Melville's debt to Milton: Inverted satanic morphology and rhetoric in the confidence-man

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 2003 by Urbanczyk, Aaron

Thus, it is no surprise there are frequent references to Milton in Melville's fiction. Melville, an author singular in his propensity for allusions, displays a particularly unique preoccupation with Milton's Satan as a fictional character. Melville discusses angels and devils in the drama of Christian salvation history in his early novel Mardi (1849) and in Pierre (1852), but he specifically discusses the excellence of Milton's Satan as a character in two places: Redburn: His First Voyage (1849) and The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). Melville's dual and separate commentaries on Milton's Satan both occur in chapters of (meta) narrative commentary. Like many of Melville's novels, Redburn is narrated in the first person, while The Confidence-Man has a third person narrator who occasionally inserts himself in the text for the purpose of theorizing about the art of fiction and the structure of the story he is telling. At face value, these two commentaries on Milton's Satan are asserting contradictory opinions. The narrator of Redburn, commenting upon the novel's perverse antagonist, Jackson, makes the following comments on the subject of Milton and his Satan:

For there is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals. There, Nero howls side by side with his own malefactors. If Napoleon were truly but a martial murderer, I pay him no more homage than I would a felon. Though Milton's Satan dilutes our abhorrence with admiration, it is only because he is not a genuine being, but something altered from a genuine original. We gather not from the four gospels alone any high-raised fancies concerning this Satan; we only know him from thence as the personification of the essence of evil, which, who but pickpockets and burglars will admire? But this takes not from the merit of our high priest of poetry; it only enhances it, that with such unmitigated evil for his material, he should build up his most goodly structure. (276)

The narrator of The Confidence-Man observes the following concerning Milton's Satan:

As for original characters in fiction, a grateful reader will, on meeting with one, keep the anniversary of that day. True, we sometimes hear of an author who, at one creation, produces some two or three score such characters; it may be possible. But they can hardly be original in the sense that Hamlet is, or Don Quixote, or Milton's Satan. That is to say, they are not, in a thorough sense, original at all. They are novel, or singular, or striking, or captivating, or all four at once. (238)

Melville seems to waver on the originality of Milton's Satan. The narrator of Redburn, young Wellingborough Redburn, holds the opinion that Milton's Satan is not a true original, because "he is not a genuine being, but something altered from a genuine original." Yet, the narrator of The Confidence-Man maintains the greatness of Milton's Satan lies precisely in his originality. Duplicity and irony inform a great deal of Melville's narrative strategy, thus accounting for contradictory and paradoxical representations of identical phenomena. Further, Melville, in his adult life, was something of an agnostic, lacking certain faith in the objective reality of angels or devils (Pommer 81). At the literal level, for Melville, Satan is not a "genuine" or real being because his existence is not a certainly. At the artistic and typological level, however, Satan is one of the true originals and masterpieces of Western literature, constructed by the "high priest of poetry" himself, John Milton.