother's wishes and pretending to marry
his secret sister, with whom he flees to Philadelphia. He is, as a result, disinherited—as
well as unemployed. "He wishes," as one reviewer of the novel neatly puts it, "to uphold
the just and true, and to do this he commences by stating a lie—his marriage with
Isabel." The situation gets considerably more complicated when Lucy seeks him out
and comes to live with the "married couple," much to the outrage of both her new suitor,
Pierre's cousin, Glen, and her brother, Frederic (Fred). The "heavenly...lie" (92), which
123
Herman Melville, Pierre, or The Ambiguities (1852) (New York: Penguin, 1996). Page references will
be cited in text.
124
See John R. Thompson, Richmond Southern Literary Messenger (September 1852), reprinted in
Contemporary Reviews, 436.
149
motivates Pierre's actions (i.e. saving his sister from desolation), turns into so many more
lies.
coming to be an author whose profile inevitably calls to mind that of Melville himself.
Based on his previous small and amateurish literary success, Pierre promises publishers
"a popular novel" (356). This promise was, of course, also Melville's promise regarding
Pierre, Moby Dick having been a complete failure, critically and financially. At the time
of writing Pierre, Melville was, as Peggy Kamuf puts it in her remarkable essay
"Melville's Credit Card," "writing on credit."125 The earlier successes of Typee and
Omoo were banked upon and Melville was given another chance by his publishers to
write something that would succeed as much as these early travel narratives. But Pierre
from the outset seems to be intentionally not a popular novel. Kamuf cites a letter by
Melville in which he proclaims the opposite of what he and his protagonist promise their
publishers: "it is my earnest desire to write those books which are said to 'fail.'"
Kamuf comments: "Melville would seek a kind of writing whose credit was undecidable,
in other words, a writing that could cause a failure of the determination, according to the
values in place, of what 'to succeed' or 'to fail' could mean in literature."
Melville wanted, as it were, to make financial success not just separate from, but
antithetical to, what he calls "individual" success. It is writing, to follow Kamuf a bit
125
Peggy Kamuf, The Division of Literature, or The University in Deconstruction (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1997), 176.
126
See Kamuf, The Division of Literature, 180.
127
Kamuf, The Division of Literature, 180.
150
farther, "with a false bottom, a kind of smuggler's suitcase that would hide its riches
1 JR
beneath banal appearances in order to get them by customs."
necessarily deceptive and tricky (suit)case of Melville's writing, where public "failure"
becomes the measure of individual "success."129 His texts look one way but actually are
to "fail" even if, at the same time, he is promising publishers that they will be
not rather acknowledge and affirm the idea that the letter itself partakes of the queerness
of "Melville confidential," of what I have been calling the "poetics of the hoax" in
Melville? Is his personal correspondence reliable? Might he not just be watching his own
back, saying in effect: "I will have meant my writing to fail, all along hoping, thinking, or
expecting it to succeed?" How can we ever know if he is lying or not? We might usefully
recall here what Jacques Derrida says about the superficiality that governs our experience
of literary texts: "there is no sense in wondering what actually happened [in a given
literary text]." Melville's epistolary comments should perhaps best be approached with
a similar caution and circumspection. Even without reckoning with the unconscious, and
128
Kamuf, The Division of Literature, 180-1.
129
The phrase "false bottom," of course, recalls Walter Benn Michaels' influential essay on Henry David
Thoreau, "Walden's False Bottoms" Glyph 1 (1977), 132-149. In this essay, Michaels considers the way in
which Thoreau's text seems to be exploring the necessary impossibility of finding "a solid bottom...a
location for authority, a ground upon which we can make a decision" (145). Likewise, the search for what
is at the foundation, or bottom, of "successful," "popular," or "good" literature remains an abyssal quest, as
Pierre also shows.
130
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 153.
151
putting to one side what is to be understood here by "failure," the most we can say is that
perhaps Melville was intentionally writing to fail. This ambiguity, of course, is what
O'Brien's review is edging up against. For him, if the quality of the writing was
intentional, intentionally bad, then it might be considered a hoax, and like the work of
Ireland, therefore find merit, or success, in that. But O'Brien apparently finds no trace of
that self-awareness, not even in the "en abyme" (as Kamuf calls it) of figuring Pierre as a
perhaps also no wonder that Kamuf employs the language of deception in relation to
border crossings, the language of immigration and customs and the need to "smuggle"
through literature. This entails not only a kind of a-national imagination beset,
nevertheless, by nationalism and the nation-state (something which I will explore further
in relation to recent criticism and some of Melville's sea-texts), but also a certain
contraband within the literary marketplace, the need to smuggle a certain illicit or
questionable kind of literature through the border patrol or past the guardians of the
institution of literature. At issue here are the nature and consequences of the fact that
Melville's greatness has been credited posthumously. As I hope will become clearer as I
credit (aesthetic credit, credit and credibility in fiction, the ghostliness of financial as well
This happens almost out of the blue, over two-thirds into the novel. As the narrator says: "In the earlier
chapter of this volume, it has somewhere been passingly intimated, that Pierre was not only a reader of the
poets and other fine writers, but likewise... Pierre himself possessed the poetic nature..." (244). Cf Kamuf,
The Division of Literature, 182.
152
It is perhaps impossible not to read Pierre as a fictional biography but, if so,
Melville's text also demands that we think anew the very relations between the
"fictional" on one side and "biography" on the other. Pierre recounts the story of
someone who becomes a writer out of necessity, but writes deceptive, untimely texts
instead of ones that will sell. It is the story of a young man who had written as a "juvenile
author" (257) but who is now attempting to write great and lofty literature. Pierre is
advanced money on the promise of writing a "popular novel"; he sends in part of his
manuscript, which we never see but which the narrator assures us is "bungled" (304), and
waits. Upon returning home one day Pierre is informed by his housekeeper, Delly, that
He passed into the closet, and slowly shooting the bolt—which for want of
something better, happened to be an old blunted dagger—walked with his
cap yet unmoved, slowly up to the table, and beheld the letters. They were
lying with their sealed sides up, one in either hand, he lifted them, and
held them straight out sideways from him. (356)
As so often with Melville, the very surface of the writing is queer and duplicitous: the
figurative sense of "shooting your bolt" (see OED, "shoot," v. sense 21b), the bolt being
a dagger (itself an oddly literal prefiguring of what is to follow), the double sense of
"lying," and the strangeness of "straight out sideways" all contribute to this. Imagining
these letters to contain "the final poniards that shall stab me, and by stabbing me, make
me too a most swift stabber in recoil," Pierre asks himself "Which point first?" and opens
Sir: You are a swindler. Upon the pretense of writing a popular novel for
us, you have been receiving cash advances from us, while passing through
our press on sheets of blasphemous rhapsody, filched from the vile
Atheists, Lucian and Voltaire. (356)
153
Swindling here is inextricably bound up with writing itself. This much is already
intimated, perhaps, in the act of naming, the performative "You are a swindler...."
Furthermore, the swindling is not only a financial concern: it extends to questions of truth
in issues of plagiarism. Pierre's writing is anything but popular in the sense that the
publishers, comically named "Steel, Flint & Asbestos" (356), understood. But it is not
simply that Pierre's writing is deemed unpopular or even "blasphemous"; it is rather that
he had promised, had entered into a contract with his publishers to write something
this passage, Kamuf draws attention to the image of printed money ("sheets" "passing
through" a press) and eloquently rephrases Pierre's actions as "trying to pass off [his
i 'i'y
writing] as common currency." She does not use the term but it is difficult not to think
here of Pierre's book, and of Melville's book, Pierre, or the Ambiguities in turn, as
counterfeit money, especially since, as Kamuf suggests, Pierre is proposing "to pay his
ITT
debt" to publishers with this text, as if the very sheets are monetary currency. If
popular literature is real money, then Pierre's lie turns into fraud, circulating counterfeit
Pierre then proceeds to open the letter in his right hand, from his cousin, Glen,
154
Thou, Pierre Glendinning, art a villain and perjured liar. It is the sole
object of this letter imprintedly to convey the point blank lie to thee, that
taken in thy heart, it may be thence pulsed with blood, throughout thy
system. We have let some interval pass inactive, to confirm and solidify
our hate. Separately, and together, we brand thee, in thy every lung-cell, a
liar;—liar, because that is the scornfullest and loathsomest title for a man,
which in itself is the compend of all infamous things. (356-7)
What, of course, Pierre has lied about is different from what Glen and Fred think he lied
about. Pierre has only pretended to marry his sister, Isabel; Lucy, his former fiancee, has
come to live with them apparently without knowing it is only pretense. His entire life, in
effect, has become a hoax. And, of course, it is an explicitly literary hoax: no one but
Pierre is a party to the truth besides the narrator and the reader. Everything, in a sense, is
happening at the level of the letter, it is a hoax in the space of literature. In this respect it
is especially apt that this passage echoes Pierre's contention that the letters will contain
"poniards" (in Glen and Fred's letter it is "point blank"). Nor is it unfitting that when
Glen and Fred attack Pierre at the end of the novel, Fred shouts "Liar! Villain!" and Glen
ends up leaving "a half-livid, half-bloody brand" (359), for they are just making good on
An angry Pierre imagines sending them (Fred and Glen) "back their lie, and
planting] it scorching in their brains," tearing off "that part of Glen and Fred's letter,
which more particularly gave the lie, and halving it, rammed it home upon the bullets"
(358-9). The letters, let us recall, "were lying with their sealed sides up." Literary letters,
in this respect, are always lying. This "lying" not only prefigures the way that the letters
themselves have to do with lying, and in particular with accusing Pierre of lying, but also
points to a sort of structural falsehood in literary narrative: from the perspective of the
implied knowledge of the fictional narrator these letters are of course not sealed.
155
Melville's text "knows": the letters in that respect are lying, in a double sense. In a sense,
literary letters are always lying. There is no literature without ruse, without deception,
without knowing concealment. The poetics of the hoax proceeds from there. If we
consider the novel's early supposition that "[w]e lie in nature very close to God" (108),
Smith's contention that lie "is probably the most poetically fruitful homonym in
English."135 Melville's text might seem to be a meditation on how the primary meaning
or surface sense of "lie" as "repose" (we are in nature - in our nature but also when in
nature, in the wilderness or natural world - closest to God) is in fact haunted by the other
Whether God lies or not, whether, in fact, God is a lie or not, becomes part of
Pierre's metaphysical crisis. It is not so much that one "lie" lies under the other "lie," as
that each lies on the surface, with the other. The surface is this saturation of lying. Thus
we are told that, to Pierre, "the world seems to lie saturated and soaking with lies," and
he refers to his Bible, and there he reads most explicitly, that this world is
unconditionally depraved and accursed, and that at all hazards men must
come out of it. But why come out of it, if it be a True World and not a
Lying World? Assuredly, then, this world is a lie. (208)
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1968), 166.
156
Furthermore, God is a lie or else how can there be so many lies? The explanation
provided by the "Chronometrical" pamphlet that Pierre reads does not suffice. The
an one who has not a thousand times been struck with a sort of infidel
ideal, that whatever other worlds God may be Lord of, he is not the Lord
of this, for else this world would seem to give the lie to Him, so utterly
repugnant seem its ways to the instinctively known ways of
Heaven....[and yet] he who regards this chronometrical conceit
aright. ..will...see, or seem to see, that this world's seeming
incompatibility with God, absolutely results from its meridianal
correspondence with him. (213)
Here we are presented with a proliferation of "seeming" ("seem to give the lie," "seem its
ways," "seem to see," "seeming incompatibility") that recalls the passage from Moby-
Dick we were discussing earlier. In the queer meridianality of this correspondence with
God (more "lying letters"?), however, it is perhaps the figure of "giving the lie" that is
most arresting. "Giving the lie" is, ordinarily, "to accuse openly of falsehood, to prove
wrong" {Chambers). But once again Melville's text lays out and lays open a kind of
diabolical duplicity and inconsistency of the lie. On the one hand, God would not exist in
a world that is capable of such lies (including imagining Him to be a lie); but on the
other, this paradox, for the Chronometrical believer, is a sort of pretense of pretense and
are as doomed to failure as those in the case of Moby-Dick. But the most productive are
157
perhaps those that try to do justice to, or let lie, the irreducibly hoaxical, undecidably
deceptive and duplicitous nature of Melville's writing. As I have been arguing in this
chapter, Melville's work is profoundly concerned with deferred effect, both in terms of
the content and themes of specific texts and in terms of the life or, rather, the after-life of
the text as such. It is in this respect that his work can indeed be likened to nuclear waste,
in the sense outlined by Derrida when he suggests that there is an "enigmatic kinship"
between "the masterpiece" and "nuclear waste," in particular in relation to the work's
capacity for "inducing meaning without being exhausted by meaning," in short for
the work of art that "resists erosion... What is it that, far from being exhausted in
amnesia, increases its reserve to the very extent to which one draws from it, as if
masterpiece with the suggestion Derrida makes in a later text {Specters of Marx) that the
credit that I am here trying to explore in Melville's work.139 Pierre may not be a
masterpiece, but it shares with Melville's greatest works a fascination with this strange
spectrality, in other words with the way literary fiction can not only be about credit and
reserve, for example, but can also embody the workings of credit and reserve. This
embodiment, moreover, outlives the author of the text: it is indeed, in part, the very
afterlife of writing. The more you draw from the literary bank the more you increase its
reserves, Derrida suggests, as if it were the case that the more you spend the more you
137
Jacques Derrida, "Biodegradables," trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry 15:4 (1989), 845.
138
Derrida, "Biodegradables, " 845.
139
See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 18.
158
accumulate. It is a sort of mad scenario, no doubt. On the one hand, it is indeed akin to
the craziness of the so-called "financial world," with all its ghostly accounting and
"quantitative easing." On the other, it is indeed evocative of what I have been referring to
as the magic of literature, the way that the most powerful literary texts seem to be
enriched by the very effort to exhaust them. It is a question of the extraordinary reserves
of "reserve," as I shall try to make clearer shortly. Derrida's concern is with what he calls
the "signature," or with what is especially "singular" about a particular writer's work.
The term "poetics of the hoax" is my attempt, in this context, to encapsulate what is
perhaps most distinctive, but also what is most playful and elusive, about Melville's.
While recent Melville criticism has rightly highlighted the pervasive importance
of queerness and uncertainty for an appreciation of his work, it is, perhaps, also worth
reminding ourselves that the history of Melville criticism should not be construed as
elliptical" and "secret" in his work. In this respect it should be no great surprise to find
that some of the farthest-reaching critical readings are not necessarily at all recent. I want
to conclude this discussion of Pierre with an example of a critical reading which, though
particularly resonant critical account for my purposes. Despite being more than fifty
years old, Charles Feidelson's Symbolism and American Literature (1953) remains a
thought-provoking and insightful account of Melville's novel, not least for the attention it
gives to the questions of lie, falsehood, imposture, and counterfeit that concern me here.
159
In a chapter on Melville entitled "The Fool of Truth," Feidelson nicely shows just how
central these questions are to a reading of Pierre.140 He does this in particular by way of
juxtaposing Melville's novel with Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters (Les Faux-
monnayeurs) (1925), seeing the latter as "the best clue to the method and meaning of
Like Gide's novel, Pierre is about the artist as counterfeiter: "[Pierre's] life and work,
governed by the noblest aims, are false currency," argues Feidelson.143 Melville's
protagonist (with whom Feidelson no doubt too quickly and too neatly identifies Melville
himself) thus concludes that, in Feidelson's words, "every supposed truth is a fiction and
that every fiction is forgery, imposture, jugglery."144 Feidelson sees Melville as writing
about "an artistic insecurity which [he] continued to exploit even as he found it
Charles Feidelson, Jr., Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1953), 162-219. In particular, I will be focusing on Feidelson's reading of Pierre, 186-207.
141
Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature, 186.
142
Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature, 187-8.
143
Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature, 185.
144
Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature, 186.
160
increasingly frustrating."145 He regards this as Melville's "fundamental artistic problem."
Feidelson concludes: "Defective as it is Pierre, not Moby-Dick, is the best vantage point
for a general view of Melville's work. In Pierre his fundamental artistic problem is more
baldly stated and more fully conceived, even as it becomes more damaging to his artistic
self-confidence."146
called into question by poststructuralist and deconstructive thinking in the later twentieth
in the context of reading a novel: How can Feidelson pass judgment on an author's "self-
Melville's "self-confidence" (or lack of it) will always entail a certain element of
fictional biography. While critics may continue to refer to the idea of Melville's artistic
Pierre, it is also necessary to reckon with the ways in which Melville's work radically
complicates all notions of confidence. Whereas Feidelson refers everything back to the
figure of the author and to something putatively going on inside the author (whether in
hoax, of seeing how the text itself draws us into a sort of vertigo of deception that is not
assignable to—and does not ultimately depend in any way on hypotheses about—the
145
Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature, 185.
Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature, 186.
161
author's state of mind. At the same time, however, Feidelson's account is especially
insightful and even topical in its attention to the importance of "forgery, imposture, [and]
jugglery." "The Fool of Truth" (with its nicely, irreducibly ambiguous title) strikingly
another fiction," failure is success, and what is counterfeit is more valuable and
At the heart of any rigorous reading of Melville's work is the need to reckon with
its singular reserve or reserves. This brings together what, as we noted earlier, Blanchot
calls "the indefinite power ... of reserve that belongs to fiction," and what Derrida refers
to as the literary work's capacity to "[increase] its reserve to the very extent to which one
draws from it."148 Reserve is ghostly: it comes from the future. It is not (yet or perhaps
ever) present. Just as Melville's writings can be seen to spectralize credit, so they call up
powerful yet undecidably serious tricks with what is real and what is fabricated, alive and
dead, black and white. "Bartleby, The Scrivener" (1853), which might also be named
by an "austere reserve" (18). He confides nothing in the narrator (besides his spookily
reiterated "I would prefer not to"), yet the narrator tells us he has "unbounded
confidence" (22) in Bartleby. The narrator confides his account of Bartleby to us. And all
147
Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature, 186.
148
Blanchot, "Idle Speech," 119; Derrida, "Biodegradables," 845.
149
Melville, "Bartleby, The Scrivener," 27. Further page references cited in text.
162
the while, hanging over this account of the unaccountable, is the narrator's question:
"Will it be credited?" (26) The text called "Bartleby" is the light but deadly, irreducibly
silence. In one of the more brutal, resentful, indeed death-desiring contemporary reviews
[Melville] into silence."150 This statement forms a refrain throughout William Spanos's
recent book, Herman Melville and the American Calling: The Fiction after Moby-Dick,
1851-1857. Those early reviews of Pierre did "freeze him into silence," notes Spanos,
"[b]ut this exilic silence, as its verbal prominence in Pierre testifies, is a resonant
silence."151 Following the work of Edward Said, Spanos describes it as the sort of silence
that "speaks the truth to the power of the hegemonic discourse that had exiled and
silenced Melville."152 Spanos reads Melville as working against the mainstream discourse
argues that—wanting to counter what was for him manifestly false, problematic and
despicable—Melville writes in a " 'language' that is utterly other than or, rather, the
other o/this 'totalizing' and 'silencing' discourse."154 The figure of "reserve," of keeping
150
George Washington Peck, New York American Whig Review (16 November 1852), reprinted in
Contemporary Review, 443.
151
Spanos, Herman Melville and the American Calling, 7.
152
Spanos, Herman Melville and the American Calling, 7.
153
Spanos, Herman Melville and the American Calling, 1-2 and 46-7.
154
Spanos, Herman Melville and the American Calling, 7.
163
back, holding in reserve, having reservations, of course, nicely interferes with all notions
of totalization or silencing. In the next chapter, I will to explore further the reserves of
silence, the strange confidences, and unspoken resonances of Melville's later writings,
above all, The Confidence-Man and the brief masterpieces, "Benito Cereno" and Billy
Budd.
Chapter 3
In this second chapter on the work of Melville, I want to focus on three of his later texts,
"Benito Cereno" (1855), The Confidence-Man (1857), and Billy Budd (1924). Each of
these texts, as I will attempt to make clear, distinctively and significantly represents the
final flowering of Melville's poetics of the hoax. They are remarkably intricate, dense,
1
Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative in Melville's Short Novels, ed. Dan McCall
(New York and London: Norton, 2002), 170.
164
and challenging works. They are also intensely poetic—and in this respect, the hoaxical
draw on and develop concerns and motifs noted in the preceding chapter, I want in the
following pages to foreground the importance of a series of additional terms: the textual
trompe I 'ceil, resonance, the snake, "inside narrative," and the mantrap.
Silent Treatment
Like Poe's "The Purloined Letter" (1844), "Benito Cereno" can be read as (in Jonathan
Elmer's phrase) "a parable of the logic of deception."3 Based on the first person narrative
"parable" that it becomes a fascinating elaboration of the poetics of the hoax.4 On the
most basic level, the text is, of course, a theater of deception. Melville's Delano boards a
strange ship, "carrying negro slaves, amongst other valuable cargo," in a distant and
harbor of an uninhabited island off the coast of Chili.5 In the course of a perplexing day,
he meets and assists its forlorn Spanish captain, Benito Cereno, his crew, and human
"cargo" (36). The encounter between the two captains is peculiar: Cereno is full of verbal
2
P. B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821, pub. 1840), in Romanticism: An Anthology, 2nd edition, ed.
Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 956.
Jonathan Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture and Edgar Allan Poe (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1995), 192.
Melville's source text was Amasa Delano, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and
Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages Round the World, Together with a voyage of Survey
and Discovery in the Pacific Ocean and Oriental Islands (Boston: E. G. House, 1817), Chapter XVIII.
5
Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno," in Melville's Short Novels, ed. Dan McCall (New York and London:
Norton, 2002), 36. Further references will be cited in the text.
165
overbearing interference from his omnipresent black servant, Babo. Above all, Cereno is
prone to almost pathological silences, with the result that even a man with such a
"singularly undistrustful good nature" as Delano suspects that the Spaniard is either mad
or plotting against him and his own ship (35). As the anonymous narrator, blending his
own voice with that of Delano's, observes: "The singular alternations of courtesy and ill-
breeding in the Spanish captain were unaccountable, except on one of two suppositions—
innocent lunacy, or wicked imposture" (52). However, Delano's suspicion is in large part
misled by his paranoia: he is capable of imagining only one deceptive plot, in which he
himself is the target. If Cereno is not simply a lunatic, then he is after Delano. The real
deception, to which Delano is blind, is right before his eyes (again, much like that
elsewhere: it is there, "all on the surface" (as J. Hillis Miller puts it), right in front of
you.6 It is played out literally in the scenes that pass before Delano: in "the black
upholding the white" (45), in the "whispered conferences" between Babo and Cereno
(74), in the refusal by Cereno to send Babo away when Delano requests to speak with
Cereno alone (77), in the overly symbolic knot handed to Delano (63), in the "juggling
play" of the shaving scene (74), in the irregularities of order on the ship, in the
furtiveness of the Spanish sailors, and in the assertiveness and violence of the slaves
against the whites. As Mike Lee Davis argues in Reading the Text That Isn 't There:
"meaning, instead of lurking beneath the surface, rises to the surface... so that things turn
6
J. Hillis Miller, "Derrick's Topographies," South Atlantic Review 59:1, 17.
Mike Lee Davis, Reading the Text That Isn't There: Paranoia in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel
(New York: Routledge, 2005), presents a slightly different but complementary litany of examples (see 86).
166
out not only to be what they are called, but to be so in more ways than one." Indeed, it
would be more accurate to say that it is not a question of meaning rising to the surface,
but rather of a powerful, queer superficiality that is there from the beginning. The
happening on the surface, to the surface—of words and events, of words becoming
events, and events words. Babo is, for example, holding a knife to Cereno's throat both as
his valet about to shave him and as a performance of his surreptitious control over the
captain: we are presented with a metaphorical "shave" ("an act of swindling or extortion"
(OED n. 2 sense 3a)) and a literal knife to the throat (72). It is a shave and, at the same
time, a "shave."9 The whole scene while Delano is on board is a masquerade, designed to
trick Delano into believing order (in the form of white supremacy) still reigns.10 It is all a
or suppression. The trick, which Delano misses and seems entirely incapable of getting, is
reading what is literally taking place. In other words, all these supposed inconsistencies
8
Davis, Reading the Text That Isn 't There, 72.
9
John Camden Hotten, The Slang Dictionary (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1872) defines shave as a "a
false alarm, a hoax, a sell," as well as in terms of swindling, overcharging or fleecing another—a meaning
still in use today. To add a fourth, and perhaps much more recognized meaning, the slang dictionary also
provides "a narrow escape," as a definition of "shave," which is, of course, what Delano and Cereno
experience.
10
Cf Peggy Kamuf, The Division of Literature, or The University in Deconstruction (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1997), 191. Kamuf writes of the way in which Delano is confronted again and again by
"a fiction, an elaborately mounted design or device, a play staged for his benefit (or rather at his expense)."
The use of expense here underscores the way in which in each of these scenes Delano is made more and
more a fool, more and more a dupe, his inability to read what is going on becomes more and more
profound. And, in fact, as we see by the end, they are all designed by Babo in order to confound Delano, to
confirm his mistaken views.
167
and peculiar happenings are not the exception but the rule: the slaves have already
revolted and taken over the ship, Cereno being merely kept alive to get them to Senegal
where they might escape bondage and live freely. As Kamuf suggests in her brilliant
precisely, Delano "reads black on white, but he still chooses to see white on black, white
over black, and credits the latter since it alone fits the larger cultural text."1' There is,
then, a peculiar pattern of Delano getting it wrong, of relying too heavily on conventional
natural order.
words. It is a disturbing account of how words mask events, of how we can be deceived,
for example, by that "larger cultural context," which Kamuf talks about, into reading
things that are not there. The world of "Benito Cereno" is the miasma of a kind of
diabolical cultural euphory that doubtless still afflicts the United States in its everyday
essence. We are told by the narrator that Delano has a "good nature" and that he is
"undistrustful" (35). It takes a lot of work for Delano to come, in effect, to overturn these
characteristics, or rather perhaps, for the narrator to reveal that the entire charade of
events is a sort of extended narrative trompe I'oeil, and that the narrative is also, and more
decisively, the story of his suspicion, of his faltering confidence in his own instinct and in
appearances. Babo, in Delano's mind, is "the spectacle of fidelity on the one hand and
by Cereno can reverse Delano's reduction of Babo to a "mute" "shepherd's dog" (39).
11
Kamuf, The Division of Literature, 185.
168
Language performs at every step and, at the same time, constantly holds in reserve. What
is reserved or held back by the text is the revelation of how a reader's own
supposedly natural order of races. We may here recall once again Maurice Blanchot's
The respect for fiction, the consideration for the force that is in it, a force
that is neither serious nor frivolous, the indefinite power of expansion, of
development, the indefinite power of restriction and of reserve that
belongs to fiction, its ability to contaminate everything and to purify
everything, to leave nothing intact, not even the void in which one would
like to revel: this is what speaks in such a book, and this is what makes it a
deceptive and traitorous book; not because it plays an underhanded trick
on us, but on the contrary because it constantly gives itself away in its
ruses and its treachery, demanding of us, because of the rigor that we see
in it, a complicity without limit—which, at the end, once we have
compromised ourselves, it revokes by dismissing us.
Perhaps more than any other text by Melville, I want to argue, "Benito Cereno" is a
"deceptive and traitorous" text that ends up by "dismissing us" while holding itself still in
reserve.
inconsistencies, but rather that it blinds him to what is deceptively, treacherously foreseen
12
Maurice Blanchot, "Idle Speech," in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997), 119-20. "Idle" doubles its meaning in the French [vaine] to also include sham.
And perhaps "sham speech" is a better or more appropriate way of figuring the words of Benito Cereno and
in "Benito Cereno."
169
undistrustfiil of convention, or what he believes to be "natural" (in particular that blacks
are "naturally" servile). At the same time, to be undistrustful is not the same thing as
being trusting or full of trust. He sees things that he does not trust (or does not have
confidence in), but the foundations he cannot distrust. Davis ascribes this susceptibility to
misreading: "The signals that Delano receives prompt him to waver between trust and
1 "X
suspicion; and, uncannily enough, he wavers wrong every time." Delano has great
confidence in his view of blacks as simple, amiable, ready to please, incapable of great
malice: "the negro is the most pleasing body servant in the world...whom a master need
be on no stiffly superior terms with...[he is] less a servant than a devoted companion"
(40). Delano unconsciously mirrors the mistaken assumptions of ship owner Alexandra
Aranda's view that these prisoners, stripped of their freedom, need not be chained,
presenting slavery as somehow equanimous, mutually accepted: his rhetoric slips easily
from "slave" to "servant" to "companion." Were they chained, the blacks would,
unshackled, how are they anything but willing (and contented) participants in their own
Delano that Babo would be anything but the "faithful" servant he appears, however
idiosyncratically, to be. This twisted reasoning is what we become a party to, turning the
page without thinking. Above all, Melville ups the ante, as Kamuf points out, by
170
such a "nature" and its contradiction by the history of relations between
whites and blacks, a history that has to lead any thinking person to reject
complacency outright... [The narrator] is willing, in other words, to play
dumb not only about the outcome of the tale, which is the minimal
condition of the narration, but also about the history and thus the reality of
the enslaved-enslaver relations.14
It is this "play[ing] dumb" that provides perhaps the most forceful index of the strange
and singular reserve of Melville's text. In contradistinction to the source text (Amasa
Delano's A Narrative of Voyages and Travels (1817)), the narrator of Melville's text
pretends not to know the outcome of the events in advance, any more than Delano (at any
rate, Melville's Delano) himself does. The narrator is thus playing what Kamuf calls "a
dangerous and duplicitous game," no doubt, but it is a place of danger into which every
reader of "Benito Cereno" is necessarily drawn.15 And this place of danger is the very
Melville thus mischievously explores the idea that a "good nature" or "good
dullness" leads to "bad reading." As Kamuf phrases it: "It is to his credulity, simplicity,
'good nature,' and bad reading [that Melville's Delano] owes his survival."16 All of these
designations of good and bad, credulous and so on are, however, irreducibly and
interminably complicated by the ways in which Melville commingles the voice of the
narrator with Delano's point of view. We are repeatedly obliged to wonder, in fact, how
good and how dull is Delano? The narrator seems to hint that the captain is self-conscious
of the ways in which he, as a sea-captain from a northern (non-slave-holding) state, turns
a blind eye and a deaf ear to slavery. Lost in various "enchantments" of the San
14
Kamuf, The Division of Literature, 188-9.
15
Kamuf, The Division of Literature, 188.
Kamuf, The Division of Literature, 192.
171
Dominick's atmosphere, imagining it to be "some deserted chateau" in which he is
prisoner, "left to stare at empty grounds, and peer out at vague roads, where never a
wagon or wayfarer passed," Delano is jolted out of his fantasy by the sight of the
"corroded main-chains.. .massy and rusty in link, shackle and bolt." "They seemed," we
are told, "even more fit for the ship's present business, than the one for which she had
been built" (62). Who is offering this thought? Is it Delano's or the narrator's? The
sobering reference to the reality of the slave trade ("link, shackle and bolt"), as distinct
both from its present, apparently purified form with happily servile slaves faithful to
weak masters and from the ostensible glamour of earlier eras of Spanish sailing, seems to
be described from Delano's point of view. What he sees ("link, shackle and bolt") he
knows is not the stuff of a clean conscience. But then a couple of pages later, in a bizarre
third person transcription of Delano's "thoughts," we are told: "His conscience is clean"
(64). On the one hand, there is the romantic ruin, the "becharm[ing]" ancient decay and,
on the other hand, the literal "denigration," the complete "blackening" or "defaming" of
history. At this moment, in the midst of these chains, robbed of his reverie, Delano's
attention, we are told, has been directed to movement within them: "peering from behind
a great stay, like an Indian behind a hemlock, a Spanish sailor, a marlinspike in his hand,"
makes "an imperfect gesture towards the balcony, but immediately...vanish[es] into the
recesses of the hempen forest, like a poacher" (62). The description is at once immediate
and distancing: in the almost cinematic detail of image and movement Melville (or the
narrator, or the narrator focalizing Delano) seems deliberately to blur or double the vision
17
Melville's interest in hallucination and forms of trompe Vceil (as well as the fine line delineating fact
from fiction) can be found, for example, in "The Encantadas," a set of ten sketches preoccupied with the
visceral and cerebral enchantments of the Galapagos islands. See "The Encantadas," in Billy Budd and
Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 67-137.
172
through the use of simile ("like an Indian behind a hemlock," "like a poacher").
Simultaneously "Indian" and "poacher," and neither, this Spanish sailor leaves Delano
wondering "[w]hat meant this?" (62). In whose eyes is the gesture "imperfect"? Was it
suspicions?
looks in the distance for his boat. The perspective shifts and we watch him, rather than
seeing through his eyes, leaning forward on the balustrade in order to get a glimpse. And
then something startling happens, a significant moment of action which is buried in the
the balustrade gave way before him like charcoal. Had he not clutched an
outreaching rope he would have fallen into the sea. The crash, though
feeble, and the fall, though hollow, of the rotten fragments, must have
been overheard. He glanced up. With sober curiosity peering down upon
him was one of the old oakum-pickers, slipped from his perch to an
outside boom; while below the old negro, and, invisible to him,
reconnoitering from a port-hole like a fox from the mouth of its den,
crouched the Spanish sailor again. (62)
Hanging precariously from a rope, suspended above the sea, Delano sees the oakum-
picker and perhaps the black below, but the Spaniard is "invisible to him"—only the
narrator knows of his presence, can describe the scene in full. Delano cannot see the
something suddenly suggested by the man's air, the mad idea now darted
into Captain Delano's mind, that Don Benito's plea of indisposition, in
withdrawing below, was but a pretense: that he was engaged there
maturing his plot, of which the sailor, by some means gaining an inkling,
had a mind to warn the stranger against. (62)
173
It seems as if "the man's air" refers to the "invisible" Spanish sailor. Suddenly, when he
goes out of view, and Delano almost falls into the sea, a thought pops into his head—he
seems to see the ominously "peering" oakum-picker and possibly another slave below
him, but does not in fact see them, for he is still "seeing" the sailor who is now invisible
double vision. The kind of seeming that we discussed in Moby-Dick returns here at the
level of narrative and focalization. The oakum-picker is "peering," just as, seconds
earlier, Delano "peers" off down imagined roads. What is in this double "peer"? It is as if
the duplicity of peer at once appears and disappears here: it is difficult not to sense, if
only on a second reading, the other sense of peer as "equal." It is a question of how the
"peering" functions as a kind of verbal surface, the simple (if deceptively simple)
duplication of a word.
As Delano tries to decipher Cereno's "secret," he falls back on the certainty that
whatever it is, it could not be held in confidence by the black slaves. Cereno and the
slaves could not be colluding, on account of the slaves being "too stupid" (63). Without
recourse to any other adjective, Delano is incapable of getting beyond his own hapless
naivety: "who ever heard of a white so far a renegade as to apostatize from his very
species almost, by leaguing in against it with negroes?" (63). And yet, here he gets closer
to the truth than ever. Cereno is colluding with the mutinous slaves, if only to try to save
Delano is able to pull himself back on deck but, having had these thoughts, is
"[l]ost in their mazes," only to have his mental life mirrored in an intricate knot being
174
tied by a Spanish sailor and several blacks.18 This knot, however, passed over to him,
leaves him mute, and is then "unconsciously" handed over to "an elderly negro," who
tosses it overboard. This situation, almost falling overboard and then having the material
representation of his entangled thoughts tossed overboard, confounds Delano: "this is all
very queer now," he thinks (64). The queerness of being told that Delano is thinking of
queerness—the entangled and duplicitous knot that this presents to the reader—is
inextricably tied up in turn with the figure of undistrustfulness that we have already
touched upon.
This undistrustfulness has to do with the confidence the reader "naturally" puts in
a narrator and the kind of confidentiality broached by getting inside another's head. It is a
matter of how the reader is to respond to a narrator whose voice and judgments seem so
strangely convolved with those of Delano himself.19 Take, for example, this passage:
Always placing himself in the center of his narrative (i.e. if there is a plot against anyone, it is against
him), Delano is perhaps a nice forerunner to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's notion of the paranoid reader in
"Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About
You," in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 123-
151. Sedgwick's title itself is beautifully suggestive. We might imagine saying to Delano: "You're so
paranoid, you probably think this knot is about you." At the end of the narrative, having been aware all
along that, whatever the appearance, slaves are enslaved, by force and against their wills, Delano is forced
to face this truth, dramatically and head-on, as it were, having been "in time undeceived" ("Benito Cereno,"
101). Yet he remains steadfastly unchanged. Here Sedgwick's question seems especially relevant and
provoking: "[w]hat does knowledge do—the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again
of knowledge of what one already knows?" (124). Here Delano, like so many of Sedgwick's paranoid
readers, participates in significant exposure. Delano does so by (however inadvertently) unveiling a
mutinous plot and, more generally, the insidious physical realities and complex psychological repressions
involved in slavery. Nonetheless the fundamentally fake principles and fictive constructedness of his (and
also his nation's) beliefs in the natural order of humans does not change, does not even appear shaken. As
Sedgwick hauntingly asks: "What is the basis for assuming that it will surprise or disturb, never mind
motivate, anyone to learn that a given social manifestation is artificial, self-contradictory, imitative,
phantasmatic, or even violent?" (141) The whole nation, the entire world of slavery (which of course goes
far beyond America itself) is built on the back of this kind of suffering. That is what Delano shows—and
shows without being affected himself.
19
Melville's text offers a singularly complex shifting and deceptive exploration of that power of
storytelling neatly encapsulated by Jonathan Culler: "To tell a story is to claim a certain authority, which
listeners grant." See Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997),
89.
175
There is something in the negro which, in a peculiar way, fits him
for avocations about one's person. Most negroes are natural valets and
hairdressers; taking to the comb and brush congenially as to the castinets,
and flourishing them apparently with almost equal satisfaction...And
above all is the great gift of good humor...When to all this is added the
docility arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind, and
that susceptibility of blind attachments sometimes inhering in indisputable
inferiors, one readily perceives why those hypochondriacs, Johnson and
Byron—it may be something like the hypochondriac, Benito Cereno—
took to their hearts, almost to the exclusion of the entire white race, their
serving men, the negroes, Barber and Fletcher. But if there be that in the
negro which exempts him from the inflicted sourness of the morbid or
cynical mind, how, in his most prepossessing aspects, must he appear to a
benevolent one? When at ease with respect to exterior things, Captain
Delano's nature was not only benign, but familiarly and humorously
so...In fact, like most men of a good, blithe heart, Captain Delano took to
negroes, not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to
Newfoundland dogs. (70-1)
It is not clear where the views of the narrator coincide with—or where they separate off
from—those of Delano himself. Peggy Kamuf, who also cites this passage, comments:
are not lent to Delano, nor are they read as reflections of his own observations." She
finely illuminates the bafflements to narratorial credibility that the passage generates, in
particular highlighting the commingling of literary and non-literary registers (above all,
vis-a-vis Melville's Delano and the discourse of the historical author Delano). In
addition, I would like to draw attention to the way that these words altogether seem to
come from another time. The reference to Johnson makes chronological sense, but the
reference to Byron is curiously anachronistic. In 1799 (the date at which Melville sets the
story), Byron was aged only eleven, unlikely to be already a "hypochondriac" with "the
inflicted sourness of the morbid and cynical mind." The narrator becomes a ghostly
presence from the future, tacitly underscoring the sense that these literary references are
176
not Delano's reflections, but nor are they the thoughts of any realistic or trustworthy
narrator. Recalling the image of Babo as a "shepherd's dog" (39), Delano is reported to
feel towards "negroes" as "other men to Newfoundland dogs." This reference to dogs
also recalls an earlier association concerning Delano's boat, Rover (clearly a dog's
name): "the sight of that household boat evoked a thousand trustful associations, which,
contrasted with previous suspicions, filled him not only with lightsome confidence, but
somehow with half humorous self-reproach at his former lack of it" (64). As I have
questions of the animal and animality, and more specifically with the strange junctures of
91
(to borrow Donna Haraway's phrase) "where species meet." With a perhaps
characteristic queerness, "Benito Cereno" would appear to be about where slaves, dogs,
and boats meet. Given the kind of unsettling and often unfathomable connections and
disconnections between Melville's narrator and Melville's Delano, any more detailed
analytic dissection of Delano's putative "confidence" or "lack of it" can only further
Another way of phrasing these concerns would be to say that blindness in "Benito
Cereno" is never isolated, it is always multiple. There is the kind of "blind attachment"
that Delano thinks he sees; there is Delano's own blind attachment to a particular set of
beliefs or expectations; and there is our blindness as readers, the strangely blind
21
Donna Haraway, Where Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
177
blindness to the future, in this case to the revelation of Delano's massive misreading.22
Let us just for a moment turn our attention to one of these blindnesses. This is the
blindness of Delano that is, in William Spanos' words, "a metaphysical mode of vision
Spanos draws on Foucauldian notions according to which what we are able to see is
delimited by the discursive limits of our historical moment. Spanos' reading focuses on
seeing/ not seeing, as does my own to a great extent, but it is perhaps also worth
knowledge and regimes of truth around speaking and silence. The climactic moment of
Melville's narrative is one of a dazzling "flash of revelation," but it is also crucially the
result of an enunciation, specifically the "husky words, incoherent to all but the
Portuguese [sailor]" (85). Delano hears these "husky words," though they are evidently
22 Qf "jhe Blind Short Story" special issue of Oxford Literary Review 26 (2004), especially the idea of "the
unforeseeable," what Helene Cixous calls "the impossibility of seeing one doesn't see" in "The
Unforeseeable," 194.
William V. Spanos, Herman Melville and the American Calling: Fiction after Moby-Dick, 1851-57
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 110.
24
See, for, example, "The Order of Discourse" (1970), in Untying the Text: A Poststmcturalist Reader, ed.
Robert Young (Boston: Routledge and Keegan, 1981), 48-78. In particular, Foucault's contention that in
spite of our current society's
veneration of discourse, under this apparent logophilia, a certain fear is hidden. It is just
as if prohibitions, barriers, thresholds and limits had been set up in order to master, at
least partly, the great proliferation of discourse, in order to remove from its richness the
most dangerous part, and in order to organize its disorder according to figures which
dodge what is most uncontrollable about it....No doubt there is in our society...a
profound logophobia, a sort of mute terror against these events, against this mass of
things said, again the surging-up of all these statements, against all that could be perilous
about them—against this great incessant and disordered buzzing of discourse. (66)
Foucault outlines the myriad ways in which both external social institutions and internal structures stifle,
forbid, restrain, prevent, and repress the proliferation of discourse in spite of the seeming love and
acceptance of its "disordered buzzing." Silence then, instead of being opposed or the opposite of discourse,
becomes a very rich and fertile discursive site. As he writes in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, (London:
Penguin, 1990): "[s]ilence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name...is less the
absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element
that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies" (27).
178
unintelligible to him; as readers, moreover, we are never told what these words are,
whether in Spanish or in another language. "The scales dropped from [Delano's] eyes"
(85): even without understanding what Cereno is saying, he can see that Babo is leading a
mutiny and that the slaves were masquerading around as if they were still subservient but
as essentially a story about "visual perception or, more precisely, American seeing," then,
I would like to add that it is very much also a story about hearing or not hearing.25 For
what Delano had been hearing or not hearing all along—in Cereno's disturbing silences,
stilted language, and nervous coughing—were signals of distress on his part. Most of all,
the American captain has been deaf to the resonant enormity of slavery and to the reality
Babo's extraordinary resistance and, above all, concerning his refusal to speak at the end:
"As for the black—whose brain, not body, had schemed and led the revolt, with the
plot...Seeing all was over, he uttered no sound, and could not be forced to. His aspect
seemed to say, since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words" (102). Thus, for example,
Once his mission has failed, [Babo] waits silently for death and ultimately
meets a "voiceless end," a manner of dying that is, in his case, particularly
appropriate, for he is no longer a leader of a revolt but once again a slave.
And a slave is always a man [sic] without a voice.26
25
Spanos, Herman Melville and the American Calling, 106.
26
Richard E. Ray, " 'Benito Cereno': Babo as Leader," American Transcendental Quarterly 7 (Summer
1970), 23.
179
Testimony is taken from Cereno, it is implied, from his Spanish crew and from Delano
but not, unsurprisingly, from the slaves. It is a "voiceless end" (102) for Babo, as Ray
stresses. The image of his silent head, which "met, unabashed, the gaze of the
whites... and looked towards the monastery, on Mount Agonia" (where Cereno himself is
soon to die), is strikingly haunting, making him, for many contemporary critics, a
revolutionary figure and the hero of the story. This characterization at the same time,
however, effectively silences the explicit and more literary dimension of Babo's
"voiceless end," in other words the undeniable parallel that Melville's text draws between
Babo and Shakespeare's Iago. This evocation of perhaps the most villainous and evil
character in English literature and in particular of his last words—"From this time forth I
reckon with the compelling and irreducible pertinence of both readings. The literary
emphasis, throughout "Benito Cereno," that this is a work of fiction, a kind of poetic
hoax that insists at one and the same time on a self-reflexive literary register and on the
particularly the reversal that Melville's text operates here—in which the duped is not
black (like Othello) but white, and the murderous or prospectively murderous character
Cf Norton editor Dan McCall writes of Babo: "We see Babo in only two ways, as Sambo and then as
Satan. We never hear him speak in his own voice. For the entire narrative he is the grinning, fawning,
faithful slave; in the depositions he is an evil mastermind. Today, many readers see him as a tragic
revolutionary hero" {Mellvile's Short Novels, 102 n. 1); and Ray, " 'Benito Cereno': Babo as Leader" on
Babo's "extraordinary intelligence," American Transcendental Quarterly 7 (Spring 1975), 19.
28
William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Norman Saunders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
v.ii.301.
180
not white (like Iago) but black —generates a kind of chiasmatic strangeness that
necessarily hangs over any attempt to impose one kind of reading at the expense of the
Silence in "Benito Cereno" is not merely to do with Babo. It is the literally tacit
environment that is broken up, for Delano, by the "interruption" of the eerie and
behind or within what the narrator refers to as "the noisy indocility of the blacks in
general" (40). It is the silence of all the aborted attempts at conversation. It is the silence,
above all perhaps, of what is passing through Delano's own mind. We might here
usefully recall Derrida's stress, in his reading of the story of Abraham and Isaac in The
Gift of Death, on the fact that a decision is always made in secret and in silence. As he
puts is: "every decision would, fundamentally, remain[...]solitary, secret, and silent."
Mellvile's entire novella is, in a sense, the drama of this interior silence. Silence reigns
supreme in scenes where Delano's suspicion waxes and wanes. For example, when Babo
begins to shave Cereno, at first "no conversation took place" (71). This leads Delano to
see "in the black...a headsman, and in the white, a man at the block" (72). Silence
enables significant insight for Delano, though the narrator quickly steps in to say: "But
this was one of those antic conceits, appearing and vanishing in a breath, from which,
perhaps, the best regulated mind is not always free" (72). Decapitation haunts, but
without a word. It is as if the narrator himself breaks the silence, thus cutting off Delano's
9
In Delano's Narrative Voyages, Benito Cereno attempts to stab one of the revolting blacks, whereas in
Melville's story, Babo attempts to stab Benito Cereno (cf "Benito Cereno" 85 n. 7).
30
See Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995),
60. Cf Derrida's remark that "The ideas of secrecy and exclusivity are essential here, as is Abraham's
silence." 73
181
thought, talking over his silent cogitations and suspicions. Some conversation between
Here, in micrological form, we are presented with a kind of vignette of Melville's poetics
of the hoax. As with the allusion to Othello just noted, it is difficult not to sense an
allusion here to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. In particular, in Melville's use of the verb
"acting out" and the "unknown," this passage calls up Cassius's notorious meta-theatrical
comment on the treacherous murder of Caesar: "How many ages hence / Shall this our
loft scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!" The "juggling
play" in Melville's text is not only about what might or might not be in the process of
being "act[ed] out" (with all the ambiguity suggested by this great scene of treachery in
Shakespeare), but also entails a disturbing but irreducible insistence on the fictional and
The "juggling play" here is of an undecidably "shaving" nature: as we shall see again in
shaving as "a false alarm, a hoax, a sell." Finally, just as the allusion to Julius Caesar
31
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. Marvin Spevack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), III.i.111-13.
32
See Hotten, Slang Dictionary.
182
use of the word "dusky" generates a queer and singular derangement. To call silence
pervasive way, the "dusky comment of silence" hangs over Melville's text: it is
Towards the end the silences proliferate and deepen. Shortly after the shaving
scene, Delano suggests that he and Cereno have a private conversation. When Delano
remarks that '"there is an interference with the full expression of what I have to say to
you,'" this is met with resistance. We read (but we are not directly given to hear) that
"[Cereno] had made Babo...not only his constant attendant and companion, but in all
things his confidant." Melville's narrator then begins a new paragraph: "After this,
nothing more could be said" (77). Just as we are told that Babo is Cereno's "confidant,"
conclusion. As so often, it is not clear whether the reader is here a confidant to what
Cereno says or to what the narrator says: "After this, nothing more could be said"
functions as another version of the great Melvillean "I would prefer not to."34 But Delano
keeps trying: '"Why not adjourn to the cuddy...there is more air there.' But the host sat
silent and motionless" (78). Again when Delano asks Cereno to accompany him back to
his ship, the Spaniard responds with silence, and the servant looks at him with a "mute
concern" (81) that is reminiscent of his "mutely turned [up]... shepherd's dog" glance in
the opening pages (39). Upon Delano's finally leaving the San Dominick, we are told that
33
There is a dusky resonance of words in Melville. For example, the "dusky moors of ocean" (86), a
peculiar metaphor of land as sea or of sea as land, that perhaps also resonates with Shakespeare's "Moor of
Venice."
34
"Bartleby, The Scrivener" in Melville's Short Novels (New York and London: Norton, 2002), 10 and
passim.
183
Cereno was "too much agitated to speak" (82). Reflecting on this silent parting ("sinister
muteness and gloom"), after "the echo of the ship's flawed bell, striking the hour"
(described as "the tolling for execution in some jail-yard") "fell on his ears" (82),
Delano's suspicion is renewed: "In images far swifter than sentences, the minutest details
of all his former distrusts swept through him" (82). At this moment he hears "the low,
buzzing whistle and industrious hum of the hatchet-polishers" and sees, as a result, "more
than all... the benign aspect of nature" in the evening light—he has a "charmed eye and
ear" (83). As always, we need to be alert to the eerie, dusky ways in which Melville's
words confide and communicate with one another. Throughout this passage a singular
kind of synaesthesia is sketched: "sinister" pertains both to sound and the visual ("sinister
muteness and gloom"); the echoing death-knell is not merely heard but falls, like an
object, "on his ears"; the "charmed" of "charmed eye and ear" resonates with the spell-
like music of its etymology (French charme, from Latin carmen, a song). Finally, in "the
low, buzzing whistle and industrious hum of the hatchet-polishers," it is, perhaps,
difficult not to hear the play of "hum" as "hoax" or "jest."35 It is now that Cereno rushes
See Samuel Johnson and John Walker, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2n Edition (William
Pickering, 1828), 355. For an early play on "hum" meaning hoax, consider this "pun" printed in the
Morning Chronicle (1 April 1814):
A Recent Hoax, though somewhat dirty,
Had Omnium rais'd, and made it Thirty;
The White Cockade (but look not grum)
Will make the Omnium—Omni-hum!
(See The Spirit of the Public Journals for 1814: Being and Impartial Account of the Most Ingenious Essays
and Jeu d' Espirits that Appear in Newspapers and Other Publications, vol. 18, eds. Charles Molloy
Westmacott, Stephen Jones, et al (London: James Ridgway, 1815), 107. There is also at least one other
reference to humming in "Benito Cereno." Caught by a wave of suspicion, Delano's "good nature regain[s]
its meridian," through some mysterious process compared with a "hoar frost" melting under "mild sun."
We are then told that once "[rjelieved by these and other better thoughts, the visitor, lightly humming a
tune, now began indifferently pacing the poop, so as not to betray to Don Benito that he had at all
mistrusted incivility, much less duplicity" (53). This "hum" as hoax or jest works on at least two levels:
first, Delano is hiding and therefore in a manner of speaking trying to put one over on Cereno, humming to
mask the sense that he had ever been suspicious; and second, Delano was right to be suspicious, his
184
out to catch Delano before he disembarks, approaching him "too much overcome to
speak" (83).
"The negro"
As I have been trying to make clear, alongside Spanos' stress on the importance of seeing
and blindness, we need also to heed the significance of sound, voice, deafness, and
This "blind 'American' trust and confidence" is also deaf, as becomes evident in
Spanos's evaluation of what Cereno comes to "see" at the end of the narrative. Delano
exclaims, "You are saved...you are saved; what has cast such a shadow upon you?" and
What Benito Cereno "sees" as he speaks this simple stunning word is too
complicated for any easy discursive answer. But we can get at its
existential force indirectly by suggesting that it and the resonant silence
surrounding its utterance brings [sic] to sudden and intensely ominous—
spectral—visibility everything that Captain Delano's discourse (and the
"authoritative" document of the tribunal) during that day on the San
Dominick left necessarily unsaid, everything that, as I have been insisting,
humming, then, in its semantic double meaning, might be read as an effect of an unconscious knowledge
that he is being hoaxed or jested, tricked by the appearance of Cereno.
Spanos, Herman Melville and the American Calling, 115.
185
was inevitable to his vision—the "vision" of his American exceptionalist
problematic.
Cereno "sees" what Delano cannot, sees images about which he remains silent while he
speaks, much like the unnamed atrocities "past all speech" (68), referred to earlier in the
story. It is this "resonant silence" that I am most interested in. Delano can neither see
what Cereno speaks, nor can he say or hear it. After Cereno's response, "[t]here was
silence...There was no more conversation that day" (101). In fact, there is no more
conversation in the text. The narrator only reiterates the pervasiveness of the Spaniard's
"muteness upon [such] topics" and cryptically remarks on other topics "upon which he
never spoke at all: on which, indeed, all his old reserves were piled" (101). All of
Melville's enigmatic narrator's reserves are accordingly, in turn, piled on these piled
reserves. It is impossible to say if or how the silence is resonant for Delano at all. The
concluding two paragraphs of Melville's text are focused on Babo and Cereno, whereas
the dull American Delano disappears. It is as if he withdraws or is withdrawn into all the
"old reserves" out of which Melville has elaborated his extraordinary narrative. At the
same time, we also are left feeling that Melville at this point in the antepenultimate
paragraph has "dismiss[ed]" Delano, just as the text as a whole (to recall Blanchot's word
once again) "dismisses" us. This is the kind of dismissal that Delano himself attributes to
the past: "forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue
sky; these have turned over new leaves" (101). And it is also, of course, the kind of
dismissal offered by that internal genius or engineer of the narrative machine, Babo. Like
Iago, once again, Babo "dismisses" us—as if dismissing everyone and everything.
186
For a long time "Benito Cereno " got little or no critical notice. But then a shift
occurred in the field of American literary criticism and what appeared to be Melville's
racism was hotly debated. Is "Benito Cereno" a reflection of the racist views and
assumptions of its author, or is it not? Some of the most impressive and compelling
critical work on this text would suggest a response which comes down on the side of
Melville's ultra-progressivity. He not only warned against forms of benign racism, seeing
"Africans [as] jolly primitives who love bright colors and have a special talent for waiting
on white people," but also "pointed to the deeprooted, unconscious prejudice of those
who claimed they abhorred slavery." More recently, what is seen as Melville's
canniness has given rise to a kind of reading in which "Benito Cereno" is susceptible to a
rich variety of historical renditions. Certain alterations Melville made with respect to the
account given in the source text by Amasa Delano, Narrative Voyages and Travels, in the
Northern and Southern Hemispheres (Boston, 1817), paved the way for a kind of
criticism devoted to determining the historical and cultural significance of those changes,
producing a series of fascinating and provoking readings that, far from charging Melville
with the same benign racism as that of his Captain Delano, see the text as a profound and
powerful indictment of US imperial and slave labor economy.39 In these pages I have
Rosalie Feltenstein puts it: "the real Delano's narrative is a flatly matter-of-fact account,
38
Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography, (New York: Random House, 1996), 349; and Glenn C.
Altschuler, "Whose Foot on Whose Throat? A Re-Examination of Melville's Benito Cereno," CLA Journal
3 (March 1975), 389.
See Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1993); John Stauffer, "Melville, Slavery and the American Dilemma," in A
Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley (Maiden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 214-230.
187
written with as much artistry and emotion as one would find in a weather report."
Melville's Delano is much more interesting—his "good dullness" is not only what saves
him but what makes him psychologically compelling, even maddening to readers.
Melville picks out, then majestically expands and uncannily transforms just a brief
portion of the original work of 1817. The section in question (Chapter XVIII of Narrative
Voyages) appears to have been written not primarily for its harrowing or salacious details,
nor its political import, but as a warning about dealings with foreigners and the trickiness
of getting compensation for assistance lent on the high seas.41 To Delano's text, besides
the monumental shift into third person narrative, Melville made a number of other rather
extraordinary additions and suppressions, including two features which have particularly
intrigued recent critics: changing the name of Benito Cereno's ship from the Tryal to the
San Dominick and changing the date of the encounter from 1805 to 1799.42 As
Rosalie Feltenstein, "Melville's 'Benito Cereno,'" American Literature 19:3 (November 1947), 246.
41
"The whole point of the original tale seems to be Americans should be very cautious in their dealings
with foreigners" (Feltenstein, "Melville's 'Benito Cereno,'" 246). See also Hershel Parker on the financial
reparations for saving ship: the real Cereno (Bonito Sereno) "determined to find grounds to deny him
[Delano] any compensation for his rescue of the ship" {Herman Melville: A Biography 1819-1851
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 237).
2
Feltenstein also explains what Melville added to Delano's narrative—in essence what makes it literature
and not history. She writes:
[Melville] changes the name of the two ships from the Perseverance and the Tryal to the
Bachelor's Delight and the San Dominick; he invents the oakum pickers and the hatchet
polishers, the shaving of Cereno by Babo, the appearance of the giant Afutal in chains,
the luncheon aboard the Spanish ship, the attack of the two Negros upon the Spanish
seaman, the glimpse of the sailor with the jewel, the incident of the sailor and the knot,
and finally Don Benito's death in a monastery. He also makes Babo, the leader of the
revolt, the Spaniard's devoted servant, rather than Muri, and extends the period of
Delano's isolation aboard the Spanish vessel. Instead of suppressing "just a few items,"
he omits the whole second half of the narrative which deal with the quarrel between the
two captains. (247)
To note several further alterations: "in the source it is the bloodthirsty Cereno himself who, with a hidden
dirk, tries to stab one of the slaves and is restrained by Delano" (247). In other words, it is not Babo who
tries to stab Cereno. Melville concentrates the "evil" in one character, Babo, going so far as to substitute
Babo's name in the legal document wherever it had designated a different slave or the slaves in general
(247). Even Benito's name is adjusted from the one in the original documents, Bonito (changing the
meaning from "pretty" to "Benedictine friar" (247). The often returned-to fact of the ship's name being
188
Feltenstein has argued, the sometimes small, sometimes fundamental alterations Melville
makes "deepen the central mystery, intensify the sinister atmosphere, and increase the
suspense, since each incident reveals another facet of the one problem about which
Delano speculates as he becomes more and more lost in a labyrinth of suspicion and
fear."43 For critics such as Eric J. Sundquist these alterations do not just "deepen,"
"intensify," and "increase." Melville's changes, especially those concerning the date and
ship's name, are read as keys to the text's true meaning. As Sundquist argues:
In the changing the name of Benito Cereno's ship from the Tryal to the
San Dominick, Melville gave Babo's slave revolt a specific character that
has often been identified. Haiti, known as San Domingo.. .before declaring
its final independence from France in 1804 and adopting a native name,
remained a strategic point of reference in debates over slavery in the
United States.44
The irony here is that the most literary or fictional aspects of the narrative—what makes
it fiction rather than non-fiction—are precisely where the most historical readings are
opened up. This is done without remarking on the strange mischievousness of such an act,
on the ways in which Melville's writing meddles with history, turning history into
literature or rather generating (through its singularly queer forms of "inside narrative") a
changed from Tryal to San Dominick is interpreted in current criticism as an allusion to the slave revolt in
San Domingo in 1799 (the date at which Melville decides to set the narrative), but it also, Feltenstein points
out, is reminiscent of the name for black friars, Dominicans, whose link with the Inquisition, Feltenstein
does not fail to note (247-8). Moreover, upon first spying the ship, Delano "almost thinks" he sees "monks"
like "Black Friars pacing the cloisters" on deck (36). The link with monasticism returns when Cereno is
made a monk at the end, becoming the very thing Delano first makes him out to be. Additionally, Benito
Cereno's link with Charles V as "the symbolic ghost of all power," made by H. Bruce Franklin in The
Wake of the Gods: Melville's Mythology and noted on 41 n. 6, is fascinating but beyond the scope of this
chapter.
43
Feltenstein, "Melville's 'Benito Cereno,'" 250.
44
Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 140. Sundquist's account has proven highly influential. More recent
pieces by Paul Downes and Jonathan Elmer use and are to some extent indebted to his compelling insights
compelling. See Downes, "Melville's 'Benito Cereno' and the Politics of Humanitarian Intervention," The
Southern Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3 (2004), 465-88; and Elmer, "A Response to Jonathan Arac," American
Literary History 20:1/2 (2008), 1-11.
189
kind of hoaxical literature and history. Having remarked on the allusion to the successful
slave revolt of 1799 in San Domingo,45 critics have created what Catherine Toal terms
text which identifies positively with the plight and cause of slaves, leaving the critics to
insert '"historical knowledge'" into "the narrative 'gaps.'" 46 The "gaps" or silences in the
literary text are thus used to save the text, to render it historically sensitive and critically
nevertheless accurate.
There is no doubt often something gratifying about making silence speak, about
articulating what is not said yet significant in a text or discourse. Such is, in effect, the
(in a more narrowly textual mode) the hermeneutics of Wolfgang Iser. But these
epistemophilia and a drive for mastery) call to be thought about differently in the context
Hershel Parker reads the change in date differently: "Melville moved the story to February of 1799, so as
to have it in the previous century, in the presidency of the first Adams, nearer the time of the building of
great American frigates, including his own ship, the United States (1797), and, he might have remembered,
not quite two years after the mutinies in the British navy at Spithead and the Nore" {Herman Melville: A
Biography 1819-1851 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 240).
46
Catherine Toal, " 'Some Things Which Never Could Have Happened': Fiction, Identification, and
'Benito Cereno,'" Nineteenth Century Literature 61:1 (June 2006), 44.
47
An installment of "Benito Cereno" was first published in the same November 1855 issue of Putnam's
Magazine as Frederick Douglass' My Bondage and My Freedom. Publishing a fictionalized account of a
slave revolt alongside an autobiographical slave narrative sets in relief the possible underlying political
stance or import of Melville's text. At the very least, it can be said that recalling this context helps to focus
attention on a way of reading which would not simply see Cereno as victim and Delano as hero. See
Robert K. Wallace, Douglass and Melville: Anchored Together in Neighborly Style (New Bedford, MA:
Spinner, 2005), 109. For a more general but powerful, if implicit, juxtaposition of Douglass and Melville
see Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, passim. He considers the texts individually but sees both texts as
central to his reconceptualization of American literature.
190
of Melville's writing. As elsewhere, it is a matter of acknowledging and trying to do
justice to the force of a kind of literary fictional "I would prefer not to" in his work. It is
necessary, in other words, to attempt to engage with the singularity of Melville's silences,
from one text to another, and to respect the workings of such silences or "reserves" in a
suggested, is thus much closer to the kind of silence we find affirmed in the writings of
Maurice Blanchot; and it is also intimately entangled in what I have been calling the
As the etymology of "contest" (from Latin con- + testari, to be a witness, to bear witness)
witnessing that keeps (itself) in reserve. Vivian Liska has glossed this Blanchotic account
Melville, "Bartleby/'^ass/wj.
49
Maurice Blanchot, "The Great Reducers," in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997), 67.
191
of literature as follows: "The power of contestation inherent in literature [is located] in its
opposed to silence), akin to what Wai Chee Dimock calls literature's "resonance." Can
silence? Resonance, for Dimock, has to do with the way in which a "text might still
matter in the present, why, distanced from its original period, it nonetheless continues to
notion of the timeless strength and integrity of great works of literature, Dimock speaks
temporal or even linguistic context. Dimock is especially alert to the sound-effects texts
make across time. She wants to "honor the claim of the ear against the primacy of the eye
in the West."54 Dimock does not give extended attention to silence in her essay, yet it
seems to me a rich and productive concept and figure, both for elaborating on the
generally what it is about literary texts that enables them to work as hoax literature. For
as I have made clear, earlier in this study, the hoax—whether literary or extra-literary (the
distinction between these being, of course, what the hoax necessarily unsettles, disrupts
50
Vivian Liska, "Two Sirens Singing: Literature as Contestation in Maurice Blanchot and Theodore W.
Adorno," in The Power of Contestation, eds. Kevin Hart and Geoffrey Hartman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2004), 99.
51
Wai Chee Dimock, "A Theory of Resonance," PMLA 112:5 (October 1997), 1060-1071.
52
Dimock, "A Theory of Resonance," 1061.
53
Dimock, "A Theory of Resonance," 1062.
54
Dimock, "A Theory of Resonance," 1060.
192
or overturns)—always entails the silence of a certain reserve. This reserve, this silence, is
indeed, in a sense, the hoax itself. The hoax, in the time of its unfolding, does not say. It
keeps silence, above all concerning whether or not it is a hoax. "Benito Cereno"
maintains a crucial silence. It holds itself, spectrally, in reserve. Like Babo, and like Iago
as described by W. H. Auden, the text called "Benito Cereno" is itself a kind of "practical
literary trompe I 'ceil or a searingly political and historical expose of the trompe I 'ceil of
One way of figuring the poetics of the hoax in Melville is through the dusky enigma of
confidence) and faith (belief or trust in). This is the perhaps rather diffidence-inspiring
pun at the heart of Melville's novel of 1857, The Confidence-Man. In the following
section I propose to explore the ways in which the novel exposes, plays with, and
analyzes this double meaning, in particular as concerns the links between literature and
55
Auden writes: "What Shakespeare gives us in Iago is a portrait of a practical joker of a peculiarly
appalling kind, and perhaps the best way of approaching the play is by a general consideration of the
Practical Joker" from "The Joker in the Pack," in The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber and
Faber, 1962), 253.
56
For the notion of textual trompe-1'ceil here, cf Jean Genet's unsettling reflections in Prisoner of Love, as
translated by Mairead Hanrahan:
But what if it were true that writing is a lie? What if it merely enabled us to conceal what
was, testimony being only a trompe-l 'ceil! Without actually saying the opposite of what
was, writing presents only its visible, acceptable, and so to speak, silent face, because it is
incapable of really showing the other one.
(Mairead Hanrahan is translating Genet's passage, quoted by Jacques Derrida, "Countersignature,"
Paragraph 27:2 (July 2004), 11). Cf Prisoner of Love, trans. Barbara Bray (London: Pan Books,
1989), 32.
193
finance, fiction and the "real world" of the market. I want to consider, in other words,
how the novel explores the inestimable importance of confidence for the organizing and
effective running of the "real" world and its institutions. This means looking, above all, at
how confidence emerges, as it were, from what might seem the simplest or most
novel, then, I want briefly to give some attention to Jacques Derrida's "Faith and
Knowledge," a remarkable essay (written in 1994) that explores the idea that all faith, all
forms of faith, are based on a fundamental faith in language and what he calls "the appeal
to faith that inhabits every act of language and every address to the other."57 The moment
I open my mouth or, in fact, write a word, I am making a kind of promise. First and
foremost, there is a sort of invisible language contract or "social bond," as Derrida calls
it, which makes it possible for us to "believe in" what others say, understand it, and
fiction (literature). The very terms of our social existence, passed down from the
"trustworthiness" of a certain kind of language.5 This is the case whether we are talking
Enlightenment thinkers and their descendants (among whom we must include ourselves)
are obliged to put into play an irreducible "faith," that of a "social bond"
or of a "sworn faith," of testimony ("I promise to tell you the truth beyond
all proof and all theoretical demonstration, believe me, etc."), that is, of a
performative of promising at work even in lying or perjury and without
which no address to the other would be possible. Without the performative
experience of this elementary act of faith, there would neither be "social
57
Jacques Derrida, "Faith and Knowledge," trans. Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New
York and London: Routledge, 2002), 56.
Derrida, "Faith and Knowledge," 80.
194
bond" nor address of the other, nor any performativity in general: neither
convention, nor institution, nor constitution, nor sovereign state, nor law.59
Derrida locates the root of our "faith" in the realm of testimony, where an oath or
promise makes truth by announcing itself as truth (even when or even if, the testifier is
lying). I have already explored the importance of this in relation to Poe's "The Facts in
the Case M. Valdemar," for example, and in Chapter 4 I will explore it further in the
language, in the language of "I promise," "I swear," "I tell you," and so forth. Literature,
I want to suggest, is the discourse in which that faith or confidence in language is perhaps
most dramatically, most playfully, but also most disturbingly foregrounded. As Simon
During notes in a discussion of Foucault and literature, '"I speak' is always true, even in
a fiction": there is a sense in which a reader (or listener) grants veracity to a narrator or
character in a work of literary fiction, no matter what they say.60 The "I speak" or "I
being perjury or lying. One does not ordinarily think of suggesting that a novel lies, even
become more complicated here, broaching the space of what I have been calling the
poetics of the hoax. The complication is to be found working in at least two directions.
First, it has to do with the purported space of literary discourse, in which what is
ostensibly fictional is drawn from or based on non-fictional writing in ways that unsettle
59
Derrida, "Faith and Knowledge," 80.
Simon During, Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing (New York and London:
Routledge, 1992), 85.
195
and even dissolve our ability to ascertain the status of what is described: the
there is the complication of literature's role in the other direction. This is what Derrida
has in mind when he proposes that testimony always bears the possibility of fiction,
falsehood, lying:
Derrida uses the word "faith," whereas Melville appears—especially in his novel of
1857—to prioritize "confidence." Faith and confidence, of course, share a common root
(L. fidere, to trust); and their definitions are intricately intertwined. (The OED gives
"[b]elief, trust, confidence" as a definition for "faith"; and "firm trust, reliance, faith" for
faith (namely faith in language) that is perhaps anterior to any recognized religious faith.
Confidence, on the other hand, might seem a more immediately and more obviously
secular term, whence its distinctive efficacy in trying to reckon with the legacies of
of the U.S. subprime mortgage market, a fifty-percent drop in the Dow Jones Industrial
average, and more or less daily reports of banks and institutions failing, never before has
there been such an emphasis on confidence and faith—or a crisis because of a critical
61
Jacques Derrida, "Demeure: Fiction and Testimony," trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, in The Instant of My
Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 29.
196
lack of confidence. The financial connotations of "fiduciary" are here radically exposed
as what is held in trust, including financial trusts as well as "of a paper currency:
depending for its value on the confidence of the public or on securities" (OED). In the
course of 2008 "confidence" revealed itself as perhaps the most fundamental principle of
capitalism—not a new version, not simply Allan Greenspan's plan, but one that is at least
as old as the eighteenth century, at least as old as the so-called "South Sea bubble." If
we think about The Confidence-Man, with all its elicitings and solicitings of confidence,
speculation on the currency of confidence today. A glance at a few recent headlines from
around the world will perhaps readily enough indicate how crucial this concept of
confidence is:
The South Seas Company was a publicly traded company that maintained a monopoly on trade with
Spain's South American colonies in the early eighteenth century. The company, at one point, took over
England's national debt and there was great speculation and financial ruin for many, including, for
example, Sir Isaac Newton, who lost £20,000 when the so-called "South Sea bubble" burst in 1720. Recent
newspaper articles have compared that financial crisis to the present one: "That speculative orgy showed
what happens when there is a confidence glut. Investors poured money into the madness, investing in pure
confidence, backing non-existent machines that promised perpetual motion and even, in one celebrated
case, 'an undertaking which shall in due course be revealed'" (Ben Maclntyre, The London Times, 9
October 2008). English essayist Charles Lamb (1775-1834), wrote "The South Seas House" (1823), a
favorite of Melville's (Mushabac, Melville's Humor, 30), where he "is affectionately remembering not only
the greed but what lies tucked within [the South Sea bubble], beneath the layers of dust, the long-buried
mysteries" (Mushabac, Melville's Humor, 146). Lamb himself describe the actions of the South Sea
Company as
that tremendous HOAX whose extent the petty speculators of our day look back upon with the
same expression of incredulous admiration, and hopeless ambition of rivalry, as would become the
puny face of modern conspiracy contemplating the Titan size of Vaux's superhuman plot. (The
Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 2, ed. E.V. Lucas (Charleston: Bibliolife, 2008), 14.)
As Mushabac glosses it: "Beneath the commiseration for the pathetic is sheer admiration for the hoax. In
fact, Lamb is celebrating the practical joke on the grand scale, the communal hoax" (Melville's Humor,
146).
197
"Consumer Confidence, Battered by Market Setbacks, Sags to a 40-year
low"
"Crisis of Confidence"
"Risky financial products: It's all to do with confidence"63
Confidence is, apparently, all. At the same time, these headlines cast us all as
perhaps serves to confide a more troubling phallogocentric "truth"), that is, as individuals
seeking, relying on, and lending our confidence(s). Confidence is the cornerstone of the
global market, and it has a slippery and priceless value. As Ben Maclntyre writes in "Be
If it cannot be bought, how can this elusive "commodity" be produced, created, and
increased? Maclntyre suggests that there is only one way—a way that, one suspects,
63
Unsigned, Chinadaily.com.cn, 29 October 2008; Lee Hyo-sik, Korea Times, 14 October 2008; Tracey
Boles, Sunday Express, 5 October 2008; Michael M. Grimbaum, New York Times, 29 October 2008;
Benjamin E. Diokno, Business World, 15 October 2008; unsigned, The Straits Times, 21 Oct 2008.
LexisNexis Academic accessed through Yale University.
64
Ben Maclntyre, The London Times, 9 October 2008. LexisNexis Academic accessed through Yale
University.
198
out very slowly in sixpences; the same people then joined another queue to
pay the coins back in. By the time worried account holders reached the
head of the queue, the time-consuming public display of a bank
functioning normally had restored the magic ingredient of confidence.65
In order to get confidence, the Bank of England had to play a trick on the "frightened"
confidence by making it appear that others had it. In order for the banks not to collapse,
they needed customer confidence back in the shape of capital investments. Without such
a material sign (or spectacle) of confidence, the banks would have no money with which
to lend (to customers or each other) or to pay back. The symbiosis, however, is less a
mutual assurance exercise than, as Maclntyre (and others) suggest, a hoax, indeed, a vast
Iain Macwhirter in the Sunday Herald (4 October 2008) suggests another link
times, but instead simply as the basis for the way markets work in general. He writes:
The talk, according to Macwhirter, is merely chatter, a sort of sham speech, created in
order to hide the fact that banks are allowed, even encouraged, through a madly
199
unregulated "credit system," to lend money they do not have in capital reserves. If we
follow the argument outlined by Derrida, we see that the idea that the banks are not lying,
and the idea that, even though there can be no proof, financial institutions can be trusted,
both originate from our confidence or faith in language, in the "I promise" or "I swear"
implicit in the credit transfers between banks, as much as between banks and their
customers. From the confidence in a single note of paper currency to the trillions of
dollars passed among banks (in the form of digitalized transactions), the supposition that
purportedly stable value of gold is merely valuable, in the first instance, as an effect of
people have the confidence that others will abide by this value. Although "stronger" or
"more stable" than national paper currencies, it still is not absolute—it rests on a primary
agreement among the world's people, nations, and business that it is worth a premium.
her essay "Melville's Credit Card": "in place of that intrinsic or inherent value we have
only convention, whether linguistic, monetary, or other."69 And this convention, this
67
Cf Derrida's contention in Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 45: "As is well known, Marx always
described money, and more precisely the monetary sign, in the figure of appearance or simulacrum, more
exactly of the ghost"; and J. Hillis Miller, The Medium is the Maker: Browning, Freud, Derrida and the
New Telepathic Ecotechnologies. (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2009), 79-80 n. 13.
68
We might note here the effects that the stock market speculation, panic and bank failures of 1837, and the
governmental buying up of property in the American West had on Melville's writing career, or at least his
education. His move away from Albany's debating scene was tied up with the crash in the financial
markets, a need to make money that would, of course, mark and re-mark his career in significant ways. Cf
Parker, Herman Melville, 108.
Kamuf, The Division of Literature, 177.
200
coming together, is the very arena of that "great hoax" called the financial industry. To
refer to the "world of finance" as a hoax industry, as I have just done, is in fact to be true
to one of the earliest recorded usages of the word "hoax," according to the OED, for
some of the earliest uses of "hoax" not only had to do with "university wit" (the playful
language of students) but also circulated around stock market discourse. The second
example of "hoax" as a noun cited by the OED is from 1814: "The day on which the hoax
was practised on the Stock Exchange."70 In this early example from the financial realm,
as in all the other instances I have been considering in this dissertation, the hoax would
be, decisively and irreducibly, a matter of language. As more recent and more
catastrophic events have demonstrated, linguistic games and financial scams are
inseparable.
steamer, Fidele.11 It is a book about the way in which belief, trust, and faith—and the
This is a reference to the "The Great Stock Exchange Hoax" (see The Spirit of the Public Journals for
1814, 110-15), which concerned false rumors circulated that Napoleon (then engaged in war with Great
Britain) had been killed and there was British victory, which on 21 February 1814 briefly caused prices to
soar on the London Stock Exchange (see Nick Yapp, Great Hoaxes of the World (and the hoaxers behind
them) (London: Robson Books, 1995), 42-43). Interestingly this collection of stories contains three other
nearly cotemporaneous uses of "hoax." First there was On the Hoax upon Royalty (reported on 16 May
1814) (see The Spirit of the Public Journals for 1814, 136-7) concerning a false report about "her majesty"
giving aid to the "suffering Germans"; "The Royal Hoax," a poem remarking on the general obtuseness of
the king (The Spirit of the Public Journals for 1814, 158); and "The Hyde Park Hoax" (13 July 1814),
another poem, presumably in response to the British campaign and policy during the Napoleonic Wars,
criticizing the "fierce and despotic" government, concerned that the British navy was going to turn against
its own people, and Trojan horse-like, infiltrate and tyrannical impose vicious rule (see, The Spirit of the
Public Journals for 1814, 208-10).
71
On the number of possible confidence-men involved see John Bryant, Melville and Repose (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), 236. Peggy Kamuf also draws attention to this "most basic assumption that
the text seems to ask us to make" (that there is just one confidence man) and the way in which the text
"never directly confirm[s] or contradict[s]" this supposition (The Division of Literature, 170).
201
chapter presents a vignette or relates a story of confidence-effects. In most cases this
takes the form of an attempt to elicit the confidence (often but not always in the form of a
and others make clear, the financial world, including banks, governments, publicly traded
companies and the stock exchange rely on and exploit confidence. The Confidence-Man
takes this one step further and underscores the way in which all our interactions, financial
or otherwise, are based on confidence or faith in, to recall once more the phrasing of
Derrida, the "social bond." While the figure of the confidence-man rarely makes a
significant sum out of his solicitations or extensions of confidence, most of the vignettes
without the promise of repayment, but in any case the exchange is always primarily a
Let us consider, for example, the moment in Chapter 8 when the confidence-man,
in the role of "the stranger," asks "a charitable lady" if she has "confidence": "Could you
put confidence in me, for instance?"73 When she replies that she could, he asks for twenty
dollars to prove it. When she hesitates, the stranger accuses her of having no confidence,
that is, of lying, an accusation which so "touch[es]" her that she is left speechless: "She
began twenty different sentences, and left off at the first syllable of each" (56).
Eventually, she hands over the money, on the understanding that it will be for the
"Widow and Orphan Asylum"—"why did you not tell me your object before?" she asks
72
London Spectator 30 (11 April 1857), reprinted in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, ed.
Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 494.
73
Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Stephen Matterson (London: Penguin,
1990), 56. Further page references cited in the text.
202
(56). She is solicited first on the principle of confidence, then swindled through a
pretense of charity: there is no evidence, however, there is nothing more than the
guise as a stranger, remarks to "the good merchant" right before he dupes him: "If by
words, casually delivered in the social hour, I do any good to right or left, it is but
see?" (68). But it also works through silence, in what is not said, in the absence of
solicitation. Leaving the ostensible "transfer-book" of the Black Rapids Coal Company in
plain sight of "the good merchant," the stranger appears disinterested enough to be
trusted. The stranger is said to place the book "between himself and
which the good merchant, scrupulously honourable, had much ado to avoid reading, so
directly would it have fallen under his eye, had he not conscientiously averted it" (68).
This way the narrator allows us to suppose that the stranger had placed the book
deliberately to grab the attention of the merchant. To raise the plotted stakes even further,
the stranger leaves the book behind, forcing the merchant to follow him in order to return
the book and ask: '"Are you not in some way connected with the—the Coal Company I
have heard of?'" (68). The merchant becomes complicit in his own duping. He goes so
far as to ask about buying stock (the stranger himself doing little more than tipping his
The stranger raises the duplicitous stakes further by asking, '"Dear me, you don't
think of doing any business with me, do you? In my official capacity I have not been
203
authenticated to you. This transfer-book....how do you know that it may not be a bogus
one? And I, being personally a stranger to you, how can you have confidence in me?'"
(69). This questioning reiterates and thus strangely doubles the merchant's confidence
'"[b]ecause,'" as the merchant puts it, '"if you were other than I have confidence that you
are, hardly would you challenge distrust that way'" (69). Confidence is gained by
questioning it—only an honest man would object to another assuming confidence in him.
It is a case, as so often in Melville's text, of saying one thing ("I am not worthy of your
trust") in order to get someone to think the opposite. This moment is an obvious example
upping the desirability of a company through the circulation of rumor. As the merchant
says: "T have heard rather tempting information of your Company'" (68).
It is convention and confidence in that convention that keep us afloat, as the final
vignette of The Confidence-Man suggests. A merchant boy places before an old man,
who is standing with the cosmopolitan, a pamphlet called Counterfeit Detector. The old
man claims not to be interested: '"...I never use that sort of thing; my money I carry
loose.'" '"Loose bait ain't bad,'" the boy says in response, '"look a lie and find the truth;
don't care about a Counterfeit Detector, do ye?... Or is the wind East, d'ye think?'" (292).
"Look a lie" is, of course, an ambiguous or duplicitous formulation. It can mean both to
look like a lie and can always be read as a shortened version of "look a lie in its face."
The boy is accusing the man of willfully deceiving himself—he can look at a lie and see
the truth, not the truth that it is a lie but, rather, in fact see the lie as if it were the truth.
The reference to the east wind is suggestive of a destructive, strong, and even
mischievous wind, capable of great force. It is vaguely menacing and ominous, like the
204
resounding final sentence of Melville's book: "Something further may follow of this
Masquerade" (298). Melville appears also to be playing with the visual as well as aural
dimensions of his text: the old man doubtless hears "Counterfeit Detector" as the title of
the booklet just put before him; but the absence of italics for this phrase in the boy's
Melville's part unsettles the distinction between the "Counterfeit Detector" as a text and
tender according to which owners can verify their own bills. In spite of his general
confidence in the money he carries, the old man checks bills issued from "Vicksburgh
Trust and Insurance Banking Company." As he does so, he balks at the idea of the
detector and the cosmopolitan concurs: '"But why, in this case, care what [the
Counterfeit Detector] says? Trust and Insurance! What more would you have?'" (294).
Still the old man checks his bill, which results in a dubious verdict—the bill seems to be
either true and old or counterfeit. The detector is deemed a "peck of trouble." As the
cosmopolitan says: '"Proves what I've always thought, that much of the want of
confidence, in these days, is owing to these 'counterfeit detectors."" Indeed, as the old
man tries harder and harder to "see the goose" in the tiny vignette in the corner of his bill,
he becomes less and less confident in his money, though the cosmopolitan begs him to
stop his "wild-goose-chase" (295). The detector which is used to ascertain whether or not
205
something is counterfeit becomes the means by which uncertainty concerning the
authentic is exacerbated.74
One of the guiding threads of my reading of literature and the hoax, and of
temporality. Melville's writings are not only profoundly concerned with deferral and
spectrality, for example, but also have been subject to these effects in the very history of
their publication and reception. If, as I have been suggesting, Melville spectralizes such
notions as credit, confidence, and confiding, this spectrality is also about the future of
these texts and how they might shape new conceptions of American literature and literary
history. The Confidence-Man sank more or less without trace, in effect, shortly following
its publication in 1857, and it was scarcely read or thought about for almost 100 years.
With its strange and kraken-like resurfacing with the edition of 1954, however, it has
become arguably one of the most definitive literary texts for a contemporary
outpouring of critical work on Melville's strange novel of 1857 and many books and
articles have appeared on the subject of the confidence man or confidence game, either
This represents a kind of eerily topical logic that resonates today in Derrida's notion of "autoimmunity"
and may be illustrated by the bizarre lengths to which certain western governments seem determined to go
in their attempts to certificate the identity of their citizens. See, for example, Jacques Derrida,
"Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides," in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jiirgen
Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), 85-
172; and Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
See, for example: Richard Hauck, A Cheerful Nihilism; Confidence and the "Absurd" in American
Humorous Fiction (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1971); Susan Kuhlmann, Knave, Fool, and
Genius: The Confidence Man as He Appears in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1973); Waldrick Wadlington, The Confidence Game in American
Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); John G. Blair, The Confidence-Man in Modern
Fiction (New York and London: Vision, Barnes and Noble, 1979); Gary Lindberg, The Confidence Man in
206
sense, we are still only beginning to come to terms with the complexity, subtlety, and
canniness of Melville's work in these respects. This may be usefully illustrated by the
general attunement in recent Melville criticism to what is sometimes gathered under the
(especially apropos the financial world, market capitalism, and credit meltdown) and
Peggy Kamuf s (apropos the sheer, irreducible duplicity of reading Melville).76 The
fundamental and persisting challenge that Melville's novel presents has to do with the
fact that it is not only an ironic or satirical account or critique of capitalism, but is also
about confidence, credit, and so on as essential traits in the experience of reading literary
fiction.77 The most interesting critical work on The Confidence-Man has invariably
sought to acknowledge and try to take account of the links between literature and con-
American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); William Lenz, Fast Talk and Flush
Times: The Confidence Man as a Literary Convention (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985);
Karen Halttunen, Confidence-men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle Class Culture in American
1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Helen Trimpi, Melville's Confidence Men and
American Politics in the 1850s (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1987); Peggy Kamuf, The Division of
Literature (1997); Mark C. Taylor, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without
Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Peter West, The Arbiters of Reality: Hawthorne,
Melville, and the Rise of Mass Information Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008).
7
See Mark C. Taylor, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Kamuf, The Division of Literature, especially, 167-222.
77
Cf William Spanos' reading of The Confidence-Man as a precursor to a resurgence in American
exceptionalism:
[The Confidence-Man] not simply intended as a scathing carnivalesque indictment of American
confidence or, rather, the confidence enabled by the internalization of the founding myth of
American exceptionalism in the antebellum period. It was also... in some significant degree
[intended] as an indictment of a collective confidence that enabled the proliferation of confidence-
men, who, feeding on the deeply inscribed optimism of the American national identity, were
"conning" their gullible fellow country-men in all manner of degrading and dehumanizing ways...
Melville views these "operators" as symbolic of a national cultural symptom...that betrayed a
fundamental sickness of American democracy: the people's susceptibility, the effect of a deeply
backgrounded and inscribed optimism that was also militantly anti-intellectual, to being duped by
duplicitous leaders—the elect—whose self-interested sociopolitical agendas were in one way or
another remote from theirs. (Herman Melville and the American Calling, 214)
207
games or con-tricks, between the narrator of a literary fiction and the figure of the
confidence man.78
The Confidence-Man from the beginning. As one reviewer wrote in the Literary Gazette
(London) in 1857:
Whether Mr. Melville really does mean to teach anything is, we are aware,
a matter of considerable uncertainty. To describe his book, one had need
to be a Hollen-Breughel; to understand its purport, one should be
something of a Sphinx. It may be a bona fide eulogy on the blessedness of
reposing "confidence"—but we are not at all confident of this. Perhaps it
is a hoax on the public—an emulation of Barnum. Perhaps the mild man in
mourning, who goes about requesting everybody to put confidence in him,
is an emblem of Mr. Melville himself, imploring toleration for three
hundred and fifty-three pages of rambling, on the speculation of there
being something to the purpose in the three hundred and fifty-fourth;
which, by the way, there is not, unless the oracular announcement that
"something further may follow of this masquerade," is to be regarded in
that light.
"Perhaps it is a hoax on the public...": the force of this speculation, with its crucial
"perhaps," is still to be reckoned with. One of the most concentrated and illuminating
explores the ways in which Melville's reader cannot help but feel "duped," part of "an
elaborate ruse."80 She suggests that there is a "double-entry bookkeeping" in the text's
78
See, for example, Kuhlmann on the confidence-game's "affinity...with literary fictionalizing"
(Kuhlmann, Knave, Fool, Genius, 128); Wadlington on what he calls "a mode offictive experience," on the
intersections between "the imagined world" of fiction and the "fabricated" relationship between reader and
author (Wadlington, Confidence Game in American Literature, ix-x); and Lindberg on the ways in which
"a// imaginative literary works are transactions of confidence between writer and reader" (Lindberg,
Confidence Man in American Literature, 299). The most subtle and powerful reading of Melville in this
context is Peggy Kamuf s (in The Division of Literature), which I discuss more fully in the main body of
the text.
79
From a review of The Confidence-Man in Literary Gazette (London) (11 April 1857), reprinted in
Contemporary Reviews, 493. The reviewer is here, of course, citing the final sentence of the novel.
Kamuf, The Division of Literature, 171.
208
"transactions with the reader." All this duplicity and double-talk is undoubtedly
As a result, this reader can never know whether she or he has been the dupe
of an elaborate ruse, nor even what it could mean in this case "to be a
dupe." The reader's relation to the text, therefore, duplicates that of the
characters in relation to the supposed "confidence-man" encountered in the
narrative.81
At the heart of her reading is a triple question: "[W]hat might it mean to call a work of
prejudgments or presuppositions would have to be in place before one could read to that
occasions," as well as the producer of texts in which one's faith is put to test with a
but I should like to conclude my remarks about the The Confidence-Man by emphasizing
literature and the secret, particularly as elaborated in the critical writings of Blanchot,
Derrida, and Cixous. The crux of the matter is perhaps encapsulated most neatly in
Derrida's discussion, in Given Time, of the "absolute inviolability of the secret," and his
exploration of the contention that the text only says what it says. At issue here is a sense
81
Kamuf, The Division of Literature, 170.
82
Kamuf, The Division of Literature, 171.
8
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 153.
209
of certainty, a certitude that is profoundly Melvillean. It is as evident in his "Call me
Ishmael" as in his "I would prefer not to," and it doubtless colors his compositional
practice more generally. What the text says, it says. What is written is written.
Let us try to illustrate the force of this inviolable certitude by looking at a single,
quite brief but provoking passage from the text itself, by foregrounding the irreducible
strangeness of the text as saying only what it says. It is a matter, as we shall see, of a
stranger is responding to the latter's belief "that beauty is at bottom incompatible with ill"
and to his declaration of "confidence in the latent benignity of that beautiful creature, the
rattlesnake, [with his] lithe neck and burnished maze of tawny gold" (224):
When charmed by the beauty of that viper, did it never occur to you to
change personalities with him? to feel what it was to be a snake? to glide
unsuspected in grass? to sting, to kill at a touch; your whole beautiful body
one iridescent scabbard of death? In short, did the wish never occur to you
to feel yourself exempt from knowledge, and conscience, and revel for a
while in the care-free, joyous life of a perfectly instinctive, unscrupulous,
and irresponsible creature? (224)85
Thus Melville produces two manuscripts of The Confidence-Man, leaves one with his wife in
Massachusetts and takes the other to Hawthorne in Liverpool. He deposits the text and then scarcely takes
any interest in what happens. See Stephen Matterson, "Introduction" to Herman Melville, The Confidence
Man, ix.
85
It should be noted that Wai Chee Dimock opens her assessment of The Confidence-Man, "Personified
Accounting," with this same extract. See her Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 176. Though I do not engage directly with her reading, my
own is implicitly indebted to hers. Accountability provides for Dimock the cornerstone of the novel: "What
accountability finally means in The Confidence-Man [is that] everyone here is either a duper or duped (or
both at once), for those two labels sum up all human beings, and account for all human transactions"
{Empire for Liberty, 210). Dimock goes on to give her own compelling account of Melville's "poetics":
"Freedom and futility sum up Melville's fateful triumph...He has finally found a poetics that serves his
210
Crucial to an appreciation of this passage is an awareness of how mazily it explores the
nature of confidence, the relations between human and animal (here the rattlesnake), and
the fundamental deceptiveness of "benignity," but also how richly and strangely it is
about the very structure of literary narration. A little later, remarking upon its '"capacity
for mischief,'" the cosmopolitan characterizes the snake as unaccountable: "the rattle-
snake's accountability is not by nature manifest" (226). (Again we might recall here
Derrida's provoking remark about the secret, whether it is a question of humans or other
animals: "Non-manifestation is never assured.")871 would like to relate this "capacity for
mischief to narratology, specifically to the figure of "point of view," and to the logic of
The stranger's questions concerning the ability "to change personalities" with a
snake have in fact already been explicitly anticipated in the cosmopolitan's remark about
"that beautiful creature," for Melville's narrator has just a moment earlier commented:
Derrida designates as the essential secret of literature, namely: "the altogether bare device
need, one that makes him transcendent and unaccountable, one that licenses excess even as it reinscribes
excess as control" {Empire for Liberty, 213).
86
This serpentine figure, of course, pervades Melville's writing sometimes (as here) as a way of
characterizing the very nature of literary narration, at other times, as a way of characterizing the behavior or
psychology of a character: see, for example, Melville, Billy Budd, 110 and 129.
87
Derrida, "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in
Literature and Literary Theory, eds. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser. (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1987), 18.
211
of being-two-to-speak." The "undetectable, unbreakable" secret of literature, according
Baudelaire, but his observation has wider currency, so to speak, in the field of literary
perhaps worthy of the name literary confidence. There is a necessary (or, to put it
for the other, knowing the thoughts or feelings of the other. It is as if the character has
confided in the narrator, uniquely, magically: narrator and character share a radically
literary confidence. In Melville's text, at the moment of the stranger's invoking the idea
of "changing] personalities" with the rattlesnake, entering into another's body, we are
immersed not only in "metempsychosis" (229), but also in a queer and serpentine
demonstration of the very nature of literary fiction. For the splitting or doubling of point
of view involved in such a change is the very process by which literary narrative works.
It has the appearance of telepathy, of what Nicholas Royle has called the "telepathy
effect." Royle uses the term "telepathy effect" as an alternative to "omniscient narration,"
88
Derrida, Given Time, 153.
Derrida, Given Time, 153.
212
in order to illuminate the singular forms of magical thinking that are at work whenever a
third person narrator lays claim to knowledge of what a character is thinking or feeling.
It is not just that the stranger appears, as if by telepathy, to pick up on the snake-like
What makes this passage from The Confidence-Man particularly resonant is its
exact reproduction of the kind of splitting or doubling that one finds in John Milton's
Paradise Lost. Critics such as Elizabeth Foster and Stephen Matterson note Melville's
allusion to Paradise Lost, Book IX.91 But what has been overlooked, what is perhaps
most striking about the resonance here, has to do not so much with the fact that Satan
becomes the serpent but with the ways in which Milton (or the Miltonic narrator)
becomes the serpent. In other words, it is not a question simply of identifying the poet
with Satan but more a matter of seeing how the logic of William Blake's famously
provocative remark that "Milton was of the Devil's part without knowing it" can be seen
to operate at a narratological level. Satan becomes a serpent; but the Miltonic narrator
correspondingly shifts from inhabiting Satan's point of view to inhabiting that of the
serpent. "Point of view" here slithers between snake and narrator, character and author.
The experience of reading is itself "wreathed" into this narratological maze. It is in this
90
See the chapter entitled "The 'telepathy effect': notes toward a reconsideration of narrative fiction," in
The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 256-76.
91
See Melville, The Confidence-Man, 333 n. 224.
92
Thus Milton moves from having Satan reflect on his own mental processes in declaring "Thoughts,
whither have ye led me...?" (Book IX, 473) to a more exterior but still knowing, or "inside narrative"
perspective of describing the serpent as "fraudulent" (531) and "guileful" (567). John Milton, Paradise
Lost (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).
213
unaccountability. As Kamuf puts it: "it is precisely on the condition of a certain
unaccountability that we read a text called literary; it is the condition to which we are
referred by the still open credit of a signature whose accounts are not closed upon the
death of the signatory." This unaccountability outlives the author; the "credit" and
dimension of literary fiction more strangely marked than in the figure of the narrator.
passage from The Confidence-Man might suggest, the snake is an exemplary figure for
literary narration. It is perhaps not infelicitous or insignificant in this respect that Freud
should refer to the snake as the most universally "uncanny" of all creatures. The
narrator is a snake and unaccountable. To have confidence in the literary text is to give
oneself over to this uncanny snake. The literary snake speaks, beyond good and evil,
before good and evil. And this snake says what it says—inviolable, unaccountable,
question of the actual, the fact that Melville's writing is always curling itself up in the
real. For all its playfulness and literary reflexivity, The Confidence-Man challenges,
questions, and unsettles what people continue to believe (madly, emptily) is a non-literary
real in the form of financial markets, money matters, the everyday workings of trade and
capital. As I hope to make clear in a different way in the final section of this chapter,
regarding the "inside narrative" called Billy Budd, Melville's writing is intimately
214
concerned with the so-called "real world"—up to and including the reality of the death
penalty in America.
Mantrap
On the slippery, slithering and elusive character of literature, and in particular for a
reading of Melville's final and arguably most densely elusive work, I want to recall a
passage I considered at the beginning of Chapter 2, where Jacques Derrida offers some
This description sharply conveys the profound (if deceptive, or deceptively non-
deceptive) correspondences between a literary text and a trap. I would recall here the
more general related remark that Paul de Man makes, in his late essay "Aesthetic
Formalization in Kleist," that "the trap" is "the ultimate textual model."96 As I hope to
have suggested, every one of Melville's major texts is at once a trap itself and a quasi-
critical or metadiscursive reflection on the text as trap. Without any further or fuller
explanation, de Man concludes "Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist" by noting that the trap
95
Derrida, "Demeure," 29.
96
Paul de Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 290.
215
is "as unavoidable as it is deadly." I want to take up the enigmatic and preemptory force
of this final remark by considering what is perhaps the most obviously deadly and
compact figure of a trap for any reader, namely, the mantrap. We might trace our path
from the snake to the mantrap by way of two connected passages in Chapters 31 and 32
of The Confidence-Man. In the first passage, the confidence-man, in the guise of Frank,
asks his "friend" Charlie for money, which causes his friend to "push back his chair as
(214). Charlie, we are told, "glided into the snake," at which point Frank takes out ten
gold pieces from his pocket to reveal that his request was a joke. This metamorphosis into
ostensible outrage at his friend's request, a version supported by Charlie who reports: "I
The second passage is also about the figure of "glid[ing] into [a] snake." It is at
the heart of the brief and immediately succeeding chapter, significantly entitled "Showing
that the age of magic and magicians is not yet over" (215-16). The interplay of "snake"
and "man-trap" is echoed again near the end of the text when the confidence-man is
deemed a "man-charmer" by a certain barber: "...the worthy barber always spoke of his
queer customer as the man-charmer—as certain East Indians are called snake-charmers—
and all his friends united in thinking him QUITE AN ORGINAL" (280). They all thought
together—the bizarre Barnum-esque capital letters here further ironize the strangeness of
this shared thinking, a shared thinking that is everywhere evident in The Confidence-Man
in all the twistings and turnings of its narratorial and characterological identifications.
97
de Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 290.
216
The trap of The Confidence-Man consists in all the mad machinations of its shape-
shifting characters and narration.98 If the last novel that Melville published in his lifetime
confidences, the last work he wrote, Billy Budd (posthumously published in 1924), is, by
contrast, all the more powerful and deadly on account of its very simplicity and its
the pages that follow. Billy Budd is hoax literature of the most advanced and incisive
kind. If we put to one side for a moment the question of complexities of structure,
language, and syntax, the story would appear to be a straightforward one about good and
evil, justice and law. A popular and beautiful young sailor, Billy Budd, whose only
"liability" is a "vocal defect... more or less of a stutter or even worse," is impressed into
Claggart. Confronted by this accusation by Claggart and his captain, Edward Fairfax
Vere, Billy is incapable of speaking and instead strikes his accuser, killing him with a
single blow. A court-martial is convened and in spite of the committee's desire to show
leniency, Vere insists on following the letter of the law, which requires execution. Billy is
duly hanged.
demands that the reader take sides, without apparently taking sides itself. To read Billy
98
In the passage that I have just quoted for example, Frank is also referred to as the cosmopolitan
presumably but not with complete certainty the cosmopolitan of the previous passage.
99
Melville, Billy Budd, 111. Further page references will be cited in the text.
217
Budd is to become entrapped by the sense of a dilemma or aporia that is at once
impression. It impresses the reader in a manner that suspends his or her capacity to
and physical entrapment. The text's uncanny captivating power is perhaps already
intimated in the queerness of its subtitle, An Inside Narrative. With the strange snapping
Melville's text locates itself in a new space of historical fiction. As "an inside narrative,"
it combines the art of ostensibly disinterested and detached historical report with some of
the most bizarrely manipulative and unsettling strategies of storytelling ever deployed in
the history of American Literature. The deceptive simplicity of the phrase "an inside
narrative" in truth wreaks havoc on all presuppositions concerning what is "inside" and
what is not. It leaves us to ponder, ultimately, if there ever could be such a thing as a
historical narrative that was not in one way or another, however tacitly or implicitly,
"inside."
What is an inside narrative? What makes one narrative more inside than another?
What is distinctive about how Billy Budd prompts us to think about the inside, its own
inside? The narrator is constantly stressing what he calls the "inner life" (112) of the ship
and of his characters, foregrounding the importance of "inly deliberating" (152), and
drawing attention to his unprecedented ability to get inside even the most furtive of
"obscure," but whose true identity (his "subterranean fire" and "monomania") is
218
otherwise invisible nature to us—a necessity, the narrator tells us, for "the point of the
At the same time we have to deal with the claim that the narrative is historical
fact. As the narrator declares: "the symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so
readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact"
(167). This is one of the ways we can see what an extraordinary trap, what a seductive
hoax and hoaxical seduction this text constitutes. The entire work is a remarkable case of
"sinister dexterity" (167). (With this left-right oxymoronism we may readily be reminded
of the shifting between extremes discussed in Chapter 2, in the context of the preface to
Mardi.) It presents itself as historical and factual and yet is in fact overwhelmingly and
the inside" of characters' minds and bodies, their thoughts and feelings. Here is the logic
of a "double bind": "historical fiction" (a generic term which we might use to describe
Billy Budd and numerous other works, perhaps all the works of Herman Melville)
"history" and "an inside narrative" but, as in a dream or the unconscious (in which, as
Freud tells us, there are no contradictions),100 here it is. The two words "inside" and
The workings of this trap will have been visible from the beginning. The narrative
is foreseen from the start, the stage is rigged, the deck is stacked. Everything is
100
See, for example, Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 4, trans.
James Strachey, ed. James Strachey, Alan Tyson, and Angela Richards (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1975),
451 and 429.
219
itself strangely foregrounded. Thus, we might consider the various ways the narrator sets
the stage for our reading, gives us a frame for our judging (the climate of mutiny, the
beautiful sailor prototype, the rumor that warships are staffed with men from prisons).
We might also think about the way in which "fore" words abound: from Billy Budd's
occupation ("foretopman") and locations on the ship ("forecastle" and "foretop"), to the
place where Billy strikes his fatal blow to Claggart's head (the "forehead"). The fore is
these two prefixes and their strange "inside" workings. Thus we encounter a proliferation
of such words as "foresight" (114), "forethought" (114, 136), "forebore" (106), "foreran"
(115, 136), "forefelt" (118), "foreheads" (131), "forechains" (132), "forwardness" (137),
"preliminary" (159), and "preconcerted" (163). All of this is bound up with our
increasing entanglement with the figure of a knowing narrator who is at once withholding
and seductive. All these fore's and pre''s point to the pleasure of anticipation, of putting
off or suspending, and to the seductiveness of digression, or what the narrator calls "the
enticements of a bypath" (113). At issue here are the ramifications of Roland Barthes's
account of the relationship between pleasure and suspense in the experience of reading.
is the sort of suspension that the narrator creates when he tells us, for example: "the
resumed narrative must be left to vindicate, as it may, its own credibility..." (129). We
are left hanging, in a kind of suspension or paralysis. It is a pleasure that is also, however,
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 65.
220
captivating—we are caught up in this foreplay, to the point perhaps of having our critical
faculties undone.
however, difficult to place too much emphasis on the strangely insistent character of
from the Latin, provisare. Numerous characters are described as prudent, including the
shipmaster of the Bellipotent, the Dansker, and the surgeon who attends to the dead
Claggart. Claggart himself is charged with "an uncommon prudence" that is "habitual
with the subtler depravity, for it has everything to hide" (131). Conversely, we are told
neither prudence nor foresight (also termed "long head") is necessary for a sailor to have
(136).102 Prudence is always a matter of irony in Melville's text. How could a reading
ever be prudent enough—especially if the reader realizes that the very understanding of
prudence entails seduction. Prudence is, as the narrator says, "surely no special virtue in a
military man" (115). And yet Billy's inability to deal in or with "double meanings and
insinuations of any sort" (108), his lack of prudence or foresight, is what seems to get
him killed. The text stutters across this point. Here, as in so many other ways, Melville's
text seems to suspend itself, or suspend its readers, in the experience of a stutter.
Billy Budd stutters. Billy Budd also stutters. But what is a stutter? To stutter is to
speak with a spasmodic repetition, but it also entails a certain suspense. Articulation is
held up, delayed, rendered less transparent. One sign of stuttering would be in the figure
that Gilles Deleuze should refer to "the angelic Billy Budd" at the beginning of his
102
Further examples of "prudence" occur on 105, 115, 131, 135, 146, and 148.
221
remarkable essay on stuttering, on the idea of the writer as "a stutterer in language."
While Deleuze does not in fact go on to elaborate the resonance of the text Billy Budd in
this context, it is clear that his evocation of what makes a writer at once stuttering and
singular is especially appropriate for thinking about Melville's last work: "[The writer] is
a foreigner in his own language: he does not mix another language with his own
language, he carves out a nonpreexistent foreign language within his own language. He
makes the language itself scream, stutter, stammer or murmur."104 If we were to say (in
Deleuzian fashion) that Melville's writing stutters, one of the ways of illustrating this
would doubtless be in terms of the striking prevalence of fore and pre words. They signal
a "beforehand" or "previously" or "in advance" that can only elude or baffle the reader.
Melville's text plays hide and seek, sometimes giving inside knowledge, sometimes not,
sometimes giving apparently historical facts, sometimes holding them back. So, for
example, we get an in-depth account of Vere's mental deliberations over Billy Budd's
innocence or guilt, but we are pointedly given no account of the final meeting between
Vere and Billy. What happens in this latter scene, we are summarily informed, is "never
known" (156). As in an historical account, the structure of the narrative is always already
in the past, and the narrator mischievously foregrounds the idea that this consequently
Let us try to illustrate this briefly, by looking at a passage that might appear to
Gilles Deleuze, "He Stuttered," in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A.
Grecco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 107.
104
Deleuze, "He Stuttered," 110.
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And what could Billy know of man except of man as a mere sailor? And
the old-fashioned sailor, the veritable man before the mast, the sailor from
boyhood up, he, though indeed of the same species as the landsman, is in
some respects singularly distinct from him. The sailor is frankness, the
landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long
head [foresight]—no intricate game of chess where few moves are made
in straightforwardness and ends are attained by indirection, an oblique,
tedious, barren game hardly worth the poor candle burnt out in playing it.
(136)
We are told that being a sailor is not a game, but, so often with Melville, what is "not"
proves a knot (as in "Benito Cereno"). This is a textual disavowal; as we might expect
from the author of The Confidence-Man, Melville is playing games with the very
negation of game playing. So, for example, the narrator plays around with the way he
tells the story—and with talking about the fact that he is telling the story—in the opening
lines of Section 18: "After the mysterious interview in the forechains.. .nothing especially
germane to the story occurred until the events now about to be narrated" (138). It is, as
Melville meddles with narrative point of view and structure, with the
presuppositions of knowledge that are the very condition of any so-called historical
narrative, compelling us to see how every such narrative constitutes a kind of hoax.
Moreover, unlike so many more traditional examples of "historical narrative," Billy Budd
is not a hoax from which one can escape but rather, like the trap in which we find
would be at once aesthetic and critical impression, the effects of a text that is bound up
with innumerable forms of impressment, seizing, and entrapping, up to and beyond a fatal
blow to the head. We could think about the strange, ghostly force of this impression in
terms of the central image outlined by Barbara Johnson in what remains perhaps the most
223
celebrated and influential contemporary essay on Billy Budd, "Melville's Fist." She
writes:
Although Johnson does not put it in this way, her account of the verbal blow dealt by
Billy Budd amounts to suggesting that Melville's is a false or fake fist, and that what the
To recognize that the fist at the heart of Billy Budd is fake or false, I would argue,
is to acknowledge the need for a subtler and less violent reckoning with Melville's text
than that which informs a long tradition of criticism. I am thinking here of what is
encapsulated by Hershel Parker's observation about the politics of reading Billy Budd:
For Parker, as for other critics, the stakes of reading Billy Budd are high: how you read
this story and interpret Vere's action is a politically charged act. Literature is not
1
"Melville's Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd," in The Critical Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1985), 92. Johnson is quoting from Billy Budd, 119.
106
Hershel Parker, Reading Billy Budd (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 97-98.
224
innocent. As J. Hillis Miller makes clear, ethics is first and foremost an experience of
response and responsibility. At stake here is what he and others have called "the ethics of
reading."107 I would argue that, in the singularly complex and tricky case of Melville,
there is also an ethics of the hoax, at least to the extent that Melvillean queerness,
What Parker's description (and even in some ways the logic of Johnson's essay) seems to
exclude is the "weak force" of a kind of radical passivity, a mischievous but discreet
(even silent) resistance to the simple violence of "fighting words." With this notion of
"weak force," I am thinking, once again, of Maurice Blanchot's remarkable essay "The
Great Hoax" and the logic of the counter-hoax it implicitly calls for. Thus he speaks of
this frail literature, scarcely existing, [that] is not much to count on in the
struggle against the great hoax...But here weakness and the language that
models itself on what lies short of all force, impede the trickster more than
1 OS
In order to think about Billy Budd as counter-hoax, then, we need to reckon with at least
two things at the same time. On the one hand, it is a question of responding to the ways in
which Melville's text evokes and engages with on us the inhumanity of slavery, the
barbarity of impressment itself, and the intolerable and unjust practice of the death
penalty. On the other hand, and at the same time, it is a matter of acknowledging and
responding to the way in which Billy Budd captures us in its explicitly literary snares.
See, for example, J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987);
and Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing, ed. Cathy Caruth and
Deborah Esch (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995).
108
Blanchot, "The Great Hoax" (1957), trans. Ann Smock in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland.
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 166.
225
The logic of entrapment, figured as the impressment of Billy Budd into the British
navy, is one of Melville's more overtly political gestures in this text: "impressment" or
obligatory military enlistment literally takes away "the rights of man." Impressment is
Billy Budd's undoing. Impressment, then, is in effect a kind of mantrap. "Mantrap" is, as
a gauge of its dark, queer workings in Billy Budd, we need to take a step sideways to
preceded by a striking use of the term "hoax" itself. Redburn is the first person narrative
of a fifteen year-old boy, Wellingborough Redburn, who runs away to sea. After a
difficult voyage, he lands disillusioned in Liverpool. The dreadful industrial chaos and
sprawl of the scene in front of him makes him remark: '"Tis a deceit—a gull—a sham—a
hoax! This boasted England is no older than the State of New York...."109 It is worth
noting this example of Melville's willingness to deploy the term "hoax" in a context that
far exceeds that of any isolated, contained trickery or mischief. An entire country
The passage that I want to consider demands quotation at length. It begins with
the representation of a sign on the page, with the sort of comical visual effect of the
Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage, ed. Harold Beaver (London and New York: Penguin,
1986), 227.
226
"NOTICE" at the beginning of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Redburn we read:
110
See, Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), ed. Emory Elliot (Oxford:
University Press, 1999), 2:
NOTICE
PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons
attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it
will be shot.
BY THE ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
Per G. G., CHIEF of ORDNANCE
227
having seen more sights, will be man-traps—man-traps, my mastersl that
frightened you!
And then, in my indignation, I fell back upon first principles. What
right has this man to the soil he thus guards with dragons? What excessive
effrontery, to lay sole claim to a solid piece of this planet, right down to
the earth's axis, and, perhaps, straight through to the antipodes! For a
moment I thought I would test his traps, and enter the forbidden Eden. But
the grass grew so thickly, and seemed so full of sly things that at last I
thought best to pace off.111
which that reading refers. "Mantrap" is a sign. The sign itself is a mantrap. The mantrap
practices" in "a Christian land" that this sign implies, but also has to do with the strangely
deictic force of the word "mantrap" (or "mantraps") in itself. The emphasis in Redburn
on the plural form, "mantraps," is not insignificant. It is this plural form that occurs in
Animated into "antic play" by what the narrator calls "a certain grim internal
what might eventually befall a nature like [Billy Budd's], dropped into a
world not without some mantraps and against whose subtleties simple
courage lacking experience and address, and without any touch of
defensive ugliness, is of little avail. (123-4)
Here the narrator, giving us a brief "inside narrative" of the Dansker's thoughts, stresses
not only the ironic "subtleties" of mantraps, but also their multiplicity and proliferation in
1,1
Melville, Redburn, 287-88.
Melville, Redburn, 287. For consistency I am omitting the hyphen here in mantrap.
228
the world of this narrative. The world into which Billy Budd has "dropped" (Melville's
use of this word suggests a kind of chance and inadvertence) is "not without some
mantraps": the nature and location of these traps are not specified in any further detail.
The phrasing of this inside narrative leads us to suppose they might be anywhere and
everywhere. In short, there are mantraps for Billy Budd; and he himself comes to be
figured as a mantrap. There are mantraps in Billy Budd; and Billy Budd is a mantrap.
hands. In its ostensibly literal sense, it is an object with extremely sharp metal teeth with
that found in Redburn or in Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders. Mantraps were still in
use even into the late nineteenth century. But the word also exists in various figurative
senses, as the OED specifies: (1) "A thing which ensnares men. In early use chiefly with
reference to marriage"; (2) "A woman who seeks to entrap a man into marriage; (more
generally in later use) a woman who habitually seduces and exploits men, a vamp"; (3)
"A person or thing intended or likely to entrap, ensnare, or injure a person or people."
"Mantrap" becomes a key word, in these less obviously literal senses, for an
understanding of the queer depths of Melville's work. The crucial moment in this respect
is when Claggart evokes the charm and beauty of the young sailor while declaring him to
be a "dangerous man." He tells Captain Vere: "You have but noted his fair cheek. A
113
See Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders (1887) (London: Macmillan, 1985), 309:
With some exertion he drew down a cobwebbed object curiously framed in iron, which
clanked as he moved it. It was about three feet in length and half as wide. Tim
contemplated it as well as he could in the dying light of day, and raked off the cobwebs
with his hand.
"That will spoil his pretty shins for'n, I reckon!" he said.
It was a man-trap.
229
mantrap may be under the ruddy-tipped daisies" (141). In what would appear to be a
combined allusion to Shakespeare's Macbeth ("look like th'innocent flower, / But be the
serpent under't")114 and a further phallic play on the rosy "bud" of the handsome young
sailor's name, Claggart's (false) accusation here figures Billy Budd himself as a mantrap.
Claggart himself but rather to the tricksiness of Melville's text, to the language of the text
of this inside narrative know he knows is false) thus simultaneously reveals a "queer"
gender-reversed coding of "mantrap," a figuring of Billy as someone who (in the various
phrasings of the OED definitions) "seeks to entrap a man," who "habitually seduces and
exploits men." It is in this context that we should consider the weird effects of Billy
Budd's presence and think back to the opening passage of the text, for example, to the
beautiful sailor prototype, and to the strangely calming effect he is reported to have had
while on his previous ship the Rights of Man. In contrast with the Bellipotent, the Rights
of Man (and it is of course impossible to set aside the resonance of the ship's name with
the book by Thomas Paine, a founding text of modern democracy, a book advocating
natural law, the loosening of government restraints in accordance with the natural
albeit unconscious, to attract and mobilize various forms of potentially dangerous energy.
The Bellipotent is threatened by his presence, at least in the eyes of Claggart and one
unnamed other. The narrator writes: "One person excepted, the master-at-arms was
114
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. A.R. Braunmuller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
I.v. 63-4.
230
perhaps the only man in the ship intellectually capable of adequately appreciating the
peculiar formulation. We might presume this one other person is Vere, who also has a
"queer streak" running through him (118): Vere and Claggart alone would be capable of
recognizing the "mantrap" of Billy Budd. But the enigmatic designation here, this strange
construction ("One person excepted"), also of course points in the direction of the
narrator himself. It is, after all, the narrator who is able to go on to reveal that the
"insight" of Claggart's "passion" assumed "various secret forms within him" (129-30).
The narrator relates an inside narrative of a singularly queer and serpentine sort, his voice
marrying Vere and Claggart, Claggart and Billy Budd, Vere and Billy. And, at the same
time this narrator is both participating in and enacting this marriage, this mantrap of
points of view and "secret forms." To recall the image I was elaborating in The
serpent. The narrator is able to slither inside Claggart in order to attest that Billy Budd's
was "a nature that, as Claggart magnetically felt, had in its simplicity never willed malice
or experienced the reactionary bite of that serpent" (129, my emphasis). The serpent is
now here, now there, sliding about from one voice or point of view to another, without
There is, in a word at once attributed to Claggart and attributable to the narrator,
an "ineffability" (129) about Billy Budd. He is "queer" in the sense that he is different, he
is singular and therefore, in military terms, dangerous. He has strange effects on groups
of men. You cannot have exceptions in the military, everyone must effectively be the
same, uniform, without singularity: "Forms, measured forms are everything," as Vere
231
says towards the end (166). Billy's good looks are potentially treacherous for what they
can hide but also, perhaps, for the suggestion that they hide nothing. It is, in short, as if he
were a strange and beautiful embodiment of literature itself, in which (as Derrida puts it)
"there is something secret, but it does not conceal itself." The moral phenomenon that
Claggart (and perhaps also Vere) sees in Billy doubtless consists at least in part in his
ability to attract and captivate men in his very simplicity. It trips Claggart up: "it was as if
his [Claggart's] precocity of crookedness (and every vulgar villain is precocious) had for
once deceived him, and the man he had sought to entrap as a simpleton had through his
very simplicity ignominiously baffled him" (138). Again and again Melville's text leads
us to suppose that the handsome sailor is simple, innocent, "without malice"—indeed that
he just is. At the same time, Billy Budd's being, the way he is, the nature of his being,
calls to be complicated and enriched by the simple, innocent yet still perhaps devastating
conclusion Jacques Derrida reaches in his reflections on the nature of "queer" in the essay
When Captain Vere calls Billy Budd to his chambers to be faced with Claggart's
" 5 Jacques Derrida, "Justices," trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Provocations to Reading: J. Hillis Miller and the
Democracy to Come, ed. Barbara Cohen and Dragan Kujundzic (New York: Fordham University Press,
2005), 243. For a fuller discussion see Nicholas Royle, "Impossible Uncanniness: Deconstruction and
Queer Theory," in In Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 113-33,
and especially 127.
232
gagged. Meanwhile the accuser's eyes, removing not as yet from the blue
dilated ones, underwent a phenomenal change, their wonted rich violet
color blurring into a muddy purple. Those lights of human intelligence,
losing human expression, were gelidly protruding like the alien eyes of
certain uncatalogued creatures of the deep. The first mesmeristic glance
was one of serpent fascination; the last was as the paralyzing lurch of the
torpedo fish. (144)
Point of view here goes truly wild. The apparent sanity of "an asylum physician" blurs
into the perspective of "the alien eyes of certain uncatalogued creatures of the deep." This
is inside narrative of the most cryptic, surreal, and chimerical kind. The serpent
metamorphoses into "the torpedo fish"—an animal (to borrow a phrase from elsewhere in
the narrative) without "biblical tincture" (127). Claggart's eyes are "paralyzing": they
cause in Billy Budd "a convulsed tongue-tie" (145), a kind of trapped trap — for "trap,"
of course, can also mean "mouth." This effective burial of speech is explicitly compared
to the moment of "a condemned vestal priestess" being "buried alive" (145). Claggart
may here appear to entrap Billy, perhaps knowing in advance how he will stutter and
falter, but in this case of entrapment the trap traps the trapper, and the action spurred is in
The figure of the mantrap foregrounds the singular violence of man on man. It
gathers up all the motifs of cruelty and inhumanity, slavery, bondage, and impressment
that I have been tracking through this chapter. At the heart of all these motifs, in
complicity with them, as it were, is the death penalty. The death penalty is to Melville a
"barbarian," but he is not the real enemy of civilization (110). What Melville's Billy Budd
finally presents us with is the challenge of reckoning with the death penalty as mantrap.
The figure of the mantrap in Billy Budd operates, as I have been trying to suggest, in
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multiplicitious fashion, embodying all the kinds of silence and reserve we have noted in
earlier works such as "Benito Cereno." Along with the numerous queer, gender-
switching, seductive motifs of Billy as "mantrap," and the more apparently figurative or
complicating preoccupation with language itself (and the literary work or "inside
narrative" above all) as trapping, there is also (as in Redburn) the barbaric character of
the mantrap in its literal form. The mantrap in this last sense would doubtless constitute
remark in Typee:
The sadism and extraordinary violence committed by man towards man, the various
"death-dealing engines" or traps invented by man, makes man for Melville the "most
ferocious animal." But perhaps the most gripping and impressive way in which Billy
Budd constitutes a poetics of the hoax is in unsettling all distinctions between a literal and
What Billy's execution prompts us to confront is the sense of the death penalty
itself, like the mantrap in Redburn, as at once a "diabolical practice" and "incredible."
116
Herman Melville Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, Intro. Robert Sullivan (New York: The Modern
Library, 2001), 125.
234
The final death-dealing engine or mantrap of Billy Budd is the "ignominious hemp about
[Billy Budd's] neck" (163). Let us conclude with this astonishing scene:
Billy stood facing aft. At the penultimate moment, his words, his only
ones, words wholly unobstructed in the utterance, were these: "God bless
Captain Vere!" Syllables so unanticipated coming from one with the
ignominious hemp about his neck—a conventional felon's benediction
directed aft towards the quarters of honor; syllables too delivered in the
clear melody of a singing bird on the point of launching from the twig—
had a phenomenal effect, not unenhanced by the rare personal beauty of
the young sailor, spiritualized through late experiences so poignantly
profound.
Without volition, as it were, as if indeed the ship's populace were but the
vehicles of some vocal current electric, with one voice from alow and aloft
came a resonant sympathetic echo: "God bless Captain Vere!" And yet at
that instant Billy alone must have been in their hearts, even as in their
eyes.
At the pronounced words and the spontaneous echo that voluminously
rebounded them, Captain Vere, either through stoic self-control or a sort
of momentary paralysis induced by emotional shock, stood erectly rigid as
a musket in the ship-armorer's rack. (163)
momentary embodiment of Keats's nightingale, Billy's voice becomes the "clear melody
symphonic effect in this passage. Here, more than anywhere else perhaps, the text
have discussed earlier in this chapter, intensely resounds here, not just in the eerie "vocal
electric current" that generates "a resonant sympathetic echo," but in the ways that other
words and images in the passage resonate across this text, across Melville's oeuvre, and
235
Is the death penalty that is here being carried out a judgment from God or from
Captain Vere? In whose voice, according to what authority can this death penalty, any
death penalty, be imposed? That Melville wants us to feel something "diabolical" and
"incredible" in the scene might be illustrated in terms of a couple of its more notable and
immediate resonances. First, with the reference to "momentary paralysis" the reader is
becomes a displaced version of the handsome sailor. The scene produces in the Captain
identification of Captain Vere with a "musket" (he "stood erectly rigid as a musket in the
There the narrator reflects on the role and significance of the chaplain on the warship:
"Bluntly put, a chaplain is the minister of the Prince of Peace serving in the host of the
Christmas" (162). Captain Vere's very body, witnessing the scene of execution, resonates
How to read, how to hear the last words from Billy's trap, their resonance and
their reserve? What and how do they confide? "God Bless Captain Vere!": these words
are at once absolutely "unanticipated," the narrator tells us, and a "conventional felon's
benediction." All conventionality, we might say, is deranged here, "launched from the
twig," sent sky-high. The words can be heard as ironic, interrogative, sympathetic,
performative speech act or event that does something absolutely surprising and
236
irreducibly mischievous with the conventional and benedictional, Billy Budd's "God
symphonically taken up by the crew, these words also resonate and rebound in at least
two further crucial directions. First, they recall Billy Budd's adieu to his former ship
Rights of Man: "And good-bye to you too old Rights-of-Man" (108). In this respect, his
final apostrophe to God and Captain Vere may be read as a "satiric sally," "a breach of
naval decorum," or, equally, with all the innocence of Adam before the fall. And second,
Billy's last words anticipate—literally, they take, capture or trap in advance—all the
resonances of what are revealed (a couple of pages later) as being Captain Vere's own
last words, repeated as if stuttered, on his deathbed: "Billy Budd, Billy Budd" (168).
Of course, there are other biblical and religious resonances—the most obvious
perhaps being that of Abraham and Isaac, the sacrifice of Isaac, his first born in
obedience to God's will, who is only at the last minute replaced by a sacrificial lamb.
There is, pointedly, no surrogate for Billy Budd, no one to die in his place. He is at once a
sort of undecidable scapegoat and trespasser, an innocent guilty of "the most heinous of
military crimes" (148). Finally, the juxtaposition of God and Captain Vere may be judged
ironic in another sense. It brings to the forefront the coupling of religion and war, which
is at work everywhere inside this inside narrative. At the end of the story we encounter
the extraordinary argument that every ship should be "rechristened" as "the Atheist,'" the
narrator finding this name, used during the French Revolution, "though not so intended to
be, the aptest name, if one consider it, ever given to a warship" (167). This recalls, once
again, the significance of the chaplain on board, of whom the narrator writes: "Why, then,
is he there? Because he indirectly subserves the purpose attested by the cannon; because
237
too he lends sanction of the religion of the meek to that which practically is the
abrogation of everything but brute Force" (162). Here our attention is drawn to the
putting his stamp of "God bless" on that which is practically "the abrogation of
everything but brute Force." Add to this the atrocious "death-dealing engines" which are
reserved for the men of one's own country, those men "found guilty of honesty,
117
patriotism and such like heinous crimes," and it is no wonder why a ship would better
be called "The Atheist." Of course, religion is not simply incongruous with war—that's
the final trap—it upholds war, "subserves the purpose attested by the cannon," as
Melville puts it. Without the "God bless," there could be no war.
Reading Melville's Billy Budd today it is difficult not to hear in its most central
resonances: "God bless America!" and "God bless the death penalty!" Billy Budd, of
course, does not explicitly voice these parallels, but they are there, I would argue, in this
reader. In the case of each of the texts by Melville that I have been discussing in this
chapter, we might note what an extraordinary distance his writing has come from the
earliest hoaxes we began by considering. Where the poetics of the hoax are most
regarding the work of Kafka. Like Kafka, what we have to face in Melville's greatest
1,7
Melville, Typee, 125.
238
1 1R
works is "the trap of his idiosyncratic evasion of interpretability." It is in this sense that
Blanchot's phrase), as the discourse of the counter-hoax that (in Derrida's words from
"Demeure") can and does "simulate everything," up to and including the manifest
18
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1994), 451.
119
See Derrida, "Demeure," 28.
239
Chapter 4
Splitting in Twain
associated with the figure of the hoax as Mark Twain. Identifying Twain with hoaxes has
been a favorite enterprise in criticism for at least forty years. To summarize how
pervasive the figure of the hoax is in the writings of Twain, we might recall Lawrence
Berkove's recent claim: "Every substantial work of fiction that [Twain] wrote...has
hoaxes at its core."3 Berkove's use of the plural, "hoaxes," is apt: as I will attempt to
make clear, the hoax in Twain is never just one. Also resonant for our purposes here is
Berkove's phrase "at [the] core." If hoaxes (plural) are at the core of every one of
Twain's major fictional works, what kind of "core" are we dealing with? In the following
chapter I want to suggest that, like those of Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville,
Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, ed. Malcolm Bradbury (London: Penguin, 1986), 55.
2
See, for example: John Bird, Mark Twain and Metaphor (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007);
Lynda Walsh, Sins against Science: The Scientific Media Hoaxes of Poe, Twain, and Others (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2006); A Companion to Mark Twain, ed. Peter Messent and Louis J. Budd (Maiden, MA:
Blackwell, 2005), passim; Forrest G. Robinson, The Dynamics of Deception in Mark Twain's America
(Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Pascal Covici Jr., Mark Twain's Humor: The Image
of a World (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1962).
3
Lawrence I. Berkove, "Nevada Influences on Mark Twain," in A Companion to Mark Twain, ed. Peter
Messent and Louis J. Budd (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 164.
240
Twain's hoax writings are engaged with larger, seemingly extra-literary questions about
everyday life. I will argue that in Twain's work these matters are always bound up with
split identity: wherever we look there is a sort of splitting in twain, in at least two senses
the concerns with the "splitting of the subject" associated with psychoanalysis, as well as
and culture. As such it generates new ways of thinking about the importance or position
of the literary in terms not only of the nation, but also of the world at large.
idea that there is ever an individual or ego, or any body (natural, physical, cultural,
imaginary), which is not split from the beginning. The ways in which Twain's writing
comes to pose as what I have been calling "counter-hoax" is by witnessing this split,
calling into question what is thought to be natural, certain, authoritative, and even real.
way in which Twain prefigures psychoanalytic thought on the question of the split ego. In
order to ground my use of "splitting," then, I will briefly outline its occurrence in
4
It is perhaps worth noting that "twain" means both two (as a noun) and to separate (as a verb). While I
will usually use the word "split," there is always the ghostly and redoubled sense of the split in twain.
241
the Ego in the Process of Defence" (1940/ 1938). J. Laplanche and J-B. Pontalis give the
Laplanche and Pontalis go on to add that "[m]any authors, including Freud, have used it
[the term 'splitting'] to evoke the fact that man, in one respect or another, is divided
the relations between ego and 'reality'" and lead to the fabrication of "a new, delusional
reality." Laplanche and Pontalis note that the notion of "the coexistence within a single
"splitting" of the ego was seen to produce two completely distinct and non-dialectical
attitudes, without relation or reality, Twain maintains a more grounded, canny, and
interactive split. Most of all, his writing takes splitting outside the ego and into the larger
world. Splitting, as elaborated through the works of Twain, affects not only the individual
5
J. Laplanche and J-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 427.
6
Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, All.
7
Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 428-9.
8
Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 429.
242
I will first look at some of Twain's best known hoaxes, starting with three of his
early newspaper hoaxes, in order to establish to what ends he employs the hoax form in a
conventional way. I will then move on to a discussion of the most notorious "hoax" in his
literary writing, a hoax that complicates and unsettles the more conventional usage found
in his journalism: one of the effects of reading this particular hoax (the so-called
the writing and reception of literary works. The hoax becomes at once a part of and a
parting from literature: it parts literature. The remainder of the chapter will investigate
these issues of splitting, literature, and the hoax in terms of the relationship between
In the 1860s, while working on the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City (Nevada
Territories), Samuel Clemens made a name for himself, both as "Mark Twain" (for it was
in this period that he started using his nom de plume regularly) and as a hoaxer. The
historical emergence of his identity as Mark Twain, in other words, was specifically
bound up with his writing of hoaxes. Two weeks after starting work on the paper, Twain
published anonymously a piece that was to become known as "The Petrified Man Hoax"
(4 October 1862) but, at the time, was presented simply as a newspaper story, passed off
243
as fact. It ostensibly fed off of the '"growing evil' of the mania for digging up
petrifactions":9
Every limb and feature of the stone mummy was perfect, not even
excepting the left leg, which had evidently been a wooden one during the
lifetime of the owner—which lifetime, by the way, came to a close about a
century ago, in the opinion of a savant who has examined the defunct. The
body was in a sitting posture, and leaning against a huge mass of
croppings; the attitude was pensive, the right thumb rested against the side
of the nose; the left thumb partially supported the chin, the forefinger
pressing the inner corner of the left eye, and drawing it partially open; the
right eye was closed, and the fingers of the right hand spread out. This
strange freak of nature created a profound sensation in the vicinity.10
There was also said to be "an inquest" led by a "Justice Sewell or Sowell of Humboldt
County." The republication of this story was widespread, perhaps reaching as far as
London. In spite of the numerous clues that this story was a hoax—the wink of the half-
closed eye, the hand gesture, the absence of any "Justice Sewell or Sowell" working in
Humboldt County (let alone the playfulness of such a name), the wooden leg—this story
found much credence in the reading public, near and far. Ivan Benson explains: "since no
file of the Territorial Enterprise for this period is extant, one must depend on reprinting
in other news papers for the text of the hoax story." In one such reprinting, Benson
records, the heading used was "A Washoe Joke," (Washoe referring to the name of a
mining region near Virginia City), leading off with the statement: "The Territorial
Enterprise has a joke of a 'petrified man' having been found on the plains which the
9
Paul Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1964), 16.
10
Mark Twain, "The Petrified Man" quoted in Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City, 16.
For this, however, we must take Twain's word: the story was "copied and guilelessly glorified...and
steadily and implacably penetrated territory after territory, State after State, and land after land till [it]
swept the globe and culminated in sublime and unimpeached legitimacy in the august London Lancet"
(from Sketches, New and Old (1875) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 241-2). See also, Fatout,
Mark Twain in Virginia City, 16.
12
Ivan Benson, Mark Twain's Western Years (New York: Russell and Russell, 1938), 76.
244
interior journals seem to be copying in good faith."13 In this case, the paper, the San
Francisco Bulletin, exempts itself from being taken in, identifying the story as a "joke"
but suggests that other papers were not so canny. The hoax, in this particular account, is
therefore produced as an after-effect of certain other editors not getting the joke. Within
days Twain made an apparent attempt (albeit a rather playful and indirect one) to clear
Mr. Herr Weisnicht has just arrived in Virginia City from the Humboldt
mines and regions beyond. He brings with him the head and one foot of
the petrified man, lately found in the mountains near Gravelly Ford. A
skillful assayer has analyzed a small portion of dirt found under the nail of
the great toe and pronounces the man to have been a native of the
Kingdom of New Jersey. As a trace of "speculation" is still discernible in
the left eye, it is thought that the man was on his way to what is now the
Washoe mining region for the purpose of locating the Comstock. The
remains brought in are to be seen in a neat glass case in the third story of
the Library Building, where they have been temporarily placed by Mr.
Weisnicht for the inspection of the curious, and where they may be
examined by any one who will take the trouble to visit them.14
Even this, however, failed to set straight the more gullible of readers. 5
This inability or refusal to read became the object of another of Twain's hoaxes,
ostensibly so obvious in graphic and exaggerated detail that even the most negligent
reader had to be suspicious. And yet many readers were still taken in. The second hoax I
will consider, first published as "A Bloody Massacre Near Carson" (28 October 1863),
told the story of "a man named P. Hopkins or Philip Hoskins" who murders seven of his
nine children and his wife with an axe and a club, after finding out about "dividend-
1
Benson, Mark Twain's Western Years, 76
14
Territorial Enterprise, n.d., reprinted in Weekly Butte Record, 15 November 1862 (Oroville, CA). Also
qtd. in Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City, 17.
Cf Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City, 17.
245
cooking" in some mining companies in which he had invested heavily. Heads "split
open," mutilation, severed limbs, scalping—what Fatout calls "a horrible harvest of
17
corpses strewn about the house"—were all gorily reported. Twain writes:
[Hopkins] dashed into Carson on horseback, with his throat cut from ear to
ear, and bearing in his hand a reeking scalp from which the warm,
smoking blood was still dripping, and fell in a dying condition in front of
the Magnolia saloon. Hopkins expired in the course of five minutes,
without speaking. The long red hair of the scalp he bore marked it as that
of Mrs. Hopkins.18
The echo of speculation and stock market activity in both hoaxes points towards Twain's
larger work of fiction (co-written with Charles Dudley Warner), The Gilded Age (1873),
a satirical text about the perils and outrageousness of speculation and playing the
financial markets.19 Some editors were less gullible this time. The Virginia City Evening
Bulletin, for example, saw in "Bloody Massacre" the signs of a hoax, calling the story "as
baseless as the fabric of a dream." In its allusion to Shakespeare's The Tempest, the
1
Territorial Enterprise, 28 October 1863. Also quoted in Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City, 100.
17
See Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City, 100. Benson refers to this story as "The Empire City Massacre"
(Benson, Mark Twain's Western Years, 90-1); Edgar Marquess Branch notes that the San Francisco Daily
Evening Bulletin (October 15, 1863) published the story as "The Latest Sensation," and also that "The
hoax...is sometimes known as the 'Dutch Nick Massacre'" {The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain,
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), 286 n. 73).
See Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City, 100. See also Benson, Mark Twain's Western Years, 90-3.
19
Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873), ed. Louis J. Budd
(New York: Penguin, 2001). This text is also compelling in terms of elaborating a way of thinking about
literature beyond national borders and especially beyond national language. Take for example the authors'
contention: "Our quotations are set in a vast number of tongues; this is done for the reason that very few
foreign nations among whom the book will circulate can read in any language but their own; whereas we
do not write for a particular class or sect or nation but to take in the whole world" (5). This statement is
funny for its suggestion that a single quotation intelligible to a given reader would be adequate to
understand the book and for the play on "take in" (that is, Twain and Warner's phrasing suggests that they
want the book to reach a worldwide audience but it also draws attention to the way in which the book may
be a hoax, it might "take in"—trick or deceive—readers).
20
Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City, 101. Fatout also refers to the "Bloody Massacre" as a hoax, as do
numerous other critics, including Benson (Mark Twain's Western Years, 93) and Branch (The Literary
Apprenticeship of Mark Twain, 80): "In the paper of October 28 [Twain] published a sensational hoax"
(100). One of the words used at the time was "joke":
246
Bulletin evokes, however inadvertently, a curious correspondence. The reference is to the
It might seem that the Bulletin would like to see the dream and hoax as equivalent. But
whereas Shakespeare's dream is emphatically "gorgeous" and leaves "not a rack behind,"
Twain's text brings home the sense that a hoax is never merely aesthetic and is
"leave a rack behind," in the form of a persisting uncertainty over its status as event or
experience. A dream vanishes on awakening; a hoax leaks into and contaminates the real
world. As was the case with "The Petrified Man," there were many believers, both in the
general public and in the newspaper industry. The San Francisco papers were especially
The man who could pen such a story, with all its horrors depicted in such infernal detail,
and which to our knowledge sent a pang of terror to the hearts of many persons, as a joke,
in fun, can have but a very indefinite idea of the elements of a joke. Is it any joke for a
newspaper heretofore of undoubted veracity and reliability permitting itself to spread a
story broadcast through the land that disgraces and injures the reputation of the very
community that sustains it? If this is a joke we can't see the point where the laugh comes
in. (Evening Bulletin, (Virginia City), n.d. reprinted in Daily Union (Sacramento),
November 2, 1863. Also qtd. in Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City, 102.)
For a further discussion of the relationship between a "joke" and a "hoax" see my discussion of Twain's
"Esophagus Hoax" below.
21
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611), ed. David Lindley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), IV.i.147-157.
247
taken in, happily picking up such a sensational story. The immediate public outcry at
such a horrid crime, as well as the hunt for actual locations and for corroborating
evidence that the story was indeed factual, perhaps contributed to Twain's decision the
next day to write a retraction in the Enterprise, "I take it all back." This was much more
unequivocally let the reader know where Twain stood. His retraction presents a striking
contrast with Poe's epistolary response to "the man in Stonehaven," namely that "'Hoax'
is precisely the word suited to Valdemar's case... Some few persons believe it—but / do
not—and don't you." Poe's non-retraction is made in a private letter, of course, while
Twain's appears in the more public form of a newspaper. Nevertheless, Twain's might
also be understood as an index of the extent to which the individual in America in the
nineteenth century became increasingly obliged to conform to what Foucault calls "the
The third hoax I want to discuss is a result of a lost unsigned editorial by Twain,
written in May 1864. The outcry around the hoax has been regarded as a primary reason
for Twain's departure from the Territorial Enterprise and subsequent move to San
248
Francisco. We can get a sense of the hoax and its after-effects through a letter to the
editor dated May 17, 1864, which purportedly quotes the original editorial:
In your issue of yesterday, you state "that the reason the Flour
Sack was not taken from Dayton to Carson, was because it was stated that
the money raised at the Sanitary Fancy Dress Ball, recently held in Carson
for the St. Louis Fair, had been diverted from its legitimate course, and
was to be sent to aid a Miscegenation Society somewhere in the East; and
it was feared the proceeds of the sack might be similarly disposed of."
You apparently mollify the statement by saying "that it was a hoax, but
not all a hoax, for an effort is being made to divert those funds from their
proper course."
In behalf of the ladies who originated and assisted in carrying out
the programme [sic], let us say that the whole statement is a tissue of
falsehoods, made for malicious purposes, and we demand the name of the
author. The ball was gotten up in aid of the Sanitary Commission, and not
for the St. Louis Fair. At a meeting of the ladies, held in this city last
week, no decision was arrived at as to whether the proceeds of the ball
should be sent to St. Louis or New York, but one thing was decided, that
they should go to the aid of the sick and wounded soldiers, who are
fighting the battles of our country, and for no other purpose the
ladies having the matter in charge, consider themselves capable of
deciding as to what shall be done with the money, without the aid of
outsiders, who are probably desirous of acquiring some glory by
appropriating the efforts of the ladies to themselves.
MRS. W. K. CUTLER, President.
MRS. H. F. RICE, Vice President.
MRS. S. D. KING, Treasurer.
MRS. H. H. Ross, Sec'y- San. Ball.27
Although we cannot know whether the editorial is reporting a hoax or constructing one
itself, we can draw several interesting conclusions from the text that we have. First of all,
there is once again the drama of naming. Here "hoax" is used, after the fact, to refer to
what has happened ("it was a hoax"). That is, the rumor of money being diverted to the
For a full account see Benson, Mark Twain's Western Years, 106-13.
Qtd. in Benson, Mark Twain's Western Years, 111.
249
"Miscegenation Society" is named as a hoax only after it has circulated. Second, there is
at the same time a sort of supplement or doubling of the hoax: when Twain is reported as
having written that "it was a hoax, but not all a hoax, for an effort is being made to divert
those funds from their proper course," he is revealing one hoax while proposing that,
behind it, there is another at play. The creators of the rumor were thus using one hoax to
reveal another. The money may not be going to a "Miscegenation Society" as the rumor
had it, but there is some attempt, Twain suggests, at otherwise diverting it. Twain here is
acting as the revealer of a hoax, and yet his editorial is taken as a hoax. The final and
most provoking detail has to do with the seemingly inflammatory choice of subject
matter, namely miscegenation. The hoaxical irony of all this thus acquires additional
complexity and strangeness for, as the Oxford English Dictionary points out, this word
circulated in 1863, which implied that the American Republican party favoured mixed-
race relationships."
In all of Twain's newspaper hoaxes, there are "obvious" clues to the hoax-status
of the stories; the final hoax even seems to mark itself as hoax in the same text. The most
obvious "sign-post" (as Fatout calls such markers) is exaggeration. Much like the over-
the-topness found in Poe's "Angel of the Odd," the items reported, especially in the
"Massacre" text, are too odd and too extreme to be believed, and yet it is for that reason
that they are, paradoxically, believable. This would correspond to Jacques Derrida's
contention that "[a]bsolute belief is only truly itself ... where it does not believe only
250
what is possible, and where it is possible to believe." To believe, in this strong sense, is
necessarily to believe in the unbelievable. Twain, however, likes to split things and
operates simultaneously on both sides of the truth/fiction fence: "Truth is stranger than
fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't." The
delight then, for Twain, was to exploit and play with this and its corollary, namely that "a
lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." There
is, in this latter formulation, a nice question concerning the speed of reading. We might
recall Blaise Pascal's aphorism: "When we read too quickly or too slowly we understand
nothing."31 Both Poe and Twain are acutely sensitive to the desire for quick or easy
reading, epitomized by what we now call consumer fiction, while also showing an
enduring fascination with the way in which writing can outlive its author as well as
outstrip any reader, continuing across the generations at once to demand and to resist
reading. Like Melville, Twain shows a powerful awareness of "skimmers"; but whereas
subtler depths of hoaxical irony (the ambiguity of oscillation between the two being
precisely what makes Melville's work so singular and enduring), Twain's dealings with
H. C. for Life, That is to Say... (2000), trans. Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2006), 4.
From Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, heading to Chapter XV in Mark Twain, Following the
Equator: A Journey Around the World {1897) (New York: Dover, 1989), 156.
30
Often attributed to Twain; however, a similar quote occurs in a sermon delivered 1 April 1855 in London
by Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-92), a Baptist preacher. He says: "It is well said in the old proverb, 'A
lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.'" See "The Spurgeon Archive,"
<http://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/0017.htm> accessed 14 March 2008.
31
Blaise Pascal, Pensees, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 251.
251
such skimmers (at least in his earlier writings) is a great deal more explicitly humorous or
this context. To read carefully, to follow the lines of description of, for example, the pose
of the petrified man and reconstruct the images from the words is to see a figure
thumbing his nose and winking at the reader. However, this image goes undetected by a
good proportion of readers. Why? No doubt it is partly because the tale's presence in a
newspaper constructs a readerly expectation of fact.33 But it also has to do with the way
one's head. What Twain homed in on early in his writing career was the ability to split in
See Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and His Moses" (1850), in The Piazza Tales and Uncollected Prose,
eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern
University Press and Newberry Library, 1987), 251.
Benson explains that the Enterprise was "a morning daily when Clemens joined its staff in 1862" (Mark
Twain's Western Years, 66), "a lively, fresh, rugged, vigorous, fearless, picturesque, distinctive, masculine
expression of the energetic life on the Comstock Lode [mining region] (Mark Twain's Western Years, 67),
which was nevertheless, or all the more so, committed to "justice, tolerance, loyalty to ideals" (71). While
hoaxes and satires were not uncommon in the newspaper, they were constructed with the ultimate end of
exposing "sham, hypocrisy, humbug" (Mark Twain's Western Years, 71). Benson argues that readers of the
Enterprise, therefore, appreciated the humor and were often able to see through the irony and joking,
whereas readers of other papers, which had picked up these tales, or readers outside of the mining mentality
were less likely to understand the context or the tone of the paper's mode of reporting (see Mark Twain's
Western Years, 76). While Benson creeps into a sort of essentialism here in his generalizing
characterization of the region's newspaper readers, there is what Gilbert Highet in The Anatomy of Satire
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962) outlines as an essentializing feature of hoaxes, wherein
something can be "for the rest of the world a hoax" (96), but for a given community or nation, not at all a
hoax. Cf Edgar Marquess Branch's contention that "[i]n Washoe the written hoax was a case of literature
imitating life," The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain, 80. In a lengthy footnote, which 1 quote in part
here, Branch offers the following:
Richard G. Lillard has written in his research notes that the newspaper hoax was also "a
part of the history of the American press during a century when widespread literacy was a
novelty and publishers as yet knew few inhibitions." In Washoe, Mr. Lillard continues,
the hoax took other forms than that best represented by Mark Twain's two famous
examples ["The Petrified Man" and "The Bloody Massacre"]. The politics of a
newspaper was sometimes changed in its owner's absence. Articles specializing in
ambiguity and culminating in anticlimactic revelation frequently appeared. (286 n. 71)
252
twain, in other words, to play with tone and substance and to exploit or confound these
readerly expectations through the slipperiness and mischievousness of a force that we are
here identifying with hoax literature. Hoax literature takes advantage, or allows an author
to take advantage, of lazy reading practices. We must, after reading Twain, meet texts
with our own sense of mischievousness and suspicion, going so far as to adopt active
In order to clarify these issues, we need to consider how the hoax figures in Twain's
more explicitly literary writing. In particular, I want to look at an example from much
later in Twain's career. The so-called "esophagus hoax" (1902), I would argue,
constitutes a new and perhaps unprecedented critical intervention in thinking about lazy
reading practices. It figures as a kind of crisis in the assumed and unassuming reception
of literary works. This hoax is different from his "newspaper hoaxes" in various ways. It
occurs in a text denominated as fiction rather than in the realm of journalism. Therefore,
its concerns, whom it concerns, and readers' expectations are, in many respects, crucially
different. Twain's fiction openly plays with the nature and expectations of realism. Some
of his writing, such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), is candidly
34
John Bird remarks: "Generations of readers have come to expect from this Mark Twain much play with
the 'petrified truth': sometimes a petrified lie, often a stretcher, very often a hoax—and sometimes, as with
the petrified man, not only a hoax, but a literal and figurative thumbing of the nose" {Mark Twain and
Metaphor, 38). I would like to suggest that rather than being done with Twain, of knowing what to expect,
detecting it and accepting that we are getting a "literal and figurative thumbing of the nose," we are still in
the process of reading Twain, of coming to see what he might have to offer to literary studies, that he is not
simply making rude gestures but, playing with the limits of credulity and with the very notions of hoax and
fiction, his work stimulates and provokes new and different possibilities for thinking about the contestatory
power of literature.
253
fantastical: we all know time travel is impossible. More generally, there are the dark
(largely posthumously published) writings of his so-called late phase, a phase marked by
dreams. More often, however, Twain's fictions rely on realist conventions of space and
time, describing characters who might be found and relating events that might occur in
"The Double Barreled Detective Story," the text in which the "esophagus hoax"
occurs, is an intriguing case in point because although it was written largely in Twain's
"conformist" realist mode, it also contains a number of features that link it to the final
dark writings. The story contains not only the weirdness of the esophagus passage itself
(which we will come to in a moment), but also other bizarre details such as the
if he were a real historical personage. If the relationship between Twain's journalism and
the hoax is apparently fairly straightforward and well-accounted for, the relationship
between his fiction and the hoax is more troubled and complex. It is not simply a matter
of "hoax" over here and "literature" over there, or indeed of designating a text as a hoax.
For, in the first instance, the "esophagus hoax" is little more than a textual detail and
arguably of an entirely different nature than the journalistic stories. It is, indeed, so small
it can go unnoticed. But seeming not to draw attention to itself, in fact, enables it to be a
hoax. What both varieties of Twain's hoax have in common, however, is that they are at
See Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), Intro. Roy Blount, Jr. (New
York: Modern Library, 2001).
36
See, for example, Mark Twain, Tales of Wonder, ed. David Ketterer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2003).
254
once bound up with a foregrounding of the experience of reading and a failure to read
closely.
It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October. The lilacs and
laburnums, lit with the glory-fires of autumn, hung burning and flashing in
the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind Nature for the wingless wild
things that have their homes in the tree-tops and would visit together; the
larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant
broad splashes along the slanting sweep of woodland; the sensuous
fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning
atmosphere; far in the empty sky a solitary esophagus slept upon
motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the peace of
God.37
This passage occurs at the beginning of what is effectively the second barrel of "A
Double-Barreled Detective Story." Coming at the beginning of the fourth section of the
text, it is the paragraph that marks, in effect, the splitting in twain of the narrative. It is a
story in which, as so often in Twain, duplicity and doubles abound. Formally, the text is
split into "two" barrels, or parts. The second follows on from the first but also stands
alone. Additionally, there is the double name of Jacob Fuller, belonging both to the felon
and his innocent cousin; there is a double of Sherlock Holmes, ripped from Arthur Conan
Mark Twain, The Complete Stories of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (New York: Bantam Books,
1990), 439. Further page references will be cited in the text. It is interesting to note that S. I. Hayakawa in
his seminal book on language and communication, Language in Thought and Action, 4* edition (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), cites this very passage from "A Double-Barreled Detective
Story." He does this in the "Application" section to a chapter called "The Language of Affective
Communication" wherein he considers, among other things, the case of literature, especially in relation to
truth or the "true" (117). In the "Application" section, he asks readers to consider "(a) what the author is
trying to communicate; (b) what affective elements help him to convey his meaning; (c) what elements, if
any, obscure his communication; and (d) how successful, on the whole, the author is in conveying his ideas
and feelings to the reader" (122). This rather earnest sounding exercise is no doubt infinitely complicated
from the start (Twain's passage is Hayakawa's first example!). How, it must be asked, is a reader to answer
these questions? It would be no doubt illuminating and possibly quite funny to read Hayakawa's own
analysis of this passage, but, alas, he does not provide one. He might refer back to his notes on "symbolic
experiences" (119) but somehow even symbolism does not quite account for the strangeness of the
"esophagus."
255
Doyle's novels to make a jarring and strange appearance in Twain's tale; and there is the
pseudonym that the innocent Fuller briefly assumes, David Wilson, which points us back
to the David "Pudd'nhead" Wilson of Twain's most famous split or double text,
Pudd'nhead Wilson and "Those Extraordinary Twins" (1894)—a text or texts which I
will consider toward the end of this chapter. What to make of all the doubles? In what
How is fiction like "The Double-Barreled Detective Story" "serving a double purpose;
having a double reference; double, twofold" (OED, sense 2)? Up until this paragraph in
the story we have been reading a straightforward kind of narrative about a woman who
has been violently betrayed by her husband and whose son years later goes off in search
of his father to take revenge. The story as a whole has been called "probably the worst
story that Mark Twain ever wrote" as well as "execrable fiction." But at the same time
it does seem to be in certain respects one of his most interesting stories, in particular for
this paragraph and for the new kind of twist it gives to our understanding of literature and
duplicity. The story as a whole did not get as much critical attention as this single
paragraph—and the paragraph did not get as much attention as a single word within it.
The word that most chokes people up is "esophagus." And it is this "esophagus"
that is allegedly the key to the manifestation of what came to be regarded as Twain's
most famous literary hoax. The story was originally published in two installments in
38
The splitting found here recalls a remark made by John Bird on Twain's writing: "The split between
comedy and tragedy is just one of a number of splits in all the stories. Just as they are repetitions, the
fragments themselves are splits" (Mark Twain and Metaphor, 185).
39
Everett Emerson, The Authentic Mark Twain: A Literary Biography of Samuel L. Clemens (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 238; William R. Macnaughton, Mark Twain's Last Years As a
Writer (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979), 168.
256
Harper's Magazine in early 1902. The first book edition, published later in 1902, leaves
this paragraph unaccounted for, but in later editions, starting as early as 1903, Mark
him to the editor of the Springfield Republican, two ostensibly representative letters from
confused readers, Twain's responses to those letters, and an unsigned editorial from a
New York newspaper. The letters from readers, in particular, seem to underscore the
success of this so-called hoax.40 Take, for example, the letter from "a professor in a New
England university":
Even in the term of address here ("Dear Mr. Clemens"), there is a splitting in twain. This
authorial division (Clemens and Twain), paradoxically enough, adds greater credibility to
the authenticity of the letter. Like the New England professor, other readers seem to see
and wonder about the "esophagus," but no one sees the fact that there is, as Twain
himself puts it, "not a vestige of sense in any detail" (440) of the passage as a whole. For
Twain's confessed intention in writing such a paragraph was "to bother some people"
40
DeLancey Ferguson writes of a possible exception to the deception: "No reference to the parody is
complete, however, without honorable mention of the young woman who saw through it, and wrote to ask
if the oesophagus was a kind of swallow" (see Mark Twain: Man and Legend (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill
Company, 1943), 287).
257
(439), arguing that if he had left that "treacherous word out... the paragraph would have
slidden [sic] over reader's sensibilities like oil, and left not a suspicion behind" (440).
dependent on context. First of all, it depends, of course, on which edition we read. In the
earliest editions, the word "esophagus" is supposedly the key to the manifestation of the
hoax: without it you might let your eyes slide over the overwrought and nonsensical
description, taking it for a little chunk of more or less "execrable fiction." The sole and
lingering presence of that "esophagus," the attention it receives and the confusion it
causes, allows the hoax to come into being. What is then happening when, in later
editions, Twain embeds this supplementary material and thereby at once names and
effectively undoes the "hoax," or makes the hoax in unmaking it? Let us try to elucidate
"hoax" at all. Rather it is a "joke": this is the word used by Twain himself and by the
author of the editorial allegedly published on 10 April 1902 in a New York City
newspaper. The specification of "hoax" only comes afterwards. This delay or deferred
effect is indeed, as I have been arguing throughout this study, an integral characteristic of
the hoax. By 1920 it is, according to Van Wyck Brooks, "the famous 'oesophagus'
hoax."41 But there are already odd and unstable things going on in Twain's use of the
word "joke." This is dramatized in the curious, haunting question from the man whose
"profession is to deal in words," the English professor from New England: "Is it a joke,
41
Van Wyck Brooks, The Ordeal of Mark Twain (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1920), 261.
258
or I an ignoramus?" Twain's text in this respect renders all of us New England university
English professors, the traditional experts of reading turned, in Twain's estimation, into
the most foolhardy and foolish of readers. What is the difference between a joke and an
ignoramus? Is it an alternative? The hoax, at least in part, is on those who think being an
ignoramus is an alternative to a joke, or even that, failing to get a joke, having to ask
about it, shows one is already an ignoramus. It is perhaps worth noting that "ignoramus,"
in its primary legal sense, is a word bound up with the non-conclusive or undecidable.
"Ignoramus" is from the Latin "we do not know," a formulation, then, suggesting that the
"I" in the question is in fact a sort of plural from the start. The professor's question can,
in any case, be read in more than one way. Are we to surmise that the missing verb is
"am" or "is"? The most straightforward way of parsing the question is to recognize the
zeugma where the verb "is" is conjugated for the personal pronoun "I," that is, in fuller
or generalize) the pronoun and thereby serve to evoke the legal definition of ignoramus:
"Is it a joke or is I an ignoramus?" In other words, is the "I" rendered a figure of non-
knowledge?
Context is everything. But at the same time what Twain's "esophagus" shows us
is that there is never a single self-identifiable context for a hoax. A hoax is, in a sense,
nothing but the splitting of (its) context. For there to be a hoax it is necessary for there to
be an act of naming. But this act of naming is not a simple addition but rather a
fundamental "bothering" of the frame, having to do with what is both inside and outside,
both part of and not part of, the "hoax." The bother is about the both. Brooks' remark in
259
1920 about "the famous 'oesophagus' hoax" establishes the hoax as something
established, even famous, yet it is perhaps always curiously dependent on the renewal of
a kind of performative, that is to say the act of naming the hoax as hoax. Here we
encounter again the kinds of questions we explored in our readings of Poe and Melville.
This drama of naming is always at stake: when is a hoax a hoax? Does it stop being one
when it is named? Or is that where it begins? These questions become still less grounded,
more on the "motionless wing," when we consider the apparently more specific term
"literary hoax," split in two as it is by the ambiguity of hoax in literature and hoax as
literature.
Twain seems to be playing around with the question of the joke—employing it in too
ironic and too enigmatic a sense to let it pass without scrutiny—and in some ways he is
asking us to think about the reader (perhaps me, or you) as a gullible idiot, someone who
does not read even in the most superficial fashion. But even the kind of reading an
reference." This passage, with its suspension of meaning and reference (most legible
42
From "This Strange Institution Called Literature": An Interview with Jacques Derrida (1989), trans.
Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby in Jacques Derrida, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 48.
260
perhaps in "the esophagus" hung in the sky, sleeping "on motionless wing"; the "fairy
perhaps, an epitomizing of the literary. There is no such thing as an "esophagus bird," but
who ever for that matter came across a "spicy morning... lit with... glory fires"? To think
the literary hoax it is necessary to think the suspension to which Derrida is referring. It is
probably also worth reminding ourselves here that, although the hoax has links to the
literary (the "fictitious") in its very definition, it is not the same as literature. The "hoax"
always refers in some decisive or demonstrable way to the real; it is never simply or
merely linguistic (like a joke can be); it always entails something beyond the text (in the
always historical: rather like a daydream in Freud's conception, a hoax always carries a
meaning and reference is not, then, an ahistorical characterization. On the contrary, the
notion of the literary hoax is historical through and through. Indeed, it constitutes a
singular topos for understanding the nature and history of American literature. One of the
ways of understanding literary history from the late eighteenth through the twentieth
called the self-reflexive, the metafictional or the metapoetic. The "esophagus" passage is
43
The beauty and the treachery (the decapitating mischief and funniness) of the hoax is that this "referring
to the real" that the hoax comprises is at the same time a miming of how we understand the "literary" as
such (i.e. there is reference, there is referring in literature, but it is in the form of "suspended relation": if
you overlook the suspended-ness, you are no longer reading the text as literary).
44
Sigmund Freud, "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" (1908), The Pelican Freud Library, trans. James
Strachey, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, ed. James Strachey, Angela Richards, Alan Tyson and Albert
Dickson, vol. 14 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 135.
261
intriguing in this context. Twain's drawing attention to the spuriousness or nonsensical
produces a new inflection in our conception of literary hoax. The "esophagus hoax" is
completely different from earlier Twain hoaxes, and, in many ways, it draws Twain's
work closer to modernism than to the purple prose of Victorian travel writing it first
of defamiliarization which is working in a very different way than earlier Twain hoaxes.
That is, it represents an unprecedented gesture of cutting language off from any
exemplifying a move towards literature taking itself as its own object. I would also argue
that the passage can be read as resonating with the language of nonsense poetry, in the
spirit of Edward Lear. We might think, for example, of the "twittering cry / [rising] on
the fragrant air" or "the river roll[ing] / with soft meloobious sound" in Lear's poem
"Cummerbund" (1874).46 At the same time, the "esophagus hoax" can be said to
more readily associate with Surrealism.47 In particular this paragraph from Twain seems
5
Critics have given a good deal of attention to the ways in which the Twain passage can be read as a satire
on or pastiche of nineteenth-century travel writing. For more on the comparison between Twain's passage
and Victorian travel writing, as well as the possible sights of Twain's parody, see W. Keith Krauss, "Mark
Twain's 'Double-Barreled Detective Story': a Source for the Solitary Esophagus," The Mark Twain
Journal 16:2 (1972), 10-2. For other source work, in particular for connections to the detective fiction
genre, see Franklin R. Rogers, Mark Twain's Burlesque Patterns (Dallas: Southern Methodist University
Press, 1960); Howard Baetzhold, Mark Twain and John Bull: The British Connection (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1970), 299-304; and Jeanne Ritunnano, "Mark Twain vs. Arthur Conan Doyle on
Detective Fiction," The Mark Twain Journal 16:1 (1972), 10-14.
46
Lear, Edward. "Cummerbund," in The Complete Nonsense Book (Vancouver, B.C.: Read Books, 2008),
392.
47
Cf Leslie Fiedler, "As Free as Any Cretur..." in Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Henry
Nash Smith (Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963) (130): "All that the surrealists were later to yearn
262
to anticipate a Surrealist attention to a non-rational, hyper-real yet imaginary scene of
preoccupation. The sheer weirdness of the esophagus might be compared to the violent,
improper, and unreal juxtaposition of images in Surrealist writing, for instance in this
verse from David Gascoyne's poem "The Very Image" (1936): "An image of an
Aeroplane / the propeller is rashers of bacon / the wings are of reinforced lard / the tail is
Finally, what is historically striking, even unprecedented, about this passage from
1902 is the singular manner in which it breaks with what Roland Barthes would later call
"a comfortable practice of reading."50 This practice, which Barthes suggests in The
Barthes' account, the reader "is never anything but a living 'contradiction': a split
subject, who simultaneously enjoys, through the text, the consistency of his selfhood and
its collapse, its fall."51 The reader "enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his
pleasure) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss). He is a subject split twice over, doubly
perverse." And that is what the hoax in Twain's text seems to entail. The "esophagus
for and in their learned way simulate, Twain had stumbled on without quite knowing it" (130). What Twain
"stumbled on," according to Fiedler was "a rollicking atrocious melange of bad taste and half understood
intentions and nearly intolerable insights into evil, translated into a nightmare worthy of America."
48
See, for example, Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). In particular, Foster
suggests that surrealism operates on the principle that you will be outraged by these images. Thus, there is a
sense of moral drive in Surrealist work.
49
David Gascoyne, "The Very Image," in The Collected Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965),
26.
50
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 14.
51
Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 21.
52
Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 14.
263
hoax" is at once a joke and a crisis, a splitting up or collapse of the possibility of reading
(through) and of being able to decide what is serious, how to read, what literature is, and
The texts considered so far are more or less undisputed in their status as hoaxes. From the
perspective of the present study, however, the question of the undecidable nature of
where a hoax begins and ends in Twain remains fundamental. There is already a well-
established reading of Twain, propounded by Pascal Covici Jr., which has sought to
broaden and elaborate the notion of hoax, to see Twain's writing as critically and
pervasively bound up with hoaxes. Such criticism can lead us toward a different way of
thinking about not just Twain's writing, but literature in general, above all as regards a
poetics of the hoax and a theory of hoax literature. Although Covici argues that hoaxes
are essentially literary forms, he also posits that they are not necessarily or not only
entities in themselves, but also can shade or tone other forms. He calls the hoax "an
element" of particular kinds of writing (such as parody and burlesque) wherein the reader
"instead of sharing the author's point of view, is fooled by the author." You think you
are reading one thing (a parody for example) in which you are set up to share the author's
laugh or derision, but in the end, the tables are turned, the laugh is doubled or double-
barreled, and it is turned back on you, the reader. This experience enacts the sort of crisis
found in "The Double-Barreled Detective Story." Though Covici, in the final analysis, is
53
Covici, Mark Twain's Humor, passim.
54
Covici, Mark Twain's Humor, 143.
264
more interested in the notion of hoax as pure form, I would argue that his treatment of the
hoax can be usefully extended in order to see how it figures as a sort of "mysterious
stranger" in literary fiction at large. The esophagus might be said to constitute the
intrusion of a sort of foreign body into literature, a kind of strange new implant in its
landscape. Nonsense poetry is, after all, nonsense poetry—but what Twain is doing is
meddling in a new and singularly "bothersome" fashion with the seriousness and non-
straightforward enough, applying even to the examples discussed above.55 But his
treatment goes further. In the light of Twain's most forceful hoax-writings, Covici
argues:
Life as it is... becomes other than it seems; values taken for granted are
exploded; even self-evaluation must go by the board as self-delusion.
Finally, society itself, and then the universe, become gigantic hoaxes,
imposing themselves on credulous man only so long as he will accept
them at face value.. .The hoax becomes, then, an element that takes one to
the center of Twain's thought. Although hoax first appears in Twain's
works as an element of entertainment, of humor, and (as in "The Empire
City Massacre" [also known as "The Bloody Massacre"]) a sugarcoating
for specific political or social satire, more and more the terms in which
Twain's hoaxes are perpetrated become the very terms of their satiric
thrust. There is no relationship between the "facts" of the "massacre" on
the one hand and the voting of false stock dividends on the other, except
the weak one of plot...In Twain's final phase, literature might almost be
said to exist for the purpose not so much of communicating experience as
of forcing the reader to an awareness of the discrepancy between what he
thinks he is and what he in truth turns out to be. In The Mysterious
Stranger the revelation is pushed even beyond the individual's
consciousness, for the world, life itself, is revealed to be a hoax, in that,
265
though it would seem to exist, it has no existence beyond the mind of the
observer; man's credulity gives reality to what, in essence, isn't there.
In the first sentence of this passage, Covici is suggesting that examining the hoax in
Twain enables the reader to get inside his head. Just as Lawrence Berkove's sees every
major Twain story as having "hoaxes at its core," so for Covici the hoax leads one to the
"center of [Twain's] thought." But as Covici goes on it becomes apparent that there is
more at stake in Twain's hoaxes than endeavoring to access his thought. The hoax turns
the imperative outward from the text, back toward the reader, to "what he [or she] thinks
he is," getting inside his or her head, reading the reader, in effect. The "gigantic hoax" of
the universe is revealed, in Twain's later writing, through literature and language,
through writing itself, and yet it is not simply or merely linguistic. Covici's account of
the hoax in Twain sounds very similar to Blanchot's notion of "The Great Hoax" and to
the sense of "gigantic hoax" we encountered in our reading of Melville. What is going on
in small, seemingly circumscribed examples, such as "The Petrified Man" or even the
fraudulent world," as Blanchot puts it, in which "our gestures, our words and thoughts—
our writings too of course, too—come to us supplied with a deceptive meaning which we
do not detect."57
Mental Telegraphy
266
On issues of originality and creativity, Twain was unequivocally a believer in a sort of
original split or doubling. As he wrote with great force and gentle laughter: "While I am
writing this, doubtless somebody on the other side of the globe is writing it, too. The
question is, am I inspiring him or is he inspiring me?"5 I would like to consider what is
going on in these words from Mark Twain, in particular what challenges his text, "Mental
Telegraphy" (1878, pub. 1893), poses for literary studies, for the study of "national
literature" or the study of a so-called single author. What does it suggest about the nature
of writing and reading as necessarily double? And about the nature of inspiration? What
telegraphy.
phenomenon that was soon thereafter (in the space between Twain writing and Twain
publishing the piece, in fact) named "telepathy." The latter was a term invented by
without the normal operation of the recognized sense organs."59 Mental telegraphy is
different from telepathy, however, in its stress on writing (graphe). It is not feeling or
sympathy (pathos) at a distance but writing at a distance—a kind of writing which binds
across national borders, languages and ages, writing that splits both the author (there is
somebody else writing this, I am not singular) and the distance (what is far away is right
58
Twain, "Mental Telegraphy," (1878/ 1891), in The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider.
(Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1991), 82.
59
First Report of the Literary Committee (9 December 1882) by W. F Barrett, C. C. Massey, Rev. W.
Stainton Moses, Frank Podmore, Edmund Gurney, and Frederic W. H. Meyers in Proceedings of the
Society for Psychical Research, vol. 1, part 2 (London: Triibner, 1883), 147.
267
here and now). Sigmund Freud was also fascinated and troubled by the phenomenon of
has suggested, pervasively concerned with questions and motifs of writing, and in
particular, with the epistolary,61 but Twain is arguably the first to elaborate a theory of
writing and mind-reading. Twain was a member of the Society for Psychical Research (of
which Myers was a founding member and Freud, in turn, an honorary member) and
occasionally referred to a novel he had written, but burned, on the subject of mental
telegraphy.62 All that remains of Twain's work on the topic are the previously mentioned
"Mental Telegraphy" and another essay, "Mental Telegraphy Again" (1895), in which he
recounts a plethora of anecdotes wherein two people seemed to be linked across great
contacting one another at the same time unbeknownst to the other's duplicate act—
60
Telepathy, along with the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, "always perplexed [Freud] to the point of
distraction" (see Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, vol. Ill (London: Hogarth Press, 1957),
419).
61
See "Telepathy," trans. Nicholas Royle in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and
Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 226-261.
62
See Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain (1917), ed. Charles Neider (New York: Harper
Perennial, 1990), 351. Twain writes:
Twenty-five or thirty years ago I began a story which was to turn upon the marvels of
mental telegraphy. A man was to invent a scheme whereby he could synchronize two
minds, thousands of miles apart, and enable them to freely converse together through the
air without the aid of a wire. Four times I started it in the wrong way and it wouldn't go.
Three times I discovered my mistake after writing about a hundred pages. I discovered it
the fourth time when I had written four hundred pages—then 1 gave it up and put the
whole thing in the fire.
63
See Mark Twain, "Mental Telegraphy," 71-87; and "Mental Telegraphy Again" (1895), in The Complete
Essays of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 1991), 160-165.
268
With me the most irritating thing has been to wait a tedious time in a
purely business matter, hoping that the other party will do the writing, and
then sit down and do it myself, perfectly satisfied that that other man is
sitting down at the same moment to write a letter which will "cross" mine.
And yet one must go on writing, just the same; because if you get up from
your table and postpone, that other man will do the same thing, exactly as
if you two were harnessed together like Siamese twins, and must duplicate
each other's movements.64
Twain likens this experience of having letters crossing to being "Siamese twins," one
what makes the experience so odd is precisely that he and his correspondent are not
related in any significant way (it is "a purely business matter"), let alone twins, conjoined
or otherwise. There is not, in other words, any organic, romantic, or sentimental reason
why they should write each other at the same time.65 Pathos seems to be absent from the
scene. There is nothing here, for example, of the kind of crazed empathetic or telepathic
rapport Poe intimates between one "William Wilson" and the other, in his tale of that
title.66 "Twain" and "his correspondent,' terms which become, in the course of the
anecdote, coolly abstracted to "you" and "that other man," are linked across a distance,
destined either to write each other or not to write each other more or less simultaneously.
Mental telegraphy entails a certain possibility of failure, that is "if you get up from your
table and postpone," your correspondent will as well. Twain's examples are strangely
4
Twain, "Mental Telegraphy," 73.
5
Cf Sam Halliday, Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 35. Halliday elaborates on the strangeness of the figure of Siamese
Twins here, noting that "[they are] invoked in order to represent a category they cannot be included in: a
form of instantaneous communication or coordinated action that works in spite of, rather in strict
accordance with, the confines of spatial contiguity."
66
See Edgar Allan Poe, "William Wilson" (1839), in Tales and Sketches, vol. 1. (1831-1842), ed. Thomas
Ollive Mabbott (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 422-51.
269
compelling and effective, perhaps because many, if not all, of us have experienced
similar phenomena—someone telephoning after years of silence at the exact moment you
are thinking of calling him or her; mentioning someone and then witnessing him or her
suddenly appearing on the scene, as if by magic; or having someone finish your sentence
exactly the way you had thought to finish it. All these experiences constitute, for Twain,
not mere coincidences but examples of "mental telegraphy." The effect of shifting the
pronoun from first to second person in order to convey this phenomenon is also a sort of
At the same time, we know that his examples are purely fictional. "Mental
of fictional or literary writing: it thus entails a kind of mixing of genres where a kind of
reminiscent in some respects of Poe's "The Imp of the Perverse." Not only do we doubt
that Twain is thinking of a precise occasion when this crossed letter writing occurred
convey something which he generally finds true), but also we "know" that the
simultaneous, linked, and duplicate. As I will show more fully later in this chapter, this is
whose strange body clock dictates "local time." Long before Derrida, Twain understood
67
See Edgar Allan Poe, "The Imp of the Perverse" (1845), in Tales and Sketches, vol. 2 (1843-1849), ed.
Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 1217-27.
68
See Mark Twain, "Those Extraordinary Twins" (1894), in Pudd'nhead Wilson, ed. Malcolm Bradbury
(London: Penguin, 1986), 257-8.
270
that mental telegraphy or telepathy is a fantasy of simultaneity. As Sam Halliday
stresses in his book Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain,
"an important criterion. ..uniting the idea of simultaneity with that of suddenly abolished
In this context we might begin to see how "Mental Telegraphy" calls to be read
both as a kind of hoax and as a text about hoaxicality. Imagine such testimonials
published in a different context. There is no sense that the anecdotes which Twain
recounts are anything other than fictional, but they are crucially constructed as //they
truly happened in real life. Different from his short stories and novels, "Mental
It nevertheless intermingles both in recent publication with his other prose, fictional,
literary, journalistic, and anecdotal.72 I want to come back to the generic impurities of
See "Telepathy," trans. Nicholas Royle in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1., ed. Peggy Kamuf and
Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 226-61.
70
Halliday, Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James, 35. Cf Charles
Lock on literature and simultaneity, "The Convergence of the Twain," in Reading Thomas Hardy, ed.
Charles P. C. Pettit (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). In passing it might be noted that Twain's essay seems to
forefigure or mentally telegraph Hardy's poem "The Convergence of the Twain," right down to the double-
sense of "twain."
7
See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey
Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
72
For example, the text is published both in Ketterer's collection of short fiction, Tales of Wonder as well
as in The Complete Essays of Mark Twain. Of course, the Harper's Magazine (Dec 1891) in which
"Mental Telegraphy" originally appeared included the essay under the heading of "Articles" as opposed to
fiction (including a piece by realist and friend of Twain Walter Dean Ho wells). See Harper's Magazine
online archive: http://harpers.org/archive/1891/12. The original publication has the various genres of the
magazine (articles, fiction, poetry) interspersed and comingling so that Twain's text is sandwiched between
to two pieces of fiction yet importantly distinguished from this genre by the designation of "article."
271
Twain's writing, the sense in which the reader is often unsure of what kind of text he or
she is reading. As Derrida declares at the beginning of his essay "The Law of Genre":
"Genres are not to be mixed." It is not good to mix genres: traditional academic rigor
and scholarship demand that we classify kinds of writing, above all when it is a matter of
distinguishing between the fictional and the non-fictional. Moreover, even if, as in the
"autobiography" on the one hand, and "fiction" on the other, is "undecidable," we cannot
"remain within" that undecidability, as he puts it.74 Still, Twain's writing seems to invite
us into that space. "Hoax literature" is another name for the experience of this
predicament.
The concept of mental telegraphy itself obviously bears a close relation to thought
identified with forms of hoax.75 It is perhaps no surprise that a writer such as Twain
would be concerned with such dubious and playful, possibly deceptive matters in writing.
"Mental telegraphy" involves thought transmission, but crucially it also involves writing
and action; it is not simply a matter of mind-reading, but extends to the actual or
Jacques Derrida, "The Law of Genre" (1980), trans. Avital Ronell, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek
Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 223.
74
Paul de Man, "Autobiography as De-Facement," in Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984), 70: "the distinction between fiction and autobiography is not an either/ or
polarity...it is undecidable. But is it possible to remain...within an undecidable situation? As anyone who
has ever been caught in a revolving door or on a revolving wheel can testify, it is certainly most
uncomfortable, and all the more so in this case since this whirligig is capable of infinite acceleration and is,
in fact, not successive but simultaneous." In short, de Man implies, the undecidable is necessary but also
unbearable: you have to get off the whirligig at some point.
75
Cf Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy (New York: Oxford University Press USA, 2002); Janet
Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritual and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988).
272
imagined consequences of such mind-reading. The concept of mental telegraphy perhaps
offers another way of thinking about novel writing and the figure of the narrator. In this
context, we can recall Nicholas Royle's remarkable work Telepathy and Literature, in
which he explores the idea that "there is no 'and' between Telepathy and Literature."
Royle elaborates a theory of third person narration as inseparable from the figure of
telepathy. He declares:
onward...
Wherever there is a narrator purporting to know what someone else is thinking or feeling
(in other words, in all cases of third person literary fiction, but also in a first person
narration insofar as the figure of the narrator is in some sense "fictional" or "literary,"
that is to say, not identical to the "real life" author), there is what Royle calls a "telepathy
effect."78 Royle does not talk about Twain's work, but I would argue that "mental
telegraphy" constitutes a particularly powerful figure for exploring the strange nature of
world of action.
Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature: Essays in the Reading Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991),
183 n. 17.
77
Royle, Telepathy and Literature, 17.
78
See Nicholas Royle, "The 'telepathy effect': notes toward a reconsideration of narrative fiction," in The
Uncanny (London: Routledge, 2003), 256-276. This figure of the telepathic, therefore, comes in to replace
the theological and misleading narratological figure of the "omniscient narrator." As Royle writes
elsewhere: "Omniscience is a religious term, part of a massively Christian discourse that continues to
dominate western thinking on narrative fiction. Omniscience is a fiction" ("Spooking Forms," The Oxford
Literary Review 26 (2004), 157).
273
It is here too that we might make another important distinction between telepathy
and mental telegraphy. Whereas the former has often been taken to entail a benign and
"positive" sense of fusion and identification (we might think of the kind of ecstatic,
mystical, apparently telepathic rapport between Jane Eyre and Rochester in Charlotte
Bronte's novel),79 the latter has the alienation of techne (the graphos) written into it. The
phenomenon of mental telegraphy always posits a split within the self. To understand the
importance of the split in Twain, one should doubtless begin with its most obvious
manifestation—in other words, as Jerry Griswold puts it, the way in which "Clemens/
Twain [was] split in two." For many critics, the question of split identity remains a
crucial feature of Twain's work. I would argue that his relation to hoaxes is based in this
splitting of) identity but not merely in a psychobiographical manner. Twain's hoaxes, as
I argued above, are bound up with splitting belief and disbelief, fiction and reality, word
and meaning. It will have always been a matter of splitting. Twain's theory of writing
as a double act—that is, I am writing this but someone else is bound to be writing it too—
provides a fascinating and provocative opening for a rethinking of literary studies. Mental
proposes that "literature consists in the altogether bare device of being- two-to-speak,"
but it also provides an exemplary text for thinking about the nature of intellectual
79
See Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847) (New York: Penguin, 2006).
80
See Introduction to Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper (1882), ed. Jerry Griswold (New York:
Penguin, 1998), ix; see also Bird, Mark Twain and Metaphor, 36-7, in which Bird elaborates a notion of
Twain as "a man of splits."
1
Cf Bird, Mark Twain and Metaphor, 36. Bird makes clear that in his view, this split conception of Twain
occurs not only on the biographical level, but also on the micrological or lexical level, suggesting that "for
this particular writer, all his words are his mark, and they are all doubled or split."
82
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: Counterfeit Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 153.
274
"somebody on the other side of the globe" writing at the same time encourages us to split
off, once again, into a much larger literary arena, across different genres and other
national literatures.
One way of exploring the concept of mental telegraphy, in this context, would be
to take up a term that Nicholas Royle develops in his work on telepathy and the uncanny,
namely the "concursor."83 As Royle describes it: "The concursor would be the strange
in question. Close yet distant, familiar but unfamiliar, concursors can have strangely
similar concerns."84 He goes on to suggest that "[t]he concursor is a figure of the strange
think about is both unlikely or unrecognized affinities between authors who are
contemporaries and the ways in which the very notion of the contemporary is haunted by
kind of critical split discourse, splitting off from one text, author, or genre to another,
exploring the literary and the real alike in terms of the notion of "deep time" that I have
been drawing on elsewhere in this dissertation. I would like to propound this double-act
and the split, as elaborated above, as a way of linking texts, authors, and genres (as well
as the notion of literature and the so-called "real world") in order that one author is not
275
literature"—but instead to see texts and authors across time and space linked together—in
For Twain, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, there is always "somebody on the
other side of the globe"—an unbeatable double, an other split off from oneself—a
authorship and, at the same time, destroys any notion of a unitary self.87 Let us then part
company from Twain in the direction of somebody writing on the other side of the globe:
There were moments he regretted the whole affair, was disenchanted with
the hoax, with the comedy he was playing, missing his home being with
Jews. And then there were moments when he went around intoxicated. He
imagined he was the hero of one of those beautiful tales he had heard as a
schoolboy in which he was magically transported to a golden palace where
there was prepared for his pleasure the best of everything. Those who
dwelt there were not ordinary people, but knights, counts, and dukes, and
he himself was a prince for whom all this had been created.88
This excerpt comes from a novel entitled The Bloody Hoax (Der Blutiger Shpas, written
Rabinovich, (1859- 1916)). It tells the tale of two boys graduating from gymnasium
See "Mental Telegraphy" (1878, first published 1893 in Harpers Magazine), in The Complete Essays of
Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1991), 82.
88
Sholom Aleichem, The Bloody Hoax, trans. Aliza Shevrin and intro. Maurice Friedberg (Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press, 1991), (233). Further page references cited in the text.
89
The text has been translated from the original Yiddish {Der Blutiger Shpas)—and just as I noted in
Chapter 1 that Cixous' texts in French contain much that is untranslatable, plays and implications only
accessible in their original language, so does Aleichem's writing, perhaps to an even greater degree. The
translation by Aliza Shevrin was "a Herculean task" (xiii), according to Maurice Friedberg, the English
language editor, as "the Yiddish text is liberally sprinkled, not just with Hebrew, but with garbled Russian
as well" (xiii). Aliza Shrevin rescued Der Blutiger Shpas, the original Yiddish not even included in
Aleichem's twenty-eight volume collected works (including, perhaps most famously, The Fiddler on the
276
(secondary school), Hershke Rabinovitch (a Jew) and Grigori Ivanovitch Popov (an upper
class Christian), who decide to switch identities, in the final decade of the Romanov
Empire in Russia (ix). The purpose of their "hoax" is to experience firsthand how the
"other half lives: Popov will be subjected to the difficulties and the enraging restrictions
that come with being Jewish in such an oppressive political and social system, and
Rabinovitch will reap the benefits of being an aristocratic Christian. The passage cited
above conveys the inner thoughts and feelings of the real Rabinovitch in his new
a Freudian rescue fantasy. Here the experience of the "hoax" is equated with living
through fiction. He is described as being at once (with his co-hoaxer) in control of the
hoax, "the comedy he was playing [by choice, determination]," and controlled or
constructed by the hoax, as if it was all somehow "created" for him, and he is merely a
player in it. The Bloody Hoax is a fascinating text for thinking about how hoaxes work,
about how a hoax seems to—even if it is, at its inception or originally, in an author's or
an agent's control—to take on a life of its own. At the same time, in a way analogous to
Twain, Aleichem explicitly links the question of literature and the hoax, while
articulating this in reference to the outside world, to politics, sovereignty, and double or
split identity. The hoax that constitutes the novel, the switching and subsequent splitting
Roof}. The book nearly having disappeared from the record and a material copy of the book so hard to
come by, Shrevin had to use a microform version (xiv). The result is a remarkable, though no doubt a
compromised, feat. I will be using the English translation here.
277
There is, however, more than one hoax in the book. Indeed, as the title suggests,
the hoax is more than simply the plot of the novel. What happens to a work of fiction
when you call it a hoax? How are we to parse the title? If we approach this question in
terms of content, in other words the hoax of the title as a hoax in the text thus entitled, it
might seem to refer to the same hoax that Rabinovitch is referring to in his thoughts
(evident to us thanks to Aleichem's "telepathic" narrator); but there is at least one other
kind of hoax explored in the novel. Through the novel's focus on "blood libel" (the truth
of fantasy of the alleged murder of Christian boys for the baking of Jewish matzos),
identity and subjectivity are themselves elaborated as hoaxes. Despite the putative
"blood" differences between them, Christians (like Popov) and Jews (like Rabinovitch)
can impersonate and exchange lives and even, perhaps, die in the name of the other. By
the end of the novel neither is whole without the other, each dependent on the other in
some necessary but supplementary fashion: each is wanted for the filling out and
corroboration of the identity of the other. Popov can only be Rabinovitch because
Rabinovitch becomes Popov, and each acts as the place-holder for the other. To be
restored to their own names and lives requires the existence of the other. Yet the
possibility of the exchange is presented as entirely superficial: although he does not know
Yiddish nor any of the Jewish customs or traditions, Popov is curiously dark featured,
easily mistaken for a Jew—his looks will override any suspicion caused by his lack of
school system, has full understanding of Christian tradition as well as the fair complexion
and features associated with "Christian blood." However, although the possibility for
exchange is marked as superficial, the ways in which identity and selfhood can be
278
mimicked, contaminated and divided are, at the core, much more profound and likely to
have deeper consequences, to be, in a word, more "bloody." Troubles mount soon enough
for Rabinovitch's imposture when he finds himself accused of the murder of a young
Christian boy, whom he had been tutoring, allegedly in order to obtain Christian blood
for the Passover matzos. This is doubly outrageous, we are supposed to understand,
because, not only are there more obvious suspects, but also in the myth only "real" Jews
kill Christians for their blood. Popov, as a Christian, would not be a murderer—the whole
basis of the case against him rest only on his ostensible Jewishness. Since Popov is not a
truly Jewish, the whole hypothesis of such murders is thereby shown up to be absurd. In
spite of Popov's multiple attempts to clear his name by telling the story of the "stupid,
bloody hoax" (345), the hoax then becomes quite literally bloody. It threatens to get even
more so as Popov fashions himself a "martyr, a Christian atonement for the suffering
The hoax in question, then, is not simply the switching of identities but is the
narrative that the dominant Christian rulers and their obliging citizens of the society
perpetuate, the notion of blood-killing itself. We find out early on that the real murderer
is a (Christian) gangster, the boy's stepfather. We also find out that this set-up for murder
is not a singular coincidence. As the real Popov wonders, when he goes to see a rabbi in
what turns out to be a failed attempt to clear his name, why is it that "this legend seems to
surface only around the time before Passover, and one does find here and there a
[sacrifice]...?" (109). In response the rabbi offers him a parable, a kind of Talmudic
hoax:
279
There was once a marksman, an expert marksman, who performed
remarkable feats, truly causing sensation. How? Every time he shot, he hit
the bull's eye. He never missed. The people wondered: How is it possible
for someone to hit the bull's eye every time and never miss? So they
began to watch him very carefully and they found out his secret. First he
shot and afterward he placed the bull's eye over the bullet hole... (109)
Not only does this passage suggest that the blood-theory is a neat and tidy alibi, a kind of
cover-up for murders propagated by the corrupt state and protected gangsters—a blood(y)
texts, the way in which narrative structures ensure in advance that the bullets always go
into the bulls' eyes. We are encouraged to read the rabbi's parable as both a commentary
on the actual bloody hoax that is the referent of the title and on the nature of the narrative
structure of the text. This parabolic mise-en-abyme is at once about the hoax as what lies
Holmes's nephew, Fetlock Jones, remarks on his uncle's supposed gift for solving
mysteries: "Anybody that knows him the way I do knows he can't detect a crime except
where he plans it all out beforehand and arranges the clues and hires some fellow to
humorous conglomeration of Arthur Conan Doyle, the author, and Sherlock Holmes, the
character.90 Such strange identity-switching border-traffic between the inside and outside
The fictionalizing of Arthur Conan Doyle turns out to be a rather interesting aspect of Twain's piece for
at least three reasons. First, Doyle has over the years continued to lend himself to fictionalization,
appearing as a fictional character in several books, of which Julian Barnes' novel, Arthur and George (New
York: Vintage, 2005), is perhaps the most recent and most comprehensive. Barnes' novel gives a
fictonalized account of a real historical situation in which Doyle helped George Edalji, an introverted half-
British, half-Indian lawyer, who was accused of writing threatening letters and mutilating animals. Police
were set on Edalji's conviction, even though the mutilations continued after their suspect was jailed.
Doyle's work helped establish a way to correct other miscarriages of justice. Second, Doyle was interested
in Spiritualism (also a member of the Society of Psychical Research), writing a novel on the subject, Land
280
of the text, such mischief-making around what an expert marksman or detective is,
complicate and enrich our understanding of the relationship between literature and
deception. In particular, perhaps, it resides in the very notion of plot, of literature as being
structured by plot and plotting. As Peter Brooks emphasizes in his incisive and
fascinating study Reading for the Plot, there is, on the one hand, "the design and intention
of narrative, what shapes a story and gives it a certain direction or intent of meaning"
and, on the other, "some scheme or machination, a concerted plan for the
accomplishment of some purpose which goes against the ostensible and dominant
legalities of the fictional world."91 But, of course, it is not just the fictional world where
there are plots. Plots are very much a part of the real world and so—whether in fiction or
in the real world—we might say along with Blanchot, "[t]he idea of plot presupposes the
intention to deceive."
altogether a surprise that Aleichem and Twain, these "strange contemporaries," did in
fact encounter one another on at least one occasion. They met in the autumn of 1906 at
the Educational Alliance (a Jewish community center for new immigrants on the Lower
of Mist (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1926). Third, it may also be that the close association that Twain
makes between the creator of Sherlock Holmes and hoaxes was not accidental. The Daily Telegraph
(England) announced on 20 March 1997 that the "debate over the Piltdown hoax" was being reopened. The
"Piltdown hoax" is an infamous hoax thought to be perpetuated by Charles Dawson who claimed in 1912 to
have found the remains of an unknown form of early human in Piltdown (a village in East Sussex,
England). It took forty years before the find was uncovered as a hoax. Roger Highfield, author of the
article, reported that "Today at a debate staged by the Linnean Society as part of National Science Week,
Richard Milner, a historian of science from the American Museum of Natural History will offer evidence
that Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was responsible [for the hoax]". See Roger
Highfield, "The mysterious case of Conan Doyle and Piltdown Man" in The Electronic Telegraph 664 (20
March 1997). The case remains open as to who is truly responsible for the hoax.
91
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1984), ix and 12, respectively.
92
Blanchot, "The Great Hoax," 159.
281
East Side) in New York. Aleichem was familiar with Twain's work, but Twain would not
have been familiar with Aleichem's work because, as Dan Vogel notes in his recent book,
Mark Twain's Jews (2006), it was not translated into English until eight years after
Twain's death.93 In an interview published in the New York Times on 22 October 1906,
Aleichem includes among his favorite authors, Byron, Kipling, Shakespeare, and Mark
Twain, adding: "the greatest of whom was Mark Twain."94 Days later, the meeting
Mark Twain,' to which Mark Twain graciously replied, 'Please tell him that I am the
American Sholom Aleichem."95 Although Vogel suggests that Twain's comment was
made out of "genuine respect for a fellow worker in the orchard of serious humor" rather
than grounded in familiarity with and knowledge of Aleichem's work, it is easy to see
why the two writers were compared, both by the media and by one another. The
similarities go beyond their use of pseudonyms, as becomes clear in reading The Bloody
Hoax. They are strikingly close too in their humor and irony, and, in particular, in
relation to the political, as well as in the many genres and styles their writing took (from
journalism to autobiography to fiction). Above all, I would argue, they share a deep
93
See Dan Vogel, Mark Twain's Jews (Jersey City, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 2006), 108. Vogel notes
that Twain had been translated into Yiddish, but Aleichem was not translated from Hebrew, Russian, and
Yiddish (the three languages in which he wrote, none of which Twain knew) until 1918.
94
Qtd. in Vogel, Mark Twain's Jews, 108. Vogel notes that two days prior to this interview, the Times
printed the headline: "Jewish Mark Twain Here." This, Vogel conjectures, "no doubt caught the eye of
Mark Twain" (108). For fuller discussion see Vogel, Mark Twain's Jews, 107-9.
95
Marie Waife-Goldberg, My Father, Sholom Aleichem (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 187; also qtd.
in Vogel, Mark Twain's Jews, 109. Perhaps, Waife-Goldberg suggests, Twain thought Aleichem did not
understand English, and thus asked for his comment to be translated.
282
Crossing Texts
In order to explore in greater detail the strange correspondences between Aleichem and
Twain, I now want to try to put The Bloody Hoax in touch with Pudd'nhead Wilson
(1894). It is, in fact, hardly difficult to connect them. Blood, switched bodies, and the
splitting of identities—these are the shared central concerns of the texts in question.
Pudd'nhead Wilson is a novel about the switching of two nearly identical looking infants,
who nevertheless have opposite legal and social standings. Valet de Chambre (Chambers)
is the son of a slave (Roxana) and therefore himself a slave, and Thomas a Becket
Driscoll (Tom) is the son of Roxana's master and therefore destined to be a privileged
local aristocrat. The two are switched by Roxana in order to protect her own son,
Chambers, from the hideousness of slavery. As the fake Tom grows older, he becomes
more and more embroiled in debt and petty crime to the extent that he kills his "uncle" to
secure his inheritance. In the course of the murder investigation, however, the eponymous
Dawson's Landing for twenty years), uncovers the true identities of Tom and Chambers.
The switch had been made possible in the first place because
[t]o all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one
sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made
her a negro. She was a slave, and saleable as such. Her child was thirty-
one parts white, and he, too, was a slave and, by a fiction of law and
custom, a negro. He had blue eyes and flaxen curls like his white comrade
[Tom Driscoll].96
96
Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, 64. Further page references will be cited in the text.
283
This splitting up of a person into fractions is elsewhere in the text referred to in terms of
blood. In spite of their legally significant "blood" difference, the boys could only be
told apart "by their clothes" and their cradles (64). By switching their clothes and cradles,
Roxy enables her son to take the place of Tom Driscoll. The babies, who become men in
the course of a few chapters, can "pass" as one another, and, therefore, as another race,
because they look so similar, because even "a fiction of law and custom" cannot
determine or detect which baby is white and free and which is black and a slave. In using
the phrase "a fiction of law," Twain is, however, discreetly articulating something
profoundly troubling that recalls Montaigne's celebrated dictum: "our law, it is said, has
legitimate fictions on which it bases the truth of its justice."98 As Derrida has made clear
in essays such as "Before the Law" (1982) and "Force of Law" (1989), one has to think
"the co-implication of violence and law."9 Thus, the phrase "a fiction of law" draws our
attention not only to the written or linguistic formulation of the law, to Derrida's
characterization of language "as the elementary medium of the law," but also to the
Cf Douglas Starr, Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce (New York: Random House,
1998), who chillingly describes the "'colored' versus 'white' blood" "controversy" in the early years of
blood collection when "the Red Cross followed the wishes of the military and turned away African-
American donors." After Pearl Harbor when the Red Cross "persuaded the military to liberalize," Stan-
recounts the way blood from African-American was labeled and processed separately, so that " 'those
receiving transfusions may be given plasma from the blood of their own race" (108). Cf also, Allyson D.
Polsky, "Blood, Race, and National Identity: Scientific and Popular Discourse," Journal of Medical
Humanities 23:3-4 (2002), 171-186. Polsky looks at eugenic measures instituted by the Nazi regime and
compares them to "one drop rule" in the U.S.
98
The Essayes of Michel Lord of Montaigne, vol. II, trans. John Florio (1603) (London: Grant Richards,
1908), 12.
99
Jacques Derrida, "Before the Law" (1982), trans. Avital Ronell, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge
(New York: Routledge, 1992), 181-220; Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of
Authority'" (1989), trans. Mary Quaintance, Cardozo Law Review 11: 5/6 (1990), 921-1045. See Derrida,
"Force of Law," 1003.
284
violence of the law as such, which extends beyond words and indeed can have and does
One might argue that the two boys were split, rather than switched, or at least that
Tom, upon finding out his "true" identity, is suddenly split or made aware of an internal
split, of the '"nigger"' in him, the way in which (we are supposed to believe) one part
functions differently than the other so that, "the 'nigger' in him was surprised when the
white friend put out his hand for a shake with him" (118). The text is, as one might
determinism and survival of the fittest, and the complications arising from a sort of social
Darwinist perspective wherein one is both the ostensibly "fittest" (white) and "least fit"
(black), when such parts are not amalgamated into one body but split apart, almost as if
they constituted two kernels in one shell. The figure the book itself uses, though in
a nut with two kernels (OED).m I will come back to Twain's use of this strange and
It is quite clear from the outset of Pudd'nhead Wilson that Twain's view of the
100
Derrick, "Before the Law," 206.
101
This extraordinary word, philopena, is also the name of a game which consists of splitting such a nut,
principally played in Germany but also in the US. See David Lewis Cohn, The Good Old Days: History of
American Morals and Manners as Seen through the Sears Roebuck Catalogs) 1905 to the Present
(Manchester, NH: Ayer, 1986), 202:
Another and highly reprehensible way of extorting a gift is to have what is called a
philopena with a gentleman. This very silly joke is when a young lady, in cracking
almonds, chances to find two kernels in one shell; she shares them with a beau; and
whichever calls out "philopena" on their next meeting, is entitled to receive a present
from the other; and she is to remind him of it till he remembers to comply.
285
and stupidity of the ordinary white citizens of Dawson's Landing to the luckless
endeavors of Roxanna.102 Bound up with questions of ethnic, racial and religious identity,
the resemblances between The Bloody Hoax and Pudd'nhead Wilson are nowhere more
striking than in their endings. Though perhaps not as forthrightly violent or "tragic" as
the ending of Pudd'nhead Wilson, the "Epilogue" to The Bloody Hoax reveals that the
young men have suffered a retribution for their hoax. The real Rabinovitch, in particular,
suffers greatly not only from the "sea of troubles" brought by "new regulations" forced
upon all Jews, but also a sort of delusional madness, evidently as a consequence of his
participation in the hoax and perhaps also of his realization of the greater hoax at work in
the country.1UJ Of course, Rabinovitch was already aware of the fundamental inequality
present in Russian society, but now that inequality is formulated in terms of a "hoax." By
the end of the novel one wonders if the boys are talking about the trick of their switching
identities, or about the greater social and political situation, when the real Rabinovitch
quote Blanchot; it is a matter, for these boys, of "employing] this duplicity," taking
See Mark Twain, On the Damned Human Race (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962). Another obvious
intertext for Aleichem's The Bloody Hoax is Twain's earlier children's story, The Prince and the Pauper
(1882), in which two boys deliberately choose to trade clothing to see what it is like to live in the other's
shoes: one boy is a prince (son of Henry VIII), the other, Tom Canty, the neglected son of a thief and
beggar. Much like The Bloody Hoax, the end finds both boys returned to their rightful or so-called natural
positions. But the two books are very different in that The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain's only
explicitly nominated "children's book," is, not surprisingly, more optimistic, as both boys have learned a
lesson and both are "improved" because of it. Without the issues of race or ethnic identity, it is instead a
matter of seeing that circumstances and environment (i.e. class) are misleading determiners of identity. The
novel does not, from that point of view, subscribe to a legal or biological determinism. The prince, as a
result of his time as Tom Canty, rules more benevolently, enlightened as to the condition of how the "other
half lives, while Tom comes to see that he is "good" and worthy in spite of his unprivileged social status.
103
Aleichem, The Bloody Hoax, 373.
104
See Aleichem, The Bloody Hoax, 336, 345, 358, and 359. Also, the narrator refers to the "bloody hoax"
at least twice (see 369 and 372). It is interesting to note the complicated nature of the hoax in the text, for
even as Rabinovitch is explaining the grave situation to Popov's father, in an attempt to set Popov free, he
refers to their "bloody hoax" as both a "mistake" and a "tragicomedy" (359). The mixing of the tragic and
the comic is always implicit in the hoax.
286
advantage of the fact that one can live as if one, is the other. In the end the hoax they
play seems only to be "in the service of greater powers," where, in Blanchot's phrasing,
the "disclosure is part and parcel of the hoax, a more dangerous form of which it is
simply designed to cover up."106 To show that the restrictions against Jews are arbitrary
because Jews and Christians are fundamentally the same (one can pass as the other, the
distinction is nominal) does nothing to end the inequality or discrimination, what Twain
calls "a fiction of law" (64). Indeed, in an uncanny and macabre way, the kinds of
enormity (actual and juridical) that are exposed in The Bloody Hoax prefigure more
In Pudd'nhead Wilson, it is clear that the decision to switch the babies is not
adopt a menacing euphemism from The Bloody Hoax, they are "restored." According to
the law, or according to the way the law reads social construction as biological reality,
and translates it into fate, a certain genealogical lineage (or bloodline) dictates treatment.
In this way, the punishment of the "real" Tom is much lighter than that of the "real"
Chambers, just as is the case with the "real" Rabinovitch and Popov. So that, once
returned to their "proper" identities, "Tom" is "sold down the river" in accordance with
untenable, return to a position of local aristocracy.107 Although the ending of The Bloody
Hoax is oddly rushed and understated, it recalls and communicates with Pudd'nhead
105
Blanchot, "The Great Hoax," 157.
106
Blanchot, "The Great Hoax," 157.
107
For a provocative reading of the ending of both Pudd'nhead Wilson and "Those Extraordinary Twins,"
see Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, "Fear of Formalism: Kant, Twain, and Cultural Studies in American
Literature," Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 27:4 (1997), 46-69. I will consider Dillon's
argument more in depth later in the chapter.
287
Wilson's suggestion that something darker awaits those who play or are played on the
borders of identity. The ostensibly simplistic and abrupt ending of both works seems
altogether disconcerting and inadequate in addressing the questions and problems the
texts introduce. This is not to suggest a weakness. On the contrary, their strength and
haunting power, their provocative force is released by such elliptical endings. Covici has
suggested that Twain's writing as hoax has something to do with inadequate endings,
10S -
"the incomplete, or purposely unresolved, story." Using the example of Twain's "A
Medieval Romance," a text that also ends abruptly, in a kind of suspension of an ending,
Covici argues that "one must re-evaluate his concern for [the trapped heroine's] fate in
the light of the hoax which seems to say what happens next doesn't really matter."
Tom is sold down the river. The final sentences of Twain's text run as follows:
How are we to respond critically and countersign faithfully the bizarre even violent
abruptness of this ending? For a possible angle, we might here recall Friedrich Schlegel's
inside, there is the mood, which oversees everything, art, virtue or genius; on the outside,
288
in the presentation of the mimic manner there is the usual good old Italian clown."
The ironic texture and speed of Twain's ending, a kind of abrupt flourish or paraph, can
To write a hoax in the context of such a sobering historical reality, as Twain does, may
seem irresponsible, but by its very brusqueness and flippancy it could be said to redouble
and re-mark this clownishness. The figure of the clown is apt here for at least three
reasons: first, in terms of the Italian clowns of "Those Extraordinary Twins," a sort ironic
twin text of Pudd'nhead Wilson, which I will discuss later in the chapter; second, because
Twain's irony entails a kind of juggling of meaning that moves too quickly between what
is said and what is meant; and finally because, whatever else we may feel about the
and our own better judgment). The real challenge and joy of reading Twain is the fact
that it is impossible to tell where his irony begins or ends. It is the kind of irony that
Irony does not stay at home; it challenges and complicates all notions of what home is. It
is no longer simply a matter of ironic words saying something other than what the
II
Qtd. in Marian Hobson, "Derrida's Irony?" in Derrida's Legacies: Literature and Philosophy, ed.
Simon Glendinning and Robert Eaglestone (London: Routledge, 2007), 99.
III
Hobson, "Derrida's Irony?," 97.
289
speaker means. Hobson suggests irony often exceeds even the intended meaning. How
can one know for sure that a statement conveying intended meaning is not itself in turn
ironic? But this apparent "systematic undoing of understanding," to recall one of Paul de
Man's most succinct descriptions of the figure of irony, is not a nihilistic gesture, abyssal
It is not that slavery is a hoax, but Twain's irony lets us glimpse in an unprecedented way
the insidious profundity and pervasiveness of the greater hoax that makes it possible—
that is to say the political, social, and economic deception, propagated in the name of
American law.
The particularly jarring irony of the ending is the contrast between the pardoning
and the actual fate, the sort of (travesty of) justice being served, the warped logic of
freeing a man in order to enslave him. In the face of this absurdity, this hoaxing or
ridiculing of justice, you have to laugh (but you do not, you cannot laugh). The ending
American race slavery. In Pudd'nhead Wilson, the basis for enslavement is inextricably
bound up with both apparent substantiality (looking "black" or looking "white," having
"black" blood or having "white" blood) and language (without which there can be no
at once of "fiction" and the abject power of fiction (social construction) making the law.
Wilson likewise as a hoax, or, more specifically, as hoax literature. The word "hoax"
290
occurs in the The Bloody Hoax at least nineteen times; it does not appear in Pudd'nhead
Wilson. But this, of course, is no basis for dismissing the aptness of the term in the
context of Twain's work. Just as the word "uncanny" does not appear in the work of
Edgar Allan Poe, despite his being widely regarded as the nineteenth-century literary
i n
master of the uncanny, so the absence or suppression of the word "hoax" in certain
Twain texts should not deter us from the view, for which I am arguing here, that Twain is
the most insistently and even the most flamboyantly hoaxical writer in American
literature.
It is hardly surprising, then, that numerous critics over the years have indeed discussed
Pudd'nhead Wilson in terms of the hoax. Besides the work of Covici, for example, we
might consider the work of Leslie Fiedler, who writes, in "Free as any Cretur..." (1955):
What is America's "secret self? How does the exposure of that secret self "bother,"
undermine, and even transform, this personified America? How is Twain's "exposure to
113
The absence of the word "uncanny" is discussed by Nicholas Royle in The Uncanny, 34 n. 60 Royle also
notes here that "Poe [nevertheless] figures for [Tzvetan] Todorov as an example of the 'pure uncanny.'"
114
Fiedler, "As Free as Any Cretur...," 138.
291
America" congruent with the "discovery" of America and the "disclosure" or
America as the great hoax, making fools out of its inhabitants while also exposing them
makes Fiedler's use of the word "hoax" both subtler and more provoking. To think of
Roxy's actions in terms of a "hoax" rather than a trick, a deception, or even, simply, a
criminal act, brings to light its double nature: it is at once amusing and (in political and
social terms) devastating. Fiedler's comments also draw attention to the important after-
effects of a hoax or the importance of the hoax as its after-effects. As we saw with Poe
and "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," even once a hoax is revealed, it can
continue to work its fooling and deceptive power, sometimes all the more precisely
because it has been revealed as hoax. That is to say, calling something a hoax does not
necessarily inhibit or diminish its effectivity. It has the capacity for a sort of after-life.
The most profound hoax in Pudd'nhead Wilson concerns the founding of the
nation. While Wilson himself makes caustic remarks about the discovery of America, I
would argue that the text is very much concerned with the founding of it, with the ways in
which its laws and practices are hoaxical. Every founding, we may suggest, is of the
order of a sort of hoax. It consists in a kind temporal duping, a double time or split
(1986), there is an essential undecidability in operation in the very signing of the text that
constitutes the founding of the United States of America. "The representatives of the
292
United States in General Congress assembled," at once sign and do not sign. Their right
As this analysis suggests, there is a kind of hoax played on time, with time, in the
founding of the nation. This temporal duping is the very condition of founding. As
,15
Jacques Derrida, "Declarations of Independence" (1986), trans. Tom Keenan and Tom Pepper in
Negotiation: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford
University of Press, 2002), 48-49.
116
Derrida, "Declarations of Independence," 49.
293
The people, "as an entity...does not exist before this declaration" (49). "The signature
invents the signer," as Derrida writes.117 The people become the people only by what
Derrida calls "a sort of fabulous retroactivity," but this, as he goes on to say, "should not
11Q
be declared, mentioned, taken into account. It is as though it did not exist." It "should
be declared..." because to make it explicit would be to show the nonsense at the origin of
law making. The power the representatives hold is only thanks to the effectivity of a
future perfect, a kind of "legitimate fiction," the self-authorization that the Declaration
119
enacts.
The hoaxicality of Pudd'nhead Wilson is irreducibly double. One critic will find a
specific hoax in Pudd'nhead Wilson, another critic a different hoax. Numerous critics
have suggested that there is a hoax in this text; but we need, in addition, to think the text
itself as hoax or, more precisely, as hoax literature. Fiedler's view is that the hoax lies in
Roxy's switching of babies. Other critics have felt less certain about where it resides. The
hoax seems somehow more insidious and pervasive than a matter of plot. Susan Gillman,
in particular, has emphasized the way in which readers "have felt 'duped' by Pudd'nhead
Wilson's 'tangle' of the 'authentic' and the 'melodramatic,' the historical texture
1 ?0
embedded in (and sometimes suppressed by) the most conventional of sensation plots."
Her characterization of the text operates under the aegis of the figure of "dark twins," the
117
Derrida, "Declarations of Independence," 49.
118
Derrida, "Declarations of Independence," 50.
119
I borrow the phrase "legitimate fiction" from Montaigne: "and even our law, it is said, has legitimate
fictions on which it bases the truth of its justice..." from Essays II, 12 as qtd. by Jacques Derrida, "Before
the Law," 183.
Susan Kay Gillman, Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1989), 53.
294
coupling of "imposture" and "identity" that provides the title of her study. This is
broadly in keeping with Covici's in some ways more traditional conception of the hoax as
"our side." In their rather different ways Gillman and Covici are responding to the
sense that Twain's text seems to be playing with us—inviting us to focus on one thing
All of this calls to mind Raymond Chandler's dictum, in the context of the genre
of the detective story: "the most effective way to conceal a simple mystery is behind
another mystery." The best way to "conceal a simple mystery" is by "making [the reader]
solve the wrong problem."12 Mark Twain likes to generate effects by the suppression or
elision of information or more generally to divert attention, and this was doubtless one of
the things that Freud loved about him. We might recall, for example, in his book Jokes
and their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud remarks on how Twain's account of his
pity."124 He recalls:
The premature explosion of a mine blew him [his brother] up into the air
and he came down again far away from the place where he had been
working. We are bound to have feelings of sympathy for the victim of the
accident and would like to ask whether he was injured by it. But when the
story goes on to say that his brother had half-day's wages deducted for
being "absent from his place of employment" we are entirely distracted
121
See Gillman, Dark Twins, 14-52.
1
Covici, Mark Twain's Humor, 143 and 160.
123
Raymond Chandler, "Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story," in The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler and
"English Summer: A Gothic Romance," ed. Frank McShane (New York: Ecco Press, 1976), 39.
1
Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 6,
trans. James Strachey, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, ed. James Strachey, Angela Richards, Alan Tyson
and Albert Dickson, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 295.
295
from our pity and become almost as hard-hearted as the contractor and
1 JC
On another occasion Freud recalls the pleasure of attending one of his public readings in
1898, when Twain recounts a "delightful little story, The First Melon I Ever Stole."126 As
Freud remembers it: "After he had given out the title, he stopped and asked himself as
though he was in doubt: 'Was it the first?' With this, everything had been said. The first
i ~\n
melon was evidently not the only one." With these perhaps seemingly heterogeneous
points of reference in mind, I would like to propose that Pudd'nhead Wilson offers itself,
Covici provides a helpful link for thinking about the relationship between
detective fiction—or the mystery story—and the hoax for, as he puts it: in the case of the
hoax "the reader's expectation must be committed in a false direction if the surprise
elsewhere, down the wrong path, solving the wrong problem.129 In other words, the
reader's attention must be diverted or split in order to make the story work. There is
always a certain sense of mystery attendant on the hoax. Certain useful distinctions might
25
Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, 295-6.
126
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 12, trans.
James Strachey, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, ed. James Strachey, Angela Richards, Alan Tyson and
Albert Dickson, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 318 n. 2
27
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 318-9 n. 2.
28
Covici, Mark Twain's Humor, 148.
129
"Contre-pied" is a term borrowed from Jacques Derrida, "Limited Inc a b c...," trans. Samuel Weber, in
Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 73. It is translated by
Weber as "fake-out." The word contre-pied only appears in the English text after Weber has translated it in
a little side note by Derrida, in which he addresses the difficult he imagines Weber will have in finding an
English equivalent to the French contre-pied. See also Royle, "Jacques Derrida's Language (Bin Laden on
the Telephone)," In Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 96-7.
296
be made, however, between the mystery story, as Chandler conceives it, and Twain's
remarks, the detective (such as, most obviously perhaps, Marlowe) is "the agent whereby
Americans can come to see and thus genuinely be themselves, to see themselves as linked
1 1A
to one another, as part of a single society." There is no such figure in the world of
Twain's writing. Instead we get Pudd'nhead Wilson. His very name—however we are
many ways shrewd and intelligent, Pudd'nhead Wilson is not a figure who unites society.
Instead, like so many figures (whether narrators or characters) in Poe and Melville, he is
an outsider, and the significance of his role is precisely to disclose the fundamental split
of society. Whereas detective fiction seeks to bind, I would argue that hoax literature
splits. Just as for Freud the analyst needs to have knowledge and understanding of the
work is also associated with hypnotism, thought-transference, and the art of the
magician),131 so in Twain a great deal of the force of the text comprises the ways in
Royle, Telepathy and Literature, 211 n. 5; Royle is here discussing Frederic Jameson's account of
Raymond Chandler: see Jameson, "On Raymond Chandler" in The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction
and Literary Theory, ed. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1983), 143-4.
131
See Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
trans. James Strachey et al, 24 vols. (New York: Vintage, 2005), vol. 1, 91, 367; vol 8, 126 n. 1; vol. 22, 40
n. 1; see also Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Emotional Tie (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993),
especially 39-61, on the role of hypnotism in early psychoanalysis.
297
Wilson's role in both defending and indicting Tom. Royal comments: "duplicity, the
contradictory impulses of emancipator and enslaver, is not only at work within his
character, but also serves to highlight the duplicity or twinness at work within the larger
text."133 At issue here, then, is what Royal identifies as the "text's invitation to split
two minds in order to go down both paths, committed to both and perhaps also other
directions, suggests a theory of split reading. One must always be of two minds. To
transpose rather differently the logic of mental telegraphy that we were considering
earlier in this chapter, it could be said that, with Twain's work, there is also a mental
telegraphy in reading, within the mind of the reader. In the complexity and slipperiness,
the duplicity and play of his narratorial and rhetorical strategies, above all perhaps in his
univocal point of view, Twain's writing seems in this respect to anticipate the example of
Freud. As Patrick J. Mahony suggests in his book Freud as a Writer, the best way of
reading Freud is to do so "in a state of free floating attention, with all that oxymoronic
Wilson one has to allow oneself to become a split reader in this sense. Split reading, as I
have tried to sketch it here, thus calls for a particularly acute attention to that
'32 Derek Parker Royal, "The Clinician as Enslaver: Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Rationalization of
Identity," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44:4 (2002), 414-431.
133
Royal, "The Clinician as Enslaver," 416.
134
Royal, "The Clinician as Enslaver," 428 n. 8.
135
Patrick J. Mahony, Freud as a Writer, expanded ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 117.
298
literature without a suspended relation to meaning and reference." To engage with
(in the sense which Derrida talks about it, in other words "[not] going beyond interest for
the signifier, the form, the language... in the direction of the meaning or referent", but
rather attending to the ways in which Twain's texts "resist [a] transcendent reading")
and a reading that, in acknowledging at every level the possibilities of "the great hoax"
(as Blanchot calls it), thereby confronts us, in intolerable fashion, with what is real, not
Phillipene
Pudd'nhead Wilson compels us to think about split reading and splitting Twain for
another fundamental reason, having to do with its publication history. When Pudd'nhead
Wilson was first published as a single text in 1894, a story called "Those Extraordinary
1 ^8
themes and nearly the same cast of characters—though crucially the Italian twins Angelo
and Luigi are conjoined, "a stupefying apparition—a double-headed human creature with
four arms, one body, and single pair of legs." This "creature," as I mentioned earlier in
136
Derrida, '"This Strange Institution Called Literature,'" 48.
137
See Derrida, '"This Strange Institution Called Literature,'" 44-5.
138
Pudd'nhead Wilson was written in 1892 and was published as a single text by the American Publishing
Company in 1894; it had originally run in seven installments between December 1893 and June 1894 in
Century Magazine.
139
Twain, "Those Extraordinary Twins," 236. Further page references cited in the text. The themes, as
Susan Gillman points out are essentially the same: issues of bonds and bondage, legal classifications that
seek to determine individual responsibility, and self-conscious demonstration of the problems of authorship
that bridges the two works. See Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989), 55.
299
this chapter, is referred to several times as a "phillipene" or "philopena": '"Ugh, it was
awful—just the mere look of that phillipene!,'" says Aunt Patsy Cooper in "Those
Extraordinary Twins," upon first meeting the conjoined twins (237). In Pudd'nhead
Wilson, although the twins are not conjoined, nevertheless in a sort of strange projection,
a drunk Tom Driscoll shouts: "Boys, I move that he keeps still and lets this human
philopena snip you out a speech" (135). This figure of the phillipene returns at the end of
fascinating further figure for thinking about Twain's twin text, as I hope to now make
which Twain prefaces the narrative with a description of his own writing process and
seeks, in effect, to defend the final product. In this way Twain foregrounds the sense in
which the tale tells itself: the writer is always necessarily doubled and split off from the
process of writing, he both is and is not the writer of the story. The story "goes along
The splitting does not stop there, however, for in this same prefatorial passage
(229-33), Twain also turns readerly attention back to Pudd'nhead Wilson, explaing that in
fact it was "not one story, but two stories tangled together; and they obstructed and
interrupted each other at every turn and created no end of confusion and annoyance"
(229). The twin stories were then split apart, subjected to "a kind of literary Caesarean
operation." Mixing the human and the plantlike, Twain reports that he "pulled one of the
stories out by the roots" (230). The image of pulling out "by the roots" is a strong one,
suggesting an irreparable rupture, a ripping away that does not allow for any restoration.
300
The opening passage of "Those Extraordinary Twins" figures literary production here is
figured as a kind of twinning and division of itself, a labor of doubling that is variously
flawed and frivolous companion piece to the more historically salient Pudd'nhead
Wilson.
of the two works in question. Pudd'nhead Wilson, we may recall, concludes with "Tom,"
having his true identity revealed, being sold down the river; "Those Extraordinary
Twins," on the other hand, concludes with the ostensible hanging of one of conjoined
twins. While both endings are inescapably gruesome, questions of slavery and racial
by focusing the violence on white foreigners, who, moreover, are presented in their very
improbability as exceptional or extraordinary. Their hanging is not the serious, like the
Cultural Studies in American Literature," Elizabeth Dillon argues for a view of these
endings as, in effect, polar opposites.141 She dismisses "the aporetic lynching of the
doubled self at the end of "Those Extraordinary Twins" as devoid of meaning, finding
140
On the issue of the critical neglect of this text, see John Bird, Mark Twain and Metaphor, 146. John Bird
also writes: '"Those Extraordinary Twins' is assuredly among the overlooked works of Mark Twain....
Critics of Pudd'nhead Wilson rarely mention 'Those Extraordinary Twins,' and when they do, it is
disparagingly, dismissively, and in passing..." Mark Twain and Metaphor, 154.
141
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. "Fear of Formalism: Kant, Twain, and Cultural Studies in American
Literature" Diacritics 27:4 (1997), 46-69.
301
Pudd'nhead Wilson. It is on account of this historical groundlessness, Dillon argues,
that "Those Extraordinary Twins" tends to be ignored or not taken seriously. It is the
farcical twin of the infinitely and manifestly more serious Pudd'nhead Wilson.14 Rather
than seeing the texts as two discrete entities, Dillon offers another way of thinking about
their conjoined status, a way of thinking, in fact, that complicates the kind of dismissal of
"Those Extraordinary Twins" that she herself makes. Providing an eloquent way of
characterizing the split not only in Twain but in literature in general, Dillon writes of
Pudd'nhead Wilson in a nutshell. This double text itself constitutes a phillipene, a textual
embodiment of the conjoined Italian twins. They are split but not split.145
Pontalis say about Freud's notion of "splitting" in his late fragment "Splitting of the Ego
in the Process of Defence" (1938). This splitting is not between the ego and the id but
within the ego. It is a question of what Laplanche and Pontalis call "the coexistence
302
within a single subject of 'two contrary and independent attitudes.'" There is, they
stress, "no compromise between the two attitudes present but [the ego] maintains them
seems to be miming such a splitting process apropos Pudd'nhead Wilson and "Those
of having "dug out the farce and left the tragedy." He insists that there is "no connection
operation" (230). His "final remarks" take us back to the beginning in another way too,
for both claims of textual splitting are followed by remarks about Twain's amateurism.
Near the start of the prefatorial remarks of the text he writes: "[The reader] has been told
many a time how the born-and-trained novelist works. Won't he let me round and
complete his knowledge by telling him how the jack-leg does it?" (230).
Correspondingly, the final sentence of "The Final Remarks" runs: "The reader already
knew how the expert works; he knows now how the other kind do it" (303). There is a
double splitting here. Twain writes in the first person but also refers to himself as author
in the third person. He splits himself further through the irony of a certain debasement.
He is not the "expert" but "the other kind," "the jack-leg." It is difficult not to read this
splitting as a sort of protective measure against criticism: by the 1890s Twain is, of
303
course, no amateur. We may recall here John Bird's characterization of Samuel Clemens
authorial level, but also a textual one. Twain's uncanny foreshadowing of the Freudian
schema, however, finds its most striking embodiment in the Italian twins themselves.
They are conjoined but split, a "phillipene." Within one physical entity they demonstrate
"two contrary and independent attitudes" (in Freud's phrase). How is one even to refer to
these twins? Is it "it" or "he" or "they"? Aunt Patsy and Rowena, who act as landladies to
the twins, debate this. Towards the beginning of their stay, Aunt Patsy cuts off her niece's
ma—you ought to say they—it's nearer right.'" But immediately following Rowena's
injunction, the narrator tells us: "The new lodger...stepped with courtly carriage into the
trim little breakfast-room" (243-4). As the text goes on it becomes clear that "they" is
responsible, "good" twin and Luigi, the Freethinking, gambling, drinking, "bad" one. We
are inevitably drawn to the sense that this apparently absurd split between the twins acts
confusion of moral identity" (17).149 Whereas Bradbury and indeed Freud are principally
As Bird writes: "we valorize Samuel Clemens because we see him as a whole, and thus somehow more
authentic; and we see Mark Twain as a fragment, as somehow suspect and an evasion, perhaps even as a
fraud" {Mark Twain and Metaphor, 37).
149
In Bradbury's reading the split is perhaps more evocative of a Kleinian, rather than a Freudian, model.
In the work of Melanie Klein, it is not principally a splitting of the ego but splitting of the object that
occurs. As a primitive defense against anxiety, "the object, with both erotic and destructive instincts
directed towards it, splits into a 'good' and a 'bad' object...The splitting of the objects is accompanied by a
304
concerned with a division within the ironically named individual, Twain's twinning
intimates a more communal or social dimension, inviting us to move from the one to the
multiple. It is in this splitting open into the outside (a phenomenon no longer of internal
division but of visible external phenomenon) that we can understand the force of hoaxical
thinking in late Twain. For, as I have been attempting to stress throughout this
dissertation, the hoax, with all its attendant duplicity, splitting of attention, meaning, tone,
register, and so on is necessarily a matter of the external and social, never of the
individual alone.
In "Those Extraordinary Twins" Luigi, the "darker" twin, is elected to the board
of aldermen but is unable to sit on it because his conjoined twin, Angelo, would have to
be present. The local government is at a standstill and the city begins to crumble. This all
takes place on the last page. The final paragraphs (leading up to the "Final Remarks")
read as follows:
parallel splitting of the ego into a 'good' and a 'bad' one" (Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of
Psychoanalysis, 430).
305
The play on "hire" and "higher" here neatly evokes the double register of Twain's
writing, at once comically playful and brutally serious. This passage also contains the last
and most striking use of "phillipene." It is as if Twain is wanting to underscore the sense
that the phillipene is not reducible to figurative or metaphorical form, it is not (or not
only), for example, a figure for the text. The phillipene is human. This chilling ending is
reads as an uncertainly comic repetition of the madness of supposing one could hang one
The ending of "Those Extraordinary Twins" also takes us back in striking ways to
the beginning of Pudd'nhead Wilson, to the moment at which David Wilson gets his
nickname. New to town, he "had just made the acquaintance of a group of citizens when
an invisible dog began to yelp and snarl and howl and make himself very comprehensibly
disagreeable, whereupon young Wilson said, much as one who is thinking aloud":
306
"Why, he must have thought it, unless he is the downrightest fool
in the world; because, if he hadn't thought it, he would have wanted to
own the whole dog, knowing that if he killed his half and the other half
died, he would be responsible for that half just the same as if he had killed
that half instead of his own." (59-60)
And so the conversation goes on until they finally decide that David Wilson is simply a
"Pudd'nhead" (60), because, as the narrator slyly says: "irony was not for those people;
their mental vision was not focused for it" (86).150 Only a moderate degree of mental
vision is required to see the connection, interdependence and kinship between this
passage and the ending of "Those Extraordinary Twins." Twain's writing requires a kind
of split attention, on the one hand, to a sense of what is ironic, humorous, or (to borrow
his own word) uncanny, and, on the other, to think through questions of responsibility
and ethics. We can read the foregoing passage as a critique of Reconstruction-era politics
(where the continued prosperity of the North is reliant on the regeneration of the South), a
meditation on personal and social responsible, and a satirical dissection of the inability to
Twins." In the latter case, the citizens absolve themselves of personal responsibility by
deciding that they are only killing the "guilty" party (even if it is a palpably mad kind of
The name of David Wilson, of course, carries with it a sort of conjoined textual twin. His name is
strangely reminiscent of Poe's infamous doubles who share the name "William Wilson." In that tale it is
finally a matter of self-reflexivity through self as other, seeing oneself and one's own evil or malice (for
who is to say which of the William Wilsons is the nefarious doppleganger and which one is innocent
"original"? The text, finally, leaves that undecidable). If Pudd'nhead Wilson works in a similar, though in
many ways completely different, mode, it would be the way in which the text forces the read into an
impossible position of having to double oneself. The text offers a theory of splitting, of reading as splitting.
There is also always the question of the spurious and spurious double, as in the sharing of the name Wilson
between "A Double-Barreled Detective Story," which was considered earlier in this chapter, and
Pudd'nhead Wilson and "Those Extraordinary Twins." There is a principle of substitutability,
gratuitousness, and meaninglessness of the name exchange that is not reducible to mere nothingness. It also
is worth noting the resemblance between "twin" and "Twain," the "twin" always already inscribed in the
author's name.
307
"guilt"). They imagine indeed that they are only killing half of the proverbial barking
dog. Wilson, on the other hand, frames his murderous impulse as a jest and is called a
fool for propounding a logic that paradoxically the "same" citizens follow to its gruesome
conclusion in the conjoined text. In this way Twain generates a kind of strange textual
context, however, which is manifestly improbable, brutal, and absurd. Rather than see the
final authorial claims about "no connection," "no interdependence, no kinship" as simply
uncanny synchronicity of comic and brutal, responsible and frivolous, serious and absurd.
In all these shifts, splittings, and doublings the question of tone is crucial.
Thinking about Twain's voice in this context might be illustrated by a remark from Jean
Genet: "And like all other voices my own is faked, and while the reader may guess as
much, he can never know what tricks it employs."151 Is "Twain" the same as "the jack-
leg" or "the expert"? Is "Twain" the same as "the author"? How do we separate the
author from the narrator? Twain's writing brings to a singularly strange pitch the question
mischievousness, and irony. As with the silences I have tired to make resonant in
Melville's writing, it is a matter of a kind of secrecy in which the internal workings of the
hoax remain opaque or unheard. One cannot think the structure of the hoax as hoax,
anymore than one can think the structure of the lie.152 The "tricks" to which Genet refers
are quite explicitly foregrounded at the beginning of Pudd'nhead Wilson; the one of the
151
Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. Barbara Bray (London: Pan Books, 1989), 27.
152
Cf Jacques Derrida, "History of the Lie," in Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002), 70.
308
very first adages attributed to David "Pudd'nhead" Wilson warns: "Tell the truth or
trump—but get the trick" (55). At whom are these words directed? To us as readers, to
other characters in the text, or to Wilson himself? Trick here, in the context of "trump,"
doubtless refers to winning a round of cards in a game like Hearts or Bridge, but its
figurative sense pervades the entirety of Twain's text. The term "hoax" itself does not
appear: as I have been trying to suggest, that is in some sense held in reserve as the
spectral figure presiding over the work as a whole. At the same time, Pudd'nhead Wilson
and "Those Extraordinary Twins" are full of allusions to "tricks" as well as "sham"
(102), "swindle" (261), "sorcery" (126), "deception" (77), and "humbug" (178). As in so
much of Twain's writing, "get[ting] the trick" 'pears (as the townspeople would say) to
be the object of reading. And like Genet, Twain leaves his tricks hanging, as it were.
Final Remarks
Twain's relationship with America was increasingly complex in the years up to and
"Particularly in his later years," as Tom Quirk has argued, "the fierceness of Twain's
anti-imperialist convictions disturbed and dismayed those who regarded him as the
archetypal American citizen who had somehow turned upon Americanism itself." In
particular, Twain took issue with what he saw as the increasing imperialist policy of the
U.S., which verged, for him, on the piratical. In a 1901 essay concerning the U.S.
occupation of the Philippines, he wrote about the presence of the American flag on
5
Tom Quirk, Nothing Abstract: Investigations in the American Literary Imagination (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 2001), 103.
309
Philippine soil, describing it as "our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and
the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones."154 And at the end of 1900, The New York
Herald published Twain's highly polemical "A Greeting from the 19* Century to the 20l
Twain's career concludes with what is often referred to as his dark writings.15 Such
writing is strikingly different even from relatively late texts such as Pudd'nhead Wilson
and "Those Extraordinary Twins." Twain's last stories are quite heterogeneous in scope
and subject matter, ranging from imagining what it would be like to transport oneself into
a drop of water on a microscope slide to visiting heaven. What all of these texts
slant. They are un-American in the sense that the stories often take place outside the
United States, even outside the known earth. More pointedly, however, they also seem
more and more interested in the far-reaching, powerful, and atrocious effects of what he
calls the "despotisms and aristocracies and chattel slaveries, and military slaveries, and
"To the Person Sitting in Darkness," in The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider
(Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1991), 296.
155
Reprinted in William M. Gibson, "Mark Twain and Howells: Anti-Imperialists," New England
Quarterly 20:4 (Dec 1947), 450-1.
156
See, for example, The Devil's Race-Track: Mark Twain's "Great Dark" Writings, ed. John S. Tuckey
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
310
religious slaveries...all about the globe." As Twain's incisive comment makes clear,
so-called "globalization" and inhumanity on a global scale are not just late twentieth- or
set in sixteenth-century Austria but nevertheless pushes its geographical and historical
limits through space and time travel. As always with Twain, there is the question of
slavery, but in this case the terms are strikingly different. It is now "Satan" who figures as
the ultimate master: all human beings are his slaves. What is uncomfortable about reading
an omniscient narrator, a kind of demonic hoaxing of the very space of so-called realist
fiction, orchestrating the events as he sees fit. The action of the story centers around
Theodor Fischer and two of his friends, Nikolaus and Seppi. Initially referred to as "the
Stranger," Satan entertains the boys, both with his ability to mind-read and with his
dictate—the futures of the village people. He announces a woman will be burned at the
stake on suspicion of witchcraft—and she is. Then Satan reveals to Theodor that his
friend Nikolaus has a grim future: he will save another friend, Lisa, from drowning but
catch scarlet fever as a result and spend forty-six years paralyzed in bed (648). Satan
157
Twain, "My First Lie and How I Got Out of It," in Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches, ed. Tom
Quirk. (New York: Penguin: 1994), 258.
158
"The Mysterious Stranger," in The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (New
York: Bantam, 1990), 602-679. Further page references will be cited in the text.
311
".. .Two minutes and a quarter from now Nikolaus will wake out of
his sleep and find the rain blowing in. It was appointed that he should turn
over and go back to sleep again. But I have appointed that he shall get up
and close the window first. That trifle will change his career entirely. He
will rise in the morning two minutes later than the chain of his life had
appointed him to rise. By consequence, thenceforth nothing will ever
happen to him in accordance with the details of the old chain." He took
out his watch and sat looking at it for a few moments, then said: "Nikolaus
has risen to close the window. His life is changed, his new career has
begun. There will be consequences."
It made me [Theodor] feel creepy; it was uncanny.
"But for this change certain things would happen twelve days from
now.. .he will arrive some seconds too late, now [to the pond where Lisa is
drowning]; Lisa will have struggled into deeper water. He will do his best,
but both will drown." (648)
As predicted, Nikolaus and Lisa drown, but Satan maintains that at least Nikolaus is
better off. Fully initiated into the peculiar form of Satan's justice, Theodor is invited to
experience, in a way perhaps best described as visually telepathic, Satan meddling in the
affairs of men as he travels across the globe. In this manner Satan shows Theodor "the
weakness and triviality" of the human race (677). The narrator tells us: "Satan was
accustomed to say that our race lived a life of continuous and uninterrupted self-
deception. It duped itself from cradle to grave with shams and delusions which it mistook
for realities, and this made its entire life a sham" (674). In a striking adumbration of
Maurice Blanchot's essay of 1957, Twain has Satan himself as the theorist of the great
hoax.
laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast" and yet, Satan argues, "do you ever use
312
it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage" (674). The rather disjunctive end of the
story finds Satan revealing to Theodor that everything he thought that he had experienced
Twain's voice is, as it were, entwined in Satan's, and this voice is laughing. This is the
great hoax, seen double through the eyes of Satan and Twain. To read and respond to this
story we should have the "sense" and "courage" to laugh. But this is no easy or
comfortable laughter, rather it is the experience (still promised or threatened with every
new reading) of becoming split oneself, of losing one's head in a literally mischievous or
headless laughter that is generated out of the serious and absurd, comic and grotesque,
313
Conclusion
I would like to conclude with a brief reflection on Frank Lentricchia's The Edge of Night:
on literature, teaching, and passion, with questions of ethnicity, politics, and "being
American." The Edge of Night mixes autobiography with fiction in mischievous and
undecidable ways: "beyond autobiography" is what the book jacket offers, but that hardly
seems to do it justice. What kind of work is this, one wonders? I want to recall two
moments that occur at the end and that bear a relation to literature that is evident only if
you have read the entire book. These moments, I here confess, have fueled the present
project in the most primitive, miniscule, and protean ways, and provided the initial
writing (see Chapter 1), the experience of this film is complete disorientation,
1
Charles Baudelaire, in Le Pays 20 April 1855 (Paris), qtd. in Stephen Matterson, Introduction to Herman
Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) (London: Penguin, 1990), xviii.
2
Frank Lentricchia, Edge of Night: A Confession (New York: Random House, 1994).
314
declassification, degenrifying. The second moment comes in the final paragraph of the
Read together, these two moments epitomize the "confession" called The Edge of Night.
They allow us to sense that what Lentricchia finds so addictive about literature, and
indeed what he has been confessing and performing, in his own prose, throughout the
book, seems to be best exemplified by the experience of film. It is here in the visual field
that, perhaps most emphatically and explicitly, one gets the feeling of being duped,
played with, fooled. It is what is so compelling about Fellini, of course, but also Alfred
Hitchcock or indeed, we might say, about any truly haunting and enduring movie.
But these concerns also characterize the field of writing and, first and foremost
perhaps, the case of what we call literature. The second moment I have cited works
slightly differently from the first, this time recalling a "real life" experience in a very
between what is real and what is fake. This ease crucially depends on a force and mastery
of naming, on the sense that one can name the fakery, enjoy the fakery and enjoy it even
more thanks to the proclamation, the ability to say: this is "fakery." It's all a hoax. This
would be as true for Lentricchia's father as for so many of those visiting P.T. Barnum's
museum a century earlier. But this anecdote's place in The Edge of Night is, perhaps,
finally less certain. On the one hand, the anecdote illustrates the ways in which the
315
witnessed in the literature that Lentricchia has been talking about in his book, in
particular in the writings of Kafka, Eliot, Joyce, and DeLillo. On the other hand, it is of
autobiographical, fictional. And in the end perhaps what Lentricchia's writing leaves us
with is an uncertainty about tone, about how the tone of "the fakery" is to be read or
Universal Studios tour we find out how the special effects in our favorite movies are
produced, or if at the end of a P.T. Barnum exhibition we are able to see how we were
duped, in hoax literature we experience no such unveiling or certainty. The effects remain
From Poe's fantastic tales of the impossible and odd, the mesmerically enchanting
confidence and credence, fiction and history, to Twain's telling tales hanging on
irrevocable splits between the deadly serious and the seriously funny, we are left with a
sense that American literature is pervaded by fakery, diddling, tricks, duplicity, fooling,
exclaim: "my god, the fakery." But how should that exclamation be heard, even or
suggest that the writings of Poe, Melville, and Twain open up new ways of thinking
about this pervasiveness, not only apropos those writings per se, but also in terms of
"American literature."
316
Those Americans who so love to be duped. This curious proclamation by
Baudelaire is made even stranger by attempting to reckon with the fact that being an
"American," the question of what constitutes "American," is now perhaps more urgently
reimagined. We could think, for example, about the fact that "the fakery" I have just been
evoking involves a story about Frank Lentricchia's father, a second generation Italian
written up in English by his son: is this the kind of American Baudelaire meant? Or we
might think about the new kinds of reading of Poe (including the reading I have
attempted in this dissertation) associated with the critical and intellectual legacy that has
followed from Baudelaire's translations of his tales into French.3 But above all, as I have
literature, and of the ways in which this leads us toward the experience of sovereignty
duping, hoaxing in the context of the writings of Poe, Melville, and Twain, is not (or not
merely) of the P. T. Barnum or Universal Studios variety, but of far subtler and more
reserved kinds. And it remains cryptic—to be heard, named, and read again and
otherwise, in light of changing contexts and perspectives. But there is perhaps a further
reason why the particular love of duping that Baudelaire assigned to Americans should be
especially resonant today, and this has to do with the extraordinary—and extraordinarily
3
I am thinking here not only, for example, of the celebrated work by Lacan and Derrida, or indeed
Shoshana Felman and Barbara Johnson, gathered in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and
Psychoanalytic Reading, eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1988),
but also of other readers in the tradition of a "French Poe" such as Maurice Blanchot and Helene Cixous.
317
hopeful—form of government America seems to have. It has often failed or, rather, it
often fails. It fails miserably and to no small extent, but—however limited and
imperfect—it remains a model of democracy, which provides a space for writing, for
thought, and for literature. And democracy here, however flawed, in this respect entails,
perhaps more than anything else, what Derrida refers to as "the right to irony in the
public space."4 As he goes on to say: "Democracy opens public space, the publicity of
space, by granting the right to a change of tone, to irony as well as to fiction, the
simulacrum, the secret, literature and so on."5 To change tone, to pretend to be serious
when being funny or to pretend to be funny when being serious, to pretend to pretend, to
transform, veer, turn, and meddle with tone, with fiction, to pretend to write fiction when
writing truth, to pretend to write truth when writing fiction—all that is impossible without
democracy, without a public space wherein irony is possible. Without this irony in the
public space, without a change of tone, without the possibility of hoax, there would be no
literature.
4
Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2005), 91-2.
5
Derrida, Rogues, 92.
318
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